Category: Journalism

The Fake News Problem: It’s not them, it’s us.

via GIPHY

(Okay, it’s a little bit them.)

It’s kinda like on November 9th, everyone suddenly discovered that social media fosters a fake news problem. Well, better late than never I suppose, but just because the topic of fake news is trending now, that doesn’t make it news. It’s been a problem for a long time, and if there’s a solution to be found, it probably does not begin by asking what Facebook, Twitter, or Google can do about it so much as what we can do about it.

Information, meaning facts, should not be political, or at least not partisan. But that ship has not only sailed, it’s gone straight over the edge of the flat Earth. And while there’s no question that I’ve seen both liberals and conservatives (for want of better terms) share unsubstantiated garbage posing as news, it’s hard to get past the fact that finding a reference point for truth in the digital age takes a lot more work than it did in the analog world of “scarcity.”

But who ceded so much power to these platforms? We did. Conservatives and liberals did. Republicans and Democrats did. Everyone who defines all professional journalism by the pejorative “mainstream media” has given power to social media as the new temples of truth. So, now, various factions are jumping on Zuckerberg, blaming fake news for the outcome of the election and insisting the company must do a better job of weeding out bogus news sites and hoaxes.

As an aside, I see no problem if AdSense or Facebook want to cut off the revenue spigots for fake news creators. Caitlin Dewey, writing for the Washington Post, profiled a fake news maker who earns about $10,000/month in ad revenue from spinning catchy dreck that your friends and mine share on social sites. But while the OSPs are reacting to the election and the backlash against fake news, they and their cadre of pundits and advocates ought to be a little chastened about their chronic abuse of the word innovation as a catch-all to describe what an unbounded internet actually produces. Just like pirate sites have managed to innovate revenue from creators’ pockets into their own pockets, these fake news creators innovate attention away from legitimate journalism toward utter gibberish simply because there’s money in it. But that doesn’t make it the OSP’s fault that so many users believe and spread all that fake news?

So, here’s a thought: Facebook is not, and never has been, a news source. At best, it’s a high-speed synthesis of the community bulletin board with the bathroom wall. And it’s one that is manipulated, adjusted, and monitored in order to maximize data harvesting and advertising value. I say this as someone who enjoys sharing a zinger, a comment, or a conversation on the platform. But news? It really depends.

Sadly, even paying attention to the publishing source is not always helpful. The tragedy of expanding, democratizing, and glitzing up news is that even the brand-name sources compete with the lowest common denominator. Many professional news organizations are apt to publish a story with thin research and a grabby headline just to remain visible in the multi-species stampede of stories careening through social media, kicking up huge clouds of dust.

Fake news is not nearly as big a problem as the real news that’s being filtered through marketing templates that drive reasonable and decent people apart, creating a vacuum in the middle.  Not only are we destroying the middle-class economically, but we seem to be doing an excellent job of ruining the center politically.

I have long believed that one of the reasons the United States is so fragile—but also the reason it can be great—is that we really don’t have a common culture. We have a million competitive or compatible narratives happening at any given moment. Then, the customization of social media seems to have exacerbated the lesser angels of diversity, fostering new forms of segregation, obliterating common ground for the sake of a complex and phantasmagoric venn diagram of American society. I suspect it’s how we look to a computer–especially one that wants to market to us individually–but not quite a fair representation of how we might wish to look to ourselves.

Paywalls, vinyl, and other dead issues.

It’s been a longstanding bias of mine that the generation we call digital natives—the kids who’ve grown up practically hard-wired to the network—will steadily gravitate toward classic, analog, and tangible media and experiences, not merely as a fadish expression of hipsterism, but as a natural result of maturing tastes and dwindling leisure time.  One of the first posts I wrote for this blog, What I’d tell my own kids about piracy. Why scarcity is a good thing. made a case for the value of limiting one’s choices rather than indulging in a kind of media gluttony implicit in the presumed need to seek out illegal channels as though the legal ones had nothing to offer.  People shared that post a fair bit, homing in on the assertion that whatever is worth your time is also worth your money.

We are, of course, seeing some trends toward “old” experiences, like a renewed interest in vinyl records, which will not likely replace streaming and digital downloads but may indicate that fans are discovering (or rediscovering) that there can be more to enjoying recorded music than just hearing it.  Even the process of browsing in a store for LPs is one that I always considered a satisfying sensory experience prior to the invention of the CD. Like turning pages in a large picture book, with each album displaying about 160 square inches of cover art in contrast to the squinty 25 afforded by a CD jewel case.  I always liked that flipping through albums was a mostly silent activity other than faint woofs of air as one leaned each record forward. By contrast, the grating clack-clack of sorting through small plastic cases always sounded and felt to me more like work.

Once home with a new vinyl album one must perform a few steps in collaboration with a mechanical object, some motion which beg a gentle touch that imbues the preparation with an almost ritualistic quality, complimenting the sense of time set aside to listen actively to new music.  For all the convenience of digital access, it doesn’t always satisfy the human need to experience life beyond the perfunctory.  Fast food is convenient and cheap, too; but there’s a reason it doesn’t replace fine dining just as there is a reason a fine meal assumes a certain presentation and atmosphere to complement the meal.  And for experiences—yes, even content—that are truly desirable, people are willing to pay when that is the only way to have them.

Certainly, The New Yorker magazine is fine-dining as publications go, and it turns out that its readers are very much willing to pay for it—even online.  According to Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal, when The New Yorker began experimenting with a paywall that would go up once a visitor had accessed a limit of six free stories in a single month, readership increased rather than declined.  “Instead of deterring readers, the number of unique visitors rose to 9.7 million in October 2015 from 5.5 million a year earlier, the month before the paywall was implemented, …” reports Trachtenberg.

I can’t say I’m surprised that, despite the conventional free-culture “wisdom” that’s been shouted at the market for nearly two decades, we find evidence that consumers are not only capable of recognizing the qualities they want in “content” but are even willing to pay for it.  Granted, the readership of The New Yorker is a devout audience that has been cultivated for more than a century, and it is currently the only property in the Condé Nast portfolio to so far experiment with a paywall. But for the same reasons a new vinyl store opened in my local mall while other retail is shuttering, the market may yet prove that there is no one new, digital model that entirely disrupts and replaces all that has come before.  Just maybe the producers and consumers of high-value journalism, music, film, TV, etc. will be best served by various combinations of new and old that are a little more complex than just putting stuff out there, signing up for an digital ad service account, and selling merch on the side.

In contrast to The New Yorker, the equally venerable publication The Atlantic was the first to “go digital”, according to this 2011 article by Lauren Indvik for Mashable.  In January of  2008, The Atlantic dropped its paywall and developed a holistic, digital strategy for both publication and advertising.  As Indvik describes, the The Atlantic’s history as a platform for editorial made it a natural for the web, but the road to profitability involved a comprehensive and creative strategy to develop advertising “experiences” for premium brands across print, digital, events, and mobile.  “Digital has proved tough terrain for many traditional advertisers, who have been forced to compete against highly targeted search and display networks, such as Google’s,” writes Indvik.

Of course, the success of both The New Yorker and The Atlantic are entirely dependent upon the quality of the work on the page, even if the two entities commoditize distribution through different models.  And the only way to maintain that quality is either a sustainable high-value ad strategy or direct sales to consumers, or some combination of the two.  This was true before the free-culture rhetoric disrupted common sense, and it’s still true.

As New Yorker editor David Remnick says in the WSJ article, “Information doesn’t want to be free, it wants to get around freely.”  Or, as may be inferred from the renewed interest in the vinyl experience, maybe the creative and informative experiences consumers value cannot be described so homogeneously as “information” the way many tech-utopians chose to interpret part of Stewart Brand’s famous quote in order to justify devaluation of the work itself. Maybe consumers don’t demand that everything be free, just that it be good.

In a related story (as reported in The New Yorker of course), Kodak drew considerable crowds at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with the introduction of a contemporary version of the Super 8 camera.  Amid a bevy of entrepreneurs offering “smart” devices that consumers may prefer to leave “dumb”, Kodak’s debut of a new way to make old home movies on celluloid is an unexpected move that may actually work. Read the full story here.

Wikileaks Ethics in Journalism

In a recent OpEd in the New York Times, media ethicist Kelly McBride generally stands by the principle that journalists should not pay sources for information; but she also wants pardoxically to propose that sometimes the ends justify the means.  Specifically, she is referring to an initiative (ploy, stunt?) by Wikileaks to crowd fund a “bounty” for a leaker to provide the full text of the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement. But more broadly, McBride seems unaware that there can be no exception to this rule of journalistic standards, if it is to remain a rule at all.  Because in the course of investigating hard news, when don’t the ends appear to justify the means?  Surely, there are reporters out there risking their lives to uncover stories that are more grave and more time-sensitive than a trade deal, even a very big trade deal.

But that central contradiction is not the only reason I think McBride’s OpEd misses the point in its analysis. What she says is that, in general, paying for information is still wrong but that extreme situations call for extreme measures until some balance is restored between transparency and secrecy.  She writes, “Right now, the bounty may be the best shot we have at transforming the TPP process from a back-room deal to an open debate. But we need a better system to discourage unjustified secrecy, to protect sources and to encourage public-interest whistle-blowing.”  Although earlier in the piece, McBride acknowledges, “It’s true that trade deals, which are usually about tariffs and the price of goods, are traditionally negotiated in secret. But the TPP exceeds agreements like Nafta in scope and scale and involves far-reaching foreign policy decisions.”

The funny thing to me about the TPP kerfuffle is that everyone is complaining both about how bad it is and about how secret it is without noticing that the latter complaint casts considerable doubt on the former.  And thanks to the headline-rich, substance-poor nature of social media, even the tidbits of information out there are being manipulated by players with their own agendas, including such mundanity as just making click-bait.  As a result, many of my friends now take as gospel rumors about possible proposals or outcomes of this deal that are entirely unfounded.  For instance, McBride sets up her larger premise, establishing the TPP’s obvious badness with this almost parenthetical statement:  “Chapters already leaked suggest that the deal restricts fair use of copyrighted material, expands medical patents and weakens public policies that govern net neutrality.”  From such statements, we are left to wonder what other nefarious proposals lurk within the TPP and to conclude, yes, the ends justify Wikileaks’s means of offering to buy a leak.

But what if many of those highly publicized assumptions based on earlier partial leaks are false or at least very misleading?  Certainly, the statement about restricting fair use is fallacious, either by design or by ignorance, and we don’t need the full text of TPP proposals to know why.  For one thing, trade deals generally do not change domestic law in the U.S.; and to imply that ratifying the TPP might alter our application of fair use is inconsistent with history and with the process presently being applied.  Second, trading partner nations cannot necessarily apply U.S.-style fair use because (hold onto your hats) they have different legal systems. (I hear they speak different languages, too.)

But here’s the insidious detail in the big picture:  McBride writes what seems like a reasonable editorial with a premise that takes for granted a false assumption like this one about fair use, unaware perhaps that this widely-spread rumor is actually a modification of an Internet-industry-backed effort to “export U.S. fair use doctrine” through FTAs to our trading partners. These companies would favor replicating our liberal application of this doctrine and even imply that U.S. copyright holders are against such a provision, but this is a mischaracterization. It is more accurate to say that our trading partners don’t have the constitutional foundation to apply doctrine as we do.  I know that’s a too complex and wonky to make a good Facebook meme or grabby headline, but that’s the point.

So, even with this one tiny matter about which much corn has been shucked, we’re witnessing a giant game of Telephone.   Silicon Valley-funded organizations say “export fair use doctrine” to start the game, and this translates to “TPP will harm fair use” by the time the message comes full circle in the form of an OpEd in the New York Times.  So, is it really logical to believe that more leaked text about even more complex issues and filtered through even more vested interests will help us make more informed decisions?  I have more than a few doubts.

Meanwhile, the TPP isn’t classified; it’s embargoed.  Journalists committed to their principles are familiar with the need to embargo a story, perhaps to ensure someone’s safety prior to publication, and it would be a shame if that kind of judgment call were inappropriately reclassified as censorship just because we now have these machines that confuse our right to know with our right to know right bloody now.  The scale and scope of the TPP are unprecedented, but the level of secrecy is not. Negotiating trade deals through real-time public referendum would be like trying to play poker while everybody’s kid brothers run around the table shouting out who’s holding which cards.  What is also unprecedented (and frankly fascinating) is that the TPP is the first trade deal to be negotiated in the age of social media, which provides what I will continue to insist a fairly opaque form of transparency at best.

In fact, I suspect one of two outcomes would be the result of Wikileaks’s brand of un-alloyed “transparency” in this case:  one would be a collapse of trade deals altogether, but the other would be truly unprecedented secrecy indeed.  As journalist Christopher Dickey points out in this 2010 piece about State Department leaks by Wikileaks, “To avoid this kind of massive leak in the future, documents will get higher classification and less distribution, and a lot of the most important stuff may not be committed to the keyboard at all.” Oversight through the filter of  representation and principled journalists is imperfect, but a much bigger question than the one McBride is asking is whether we want to be a nation that does imperfect things as a republic or a nation that doesn’t do anything because we choose to embrace the near anarchy of direct democracy?

To be sure, I feel, as many of my fellow progressives do, that we have ceded far too much power to corporations overall, allowing deregulatory trends to foster wealth consolidation, poor environmental policy, weaker labor rights, and downgrades in education, medicine, infrastructure, and other foundational enterprises.  If we hope to address any of these issues, we need to find the political will to do so through domestic policy, investment, and the representation we choose to elect. In the meantime, it doesn’t seem helpful to perpetuate confusion about what trade deals can and cannot do to our domestic laws, let alone to cite that confusion as a reason for serious journalists to abandon their hard-won principles.  Frankly, I think we have enough hacks.