Platforming My Enemy: The News, Future Tense
Here's Part III in the series. It's been an extremely busy week here at The Real Story and its not letting up this weekend. This wasn't supposed to be a daily. . .
. . . The Real Story was supposed to be a place for deeper dives into the issues I was covering for the mainstream media. Once, maybe twice a week. “All the news I couldn’t fit in print” is the way I put it, as I recall.
Starting with last weekend’s podcast with the irrepressible Sam Cooper, this joint has been rocking. Sam’s new joint is hopping too (he’s put up a transcript of our podcast conversation for his paid subscribers) and Sam’s been busy. He was testifying at the House affairs and procedures committee this week.
No paywall here today.
I’m going to get out of the way and let the leftish media brainiac Marc Edge have at it for the third in his series (Part I here, Part II here), but first I wanted to draw attention back to a Real Story edition from last summer. I’d decided to roar south on my Triumph to face my fear of heights again by crossing over the Megler Bridge at the mouth of the Columbia River: That’s enough Canada. I’m outta here.
I was at my wit’s end with huge stories that weren’t breaking into the mainstream, until one of those stories did: The Laith Marouf outrage, over which, even now, nobody has been forced to resign or find another job. I wrote about it for Viv Bercovici’s State of Tel Aviv webzine.
In that last Real Story newsletter before riding south along the coast to Oregon I included a snippet from an essay by Andray Mir, author of the book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, that’s immediately relevant to the concerns of this newsletter and the subject of Marc’s series this week. This was that snippet:
By the end of the twentieth century, the news media had reached the apex of their 500-year history. Even regional newspapers such as the Baltimore Sun possessed several well-staffed foreign bureaus. Never were the media as rich and influential as in their golden age, just 25 years ago. Plenty of journalists still on the job remember those glorious days. . . . The Internet broke this idyll. It turned out that the ad-based model relied not on the content attracting an affluent audience but on the monopoly over ad delivery that the Internet simply destroyed. The ad-based media business achieved power and prosperity over the course of 100 years; it collapsed in just ten.
What to do about all this? I’ve teased Marc about what I’ve called his touching faith in government. My own faith, to the extent I have any, is in the notion that sensible people will always want quality journalism and things will sort themselves out, with or without the state. And preferably without. There will always be a constituency for “news,” for true stories about things that matter. That’s where my hope lies.
The thing is, at the moment, a major overlooked contributor to the Anglosphere’s bleak journalism landscape is a crippling crisis of epistemology: how we go about the business of determining the real from the imagined, and how to discern knowledge from belief. It’s as though everybody is convinced we all deserve our own “truth.” As I’ve said more than once, it’s not just that facts don’t matter anymore, it’s that it doesn’t matter that facts don’t matter.
At the moment, this country is run by a post-truth government in Ottawa with like-minded fellow travelers in all reaches of the bureaucracy, the corporations, the universities, the schools. . . and the news media. Another thing I never tire of saying: If the truth is whatever we say it is, the “truth” that will prevail will be the one with the loudest voices, the deepest pockets and the shiniest boots. There’s hope, but as Winston Smith put it in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: “If there’s hope, it lies in the proles.” And of course, in subscribers:
Anyhow, the last word goes to Marc.
Part III: The News, Future Tense
by Marc Edge
We have been living for the past few decades through a communication revolution that was supposed to deliver an info-utopia in which the gatekeeping and agenda-setting power of mainstream media would be broken by millions of citizen journalists and bloggers. The truth would at last be set free because everybody who had a computer and a connection to the Internet could be their own publisher.
In one such vision of the future, you would be able to call up your own virtual newspaper, dubbed The Daily Me by MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, which would be customized with content of interest to you.
Instead we are suffering through a dystopian info-hellscape of disinformation, polarization, filter bubbles, online surveillance, paid content masquerading as news, and bloggers shouting from the margins. More and more, so-called journalism is simply opinion based on less and less reporting.
Ottawa has finally decided to do something about the problems posed by the Internet, and its latest scheme is to make Google and Facebook bail out our flagging news media because they are making so much money by taking away their advertising. Bill C-18 The Online News Act, is supposed to serve as a lifeline. It may be more like an anchor if the digital giants refuse to pay up and instead stop circulating Canadian news, as they have threatened.
Bell Canada recently laid off 1,300 staff in its Bell Media division, closed several radio stations, and axed CTV’s bureaus in London and L.A. partly in anticipation of this eventuality.
It looks like our news media are going to hell in a hand basket, and a point may be coming soon when Ottawa has to pick up the pieces of its spectacular crash. Rather than continuing with a patchwork quilt of bailouts and policy workarounds, a comprehensive strategy is needed that is designed for the future rather than for keeping old media on life support.
Now that the advertising bubble has burst because Google and Facebook perfected target marketing, a new national model for news provision should be developed by the federal government in conjunction with media and academics.
The negative trends we have seen recently in news provision – absentee corporate ownership, concentration of ownership, asset stripping – should be reversed if at all possible. Democratization of our news media should be encouraged, with local citizens’ groups and journalists being given representation on their editorial boards. Here are a few ideas that have been floated or even tried in different parts of the world that hold promise in the Canadian context.
Spanish scholar Núria Almiron noted in her 2010 book Journalism in Crisis that ownership of media by publicly-traded corporations makes them responsible for providing profits, not news. She surveyed proposals for a better model from around the world and noted that they all point to low-profit or non-profit. She called for “a mindset shift away from the old way of thinking about non-profit and the media, where non-profit becomes a model not just for small and secondary media, but for private mainstream media as well.”
French economist Julia Cagé proposed in her 2016 book Saving the Media a new “crowdfunded” form of media ownership halfway between a foundation and a stock-issuing company. Nonprofit media organizations of this type would be able to accept tax-deductible donations in exchange for shares of ownership that would not trade publicly. Readers and journalists could also buy shares that would enjoy extra voting rights to offset the influence of larger shareholders and thus diffuse power throughout the organization.
A UK initiative commenced in 2018 saw £8 million (C$12.9 million) a year taken from the BBC’s budget, which is funded through a licence fee on every TV set there, and used to create a network of so-called democracy reporters covering city and town councils on a co-operative basis. Local publications bid for funding of these reporting positions but must share their stories with other media outlets. An initial 150 reporters were assigned mostly to the three large newspaper chains, but a second round of three-year contracts saw the number increase by 15, with more independent media included.
My favourite proposal was made by U.S. media scholars Robert McChesney and John Nichols in their 2010 book The Death and Life of American Journalism. It called for a voucher system in which citizens would be given a certain amount every year to donate to news media outlets of their choice. Qualifying media would also be able to accept tax-deductible donations. A start-up media outlet would have to get at least 100 people to sign on to receive funds, which would encourage new voices.
Some elements of these proposals have already been adopted by Ottawa. Its 2018 Local Journalism Initiative devoted $10 million a year to increasing news coverage in under-served communities and was recently renewed for another two years. Its five-year $595-million bailout package introduced in 2019 allowed news media outlets to convert to non-profit status and accept tax-deductible donations, but so far the Canadian Jewish News and Victoria’s eco-publication The Narwhal are the most notable conversions. Montreal’s La Presse, which went digital-only in 2017, also became a non-profit the following year.
The 2019 bailout also allowed subscribers to digital publications to claim a measly tax credit of $75 annually.
With the bailout ending this year and Canada’s news media apparently imploding, Ottawa needs to bolster the Local Journalism Initiative akin to the more comprehensive UK system of democracy reporters. Rather than being run by the public broadcaster, whose local news coverage should also be increased to foster competition, that could perhaps fall to the Canadian Press news agency, which is a shadow of its former presence in news.
Ottawa should also increase incentives for both non-profit news and digital subscriptions. The money for a voucher system could come from a fund Google and Facebook contributed to, as they have offered to do. It could also be funded with proceeds from Ottawa’s pending three percent Digital Services Tax on the revenues of companies that provide online services, which is similar to those in France and the UK and is expected to rake in about $680 million a year.
Whatever digital content citizens choose under a free-market voucher system might appear on their personalized Daily Me alongside the increased meat-and-potatoes news coverage of their local communities.
Problem solved. You’re welcome.
Marc Edge is the author of seven books, most recently The News We Deserve (2016) and The Postmedia Effect (2023). He is media columnist for Canadian Dimension.
You had me until "a new national model ----- should be developed by the Fed Gov." Have we learned nothing? The Real Story, The Line , Inkless PW, etc is the promise of the future. The Feds can use the tax system to a greater degree to keep us proles involved.
I do not find Marc Edge's solutions useful. Like many, he blames the problems on profit-making. But his campaign to transform the media into a public utility is unsatisfactory. As a libertarian oriented person, I distrust concentrations of power. I prefer crowd funding over government funding; crowd funding certainly has the merit of breaking down such structures, but it does not resolve the problem of echo chambers. I think Terry's concern about the epistemological crisis is more important. When truth and facts have no value, no model resolves the media crisis. I do not think the crisis is caused by profiteering; nor do I think it is caused by technology, targeted ads, and the end of the monopoly on advertising. I think it is a side-effect of the notion of "their truth" and "alternative facts" (phrases that are synonymous). Until we agree that there are facts and truths, I fear no action resolves the crisis of journalism, or history, or science ....