1 – TL;DR (or ‘Thesis’, if you book-learn)
To preserve free society we must preserve journalism and to preserve journalism we must pay for it.
2 – The Fourth Estate
The viability of a free democracy is contingent on the ongoing education of the public. It is by now beyond doubt that popular awareness is the only bulwark we truly have against the natural tendency of power to beget power. Said popular awareness is the exclusive product of journalists and the supporting enterprise of publishing. History relentlessly teaches us that, in societies without freedom of the press and a sufficiently robust journalistic community, power will consolidate in shadow, authority will calcify into tyranny, and human potential will soon be forfeit to the ends of the powerful. Any measure of freedom that we possess today, we owe to the historical primacy of journalism, and the fates of both freedom and journalism are permanently fused.
3 – TV News As Passive Entertainment
That primacy is currently being lost. It has been slowly slipping away since at least the 90s, with the advent of dedicated 24-hour cable news networks. Before cable news, the news programs on any given TV station were a loss-leader, i.e. a public service provided for the sake of justifying, to the FCC, the broadcast companies’ enormous profits from their entertainment products. On cable news, however, the news is expected to deliver ratings just like any other show, making sensationalism supersede pertinence and veracity. The public-service aspect is absent, leaving only the will of the marketers. Though the publication industry in general, including the journalistic press, has always had some measure of sensationalism and hyperbole, the current degree to which our news media has become a circus is unprecedented and profoundly ominous. Unchecked market forces will accelerate that degradation until the news is indistinguishable from marketing and celebrity gossip.
4 – The Murdoch Empire
Being explicitly capitalist entities, every 24-hour news channel has its own corporate demon to feed; None of them are free of corruption, albeit in varying measures. In the uniquely toxic case of FOX news, that demon is a naked appendage of a political party – and of the government, when that party is in charge. FOX News can be seen as the dark exemplar of what happens when the news business is expected to thrive in a mercilessly capitalist environment, with nothing but ratings to secure its meals. The channel was first conceived explicitly as a Nixonian Republican mouth-piece, serving up constant scathing opinions and flashy graphics and an endlessly marching chyron of ticking updates, the next of which might be important. FOX’s content was meant to counter the so-called ‘liberal bias’ that, as Rupert Murdoch imagined, must have been the very force impelling journalists to be so anti-authoritarian, and giving newspapers wherewithal to undermine Republican war-making efforts in the 60s and 70s. Murdoch, and Republican operative Roger Ailes, cynically injected a pre-corrupted news source into a nascent cable TV News market, and it became wildly successful in that late-90’s miasma of TV journalism’s creeping corporatization. Present-day FOX News, and its alarmingly efficient mobilization of america’s surplus of low-information voters, has obviously been devastating, both to our society and to the world’s security. That extant damage is still nothing compared to the potential of the internet, as witnessed spectacularly in 2016.
5 – Information On Tap
The internet has supplanted both the radio and the newspaper to most Americans as the preferred source of news. It is expected to soon overtake TV as well, becoming the primary source of news to the voting public. Recognizing that eventuality, journalistic institutions have tried two fundamentally different avenues to monetizing their content and staying solvent in the digital age: an advertisement-supported, free-to-consume model, and a more traditional subscription model. The former is by far the most common and by that measure more successful. Given FOX News is the rotten fruit of the hyper-capitalist take on TV news, it sadly follows that a purely advertisement-driven click-economy can drag journalism to untold depths of exploitative worthlessness. Remember that Newspapers still live and die by their paying readership, and TV news, sans any subscription models, was heretofore a loss-leader, subsidized without condition for its own sake. Both are now rapidly shifting, unprepared, into an environment wherein loss can be fatal. That shift should be a grave concern to all of us, as it threatens to either kill or contaminate a huge portion of available journalism, supplanting it all with paid messaging.
6 – Clicks and Shares and Their Elusive Worth
Though widely popular for obvious reasons, the ‘free’, advertising-supported model is both unsustainable and functionally hostile to journalistic integrity. Just as ratings are paramount to the equally ‘free’ and advertising-supported TV news channels, clicks and shares are the lifeblood of the majority of internet news. Unfortunately, our views and clicks and shares are so near to worthlessness, that they will never support anything but the bare minimum required to turn a modest profit. The catch to the ‘free’ system is always that, while consumers prefer free content, they hate advertisements. They block or simply ignore the vast majority of ads they encounter everywhere in life. This creates a vicious cycle of value loss, whereby more ads mean more noise and less engagement with the consumer, decreasing the value per-ad. That requires the content provider to then sell even more ads to compensate for the value-loss, exacerbating the problem in the long-run. The only other way to recover ad prices on the internet is by driving more traffic to advertisers, which eventually must be done by compromising the content. In the case of journalistic publications, this puts an utterly toxic pressure on the news itself to be more sensational and to command more attention, at the expense of diligence, credibility, and dignity.
7 – Crisis of Quality
Ethics and ideals of the golden age of TV journalism notwithstanding, News is still, and has always been, a consumable product. Regardless of how vitally important journalism is to our entire society, Journalists – no matter how dedicated – can not be expected to toil penniless in an economic vacuum. News costs money and time to gather, vet, write, and publish and it must recoup that cost to survive as an enterprise. It follows that, as consumers gravitate towards ease and thrift, the same market forces that have made sugary drinks and fried air a staple of the American diet, would likewise wither the integrity of any journalistic edifice subject to those forces. That is exactly what was happening on 24-hour news channels, and it has accelerated with the popularity of ‘free’, ad-supported internet news: You get what you pay for, and ‘free’ news comes at the expense of journalism itself. The resulting advent of clickbait has brought the average quality of online news to a perilous depth. The hyperbolic headlines, the breathless recitations of puerile twitter spats, and the worthless memes that now inundate our various news-feeds have left little room, in a crowded attention-economy, for sober analysis or anything longer than a tweet. This is the result, not of demand, but of a lack of demand; For the strength of the Fourth Estate as our aegis of liberty is directly proportional to the perceived monetary worth of its service. Devalue it enough, and it will yet become irreparable, then unrecognizable.
8 – Eroding Trust
Enter the phenomenon of ‘fake news.’ The ease with which our new online market of virtually valueless information can be manipulated by a dedicated actor is troubling enough. With the addition of particularly destructive actors – e.g. hostile foreign nations – the very existence of a ‘cost-free’ news sphere becomes a major liability for American democracy and, therefore, the entire free world. The mass activation of America’s twitchy cult of credulous single-issue rubes – via cheap internet trolls and spam bots working for the Kremlin – in an electoral system as fragile and lopsided as our own, has already delivered us disastrous consequences. There is no question now that the trump administration owes its place in history to Russian efforts, and the presidency is therefore compromised by a hostile foreign power. As expected, U.S. influence and good-will with the rest of the world now declines daily, and Americans can trust absolutely nothing that comes out of their White House. We can expect more of the same in all upcoming election years, with precious little power to defend our country from a new form of information warfare that has simply weaponized our own thirst for convenience.
All of those Russian efforts took place on the internet, trading memes and fake news articles to generate more traffic to spread more pro-trump propaganda in key swing-states. It is important to remember, however, that all of the fake news from Russia that made its way into American minds did so via ‘free’ news sources. In the old-guard news sources, however – with reader-paid content and a fiscal interest in the trust of their audience – claims are vetted and sources checked, and integrity held fast. Such is the real lesson of this catastrophic experiment: By being the direct source of income, we kept content providers in fealty to our own confidence, giving proper weight to ethics and accuracy, through a torrent of defiling bilge that easily overwhelmed the ‘free’ model.
9 – What Can Be Done
We have been treating journalism as another free entertainment product, submitted for – rather than object of – our interests. In doing so, we have irresponsibly compromised our only recourse to the corporate and government corruption that has routinely poisoned cities and started wars. We are already seeing the broad and tragic results of that abjection, and circumstances will deteriorate so long as we casually expect our supply of the day’s news to be financed by Someone Else™.
Monetary support for journalistic entities of all kinds must return as a matter of course in American life. In the digital age, that means the mass purchase of online subscriptions to news sources that offer ad-free, or ad-limited content to subscribers. Even if you, like myself, still get most of your news from aggregators like reddit or a personal feed like facebook, know that the quality of that news can not be sustained by any amount of those ethereal clicks and shares. So, I am asking you to pick one and pay them real money. Everyone in America should choose any number of local newspapers, national news magazines, or other such journalistic edifices, and just commit the 10-25 bucks a month for online subscriptions. As a bonus, maybe even visit them every now and then. Treat this 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. The only thing that keeps the fate of the Fourth Estate in our own hands is our collective will to subsidize its work with our own money. The return on this investment will be nothing less than the survival of the free world.
Saving The Fourth Estate 