Category: Information

NYTimes Reports: Propaganda Mills Have Replaced Local News

“You provide the prose poems. I’ll provide the war.” – Charles Foster Kane, Citizen Kane

You are probably familiar with “advertorials,” the relatively benign mash-ups of information and advertising offered by many print and online publications. For instance, a regional electric service company that sells generators might publish a page that reads a lot like an article suggesting some good reasons to consider a backup generator for the coming Winter. This blurring of editorial and marketing is usually transparent to the reader and, in most cases, the publisher explicitly states somewhere on the page that it is a paid ad.

But according to a story published Sunday by the New York Times, millions of Americans are now reading articles they perceive as local news, but which are in fact the equivalent of advertorials, paid for and directed by political operatives and major business interests. And the articles are in no way identified as distinguishable from real news. Focusing primarily on a network owned by former TV reporter Brian Timpone, the Times states:

Maine Business Daily [MBD] is part of a fast-growing network of nearly 1,300 websites that aim to fill a void left by vanishing local newspapers across the country. Yet the network, now in all 50 states, is built not on traditional journalism but on propaganda ordered up by dozens of conservative think tanks, political operatives, corporate executives and public-relations professionals, a Times investigation found.

The Times feature describes a content mill in which freelance writers—many who might otherwise be real journalists if the industry had not been gutted by the “free content” cluster bomb dropped by Google & Co.—are paid pennies on the dollar to write articles with very clear instructions as to what they should say about political figures or matters of public policy. Not only are the articles not local news in any sense, but a story aimed at, say, residents of Hanover, New Hampshire may be written by somebody sitting in her apartment in Atlanta, who has been paid between $3 and $22 for coloring in a few lines provided by “the clients.” How this is demonstrably different from Russian troll farms is a mystery to me, except that I imagine Russian trolls are paid better. The Times article states:

The network is one of a proliferation of partisan local-news sites funded by political groups associated with both parties. Liberal donors have poured millions of dollars into operations like Courier, a network of eight sites that began covering local news in swing states last year. Conservative activists are running similar sites, like the Star News group in Tennessee, Virginia and Minnesota.

The most compelling (okay, infuriating) example cited by the Times describes how hotel magnate Monty Bennett, a major donor to President Trump, used the MBD network to lobby for a coronavirus stimulus bill in a manner that ultimately garnered his publicly-traded company a $70 billion government bailout. The Times also reports that Mr. Bennett also paid for articles designed to influence at least some of the rhetoric vis-à-vis U.S. China policy in response to the pandemic.

So, if you find yourself wondering how millions of Americans can believe any of the crap the president says, or why they are not outraged when millions of tax dollars allocated for “small-business” support winds up in the accounts of major corporations, at least some of this mass cognitive dissonance can be explained by the amount of professional propaganda online that is so easily disguised as journalism.

Thanks entirely to the democratizing power of the internet, the political propaganda game is bigger business than ever. The hippie/libertarian mantra that “information wants to be free” (which was not even the whole quote) became the business model for Web 2.0. Thus, the alleged monopoly on “information controlled by mainstream news organizations” was the cocktail shaker where the anti-copyright narrative collided with our political divisions, added a heaping dollop of conspiracy theory, and poured forth a river of yellow journalism that might even disgust some dormant scruple in Mr. Hearst himself.

Whatever was imperfect about mainstream journalism, it was professional and, in general, there were standards. As I said in an older post, there was a lot to be said for TV news before the expansion of cable. It was mandated by law and a money-loser for the networks. Consequently, there was no reason not to separate the news division from entertainment and let the journalists do their jobs. Millennials and Zoomers have no knowledge of this era, and I daresay a few Boomers have forgotten it. The fact is that less was way better than more. As I said in that same post, we used to argue about what to do next or how to do it but not about what has already happened. The truth was not nearly so subjective for the vast majority of citizens.

What cable TV initially did to news, the internet did to everything, and at logarithmic scale and velocity. Yet, even as we watch disinformation trample sanity in the streets, the tech-utopians in the blogosphere and many of the executives in Silicon Valley still cling to the narrative that more speech is the antidote to bad speech. This premise was naïve when Justice Scalia articulated it in context to the Citizens United opinion, and it was no wiser when the major internet companies asserted it (with the help of the EFF, Techdirt, PublicKnowledge, et al) in defense of their revenue streams.

Now, as we watch Twitter and Facebook try to stuff the arms and legs of their genies back in their bottles, this Times story reveals why those efforts are almost laughably futile. Local newspapers have been wiped out by the “natural price of zero,” and in their place, propaganda networks serve heaping portions of cheaply-made garbage to a public that not only can’t tell the difference, but increasingly doesn’t even want to know. Confirmation bias may have achieved its apotheosis this week when the President of the United States, in the middle of a pandemic, called one of the world’s top infectious disease experts an “idiot.” And yet, the tech-utopians and speech absolutists keep saying more—more speech is the antidote to bad speech. Really?

Thank You, Christopher Dickey

Interview with Christopher Dickey. August 29, 2012.

Yesterday, the world lost one of the great journalists, and great human beings, who have shaped our thinking in the last half century. American correspondent Christopher Dickey died in Paris at the age of 68. I will not attempt to eulogize, or even summarize his contributions to reportage and literature. There are dozens, or more likely hundreds, far better suited to that task, and who will doubtless attend to it. For starters, his colleague Barbie Latza Nadeau, wrote a beautiful tribute for The Daily Beast.

But because Chris was an old family friend, and because he was so gracious, he was kind enough to be the subject of the first podcast interview for this blog when it launched in 2012. We talked for over an hour about journalism and security in the digital age, and he is such a polymath that it was no easy job deciding what to cut for the roughly 30-minute conversation that was ultimately published. I listened to the interview again this morning, and, unsurprisingly, Chris’s insight remains instructive, even in a world that has changed so dramatically in eight years. I wish I could ask him new questions, but that only puts me in a very, very long line. I will always be grateful to Chris for this kindness, and others, and wanted to re-post the interview today upon learning this sad news. My sincere condolences to his family and to so many who knew and loved him.

Archery photo source by: daseaford

Social (Media) Distancing

Between the headline and the Share button.

Access to credible, useful information could not be more essential than it is in the present moment. But as we are all presumably more attentive than ever to our social media feeds, we are correspondingly bombarded with more garbage content. This crisis is a perfect opportunity for trolls to ply their trade. Whether it’s idiots having a laugh, professional mischief-makers working for foreign agencies, or any number of vested interests, there is no shortage of intentionally misleading material online. But that may not be the greatest concern.

Unfortunately, the expansion of the news market—from the earliest days of cable TV to the breadth of Facebook’s role as a virtual newsstand—has forced even venerable sources to take a more slapdash approach to their reporting. In order to remain relevant (i.e. extant), organizations with distinguished pedigrees are chronically guilty of publishing stories designed to grab, terrify, and outrage more than they are to inform or promote thoughtful dialogue. Almost worse than that, even if the reportage is soundly crafted, the headlines are too often screaming at us because they are designed to promote (mostly negative) social media interaction. And far too many of us are guilty of reacting to and/or sharing only the headlines, where the distinctions between accurate and inflammatory can be rather subtle.

For instance, while acknowledging that we are justified in distrusting Attorney General William Barr on the grounds that he shows little respect for constitutional principles, let’s compare two headlines in which the Rolling Stone follows up on a story first reported by Politico: 

Politico: DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic. 

Rolling Stone: DOJ Wants to Suspend Constitutional Rights During Coronavirus Emergency

To be clear, the actual story is cause for concern, or at least awareness. Assuming the central reports are accurate, the DOJ apparently wants Congress to draft new legislation that would empower courts to detain arrested individuals indefinitely while the courts are shut down or delayed during this crisis. The problem is that this infringes rights protected by the Sixth Amendment, and, as mentioned, one can be forgiven for assuming that AG Barr might not give a damn. Both Rolling Stone and Politico do acknowledge that legislation of this nature is unlikely to find any purchase in the current House of Representatives, but it is not the story itself that prompted me to write this post.

I wanted to call attention to the psychological effect of the Rolling Stone headline. With a constant awareness that we have a president who is ignorant about the Constitution and an AG who has shown contempt for the Constitution, that headline almost immediately provokes dystopian mental montages. Before one even chooses which emoji to click, one cannot help but conjure images of smashed presses and jackbooted thugs suppressing speech as Barr takes an Orwellian Sharpie to pesky items like the establishment clause. The whole proto-fascist narrative plays out in the time it takes to share the headline with a comment like, “This is what these guys have wanted all along.” But who reads the story?

Ascribing authoritarian motives to this administration is at least half true, which is one reason why sensational headlines can be so dangerous—because we need to know who is trying to cross which lines and why. We are at a very precarious moment in history—not only because we are deeply concerned for our safety, but because American institutions have been under assault since long before we collided with the vector of Covid-19—and long before Trump and his acolytes brought their own sledgehammers to the party. 

As with the harm to journalism, the abandonment of institutions and the devaluation of expertise is a dire consequence of “democratizing” information through digital platforms. We exacerbate the problem by sharing fragments and impressions that feed anxieties that—perhaps because they are plausible—are the concerns most in need of informed skepticism. 

Now that most of us have segregated in an effort to mitigate the spread of a literal virus, those of us fortunate enough to have the time and ability to keep up with the feeds, might also do what we can to mitigate the spread of viral misinformation. To that end, it would probably help to put some distance (i.e. time) between encountering a headline and clicking Share. There is no urgency to respond to a story or to share it immediately. That urgency is an illusion fostered by the medium itself, and our responses to the stimuli principally serves the platform company’s interest in data-harvesting. 

If Facebook users, for instance, committed to not sharing anything until they’ve read it, this might help slow the rate of misinformation. Better yet, before sharing, why not take a moment to provide friends with a summary of what the story actually says, or fails to say? Doing this would emphasize how often stories are out of synch with their headlines. In a time when we have plenty of reasons to be worried and plenty of reasons to be angry, it is especially important that we worry about, and are angry about, things that are actually true. 

This seems like a very good time to step outside the whirlwind of what scholar Alice Marwick calls our deep stories and apply some critical thinking, even if this means taking a moment to look for counterfactuals in a story about some party or entity who deserves some measure (or a whole truckload) of our scorn. There has never been a time when accurate information matters more than it does right now. Social media, in many ways not always visible, is designed to frustrate that need. If we have the time, and take the time, to provide badly needed context for one another, a social platform can be a wonderful source of useful information; but absent that context, the deluge of images and headlines alone can be a steady flow of gasoline on an already smoldering fire. 

Also see:  Reducing the Spread of Misinformation Online from the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. 

Virus art by: Kateryna_Kon