Monetizing the Meerkats

 Picture the classic photo of meerkats, with a couple of sentinels standing tall while the rest of the group forages. The group takes turns standing guard and gathering food, so everyone gets what they need.

Humans divide tasks more completely, using money to ensure that anyone not directly engaged in producing food or making shelter gets some. Our sentinels need to get paid in order to maintain their vigilance and reporting.

The myth of impartial journalism stems from an ideal worth striving for, and from some real life examples of it. But how can a journalist be truly impartial if there is such a thing as right and wrong? The obvious stuff may be easy enough, but, when it comes to conjectural policy, editorial bias skews everything.

In the old model of print journalism, ad revenues would determine the size of the paper. Once the ad banks were laid in, what remained was the "news hole." A paper might run at a deficit for a while, but financial reality is financial reality. In general, a paper would have to keep a sustainable balance. Thus, "All the News that's Fit to Print" becomes, "All the News that Fits." An editor decides what's worthy to make the cut, even more than when coffers are full and a few more things can be shoehorned in.

Now we have many reporters on platforms of all sizes, from a couple of planks sketchily nailed into the top of a swaying tree to concrete monoliths of established corporate media. No one has a monopoly on the truth or any obligation whatsoever to deliver it. Our sentinels keep watch and report.

Corporate media can no longer be trusted. Collectives providing information from lower tiers definitely reflect their own biases. Bias does not always bring inaccuracy. Unfortunately, your sense of accuracy depends on your vision of the present and future of the country. Those opinions are shaped by your beliefs about the past and the principles you derive from those beliefs.

In reality, nothing is secure, as the SCOTUS decision of July 1, 2024 proves. They rendered the entire constitution and Declaration of Independence irrelevant by making the president a king. For our nation to succeed, ruled by a document instead of a personage, we needed people of integrity to uphold and defend that document against all enemies foreign and domestic. Instead, domestic enemies have used the system to destroy the system. But I digress.

To keep our watchful meerkats standing tall, they needed the funds to survive. All media have been holding out the beggar's bowl for years, but it's gotten worse and worse in the past couple of decades. The people who want you uneducated and uninformed have done a good job of vilifying public education and the profession of journalism, while concentrating control of mass media in their own hands. Journalism that doesn't expose the schemes of the powerful is just public relations.

The sides are drawn: it's money versus people. We toil to get some and it gets dragged back from us. Every endeavor that might once have started out based on some intellectual and ethical principle becomes a business and turns toward the pure pursuit of maximum profit margin. This cynical and destructive model warps the entire economy.

An independent journalist does not provide food or shelter. They provide information. The truth is seldom popular, so the income is meager. There's no easy money anywhere. It's hard to rise in the pyramid scheme of capitalism. The "idle rich" have to keep scampering around looking busy, while the descending tiers of their supporters do the dirty work to keep them in power and secure the foundations of cheap labor: us.

I can say for certain that the time to observe, analyze, and write comes directly from either sleep or work. If you can't connect your efforts to a revenue stream, or even a series of discrete splashes, your income will suffer.

How do you know?

With the 2016 presidential primary already underway, I've been thinking about the way people get their information now, and how it has changed since the time before broadcast media.

Before radio, anyone interested in political information and candidates would have to read whatever printed matter was available, or encounter the candidate in person, or listen to another live speaker. Political participation depended on literacy, because no candidate could travel so widely and address large enough audiences to mobilize a useful number of voters.

According to this suspect graph on Wikipedia, voter turnout was quite high between 1836 and 1896, before dropping off sharply at the beginning of the 20th Century. Unfortunately, data on voter statistics from before broadcast media don't come readily to hand, so I have no better numbers to offer. But I don't really care about overall numbers. Think about the methods of communication and how they affect the lives of ordinary citizens.

With the coming of radio, people no longer had to be readers. Later, with the coming of television, they no longer had to imagine the visual aspects of what they heard. As video has developed it has followed in the footsteps of film in providing instruction as well as entertainment, so that an attentive viewer can learn concepts and procedures through multiple senses, and inattentive viewers can think they did. The process of examining and reviewing written words has fallen off, while the absorption, conscious and unconscious, of information that may be wildly skewed, has risen sharply.

The Internet is the descendant of television. According to a Rodale article, video content is expected to comprise 86% of the Internet by next year. Obviously, people would rather see something that walks and talks --and dances -- than read something that sits there and requires them to engage more analytical faculties to absorb it.

Personally, I tend to skip videos and look for something I can read. But I am politically and economically insignificant, being nonpartisan (though left leaning) and dirt poor. But as a canary in a coal mine, I have to chirp out that encouraging people to absorb most of their information through what are basically animated cartoons does not bode well for the intellectual future of the species.

Intelligent people will think about what they've been fed, but they have to fight through the psychological manipulation inherent in the medium to do so. People with less time or inclination to think will be herded. The shepherd and the crook may be one and the same.

As animated content takes over more and more, written information will become harder to find. In the Dark Ages, illiteracy created a wall between the people in power and the people over whom they exercised it. Grubbing for survival, the serfs and peasants learned what they needed from the people around them. No one asked for their opinion about affairs of government. Now, in the era of video serfing, the semi-literate, harried multitudes are simply steered with simple words on paper and a lot of haranguing through speakers and screens.

Even if you dig for the more measured tones and thoughtful presentation of public broadcasting you're getting only a peephole view of the world. And public broadcasting is picking up a lot of corporate financing, which has to alter the content, even if it's done subtly, so as not to alarm the shy, skittish intelligentsia. Because every single human views the world from within the confines of their individual brain, the most rational individual will still transmit and receive through a filter of preconception. These prejudices apply to written material as well as audiovisual.

Written material is superior because it stimulates critical brain activity more effectively than video. You may agree or disagree with material in either medium, but the forced pace of video carries you past each point faster than you can say, "hey, wait a minute." Written propaganda has had plenty of influence through the centuries, and continues to do so. But seeing it on paper and being able to look at it over and over without rewinding allows you to review it, to catch things you might not have noticed before, without sitting through a bunch of the rest of the presentation as you try to rewind to the spot you remember. The emotional impact is more controllable without an animated presenter cranking up the feeling.

Of course information in any medium is only as good as the investigation behind it. So the whole thing stumbles over access. Can a reporter get to information? Has the information been formulated for effect, or is it really unaltered primary data? Has the information been filtered through the editorial bias of the publisher? Since that is almost inescapably true, has that bias rendered the information useless, if not outright harmful?

Many of the details we are given, and encouraged to either enthuse or rage about, are irrelevant to the broader implications of a given event. That's when the reader, viewer or listener has to rise above the thicket of detail to think about major movements and basic principles.