Big country, Big Business, bad news

Come along on a quick, blurry drone flight over the history of journalism in America. This comes to mind now as I see complaints online that the mainstream media are not covering the massive protests today against the Republican administration

When the First Amendment established freedom of the press, the entire country didn't even take up the entire east coast of what we call the United States today.

 Newspaper circulation was limited to a small radius around the point of publication. Editors and publishers felt no obligation to be neutral, but the low startup cost meant that multiple papers could cover a heavily populated area. Advertiser-supported funding didn't threaten to warp coverage, because advertisers were already sympathetic to the paper's editorial stance or they could be replaced if they objected to content and took their business elsewhere.

As the country grew, so did the influence of major publications. As controversies grew heated, sometimes a newspaper publisher would be murdered and their offices destroyed, but the general business model managed to survive. That tended to happen in smaller market areas, so it didn't disrupt the industry as a whole.

By the end of the 19th Century, newspapers wielded massive power. This held up all the way to the late 20th Century. Television pulled some revenue and had greater impact on the senses, because of moving pictures and audio, but broadcast presentations couldn't go into the depth of analysis that print articles could. And newspapers were always on. A newspaper could pass from hand to hand for hours or days.

The influence of the written word on anyone who can read retains its impact as it goes from a breaking story to old news to history. The impact may vary at each of those stages, but it can actually increase at the history stage, as unfolding events after it was new give it more significance. Video  -- especially if the broadcaster opts not to archive it -- only lives for as long as it takes to perform it. It's much harder to review in sections, too. Reread this paragraph a few times and compare it to rewinding a video to exactly the right spot over and over.

Whatever the medium, news outlets seemed to prize their position as a foil to the government. They might not be opposed, but they represented the critical, independent observer. The people had a right to know, and journalists had a Constitutionally protected role in providing that knowledge.

Prosperity makes life more expensive. Subsistence is a basic equation: get enough food and find sufficient shelter to survive whatever conditions nature is throwing at you. Once subsistence is assured, the human mind starts looking for something else to do. This cave is damp, this hut is leaky. The trail to the next village could be a little smoother. Speaking of the next village, those smug bastards have some pretty nice farm land, and they don't look so tough... Next thing you know, you have a major civilization, where basic shelter costs you more than you can scrape up from this thing you have now called a job.

Running a business, especially a news business, in a prosperous, civilized country takes a lot more money than it did in the 18th and at least the first half of the 19th centuries. At the same time, multiple factors have reduced Americans' ability and willingness to read. I have no solid statistics on it because I can't be bothered to look them up, but the dominant forms of Internet content certainly seem to be video based, while television news and news-imitating programs dominate in forming public opinion. Blogs of the early 2000s gave way quickly to video blogs and now to quick hits like TikTok.

The internet supports small content providers, but they rent their space from the large (or huge) corporations that own the actual hosting sites. Huge corporations, meanwhile, blast out their content directly over online and broadcast channels. Newspapers put content online, constrained then by the space limitations and intrusive ad formats of those spaces, losing all of the advantages of paper publication. I live beyond the reach of any major newspaper, so I haven't seen an actual paper paper in years. But I can subscribe to the web versions of major papers all over the world. Or I could if I could afford it.

News has always been curated. "All the news that's fit to print" reflects the editors' opinion of what's fit to print. When I worked for a small weekly paper I joked that our motto was "all the news that fits." The "news hole" is what's left on the page after that edition's ads are blocked in. The size of your news space is determined by your ad revenue. That revenue also has to pay the rest of the newspaper's overhead.

Advertisers generally don't care about the news. They care about whether a publication or broadcast outlet can deliver their message to a lot of eyeballs. If enough people aren't reading stuff on paper, it doesn't matter that the paper medium was much better at presenting detailed information. Detailed information is no longer reliable bait for enough people to reward the advertisers' investment.

Advertisers do care about news-imitating content that will stimulate desirable buying or voting behavior. It doesn't have to be true. That's not just a sad truth about human susceptibility to gossip, it's legally true since the 1980s, when the Republican administration got rid of the Fairness Doctrine, which required genuine balance in presenting controversial topics on broadcast media, and made hysterical exaggeration more difficult. "Free speech" advocates said that this stifled free expression -- i.e lying -- and demanded its removal. The conservative administration knew a good thing when they saw it, realizing that their positions never polled well when presented in a non-partisan way. So down went the Fairness Doctrine and up went Fox News and talk radio.

Broadcast news had an advantage over print in reaching rural areas, which was later boosted significantly by cable television. Small local newspapers could only reach so far and cover so much. Big papers would mail out to anyone willing to pay, but news wasn't fresh when it arrived. The simple beliefs and perceived wisdom of rural populations living closer to basic subsistence is no more valid than the opinions of city dwellers who have lived for generations cut off from firsthand contact with agriculture. These demographics, isolated from each other, shared some similar receptiveness to misleading content, albeit from opposite gaps in their lived experiences.

Fox disguised their right wing goals by hosting liberal entertainment content, but their "news" department has now evolved into a blatant megaphone for authoritarianism. The corporation plays hardball with cable providers, which raises fees for cable subscribers and forces Fox onto basic cable lineups with no opt out.

As corporate consolidation has cut down the number of corporations that fund broadcast outlets, the natural inclination of capitalism toward authoritarianism shapes the content that you are allowed to see. Similar pressures fall on print media, with the Wall Street Journal, for instance, owned by the same corporation that owns Fox. And of course Jeff Bezos, lovable potentate of Amazon, drew a lot of attention to his ownership of the venerable Washington Post when he kneecapped their editorial integrity before the 2024 election.

Gone are the days when you could pick up a newspaper with a reasonable expectation that you would find bland, boring, but factual content about issues of importance. Fans of the new dispersed media model of independent journalists all over the internet will say that even then you couldn't trust that the big paper wasn't burying something that the ownership didn't want the common folk to know. But now you can't trust that the valiant independent muckraker of your choice isn't blatantly making shit up or hiding facts just as much as the big corporations are. You may have more options for fact checking your fact checkers, but you have to put in the time and find the sources to do so.

If Daniel Ellsberg sent his bombshell information to the New York Times today, they'd rat him out to the government in seconds. Either that or the reporters who received the information would sit on it until they could put out a lucrative book a year or two later. Prove me wrong, Gray Lady. But finding a replacement media channel that we all can share is impossible. When there were three broadcast networks and a handful of major newspapers, we all argued from the same fact sheet. Now the political discussion has to weed through all of the relevant information and dismiss influence operations and insane conspiracy theories every damn day.

I don't present news here. I just present emotional support. And dismissive insults as appropriate, but that's emotionally supportive to people who share my point of view. Good luck out there!

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.

The online ad model mutilated journalism

 Eons ago, in the mid 1970s, the basic journalism class required of anyone in the College of Journalism at University of Florida taught news writing as a means of conveying information efficiently to readers who were most likely to skim. This meant that the structure of a hard news story would load as many essentials as possible near the top, including the headline. That way, if a reader was just glancing over the pages, the headlines would provide a summary of the subject matter, and each article's lede paragraph would convey the most important content.

Throughout the era of printed paper, the format held up. The ads had their part of the page and the news and features filled the rest. Front pages had little or no advertising. The purpose of a newspaper was to convey the news. It was a point of pride. Papers might have a known editorial bias, but the straight news was served straight, under headlines that might be downright dry. Cynically, you could say that it didn't matter to the publishers if anyone actually read the news, as long as the advertisers thought that enough people did to make it worth buying ad space. In other words, the paper was prepaid.

As soon as "pages" became digital images that wouldn't appear until a reader asked for them, advertisers had a sure-fire way to audit actual views. Journalistic outlets now desperately needed readers to click though. The clickbait headline was born.

The problem is: people still skim the same way they did. Many of us are even reluctant to click through because the ads fill our devices with trackers and other garbage that we'd rather avoid. Lots of us navigate in a world informed only by inflammatory and misleading headlines composed purposely to upset us. In addition, journalistic standards had already slipped due to the influence of broadcast media and the shift to news as a business rather than a public service.

Granted, journalism has always been used as a way to control and direct opinion about issues important to the publisher. As more persuasive media evolved, they increased opportunities for nefarious actors, against which the stolid and factual reporting has little chance. Printed papers had greater resistance to corrupting influences, and a much wider reach than their audited circulation and projected secondary readership could ever capture. A printed page could blow around for weeks or longer, falling under the gaze of an unimaginably diverse audience for free. Now everything is TV, or at least viewed on a screen, almost obliterated by commercial messages.

The visual dominance of ads emerged in glossy magazines in the 1980s as a harbinger of the trash we have to hack through today to view or read the content we actually wanted. Bike and outdoor magazines in the 1970s were nerdy, with an obvious division between the editorial content and the ads. By the mid 1980s, it was getting hard to tell the difference between ads and articles. Mainstream consumer magazines had gone ad-heavy long before that. But at least in a printed publication you could flip past those pages risking nothing more than a paper cut if you were exceptionally clumsy and unlucky. In digital format, you have to keep whacking back the pop-ups, and you'll still be trailed afterwards by targeted supplicants reaching for your credit card based on an algorithm's perception of your desires.

In this digital age, another problem plagues journalists and readers alike: Is your browser up to date? I'm writing now on a MacBook from 2009. The browser is Firefox, updated as far as it can be. It is slow and lots of pages don't load correctly. I keep scanning idly for a newer used unit, but computer companies keep trying to collect and control their clientele, so the newest of the new may come with numerous sturdy strings attached. Windows computers come with nothing but teasers pre-installed, requiring you to use their cloud services and pay to subscribe to the software itself.

My other option is a 2019 Lenovo that was so slow from the git-go that just booting it up is a chore. I cleaned out a lot of the crap that was dragging it down, but it will never be blazingly fast or fully trustworthy. So that leaves me with my phone. A lot of people use their phones for everything. I use it for more and more because the apps generally work more smoothly, but sometimes I need a bigger screen and a real keyboard. So my connection to the flow of digital information-- and I'm sure I'm not alone in this -- breaks up often.

Print media are still available, with all of their old limitations and then some. I live in a rural area, so good coverage of news at any level has always been hard to find. Someone has to get the story, and a publication has to have space to print the story. The town I live in is between the coverage areas of several papers, so it gets mentioned in passing if at all, except when something exciting happens. Then that item is all that makes the news. Localized web coverage, mostly on social media, is so filled with personal rancor that it soon becomes too stressful to read. Ignorance truly is bliss. In fact, bliss is impossible without it.

Printed matter needed paper. Paper generally came from trees. Cutting trees means cyclic or permanent deforestation, depending on what investors decide to do with the land from which the trees were taken. Investors are looking for profit, not sustainability. If a piece of farmland or timberland will fetch a fat profit being stripped for a housing development or an industrial park, say goodbye to the trees, and don't ask where your food will be grown or your groundwater will percolate. 

Digital media depends on a steady supply of functional devices that the manufacturers are falling all over themselves to make obsolete as quickly as they come out. "Built to last" isn't even a selling point anymore. A scrap of newspaper might be legible in fifty or a hundred years. Will an old computer still boot up? And if it does, and civilization still exists and functions, will it be able to connect to whatever the network is by then? Not in the current business model. And the business model is all we pay attention to anymore. Forget quality of life and acquisition of skill and knowledge for the overall improvement of humanity. Just rake in cash as much as you can.