Following on last week's visits with media ecologist Andrey Mir and his profound insight that because people no longer turn to the mass media for news (thank Twitter and other platforms), outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post, but rather:
....Because of the internet, ad revenue in the media has declined much faster than reader revenue. The media were therefore forced to switch to the reader revenue business model aimed to sell content. However, as content is free on the internet, it is hard to sell. People almost always already know the news before they come to news websites because they invariably start their daily media routine with newsfeeds on social media. Increasingly, therefore, if and when people turn to the news media, it is not to find news, but rather to validate already known news.
Thus, the reader revenue the news media now seeks is not a payment for news; it is actually more a validation fee. The audience still agrees to pay for the validation of news within the accepted and sanctioned value system. After switching from ad revenue to reader revenue, the business of the media has mutated from news supply to news validation....
And here with a slightly more "In-your-face" take on what Mir is looking at is the substack of Leighton Woodhouse, July 27:
A few weeks ago, in Los Angeles, a brawl broke out on the street in front of a spa in Koreatown. A video had gone viral in late June of a woman berating a staff member of Wi Spa for allegedly allowing a trans woman to use the women’s locker room. The trans woman, the angry customer claimed, had strutted around with her exposed penis in full view of children. A giddy Tucker Carlson showed the video to his national audience, applauding the irate customer for her bravery while voicing not a word of skepticism about her claims, for which there is no evidence and some reason to believe was entirely made up. Soon after, an “anti-pervert protest” took place. Black-clad counterprotesters mobilized to confront the “transphobes.” Physical violence ensued.
This much we know for certain. For other details, we’re forced to rely on the reports of national media outlets. Not so long ago, that would have been a straightforward and relatively non-problematic proposition. But as the field of journalism has been forced to undergo drastic changes in response to the broken revenue model of the news business, that’s no longer the case. Increasingly, relying on mainstream media accounts is like relying on official updates from the U.S. military regarding developments in a war, or press releases from a corporate PR firm describing a company’s recent stellar performance. Some of the facts you’re presented with are probably accurate — maybe even all of them — but you have to start with the assumption that the whole thing is by and large propaganda.
For example, here is a New Republic article recounting the details of the melee in Los Angeles. The author of the article lives in New York, and doesn’t appear to have been present at the protest (I emailed her to ask but received no reply). The reporting is cobbled together from videos on YouTube. The protesters, the reporter declares definitively, were “Proud Boys” and “QAnon adherents.” The evidence for both is hearsay. The Proud Boys claim is from an activist who was shooting video from his phone. The evidence for the QAnon claim appears to be from a story by a Guardian reporter who, unlike her TNR counterpart, was actually present, but who didn’t in fact claim that the protesters were “QAnon adherents,” just that they chanted a slogan that is popular with QAnon types. (A Los Angeles Magazine freelancer who was present claimed, for whatever it’s worth, that he recognized “a number of protesters from past QAnon rallies, though I know not all of them subscribe to the conspiracy.”) The New Republic account goes on to describe how these right-wing ruffians “harassed journalists” and attacked defenseless bystanders, some of which is backed up by video. Then the police showed up and “targeted trans rights supporters and anti-fascist activists … beating at least one of them with batons, firing rubber bullets, and arresting 40 people.” The article warns ominously of the “right-wing outrage machine” that is ramping up “attacks on trans people.”
There’s nothing extraordinary about the New Republic piece. I’m not dissecting it because it’s special, but because it’s typical. Any number of articles followed the exact same script, whether they were published in Vice or The Daily Beast or Jezebel. The debatable presence of the Proud Boys and QAnon is a staple in these reports, as is the absence of any interviews with anyone present, the omission of any reference to violence from the counterprotesters, and the exclusive reliance on YouTube videos and the one article by a reporter who was actually there to piece together the reportage.
These aren’t so much reports, in other words, as write-ups. There isn’t even an attempt at original fact-finding. The sourcing is almost entirely derived from the posts and videos of left-wing activists, which are taken at face value. The unquestioned assumption is that everyone who showed up to protest the spa were bigoted, monstrous people, and there’s no curiosity about what else might constitute their points of view. The takeaway — that a menacing cabal of right-wing extremists is putting the rights and safety of trans people at risk — is precisely on-message with the activists whose side the reporters are blindly taking.
By all appearances, the reporters watched some videos, discerned the narrative being presented to them, and wrote a book report on it. This is journalism in the same way that television recaps are journalism.
The New Republic was once one of the most prestigious magazines in America. But more than almost any other national outlet, it has been pummeled by the collapse of the old advertising-based business model of mass media. It has suffered through failed buyout after failed buyout, including one by a well-intentioned tech billionaire that led to a staff revolt and mass resignations. For a long while, TNR’s writers and editors clung jealously to the lofty ideals of the journalism profession of the twentieth century, resisting the industry’s rapid descent into click farming as a result of the diversion of its ad revenues to Facebook and Google. But that version of the profession doesn’t exist anymore. Inevitably, the new economic forces shaping the industry caught up even to the vaunted New Republic, and it was assimilated into the vast digital monoculture that is the journalism of today. Now, the outlet formerly known as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One” has to wrestle in the muck with all the other left-of-center political tabloids, defending its dwindling share of the market by competing for the attention of liberal readers with sensational stories that stoke their anxieties, flatter their moral egos, and confirm their biases. This is what journalism has become.
In Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Miroshnichenko describes the drift of digital media toward what he calls “native propaganda.” The term is derived from “native advertising,” which, under a prior media business model, was an innovative new experiment in revenue generation....
....MUCH MORE
We'll be back with more of Mir's thinking next week.
