1 – Last Sentence Here Is The Thesis Cause I Did College Once
There are very few societal ills that I will concede are the fault of my own generation (Millennials, of course), or Generation X for that matter. This site is however concerned with one such problem. For the disquieting condition of the major journalistic institutions, and the public’s abysmal standards for news in the digital age, I must admit responsibility truly lies more with the youngs than it does with the olds. The obligation to fix it, of course, is ours alone. So, I am writing this as a plea to my own generation (and to generation X before us, and to all those after us) to address this crisis by paying actual money for news. Our clicks and views and shares are pathetically insufficient to sustain something so crucial to democracy. To preserve free society we must preserve journalism, and to preserve journalism we, the people, must pay for it.
2 – The Fourth Estate
(Skip if you already agree that journalism is invaluable to democracy, and that it must be independent to be credible.)
The constitution has prominently mandated freedom of “the press” since it was first drafted. At the time, “the press” was not a synecdoche for journalism specifically, but for the production of reading material of any kind. Many printed pamphlets, declared seditious by the Crown, had just recently played a critical role in arousing revolutionary sympathies in the colonies. Royal efforts to control public discourse by regulating print were then only recently defeated by way of violent revolution. Preventing government censorship of the printed word was both a logical extension of freedom of speech, and an acknowledgement of the revolution’s debt to publishing. Since then, ‘Freedom of the Press’ has expanded its legal protections to subsume journalism and journalists, in general.
We know checks and balances are in place for the sake of mutual accountability between the three branches of government. Were that the totality of account in government, it would only ever produce internal reports and public statements that we are obliged to trust. Corruption would flourish inevitably and immediately. Independent oversight is the only means of holding the entire apparatus to any ethical standard. The same caveat applies to corporate powers; Sociopathic corporate behavior is widely presumed to be auto-regulated by the threat of boycott and competition, but neither boycott nor competition has any initiative without the free spread of information.
Virtually every time that a government or corporate interest has tried to suppress or discredit journalism, the full story it was trying to hide has been one of its own criminality, incompetence, malfeasance, or all three. Each instance of that dynamic is further proof that any power dependent on popular ignorance is inherently tyrannical. The primacy of ‘The News’ has, for the greater part of two centuries, meant the difference between The People’s real democratic agency and their de-facto serfdom to unaccountable barrons.
Democracy’s viability requires the ongoing education of the public, and to say investigative journalism has thus far proved its worth, to that end, would be a new standard of understatement. The intrepid muckrakers of the progressive era permanently transformed public awareness. S.S. McClure’s original publication, McClure’s Magazine, introduced the format of the exhaustively-researched essay as staple periodical content. Within, he published Jack London, Ida Tarbell, and Upton Sinclair, whom informed shocked readers of that which their masters bid them stay ignorant. In the following age of radio and TV, Edward R Murrow and Murrey Marder’s famous erosion of public credulity for Joseph McCarthy helped bring his insane crusade to an end, and the nation somewhat back to its senses. The Washington Post and The New York Times deciding to publish the pentagon papers, lifting the veil on the Vietnam war, withered public support for that doomed engagement and denied Nixon the chance to write that chapter of U.S. history. There are hundreds of other examples and more every minute (source). Thus Freedom of the Press is elevated, from being a logical extension of the Freedom of Speech, into being itself a discrete Article of American social structure. In practice, a demanding yet crucial prescription for a free society under democratic government: a ‘Fourth Estate.’
3 – TV News As Passive Entertainment
(Skip if you already agree that the 24-hour news cycle has corrupted TV news.)
The majority of news consumption has moved to television, and the perils of competing interests have followed it there. Despite stern warnings from elder journalists, the aforementioned primacy of ‘The News’ has been slowly slipping away since at least the 90s, with the advent of dedicated 24-hour cable news networks, that rely on the news itself to sell advertising time.
Way back in my day, Tom Brokaw was the serious voice of things as they were. An even, deliberate, dutiful monotone that dispassionately recited facts to bore a young me. My household watched the NBC nightly news, but all of the other major networks also had their own serious-man reading the dull things into the camera as a matter of course. TV news back then was free, yet it did not by itself usher in the demon of mass confusion that has followed free internet news. This is because TV news at the time was free for different reasons, in a different environment, and with different consequences.
To illustrate how the journalistic sphere of popular media has changed, we must start with one axiomatic truth: Investigative journalism is expensive to produce, compile, vet, and deliver and it has never earned that money back in ratings. One then questions how it was ever free and of such high quality so long ago, and why this present corruption didn’t just happen immediately. The answer is that TV News was not meant to generate ratings or revenue at all in the days before cable. The News hour was meant to earn was goodwill among viewers and the FCC, and having the public trust is a dignity that was, at the time, valued by itself. As veteran news icon Ted Koppel described in 2010:
To the degree that broadcast news was a more virtuous operation 40 years ago, it was a function of both fear and innocence. Network executives were afraid that a failure to work in the “public interest, convenience and necessity,” as set forth in the Radio Act of 1927, might cause the Federal Communications Commission to suspend or even revoke their licenses. The three major broadcast networks pointed to their news divisions (which operated at a loss or barely broke even) as evidence that they were fulfilling the FCC’s mandate. News was, in a manner of speaking, the loss leader that permitted NBC, CBS and ABC to justify the enormous profits made by their entertainment divisions.
~Ted Koppel, in the Washington Post
What saved early TV news from instant corruption was its status as a perfunctory appendage of a larger capitalist animal. Via sheer executive indifference, TV News enjoyed a five decade golden age wherein it could just be a faunt of objectively valuable information. So, for my parents’ life and much of my youth, TV News was entirely its own thing, not just yet another entertainment product. Its champions – Rather, Brokaw, Koppel, Cronkite, Walters, Jennings, et al – with their stoic, grown-up assessment of harsh realities and unhappy facts, were heretofore assumed to have intrinsic worth, regardless of ratings.
Cable news has now changed all of that. Once the news became the totality of the content, and the profit motive enveloped the production, the shit wagon hit the jet turbine. The need to maintain ratings all-day-every-day impelled the cable news channels to produce passively watchable content around-the-clock, irrespective of the flow of actual news or the relative import of any given story. The demands of advertisers permanently shifted the concern from pertinence to sensation. Ratings are now the sole profit driver behind networks ostensibly dedicated to journalism and all of them, to varying degrees, keep those ratings by the same means of any other scripted show: by giving the viewer a narrative to follow, with intermittent pablum for comic relief.
4 – The Murdoch Empire
(Skip if you already agree that FOX news, and its ruthless mastery of the new sensationalism, is a turgid example of a News source turned cancerous.)
The 24-hour news cycle certainly predates FOX News, just as the presence of corruption and egomania predate any given historical villain. It is perilous to define any phenomenon by its exemplars, rather than vice-versa. I would however argue that it is appropriate, in this case, to vector a spotlight onto FOX News, as it is a peculiarly noxious entity and indeed the face of everything wrong with news as it is today. FOX news has cratered the public’s regard and standards for journalism, all by sheer force of capital.
Even back in 1995, in the dim twilight of TV News’ halcyon innocence, there was a pervasive public suspicion that virtually all media had a liberal bias. It could be said that the media had, at least in part, taken down Nixon and McCarthy. One could argue that coverage of Reagan’s Iran/Contra scandal was unfairly biased against the president secretly selling weapons to Iran to fund Nicaraguan death squads. Media coverage of Republicans lambasting Bill Clinton for infidelity, and the indignant demand for The Truth about said infidelity, had strangely failed to portray conservative thinking in a flattering light. The anti-authoritarian leaning of the journalist caste probably contributed to those ‘liberal bias’ optics. Popular entertainment’s inexorable march towards inclusivity and normalization of non-white, non-straight, non-male people may have made a certain population feel threatened. Whatever the sum causation, Rupert Murdoch wanted a pro-Republican TV channel (source) to combat the Liberal Bias he saw everywhere. Murdoch tapped former Republican media consultant Roger Ailes to head the nascent Republican network, trusting him to deliver a shiny beacon of confirmation bias to american conservatives who were apparently still underserved by AM radio’s saturation.
Rupert Murdoch was already a trash-media magnate in 1995. He had entered the tabloid game in the 50s and, by the time he set his sights on American TV, the not-at-all-ironically named News Corp. already had numerous newspapers in multiple countries. His reach into the realm of TV would be the most consequential thing he had ever done to the world. The crux of my argument in this piece is that low-information voters do real, lasting damage to democracies and Fox News channel has cultivated and mobilized more low-information voters than America can withstand (source).
FOX News channel went on-air in 1996 and, just 4 years later, had so capitalized on the 24-hour news format’s endemic circus, that they dominated the field, at least in ratings (source). Viewers of FOX News, however – according to all research thus far conducted – are apparently no better informed with it than they would be without it (source, source, source). They are certainly angrier and more convinced of their own knowledge, however. FOX has observably turned countless political diletante grandparents into staunchly conservative voters. FOX is still the primary source of misinformation about (and therefore approval of) the Iraq war, and at least one study estimates it gave G.W. Bush a second term (source, source).
It is true that MSNBC builds its own bubble for liberals, but MSNBC is, ratings-wise, non-competitive with FOX and has a minimal impact by comparison. More importantly, MSNBC was not conceived as a liberal station; It hired all liberal commentators, and doubtless is just as guilty of the corruption that a 24-hour-news-cycle imparts. FOX News was born corrupt – explicitly created for partisan spin in favor of Republican agenda items. The sensationalist blight, over an already fundamentally unethical core, has created a powerful media edifice so nakedly partisan, that as long as a Republican is in the White House, the channel is indistinguishable from the state-run TV in authoritarian dictatorships. This was made possible by private capital alone, accountable only to owners and sponsors. If MSNBC is the only answer to that, then TV news is already lost. This is the fate of all news if we allow ratings and celebrity, via sharing/clicking/advertising, to determine what we get when we seek information.
5 – Information-On-Tap And The Print-Killers
(Skip if you already agree that the internet has dominated and transformed the nature of news as a consumable product.)
My generation was the first to really grow up with the internet. The eldest of us (including myself at 36), were the last to remember a time when there simply was no internet. Then, there was only dial-up, and when broadband cost like 150 bucks a month and only one of your friends had it. We were also the first to replace channel surfing with web surfing. As we grew accustomed to just being online without a specific purpose – just to browse idly – we started getting used to news coming from websites instead of from the local TV station or the daily paper.
The internet has now replaced both the newspaper and the radio to an entire generation of americans. By 2016, the internet had easily eclipsed both of them as preferred news sources for all americans (source), now second only to erstwhile newspaper-killer, TV. But even that is also changing quickly, especially with younger people. Notably, even the olds are getting more news online than ever before – but you probably already knew that after those last few facebook posts from that one uncle.
That print is dying has become consensus reality. Print sales industry-wide have been declining since at least 2009 (source) and circulation is plummeting (source). According to the New York Times – though their overall profitability has been steady in the trump era’s firehose-of-scandals – their print sales are far outpaced by online subscriptions. It’s basically as I expected, but apparently the difference is quite stark: For the New York Times specifically, online subscription income providing two thirds of 2018’s third-quarter haul (source). That is not likely to reverse; this is the new environment in which journalism is expected to survive, and the rules here are very different.
The newspapers’ first attempts to monetize internet news in the style of the old subscription or pay-per-copy model was as clumsy and tone-deaf as could be expected. Starting in the 90s, experiments with paid news content on the internet had mixed results (source). From utter failure to relative okay-ness, the model appears to have stabilized but is still weaker and with higher management costs than just throwing ads on everything. The subscription model, however, were it valued by consumers as highly as it should be, could conceivably sustain the journalistic giants while keeping them in fealty to the public’s ongoing trust and not just our fickle, exploitable attentions.
This sudden erosion of the altar of print news has so far been spun merely as the death of print, but it could easily be the death of news too, if we don’t correct our habits. I predict that journalism as we have known it will not survive a total conversion to a ‘free’, ad-supported business model; The degree to which that conversion is already complete has done enough damage as it is.
6 – Clicks and Shares and Their Elusive Worth
(Skip if you already agree that the ad-supported business model of internet news is untenable for journalism in the long-term)
One of the top aggregators on the internet is Reddit. Reddit follows in the vein of Digg, Fark, and some other sites I forgot about when I got on Reddit. It has become the premier venue to try one’s hand at going viral. If you have a youtube video or a blog or an op-ed in the local paper, you post that link to Reddit and hope it catches on. If it does, it will be shared via tweet and facebook wall and make you internet famous for nearly an hour. Going viral, or at least getting lots of attention on aggregator sites, is a positive boon to content creators – including news sites – who survive on web traffic to bring in ad dollars. The familiar hunger for advertising income is the impetus behind this unending gold-rush into the sphere of link-sharing; A gold-rush that is evidently much more rush than gold (source).
In the Columbia Journalism Review in 2016, in an article that suggested the revival of print – albeit in some limited, boutique capacity – and underlined the inherent problems with internet content, Michael Rosenwald spoke with tech visionary Roger Fidler (who famously anticipated the iPad back in the 80s). Salient point here:
The idea of interactive advertising has clearly not panned out, [Fidler] says. Readers are annoyed and distracted by it, so many block it with browser extensions. He and others have observed that print offers a limited amount of ad space, which is infinite online, driving down ad prices and sending publishers racing around a hamster wheel. To make money, they need more content to advertise against. Some of this content is—how to put this?—lousy, giving readers another reason not to pay for news. (source)
It’s an easy diagnosis from an obvious line of cause-and-effect: People like free content but hate advertisements, as expected. Advertisements allow the content to be free and therefore popular, but the value of the ad sales is suppressed by both its ubiquitousness and the predictable popularity of ad-blocking browser features. The value of content’s popularity to its advertisers is then also suppressed by the tendency of the audience to either avoid or ignore advertisements while consuming that content. The vicious cycle of value loss forces content providers to increasingly sacrifice substance for sensation to drive down production costs and drive up traffic. Now they need to pump those nearly-worthless views and clicks into the millions to net any kind of respectable return. The news-scape, as I assume we have all noticed, is now saturated with garbage – dubbed ‘clickbait’ by the internet collective – and so long as clicks are still the inflated currency of internet news, I don’t see this getting better. You get what you pay for, and free news comes at the expense of journalism itself.
7 – Crisis of Quality
(Skip if you already agree that the quality of our news has been degraded by the ad-supported business model of both internet and TV news.)
Newspapers have certainly chased sensation to move copy long before the internet. It was more of an issue when the newsboys were yelling headlines on the street than when the subscription model made bank in the newly-minted suburbs of post-war America. TV News of the 80s and 90’s certainly did the same thing to a degree, hoping the news hour’s average ratings could be buoyed by a must-follow saga or an explosive event. The important things were still there, though; Stories and analysis could still, in a great majority, be trusted to relay facts in good faith, and journalists would still dig into a story for insight for the sake of having done it.
There was also a tone of dignity to the journalistic gestalt that is apparently limited to the old-guard. That dignity was part of the overall effort to earn and maintain public trust and it has since been abandoned by the sphere of new media listicle repositories and bloggy little think-pieces like this one. Imagine Dan Rather reporting that someone had ‘destroyed’ someone else via mere public statement. I doubt Brokaw could stomach having to proclaim anything had ‘won the internet’ or ‘is everything right now.’ Imagine a front page headline in the Post breathlessly exclaiming that someone had clapped back. The idea is, for now, comfortingly absurd; not just because the tweeters and facespaces didn’t exist until the 21st century, but because we know intuitively that that kind of bullshit is beneath serious people. But that kind of bullshit gets clicks and shares, so it pervades your every waking moment online, to your detriment.
As of right now, the average quality of news online is abhorrent. Much the same can be said of the aggregate TV News since at least 2001. Adopting a business model that obviously demands more and more spectacle with less and less delay and on an ever smaller budget, has caused the heretofore manageable problem of sensationalism to explode. Now rampant like never before, sensationalism’s modern form, clickbait, has dragged down our collective standards and damaged the global human psyche with the mass ignorance it spawns, and on which it feeds.
While ‘Fake News’ gets its own section in this piece, social media in general, and the proliferation of meme-sharing in particular, deserves consideration as well. The meme-as-argument trend is recognizable behavior from long before the internet: What used to be bumper sticker wisdom and t-shirt slogans on the trucks and torsos of yesteryear’s clueless yokels, are now the bite-size McTheses of countless simpletons decorating their own corners of the internet with precious affirmations. Memes have become worse than bumper-stickers however, via two aggravating factors: the ease of sharing things on the internet, and peoples’ inclination to accept text as reliable if it accompanies a picture. The term ‘viral’ is just painfully apt, and that so many use it to gleefully describe the rapid spread of goofy nonsense through a bankrupt culture as a good thing, is a plot point I’d have declared ‘too on-the-nose’ were it written into dystopian satire.
Depthless platitudes and pseudo-wisdom abound in any medium in any time period, but an additional complication just now exists to make it all much worse. The special problem with getting news from a ‘feed’ is that news has no civic value when it is selected for us by taste instead of veracity or relevance, and being pandered to by marketers is not conducive to mental health or maturity. We keep scrolling to the next thing; not because we are dim and incurious, but because we have been conditioned to be human magpies by a world full of relentless marketing. The daily information we seek is now just as obnoxiously marketed as everything else, thanks to the hyper-capitalization of the news by internet and cable TV content providers. Every marketing campaign tries to cut through the noise generated by other campaigns also trying to cut through the noise. Crowded places get louder and louder until absolutely everyone is yelling. Our want for free information in a mercilessly capitalist environment has degraded and devalued the quality-filter that our quaint public-service and subscription news sources maintained as a matter of principle.
8 – Eroding Trust
(Do not skip.)
Many hands have been wrung over the phenomenon of ‘fake news’. It’s not new, but today’s iteration is uniquely fecund in the era of social media and headline-width attention spans. Forget the catch-all epithet employed by trump to dismiss unfavorable coverage; The real definition of ‘fake news’ – as it was originally coined – is unscrupulous hacks creating entirely fictitious news stories and publishing them on deceptively legitimate-looking websites to drive click-traffic and therefore ad revenue (source). They may also pay mass influencers to share their links thousands of times, in hopes of going viral – the holy grail of internet jackpot unicorn mixed metaphors. As we know, viral content has miniscule production costs, puts eyes on banner ads and, so far, no legal repercussions for being provably false. An ascendant hoax-industry is already a troubling development and, as we’ve seen, a hostile foreign government wishing to sow chaos in our borders can simply employ the same deceptions to contaminate our politics at will.
We know Putin despised Hillary Clinton (source) for calling his own rigged election a rigged election. We know that Putin almost certainly has leverage on Trump (source, source, source) and that 2016 was a golden opportunity to translate that kompromat into leverage on America. As expected, in 2016, about 3 times the amount of fake news spread online was pro-trump as was anti-trump (source). The prevailing assessment, from actual journalists (source) and our own intelligence agencies (source), holds that the spread of fake news by paid internet trolls was an integral arm of Putin’s efforts to undermine our democracy with acts of information warfare.
We know that, of the extant sum of fake news, only a portion of both pro- and anti-trump fake news came from american yellow journalists marketing horseshit to credulous puds. We also know that another, more deliberately one-sided batch of equally poisonous propaganda was injected into our media by Russia to weaponize our surplus of low-information, single-issue voters. The effect of fake news from Russian trolls on the US election was hard to exactly quantify, but impossible to ignore or discount. The result was that a candidate who was given the longest possible shot, and even lost the popular vote by 3 million, still managed to squeak by an electoral college victory by thin margins in key swing states (source). The product of that fluke-stravaganza has been manifestly injurious to the entire free world. For America’s part, this threat has no precedent, as it now comes from within.
The one shred of hope in the situation can be found in this fact: Russian propaganda only ever showed up in unvetted message boards, facebook posts, trash news sites, and other free content providers who rely on advertising. That all this content was free was the sole reason it spread so far and so fast – it cost nothing to post or share, or in some cases it wasn’t so much ad-supported as it was itself an advertisement, making money for the site that hosted it. To show up in subscription content, paid for by readers who value credibility, it would have had to be vetted and it would have failed. Content providers who rely on the trust of their readership, instead of on advertising, held fast against the corrosive tide. If, in our ongoing information war with the forces of fascism, we are ever to take advantage of the strength of the real journalism industry, we have no choice but to double and triple down on our support for reader-paid content.
In recent years, so many people have decided that news was now free by-nature, that little consideration has been given to how legitimate journalism ever sustained its own existence in a crowded media mileu. When we laughed off the responsibility to directly support journalism – in favor of whichever ad-supported news source showed up effortlessly in our feed – the monkey’s paw curled another finger and we ignored the implications. The New York Times’ 125 Pulitzers don’t pay the bills on their own, and stature means less now than it ever has to the average consumer, unfamiliar with news that is not fed to them. The tragedy of that development is that we need our institutions now more than ever in the last century, and the difference between a trustworthy source and a bullshit source should, rightfully, be its history of accuracy. To devalue that reputation is to lose the benefits of our most solidly established defense against government and corporate suppression and propaganda, domestic and foreign. We have already seen the damage, and it will not stop without our action.
9 – What Can Be Done
In the pitiless capitalism in which we live, what had seemed to be just a convenient alternative to dedicated news sources has become a suppurating growth of ruinous lies so quickly, and so insidiously, that this country can not be expected to recover organically by purely free-market forces, i.e. basically letting the problem sort itself out over the next thousand years. It is up to us right now – the people, the market – to rescue this often-abused unofficial branch of government, on which our freedom depends, from our own market forces that have done nothing but harm. We thought we didn’t have to pay for it, and now we are paying for it, and we will continue to pay for it, until we start actually paying for it.
The ebbing pool of crises here described has three contributing sources. One: The discrepancy between the cost of producing investigative journalism and its expected returns. Two: The devaluation of journalism by the popular presumption that news is now free. Three: The relatively new phenomenon of getting one’s news from a personalized feed instead of from any given publication with a dedicated editorial staff. Journalism can not fulfill its role as a mass-educator when information is curated solely by dopamine. All three of these self-aggravating factors can only be mitigated by the conscious efforts of people who recognize their responsibility to the future. We must insist on paying directly for journalism, because no other business model is worthy of the enterprise.
Since supporting journalistic publications is no longer a matter of course for American life, it must be deliberately revived by our resisting the pull of ‘free’ things. The easiest, most realistic and practical way for our own generations to support and preserve journalism is by the mass-purchasing of online subscriptions, specifically to journalistic entities who offer ad-free content to subscribers. Even if you, like myself, still get a majority of your news from aggregator sites like Reddit or from your Facebook or Google news feed, know that the quality of that news can not be sustained by your having seen it, clicked on it, or even shared it. So when you are browsing free lists of links to articles, pick one that you think is particularly important and commit to spending the 10-25 bucks a month supporting that publication. Your local newspaper is an excellent option, or news magazines like Time or The Atlantic. Buy subscriptions and send emails stating specifically why you subscribed, that you appreciate investigative journalism and support the ceaseless inspection of the powerful. Treat that expenditure as a tiny supplemental tax to maintain an independent oversight agency that is the size of the entire journalism industry and answers only to us. Our money is the only thing that keeps the fate of the Fourth Estate in our own hands. The return on that investment will be incalculable, given the alternative.
Saving The Fourth Estate 