Ronna McDaniel's tenure as an on-air commentator for NBC News is already over: The network fired the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman this week after enduring a full-on mutiny from other staffers and hosts. MSNBC pundits Chuck Todd, Joe Scarborough, and Rachel Maddow all criticized network heads for bringing McDaniel on board. Todd suggested her commentary would be suspect, since she had only recently departed the RNC; Scarborough said he "strongly objected" to her; and Maddow said the network hiring McDaniel was like hiring a mobster to work at a district attorney's office or a pickpocket to work as a TSA screener (imagine that!). Watch:
"Bad decisions will inevitably happen. Mistakes will be made. But part of our resilience as a democracy is going to be us recognizing when decisions are bad ones and reversing those bad decisions." Rachel Maddow encourages her colleagues at NBC News to 'take a minute' on their… pic.twitter.com/T1FVMh5KIP
— Maddow Blog (@MaddowBlog) March 26, 2024
I criticized Todd's objections to McDaniel earlier this week. If McDaniel's proximity to the RNC means her credibility as a commentator is suspect, then MSNBC host Jen Psaki should be considered a major liability; Psaki served as White House press secretary under President Joe Biden while negotiating her role at MSNBC. There's nothing particularly new or stranger about this—political communications officials frequently move from government to campaigns to cable news and back again. Anyone who pretends that this was the major issue with McDaniel is lying.
Maddow's criticism of McDaniel gets to the actual heart of the matter: Progressives at MSNBC think that McDaniel's political views and actions with respect to former President Donald Trump are disqualifying. They say that McDaniel was part of Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and for that reason, she has committed an unforgivable sin.
The truth, however, is that McDaniel played an "ambiguous role" in promoting Trumpian election denial, explains Reason's Jacob Sullum. She initially gave credence to wrongful claims by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani, and supported Trump's efforts to re-litigate the outcome, but as promised evidence of fraud failed to materialize, she increasingly distanced the RNC from Stop the Steal—infuriating Trump in the process.
In its write-up of McDaniel's sudden rise and fall at NBC, The New York Times credited her for rejecting "Mr. Trump's most far-fetched election-theft scenarios." Nevertheless, the Times chided her for casting any doubt on the validity of the outcome whatsoever, reminding readers that she once said Biden hadn't "won it fair" and had gestured at various fraud allegations.
In merely whining about the supposed unfairness of election, McDaniel is in good company, of course. Indeed, much of the mainstream media seems to have completely memory-holed the fact that numerous Democratic officials and progressive pundits said the 2016 election—won by Trump—was unfair due to alleged Russian interference, voter suppression, and hacks and leaks emanating from the Hillary Clinton campaign. Clinton herself infamously declared Trump an "illegitimate president."
" I believe he understands that the many varying tactics they used, from voter suppression and voter purging to hacking to the false stories—he knows that—there were just a bunch of different reasons why the election turned out like it did," she said in a 2019 interview.
Clinton was hardly alone in that belief. When Trump was sworn in as president in 2017, nearly 70 congressional Democrats slipped the inauguration; many of them did so because they viewed the election as illegitimate. The late Rep. John Lewis (D–Ga.), a beloved civil rights icon, explicitly said he would not attend the inauguration because "I don't see the president-elect as a legitimate president." The reason he cited was Russian election interference.
"I think there was a conspiracy on the part of the Russians and others," said Lewis.
He made these remarks during an interview with…NBC's Chuck Todd, who somehow failed to assail Lewis for indulging in election-denying conspiracy theories. In fact, Todd's response was downright agreeable. "That's going to send a big message," said the host.
Then there was Stacey Abrams, the Democratic candidate for governor of Georgia in 2018, who repeatedly and brazenly claimed her Republican opponent, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, had stolen the election. Those claims were echoed by current White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre—before she took that job—who had also called Trump's win illegitimate.
To be abundantly clear, neither Clinton nor Abrams nor any of these other figures are morally equivalent to Trump, who took active steps to contest his loss in court. But they did gripe about their losses, and help inspire public doubt in the validity of their outcomes. According to Roll Call, 62 percent of Democrats believe Trump's 2016 win was illegitimate because of Russian interference—even though the most sensational claims about vast foreign influence on social media were substantially debunked.
Would NBC hosts rise up in fury if any of these election deniers were offered plum gigs at the network? Of course not.
I found myself completely baffled by this New York magazine profile of Andrew Huberman, a Stanford University professor of medicine and popular podcaster. Writer Kerry Howley—formerly of Reason—tears Huberman apart for dating multiple women at once (without their knowledge, according to them); the piece reads like an attempted #MeToo-ing, but falls short of offering up anything bad enough to be worthy of such a brutal takedown.
That was my take at least, and Glenn Greenwald and Saagar Enjeti expressed similar sentiments. My Rising co-host Briahna Joy Gray felt differently, however, and we argued about it on the show.
Did you catch the debut of Free Media TV? Watch below. We're just getting started.
The post Ronna McDaniel and the Media's Election Denial Double Standard appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The New York Times recently published an opinion piece by Graciela Mochkofsky, dean of the City University of New York's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. She argued that churning out more journalism degree holders could help revitalize a dying industry, and that making such educational programs free is one way to do that.
"Journalists are essential just as nurses and firefighters and doctors are essential," she wrote. "And to continue to have journalists, we need to make their journalism education free."
Even setting aside the fact that nurses and doctors do not generally attend school for free—and that firefighters get training, not master's degrees—this diagnosis still makes very little sense. First, it's not clear that the market is asking for more journalists, and thus explicitly encouraging additional entrants into the field is a dubious proposition. Second, even if producing more journalists is a socially desirable goal, subsidizing journalism school is a poor way to achieve this. Indeed, it's perhaps something of an open secret among actually established journalists that majoring in journalism is often a mistake—and pursuing a graduate degree in journalism is an even worse one.
Mochkofsky likened journalists to doctors and firefighters, but the profession has far more in common with the latter than the former. Journalism is akin to a craft or a trade; it is distinctly unlike science. Aside from some minimal abilities that should be acquired during primary education—i.e., competent writing—the technical skills required to do it are best learned on the job from seasoned professionals during the course of an internship. These skills are not so complicated that they must be studied in a classroom with textbooks and formal instructors.
I've always found that writing itself is much like exercising: If you do it regularly, you get stronger and better at it, and if you stop doing it, you get weaker and worse at it. News stories aren't meant to be observed under a microscope; the best way to learn how to write them is to just start doing it.
In her 2021 book Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, Batya Ungar-Sargon argued that over the course of the 20th century, journalism morphed from a respectable middle-class trade into an exclusively upper-class vocation as credentialism took hold. This transformation has not been good for the industry; the media now disproportionately consist of young people with exceedingly progressive and occasionally hostile views, and that's because journalism is increasingly the province of well-educated and wealthy elites.
It's true that making journalism school free would alleviate the latter problem, but it still robs aspiring journalists of vital years of their lives that they could spend actually practicing journalism. This creeping tendency in public policy to make ordinary work impossible unless and until would-be workers obtain a bunch of certificates is deeply pernicious, and contributes to the country's underemployment problem. Let J-school be the province of a small subset of academically inclined writers—most aspiring journalists need an apprenticeship, not a degree.
This week, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, a case that will determine whether federal agencies unconstitutionally pressured social media companies to censor speech. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson received much criticism for appearing to despair that the First Amendment might stop the government from doing just that, but in truth, a clear majority of the justices seemed skeptical that the feds' actions had crossed a line.
I would be more concerned if the First Amendment did not hamstring the government in significant ways. https://t.co/AvuByp4rZx
— Robby Soave (@robbysoave) March 18, 2024
A loss for the plaintiffs would be deeply unfortunate. This case represents the Supreme Court's best chance to prevent jawboning by the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the FBI, and the Department of Homeland Security. These government entities did not merely ask social media platforms to take down contrarian speech—they implicitly and explicitly threatened to harm the companies if they did not comply.
We discussed the case on Rising with Twitter Files author Matt Taibbi. Watch below:
It's time to start a re-watch of House of the Dragon. HBO just released two trailers for the hotly anticipated second season of the Game of Thrones prequel, which takes place a century and a half before the original series. While the later seasons of GoT were plagued with plotting issues, godawful dialogue, major inconsistencies, and even production errors, HotD's first season was as good as Thrones at its best. The second season will depict the Targaryen civil war: a bloody battle for the throne fought between two factions of the famed dragon-riding family. (If HotD has one flaw, it's that one side—Team Rhaenyra (Emma D'Arcy)—is about a thousand times more sympathetic than the other side, at least for now.)
The post Don't Make Journalism School Free appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Before anyone was "canceled" for saying a "wrong" thing, actress Emily Blunt and I feared speaking.
"It was terrifying…. You're just gripped with terror," says Blunt in my new video.
I also used to wake up scared, fearing I might have to do a few seconds of live TV.
We feared speaking because we are both stutterers.
"Are you cured?" I ask Blunt.
"Are you?" she shoots back.
No, is the answer. Neither of us is cured. Stutterers rarely lose our fear of some words.
But we've found ways to cope.
Blunt avoids situations that trigger her stutter.
"I want to pitch a scene," she says, "I can't do it…. I would rather say, 'Give me the scene and I'll write it and then I'll send it to you.'"
On the phone, she fears trying to say her name. "If I'm calling someone and they go, 'What's your name?' It's tough."
Our stuttering was worse when we were kids. Blunt tried not to speak. She just shut up.
"I didn't want to be in any of the school plays. I did not want to read out my poem in class."
She wanted to keep her problem secret.
"You did not talk about it at all."
Her family rarely talked about it even though her grandfather, uncle, and cousin stuttered too.
"We have to destigmatize this thing," she tells me. "Nobody talks about it."
That's why she was talking to me.
Both Blunt and I work with a charity called the American Institute for Stuttering (AIS). AIS tells stutterers: Go ahead and speak, even if that means stuttering in front of people.
This "go ahead and stutter" treatment is probably one of the better options. The happiest stutterers are those who speak freely, even if they stutter.
But Neither Blunt nor I want to stutter in front of people.
It really misrepresents you," says Blunt. "You know what you want to say…but you can't convey it. It's just imprisoning."
And embarrassing.
"The shame, that's the hardest thing," says Blunt.
And yet she's a hugely successful actress.
Blunt doesn't stutter when she acts. That's not unusual. Playing another character allows many stutterers to be fluent. It why you probably don't know that Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and James Earl Jones stutter, too. They just don't stutter on stage.
Blunt discovered the benefit of "acting another part" when she was 12. Doing impressions, she became fluent.
"I could mess around in the playground and do silly voices," she says.
A teacher noticed that. He encouraged her to act in a class play.
"I did a really stupid Northern English accent. It did allow for great fluency!"
Did that start her movie career?
"It would make a great sound bite, but I wouldn't say it became the moment where I decided to be an actress. But it did free up my speech in a huge way."
But while actors can do other voices, I couldn't do that when I got a job as a TV reporter.
I didn't choose that job. I fell into it, never imagining that I'd go on the air.
Seattle magazine had offered me work in their circulation department, but the magazine closed before I got there.
"Want to work in our TV station?" a manager asked.
"OK," said young me.
I did research for anchors and avoided speaking myself.
Then they forced me to cover a story. I'd get a film editor to cut out my blocks. I dreaded speaking.
What finally helped me was intensive therapy at a clinic in Virginia. They used computers to reward us stutterers if we initiated sounds gently.
They also slowed our speech to two seconds per syllable. That was really tedious. We sounded like cows mooing. But it helped me. Soon I learned to speak without blocking.
It was as if a cork had been removed from my throat. You couldn't shut me up. That treatment allowed me to have a TV career.
I assumed that treatment would work for everyone, but it didn't. Maybe other stutterers, less motivated than I, didn't spend as much time practicing. In any case, that company is now out of business.
"I don't think one method will work for everyone," says Blunt.
It won't.
It's good that we have choices.
More information about that here: www.StutteringHelp.org.
COPYRIGHT 2024 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.
The post How Emily Blunt Copes With Her Stutter appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A safer, saner social media world is possible, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen told members of Congress in 2021. Instead, she said, leaders at the social media company chose engagement over democracy, using algorithms that kept people glued to the site but also angry, anxious, and ill-informed.
Haugen's diagnosis of the cause of our current political dysfunction (social media algorithms) and cure ("get rid of the engagement-based ranking" of content and return to displaying posts in simple chronological order) has become dogma for many politicians, members of the press, and would-be change-makers. Doing away with algorithms would also halt hate speech and misinformation, these groups insist.
But more and more research is casting doubt on such claims. The latest comes from a collaboration between academics and Facebook parent company Meta, who set out to explore the impact of algorithms in the lead-up to the 2020 election.
The first results from this project were published in four papers in July. Michael W. Wagner, the project's independent rapporteur, called the studies works of "independent," "rigorous," and "ethical" research.
With users' consent, researchers tweaked various elements of their Facebook feeds to see what effect it would have on things like political outlooks and media diet. The interventions differed by study, but all revolved around assessing how Facebook algorithms affected user experiences.
What they found cuts to the heart of the idea that Facebook could produce kinder, better informed citizens by simply relying less on engagement metrics and algorithms to determine what content gets seen. "Both altering what individuals saw in their news feeds on Facebook and Instagram and altering whether individuals encountered reshared content affects what people saw on the platforms," reported Wagner in the July 28 issue of Science. But "these changes did not reduce polarization or improve political knowledge during the 2020 US election. Indeed, removing reshared content reduced political knowledge."
In one study, led by Princeton University's Andy Guess and published in Science, select users were switched from algorithm-driven Facebook and Instagram feeds to feeds that showed posts from friends and pages they followed in reverse chronological order—just the sort of tweak social media critics like Haugen have pushed for. The shift "substantially decreased the time they spent on the platforms and their activity" and led to users seeing less "content classified as uncivil or containing slur words," concludes the study (titled "How do social media feed algorithms affect attitudes and behavior in an election campaign?").
But "the amount of political and untrustworthy content they saw increased on both platforms." Despite shifting the types of content users saw and their time spent on Facebook, the switch "did not cause detectable changes in downstream political attitudes, knowledge, or offline behavior" during the three-month study period.
Despite some limitations, "our findings rule out even modest effects, tempering expectations that social media feed-ranking algorithms directly cause affective or issue polarization in individuals or otherwise affect knowledge about political campaigns or offline political participation," the team concludes. They suggest more research focus on offline factors "such as long-term demographic changes, partisan media, rising inequality, or geographic sorting."
In another study—also led by Guess—researchers excluded re-shared content from some users' news feeds. These users wound up seeing substantially less political news ("including content from untrustworthy sources"), clicking on less partisan news, and reacting less overall. Yet "contrary to expectations," the shift didn't significantly alter "political polarization or any measure of individual-level political attitudes." Those in the experimental group also ended up less informed about the news.
"We conclude that though re-shares may have been a powerful mechanism for directing users' attention and behavior on Facebook during the 2020 election campaign, they had limited impact on politically relevant attitudes and offline behaviors," write Guess and colleagues in "Reshares on social media amplify political news but do not detectably affect beliefs or opinions," also published in Science.
In another experiment, researchers tweaked some Facebook feeds to reduce exposure to "like-minded sources" by about a third. As a result, these users indeed saw content from a more "cross-cutting" range of sources and less "uncivil" content. But this failed to alter their political attitudes or belief in misinformation.
Ultimately, the results "challenge popular narratives blaming social media echo chambers for the problems of contemporary American democracy," writes a research team led by Brendan Nyhan, Jaime Settle, Emily Thorson, Magdalena Wojcieszak, and Pablo Barberá in "Like-minded sources on Facebook are prevalent but not polarizing," published in Nature. "Algorithmic changes…do not seem to offer a simple solution for those problems."
For years, politicians have been proposing new regulations based on simple technological "solutions" to issues that stem from much more complex phenomena. But making Meta change its algorithms or shifting what people see in their Twitter feeds can't overcome deeper issues in American politics—including parties animated more by hate and fear of the other side than ideas of their own. This new set of studies should serve as a reminder that expecting tech companies to somehow fix our dysfunctional political culture won't work.
The post Do Social Media Algorithms Polarize Us? Maybe Not. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In the mid-2000s, the news media underwent rapid change, beginning a transformation from stodgy to spicy. Social media networks and trailblazing online-only news outlets changed the way everyone used the internet. Perhaps no one had a better view of the whole news landscape than Ben Smith.
Smith was the first editor in chief of the recently shuttered BuzzFeed News, a New York Times media columnist, and a co-founder of Semafor. In his new book, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race To Go Viral, Smith charts the rise and fall of Gawker, HuffPost, Breitbart News, and BuzzFeed News.
In the 2000s and early 2010s, these sites dominated news cycles and pulled millions of eyeballs due to their unique abilities to shape media narratives in surprising and irresistible ways. It seemed they would define the new century while legacy outlets such as The New York Times would be lucky to survive in the new, massively online mediascape. But Donald Trump, revenge lawsuits, untimely deaths, and the vagaries of the internet ended up disrupting the disrupters.
In May, Reason's Nick Gillespie interviewed Smith in New York City about the ever-changing media landscape. They discussed his controversial decision at BuzzFeed to publish the Steele dossier (which contained allegations about collaboration between Trump and Russia, along with other salacious details), what the firings of Fox's Tucker Carlson and CNN's Don Lemon mean for journalism, and the future of Semafor.
Reason: What is your book Traffic about?
Smith: How totally insane this particular media moment is with, sort of, social media flying apart, Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon getting fired, and these great platforms of the 2010s shutting down. I mean, in some sense, this is the origin story of all that and the story of all these kind of wild characters and outsiders downtown in Manhattan, 20 years ago, thinking that they were inventing a new media and that they had discovered these new kind of forces of the internet that they were going to channel and use to overturn everything that then existed.
What was Gawker, who was behind it, and what was its peculiar genius?
You have to put your head back into that moment when places like The New York Times, CBS, and Condé Nast seemed just incredibly vulnerable as businesses. They just weren't on the internet. They were like emailing around PDFs of their stories three weeks later. They seemed fossilized.
We were coming out of the Iraq War, and there was a sense that the media had really, on the biggest story of the generation, totally failed. And so there was—from a business model perspective, but also culturally—this sense that these were these kinds of discredited, failing institutions, and a lot of appetite from readers for something new.
In that context, this British journalist named Nick Denton, who had been at the Financial Times, who came of a very elite British pedigree, rolled into New York with this idea that if he just started a couple of blogs, he would build a huge digital empire. But mostly he just started blogs, the first of which was a tech blog called Gizmodo, but the most legendary of which, started soon after, was Gawker. It started with these young writers, young women who were great stylish, funny writers like Elizabeth Spiers, who were just these total outsiders to the media industry throwing entertaining stones at it. Spiers went and infiltrated the Condé Nast cafeteria and just mocked the folkways of this ancient media class essentially.
They were these incredibly hierarchical institutions where the junior staff literally stayed on the periphery of the offices because they were scared to walk through the middle where the powerful people were. Gawker challenged that. Also it was sometimes incredibly cruel and petty and bitchy and gossipy in the spirit of the British media, but also because they were outsiders and they had no power. It seemed totally fine to act that way, basically, and I think it gradually evolved into this pretty, in some ways, influential empire of blogs.
Was there a story at Gawker early on that highlighted Denton's take on journalism?
One of the iconic stories, which was on Gizmodo rather than Gawker, came when they got hold of an iPhone that they were not supposed to have. I think the traditional tech media, which they were also at war with, would've probably talked to Apple. They just basically obtained this phone illicitly and published all these heretofore secret specs. An engineer left it at a bar. They didn't steal it per se. Apple sent the police after them, which was incredibly valuable for their reputation. That's who they wanted to be.
So they were always looking for opportunities to prove that they were outsiders who would do what nobody else would do. The other, and probably more lamentable, threat of that is that they would publish sex tapes, which somehow, again, it's very hard to imagine the moment in which that seemed like a normal or acceptable thing to do.
Nick Denton's philosophy of what the internet could do was this very specific, very ideological point of view, which is just that it ripped the mask off the media, and off its audience. You could look at the traffic, you could see that people wanted pornography rather than high-minded stuff, so give it to them because that's what they wanted. And you could print the conversations—the bitchy conversations that journalists would have at bars but not print. That was the spirit of it.
Huffington Post became a major player in this space as well. What was The Huffington Post?
The other thing that was happening then was that Democrats were freaking out that George Bush had just beaten John Kerry, and they were looking for a way to channel this new internet media, which was presumed to be young and progressive. That's who was on the internet; it went without saying that the internet was of the left in some sense.
So Arianna Huffington, a conservative turned liberal, Californian, Greek, great character, and Ken Lerer, this very savvy New York P.R. guy who helped sell AOL, and Jonah Peretti, this tech guy, basically went to start what would become essentially this vehicle for promoting Barack Obama in the primary and then in the general election. Their fourth partner—again, it's one of those things where you have to think back about a world in which this made sense, they were hoping to be a liberal version of the Drudge Report—so it made sense to go to the Drudge Report and pick off Drudge's deputy, this guy Andrew Breitbart.
He had this incredible power in the culture, but also Matt Drudge paid him irregularly, whatever he felt like, and never gave him any public credit. It was a very strange story.
But in any case, it made sense for them to go to the right-wing place and hire that guy because they were all on the internet. The relevant world was the internet, as opposed to the establishment media, as opposed to right versus left. All the right-wing bloggers and the left-wing bloggers had more in common with each other than with these old media people.
HuffPost had this idea of itself, like Arianna would give speeches saying that people were reading it because of its coverage of the Iraq war. But what Jonah Peretti, my old boss, had sort of realized was that was not what traveled on the internet. What traveled on the internet was kind of salacious celebrity coverage. And so he developed this thing called "the mullet strategy," which was serious upfront, party in the back. So there'd be the big headline about Iraq and then scroll down for the good stuff.
Jonah Peretti was working at The Huffington Post, and then he started BuzzFeed. What was BuzzFeed?
Jonah came from this different place. He was not a journalist, he was—it's funny, another term that has fallen out of fashion—but he had come up as a culture jammer. He did weird pranks.
Nike at one point had this thing where you could customize shoes with your name or with any English word. And he tried the word sweatshop and the customer service representative wrote back that it wasn't an acceptable term. He wrote back that actually, in the terms of service, which he had read, was "a word in the dictionary." And they went back and forth several times until he wrote to them that he was OK with them not printing the shoe, but could they send him a picture of the 7-year-old Vietnamese girl who had assembled it, and they did not respond.
And then he forwarded that email to a few friends, and within weeks it is everywhere on the internet. One of his friends has posted it to a blog and is getting a lot of traffic. He's on The Today Show debating a Nike spokesman about sweatshops, which he knows nothing about.
And the whole experience, he's sort of like, "What happened here? This is really interesting. This is some new thing in media," and he gets sort of obsessed with capturing it. Through a series of weird pranks and then figuring out how the internet works at Huffington Post, he then launches this thing, BuzzFeed, which is really a laboratory for really weird stuff that they think might travel around the internet. And it's with no sense of journalism or not journalism; it's just web culture memes and measuring each one's traffic and figuring out what people will share.
Let's talk about Breitbart, because it is funny at Huffington Post you have four kind of main founders and I think three of them will say how Andrew Breitbart really didn't do anything. Breitbart would say, "I actually did everything." And he's not around to talk about that, but what was Breitbart.com?
One of the things Drudge did was link to Reuters stories and A.P. stories. And so Breitbart started this thing, Breitbart.com, that subscribed to the wires and captured the traffic from Drudge, when Drudge felt like letting him do that. And they kind of only communicated by instant message; it wasn't like they were tight.
But he gradually, I think really particularly watching Nick Denton and Gawker, decided that there was space for confrontational, outsider right-wing media and started these blogs which evolved. Actually [Breitbart's] great moment of triumph was exposing Anthony Weiner's indiscretions.
Breitbart was kind of a right-wing culture jammer. He would either take found material and recontextualize it or get a piece of video and expose it in a way that the people who took it didn't expect it to be done.
He had grown up in Hollywood, basically, and worked in the entertainment industry and lived in L.A. He had this basic belief that culture is upstream of politics and that Republicans were so hopelessly lost in the culture wars that by the time everything got to Washington, they were lost. I don't think he was actually a cultural conservative, which is confusing. He was a partisan, fighting Republican who wanted to start inflammatory battles, but interestingly, not particularly about, for instance, gay rights. A complicated person.
What was going on at The New York Times during the '00s and the very early teens?
They were panicking. They were selling everything other than their core assets from The Boston Globe to real estate they owned. A.G. Sulzberger, the current publisher, talks about basically throwing all the furniture into the furnace to keep the ship going. Rented out floors in their building. Tried a paywall when no one would pay and then tore it down. It really seemed for a long time like they were just the inevitable losers of this transition. It was sort of conventional wisdom to talk about them going out of business, to kind of pity them. This is as late as 2015.
Jonah Peretti, the BuzzFeed CEO, was asked to address the New York Times board and give them advice. And then Cliff Levy, who's one of the senior editors, interviewed him and asked him, "If we hired you tomorrow to be CEO of The New York Times, what would you do?" And Jonah says to them, with a straight face, "Well first I would ask you for a raise. And then I would go into my office, lock my door, and cry." Just to give you a sense of sort of the arrogance and sense that we had the wind at our back and these guys were screwed.
A lot of other media institutions had watched the bloggers and watched the internet and tried to copy them fast. They'd launch little blogs. They were jumping around trying to copy the internet, basically. And the Times didn't do that. They watched and they waited and they followed slowly and deliberately, and it worked. And they really were able to build this. Once people were ready to subscribe to things, partly trained by Netflix, trained by Spotify, the Times was able to build a real business.
Gawker, Breitbart.com, BuzzFeed News, all of these entities were, it seems, focusing less on content and more on traffic. What led to their demise?
We all made different mistakes, but the biggest version of the story is that if you were paying attention to traffic in the aughts, in the early 2010s, what you saw was this huge tidal wave of Facebook. And I think BuzzFeed was the first: Jonah was the first to see it really clearly and to orient his business toward it. He built this enormous scale by creating the kind of stuff that people were interested in sharing on Facebook in a technical way that was easy and friendly to share on Facebook.
Facebook had tried to acquire BuzzFeed, and Jonah was close to Zuckerberg, talked to him all the time, and had a sense of how the platform worked. The theory was these social media platforms are the new cable companies—Facebook, but also Twitter, Snap, Pinterest, and the publishers who figure out the kind of content that works on social media. The same way what had worked on cable, like MTV, was not some preexisting thing repackaged. It was really people figuring out this new medium. The details were a little fuzzy, but this would wind up being a successful business. And that was just totally wrong.
What was wrong about it?
The mechanism by which the money would change hands. There were periods when Facebook was starting to pay publishers and license stuff, and we had shows on Snap and on Twitter and they were paying us money. I was like, "We're taking in millions of dollars directly a year from these platforms. This is the future that Jonah had predicted." But I think there were a number of things. One was that these platforms were mostly reliant on user generated content and loved it because it was free.
And in fact, professional content didn't, by their metrics of traffic, perform better than random user-generated stuff they didn't have to pay for. And it's obviously a better business to get things free than to pay for them. And I think you can say, "How's that working for them now?" I don't know. Not that well, they're unraveling and losing relevance. And is there some world where they were competing against Netflix and The New York Times for quality stuff? I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not.
How does the 2016 election play into any of this? There was maybe a decade or so where people were into social media, people were into new media, and then it's like, "It led to Donald Trump being elected, so now we have to figure out how to kill it."
I think there are a couple of things. The first is just that there was this notion that your personal news feed on Facebook was this place where there were pictures of your friends' kids, silly memes from your high school friends, and also really interesting journalism and cool entertainment. It was all mixed up together. And that was sort of nice.
And I think before we get to political outrage at Facebook, at some point it was insane people screaming at each other all the time. And that was not a great user experience. Actually, Facebook had seen Twitter growing and been like, "Why are they growing? It's news, let's copy it." It opened the floodgates to news onto the platform and it'd become an incredible traffic source for publishers, but also a more and more toxic, contested place.
You made the decision to publish the Steele dossier, the source of the idea that there was a pee tape of Donald Trump—which I hope to God, even if it's true, it never sees the light of day, because I already have nightmares. Most of the Steele dossier has been debunked.
Yes.
What went into your decision making to say, "Okay, we're going with this"? And then what's the effect of something like that on trust in media?
I certainly came to that decision with a sort of Gawker mindset in a way, that we should be saying to our audience the same thing we're saying to each other. That it seems crazy that you and I would have a conversation and then a lawyer or doctor or teacher or construction worker who is in our audience would say, "Hey, what are you talking about?" We'd be like, "Sorry, you're not smart enough to understand this."
A lot of journalists had been given the dossier. It was compiled by, actually at that time, a very well-regarded former British spy who was involved in the FIFA investigations and knew a lot of journalists from that.
We, like I think everybody else, got the dossier later and through a weird side door, so we weren't bound to secrecy. But also we did what everybody else did; we sent a reporter to Prague to see if she could figure out if Michael Cohen had been there. She went from hotel to hotel showing his picture. And it's amazing: People at hotels, I guess in Prague, will just check their guest registry for you, if you're sort of a charming, friendly reporter, apparently. And we went to Moscow to talk to see if anybody at the Ritz-Carlton would discuss this with us.
I was already thinking: Every journalist in Washington has seen this thing, all the intelligence officials, a lot of the senators. Harry Reid has written an open letter to James Comey saying he knows that Comey has compromising information on Trump, demanding he release it. [Arizona Sen. John] McCain is acting super weird in a way that you don't really understand unless you know about this. So at some point you're kind of like, "This is the dark matter of Washington and everyone is in on it, except for the reader." It's hard to explain what's going on, actually, without some reference to it. So we're thinking: How do we cover it?
It wasn't really this grand principle. There's a very specific thing that happens, which is CNN reports that this previously secret document has been briefed to President Obama and President-elect Trump. And that it alleges that Trump was compromised by the Russians. And at that point, to me, it's like, "I'm holding in my hands a list of suspected communists in the State Department." You can't show the document. You can not report on it. Which is where we were. But you can't show it and then say, "But it'll burn your eyes out if you look at it." I just think that's not a tenable position. So that's why we published it.
After BuzzFeed, you worked as the media columnist at The New York Times. Why did you leave?
For one, writing about the media is super weird. You wake up in the morning, punch one of your friends in the face. At some point you're just moving people from the category of friend to enemy. And how long do you want to do that? It's weird to write about your own industry. I like to make trouble, but how long do you do that before you just become Gollum?
But the other was that I had this front row seat to this really strange moment that, in some ways, reminded me of this moment of total dislocation and change that we'd been in the middle of in the early aughts when this whole new scene was being created. I've been talking to Justin [Smith], my business partner, for years actually about doing something. And the moment just felt right. And I had spent three years of reporting and talking to people and chronicling this moment of this whole new thing and the crazy trajectory and crash of social media. It felt like this new moment when readers feel really alienated from a lot of their options, feel really overwhelmed and it seems like a good moment to try something new.
What's your elevator pitch for Semafor and why do we need one more news site?
I don't really see it as we're slotting into some lane to the left of something or to the right of something. What people want has changed, I think, and the problems to solve have changed. People feel incredibly overwhelmed and are unsure of what to trust. I think it's a moment when people connect to individual journalists more than necessarily to kind of a faceless brand—we've seen places like Substack.
We're trying to take great journalists of a certain type who break news—great Washington reporters, the best Wall Street reporter at The Wall Street Journal, Max Tani and I are covering the media—and present what we're doing in a way that's totally transparent. We actually do it in a very stylized way. We say here are the facts in this story, here's my opinion, and here's the opinion of somebody who disagrees with me. Break that up in a very clear way and try to bring in as many views from other publications, from other people, as possible so that you don't have to do that thing where you read an article, you think it's probably true, but then you Google seven more articles just to triangulate what's really happening. The valuable thing you can do is try to do that work of unscrambling this totally messy landscape of people. And that's what we try to do.
What is Semafor's business model?
We sell advertising and we do events. That's how we make money. When you hear journalists talking passionately about the business and which is better, they're just talking about their books. Media's a pretty tough business. What is Disney's business? It's 19 different things and they do them all pretty well.
For news, which is a particularly hard business within media, you shouldn't go out there with some ideology that one dollar is better than another dollar. All these things have their problems. Subscriptions tempt you to pander to your subscribers. Advertising can be corrupting. Or you can build a good relationship with your audience and make money in a bunch of different ways.
Recently both Tucker Carlson and Don Lemon got canned by their organizations. How does that factor into your view of the media landscape?
It is part of the same phenomenon of consumers and of advertisers and of corporate media companies saying, "This is not what anyone wants, this level of screamy polarization." And ultimately these big corporations that own these broadcast channels are just pulling the plug and saying, "Move back to the center."
Do you think that will happen at MSNBC as well?
This is all relative. Fox has always been, as long as I can remember, essentially the most important institution in the Republican Party. It is obviously this polarizing and partisan thing. But Carlson was doing something different. Most of it is just preaching to the faithful about whatever the Republican candidate wants and kicking the Democrat. Carlson, I think, was not all that interested in helping Republicans win. He was interested in taking the attention of all these Republicans and moving it way out toward Viktor Orbán and Nayib Bukele and global right-wing populism.
Do you have any comments on Vice essentially going tits up?
It was an incredible hype machine, incredible brand. It did a certain amount of incredibly cool content, but not a lot. It was not totally on the internet. It was always a pure brand more than a media thing. The founder, Shane Smith, just I think the greatest salesman of Gen X, took more than $100 million in cash, probably quite a bit more, out of the company. Which is crazy for a company that's not worth that much more than that.
This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity. For a podcast version, subscribe to The Reason Interview With Nick Gillespie.
The post Ben Smith's One Neat Trick for Going Viral appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A wire report about fighting in the West Bank shows up in news editors' feeds around the world. A Jordanian outlet wants to print it—and makes sure to replace every mention of the Israel Defense Forces with the occupation army. Across the Jordan River, The Times of Israel is also making edits, appending the word terrorist to any mention of Palestinian guerrillas. Side-by-side in a Google News search result, the articles make for a striking contrast, a kind of uncanny mirror-world.
People from around the world count on a small group of American and European agencies for their news. Wire services like the Associated Press and Agence France-Presse gather breaking news and sell the stories to news outlets for a small fee. While overall media budgets are shrinking, the internet has allowed local newspapers to get wire reports more quickly and easily than ever before.
The wire services have some advantages over local press, even when covering local stories. They tend to have better resources, and their international presence helps them avoid different countries' censorship laws. Since these agencies are based in the West, their coverage is written for Western readers. But many of their audiences today are in other parts of the world; foreign editors spend a lot of time and effort adapting wire reports to local perspectives.
Several months ago, I received a grant from the Fulbright Program, an educational exchange funded by Congress, to research how the Jordanian press interacts with international media. I was free to conduct my research and write about the results as I wish, as long as I made it clear that my words do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. government, or any partner organizations.
For my research, I volunteered at several Jordanian news outlets. Jordan News is the English-language edition of Al Ghad, a privately owned newspaper. Roya TV is a privately-owned station that broadcasts in Arabic and publishes online content in English. Radio Al-Balad is a nonprofit Arabic-language station that has received funding from European governments.
At all three outlets, I helped translate local content into English, and observed as editors adapted foreign stories for local audiences.
Jordanians pay close attention to English-language—especially American—media. The kingdom receives large amounts of U.S. aid and even hosts U.S. military bases. Some Jordanians received an American education, and many more are fans of American pop culture. A large Jordanian-American diaspora regularly travels between the two countries.
But there are important differences between Jordanian and American views, especially when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While American politics has a strong pro-Israel streak, about half the population of Jordan has Palestinian roots, the descendants of refugees who were expelled by or fled from Israeli forces during the 1948 and 1967 wars.
Even straight news reporting can reflect sharp disagreements, since the very names of places are political. Israel and Palestine do not have defined borders.
The whole land was a British colony, known as the Mandate of Palestine, before a civil war broke out in 1947 and 1948. Jewish nationalists declared the state of Israel, and the rest of the old Mandate fell under Jordanian and Egyptian control. Israel captured the remaining Palestinian territories—the West Bank and Gaza—in 1967. During peace talks in the '90s, part of those territories were placed under an autonomous Palestinian Authority, which declared itself "the state of Palestine" and won a United Nations observer seat in 2012.
Neither Israel nor Western governments recognize the state of Palestine as an independent nation. Many Western newsrooms follow their governments' policies. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle all ban their reporters from using the word Palestine to refer to a country.
The Associated Press allows its reporters to refer to the state of Palestine when talking about the United Nations, or similar international forums like the Olympics. In other cases, Associated Press guidelines say to use Palestinian territories for the West Bank and Gaza, "since [Palestine] is not a fully independent, unified state."
Some Jordanian journalists see things quite differently.
Roya TV always uses the term Palestine in its Arabic- or English-language content. Israel is referred to as either the Israeli Occupation or Tel Aviv. It sometimes makes for awkward reading. "Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu" becomes "Israeli Occupation Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu," in Roya's parlance.
"Roya's in-house style reflects its commitment to presenting news stories through a Palestinian lens and the aggression the Palestinian people face every day from the Israeli Occupation," says English news editor Dana Sharayri.
Sharayri believes that it's important to highlight "the historical context and the continued struggle for Palestinian rights," whether in the territories set aside for the Palestinian Authority, or the territories that became Israel in 1948.
Jordan News hews more closely to the style preferred by the Associated Press. The West Bank and Gaza are occupied Palestinian territories. The Old City of Jerusalem and its eastern suburbs, which Israel captured in 1967, are occupied East Jerusalem. According to Editor in Chief Osama Al-Sharif, referring to the territories that way is a matter of "international law and U.N. resolutions."
In May 2022, Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead in an Israeli raid in the West Bank. Her employer, Al Jazeera, accused the Israeli army of assassinating Abu Akleh, but many international news services were reluctant to point out a perpetrator at first.
Jordan News ran Al Jazeera's claim as a headline: "Israel kills journalist Shireen Abu Akleh 'in cold blood.'" Al-Sharif said that looking at all the sources and his "40 years of experience" led him to run that headline.
After first implying that Palestinian guerrillas were to blame, Israel later admitted that one of its soldiers shot Abu Akleh, and claimed the killing was an accident.
Most strikingly, Jordan News never refers to the Israeli military by its official name, the Israel Defense Forces. Instead, they are the Israeli occupation forces. "We are calling it for what it is," says Al-Sharif.
Less than 100 miles away, Israeli editors are busy taking out references to occupation. The Times of Israel, an English-language newspaper, removes the word occupied from foreign newswires about Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, a territory Israel conquered from Syria in 1967.
Unlike the West Bank and Gaza, the Israeli government has formally annexed East Jerusalem and the Golan. Referring to those places as occupied will "get you labeled with a certain bias" by Israeli audiences, says Deputy Editor Joshua Davidovich.
"We're not in the business of endorsing or not endorsing annexations," Davidovich says. "It's just an expression of our Israeli point of view."
Other Israeli newspapers do not even use the term Palestinian Territories or West Bank. The Israeli government officially calls it Judea and Samaria, the name of the West Bank in Jewish scripture, as do most Israeli media outlets in Hebrew and some in English.
Perhaps the most dramatic disagreement comes when talking about the Palestinian guerrillas who fight Israel. Over the past few decades, these groups have targeted both the Israeli army and civilians, including with indiscriminate shootings and bombings. The Israeli government calls them terrorists, and the U.S. government has also listed many Palestinian rebel groups as terrorist organizations.
The Associated Press discourages using the term terrorism in general, because it "is often used loosely by governments and leaders to condemn any rival political group or act of resistance." Hamas, the Palestinian rebel group that controls Gaza, is simply a "political party, which has an armed wing." Jordan News follows the same rules.
The Times of Israel, however, has a policy of explicitly calling Hamas and other Palestinian rebels terrorists. Davidovich claims "the word has a use in delineating the difference between a non-regular combatant targeting other combatants, as we would describe a militant, and someone who deliberately targets civilians."
Roya, on the other hand, avoids using the terms terrorist or militant, instead referring to the Palestinian resistance. Sharayri argues that the guerrillas are "defending their homeland" and "resisting the inhumane acts perpetrated by the Israeli Occupation Forces."
Given all the ways that wire reports clash with local sensibilities, it's reasonable to ask why local newspapers don't just cover the stories with their own reporters. Al-Sharif and Davidovich are unanimous on that point: The wire services tend to be fast, trustworthy, well-sourced, and good at explaining context to unfamiliar audiences.
"A lot of times when you're in the thick of it, you lose sight of the overall picture…and what the rest of the world thinks is going on," Davidovich says. "Strange as it is to say, [the wire services] might have access to places we might not," he added. For example, he says Netanyahu "does not like talking to the Israeli press," but is more talkative with foreign media.
Then there's the censorship issue. Israeli journalists have to get a military censor's approval to write about certain national security topics. Jordanian authorities often use gag orders, "cybersecurity" laws, and the threat of defamation lawsuits to reign in the local press. Both the Palestinian Authority and Hamas have arrested and tortured journalists for criticizing them.
Wire services have a simple workaround for censorship. If a journalist in Gaza or Tel Aviv gets a sensitive scoop, their organization will publish it under the name of staff in New York or London.
That isn't to say that wire journalism is risk-free. Hamas held several wire reporters at gunpoint in 2017, and Israel blew up the Associated Press offices in Gaza in 2021, claiming that Hamas fighters were stationed in the building.
In turn, news published abroad allows the local media to indirectly report on sensitive topics. For example, Israeli newspapers will almost always add the disclaimer "according to foreign reports" when alluding to Israel's nuclear weapons program. When Jordan carried out secret air raids against drug traffickers in Syria earlier this year, Jordanian media reported it as a claim by the British wire service Reuters.
Wire services and local news both have their problems. Bringing them together may be the best solution—especially in a world where censors and border guards want to squelch the flow of information.
"We use all media sources including Times of Israel, [right-wing Israeli newspaper] Jerusalem Post, and [left-wing Israeli newspaper] Haaretz," Al-Sharif says. "We look at all and decide how best we can present objective and balanced news."
The post How Middle East Outlets Reframe the News To Fit Their Narrative appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>California lawmakers are moving ahead with plans to make Google and Facebook subsidize traditional media. Legislation from state Assemblymember Buffy Wicks (D–Oakland) would require some digital platforms "to remit a journalism usage fee payment…equal to a percentage…of the covered platform's advertising revenue generated during that month multiplied by the eligible digital journalism provider's allocation share."
Essentially, A.B. 886—dubbed the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA)—would make entities like Google and Facebook pay to link and send traffic to media websites, despite the fact that media outlets get as much if not more out of this arrangement.
This sort of "link tax" not only makes no sense but is "actively harmful to the open web" and "based on a ridiculously confused understanding of basically everything," writes Techdirt's Mike Masnick. More:
In short form: if any website does not want to get traffic from Google or Facebook, they have the power to control that by using robots.txt or redirects. It's easy.
The problem is that they want the traffic. They want it so bad that they hire "search engine optimization" experts to help them get more traffic.
The problem is that they don't just want the traffic, they also want to get paid for that traffic.
This is backwards in so many ways. It's basically saying that they should get paid to have other companies send them traffic.
It also breaks the most fundamental concept of the open web — the link — by saying that the government can force some websites to pay for linking to other websites (and, on top of that, force the paying websites to have to host those links, even if they don't want to).
Everything about this is filthy and corrupt. It's literally Rep. Buffy Wicks and others in the California legislature saying "we're forcing companies we dislike to give money to companies we like."
Under the CJPA's terms, online platforms would be subject to the link tax if they have at least 50,000,000 monthly active users or subscribers in the U.S. or are owned or controlled "by a person with either…United States net annual sales or a market capitalization greater than five hundred fifty billion dollars ($550,000,000,000), adjusted annually for inflation" or "at least 1,000,000,000 worldwide monthly active users on the online platform."
Meta has said that it will stop letting news sites post to Facebook and Instagram in California if the bill passes:
There you have it. Meta will pull news from FB and Insta if California passes CJPA. Expect similar moves from other tech co's.
Kudos to @Meta for taking a stand here.
???? Californians: melt the phones. The bill is expected to pass the House Friday.#FAFO https://t.co/aZvcTWymgv
— Jess Miers ???? (@jess_miers) May 31, 2023
The California bill echoes the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA), a misguided federal proposal from Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.).
In both cases, lawmakers mean to use the power of the federal government to prop up favored industries (newspapers and other traditional media outlets) at the expense of disfavored industries (tech companies).
Debt ceiling deal passes House. The House on Wednesday passed the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act, a deal inked by President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R–Calif.) to suspend the debt ceiling through 2025. More than 100 members of the House voted against the measure, but more than 300 voted in its favor, which sends the deal on to the Senate for a vote.
See also:
• Debt Ceiling Bill 'Locks in the Inflated Spending Levels of Recent Years'
• Debt Ceiling Deal Curtails GOP-Backed Budget Cuts, Spending Caps
• Conservatives Rage Against Debt Ceiling Bill: 'Not One Republican Should Vote for This'
How Congress is trying to childproof the internet. A barrage of state and national legislation takes aim at privacy and free speech online under the guise of protecting children and teens from harm. I dug into the different proposals before Congress, and the worst of the new state bills and laws:
Ultimately, this onslaught of "child protection" measures could make child and adult internet users more vulnerable to hackers, identity thieves, and snoops.
They could require the collection of even more personal information, including biometric data, and discourage the use of encrypted communication tools. They could lead social media companies to suppress a lot more legal speech. And they could shut young people out of important conversations and information, further isolating those in abusive or vulnerable situations, and subjecting young people to serious privacy violations.
Read more about the specific proposals here.
A Georgia law requiring lactation consultants to be licensed is unconstitutional, the Georgia Supreme Court says. In 2016, Georgia became the first state in the country to require lactation consultants to be licensed by the government. Lactation consultants help new mothers who are having trouble breastfeeding and have become popular over the past decade (spurred in part by a coverage requirement in the Affordable Care Act).
The Georgia law "would have forced hundreds of women out of work," according to the Institute for Justice (I.J.), a nonprofit libertarian law firm that challenged the law on behalf of lactation care provider Mary Jackson and a nonprofit she helped found. Jackson has more than three decades of experience in the field and helped start Together with Reaching Our Sisters Everywhere (ROSE), a nonprofit dedicated to boosting breastfeeding among women of color. But under Georgia's new licensing law, she would have had to undergo extensive new training to continue working legally.
More from Scott Shackford:
Georgia Supreme Court Chief Justice Michael P. Boggs wrote the ruling in Jackson v. Raffensperger, and he was critical of attempts to declare that the state has a "public welfare" interest for every licensing law it passes: "Georgia's Due Process Clause requires more than a talismanic recitation of an important public interest." Here the court examined whether the licensing requirement protected the public from unsafe or harmful health practices. They found the state's evidence wanting:
Certainly, there is nothing inherently harmful in the practice of lactation care, and there is no evidence of harm to the public from the provision of lactation care and services by individuals who lack an [International Board Certified Lactation Consultant] license.
To get this license through a private credentialing body, the court notes, requires 14 different health courses (some college level), 95 hours of training, 300 supervised clinical hours, and up to $700 in costs. Boggs notes in his ruling that only 162 of Georgia's 470 lactation consultants have gone through the process to get licensing.
The state admitted to the court that they had no evidence that anybody was harmed by unlicensed or incompetent lactation care before or after the law's passage. An analysis of a version of the law that was considered in 2013 (and not passed) noted that there was no evidence of any harm caused by the state's failure to license or regulate lactation consultants.
Thus, the Court concludes that the law "violates Plaintiffs' due process rights under the Georgia Constitution to practice the chosen profession of lactation care provider."
"This case sets a precedent that the Georgia Constitution demands the government justify restrictions on economic liberty," said I.J. Senior Attorney Renée Flaherty in a statement.
• The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska and Planned Parenthood of the Heartland have filed a lawsuit challenging Nebraska's restrictions on abortion and gender transition treatment for minors. "The lawsuit argues that the Legislature, by combining sections of two bills involving different topics, violated the State Constitution's restriction that bills cover only a single subject," notes the Nebraska Examiner. "Supporters have argued that both parts of the new law regulate health care for children."
• Iowa's new school choice program, which allows families to apply for funds to send their kids to private schools, has launched. On the first day, more than 5,000 families applied, according to Republican Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds.
• Canada is putting warning labels on individual cigarettes.
• Is this Aubrey Plaza ad for "wood milk" illegal?
• New York City won't stop arresting people for filming cops:
More than 2,700 people were arrested while they were filming police in 2021 and 2022, according to NYPD data.https://t.co/y7VhHDQAKG
— Gothamist (@Gothamist) May 31, 2023
The post California Lawmakers Want To Make Tech Companies Subsidize News Media appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Lost in the incredibly expensive fight over how many billions of dollars the federal government can waste is any number of more modest bills—some of which wouldn't add to our nation's debt and would help protect Americans from that very expensive government.
Consider the PRESS Act—officially the Protect Reporters From Exploitative State Spying Act. The PRESS Act is intended to stop the federal government from attempting to force journalists to divulge the identities of anonymous sources, like government whistleblowers. There are exceptions if the government can show that disclosing the identity of the source is necessary to identify a terrorist or to prevent violent crime or crime against a child.
More importantly, the bill also prevents federal agencies from bypassing the above protections by turning to third-party service providers (like messaging apps or social media platforms) to get the journalist's communications. Again, there's an exemption for threats of imminent violence, and there's a process involved that requires a subpoena and a court hearing. Essentially, it would serve as a federal "shield law." Nearly every state has some sort of law that stops journalists from being forced to reveal sources, but there is currently no federal version.
The bill was introduced in the House by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D–Md.) and sailed through entirely by a voice vote. But in the Senate last week, where it was sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden (D–Ore.) and Mike Lee (R–Utah), an attempt to get it passed by unanimous consent during the lame duck session was derailed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R–Ark.). He objected on national security grounds, going so far as to use the release of the Pentagon Papers by Daniel Ellsberg, which revealed secrets of America's handling of the Vietnam War, as an example of why it's actually bad to protect journalism and journalists from government authority or prosecution.
"This essentially will grant journalists special legal privileges to disclose sensitive information that no other citizen enjoys," Cotton said.
But Cotton is wrong just on the facts. Journalism is a career for some, but it's also an activity or action that everybody can perform. The PRESS Act defines a journalist as a person who "regularly gathers, prepares, collects, photographs, records, writes, edits, reports, investigates, or publishes news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public." The bill uses a similar definition for journalism itself. It does not require a person to be employed by a media outlet as a reporter to claim its protections. Anybody who performs the act of "journalism," even if he's not paid and even if he has political biases or agendas, is protected by the law.
Given the state of the media today and the decline of Americans' trust in the press, it's tempting to buy into critiques that the last thing we need is to give journalists greater privileges and powers. It's also not a new line of attack—Reason's Matt Welch took note of anti-press sentiment back in 2005 with Judith Miller, who spent 85 days in jail for refusing to reveal that Scooter Libby leaked to her the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Don't succumb to such short-sighted thinking about who is actually served by media protections. Who are the actual beneficiaries when press shield laws stop the government from forcing journalists into revealing their sources? Who were the beneficiaries of the leaking and publishing of the Pentagon Papers? It's the American public that gains the most when the government's power to punish anybody who engages in journalism is restricted. It's the public that gains when sources can turn to journalists and reveal the truth of what the government is keeping secret.
Cotton's position about the release of the Pentagon Papers and his general support of the security state is anti-democratic and anti-liberty, treating American citizens as though their need for information is subservient to whatever the federal government and military desire. Americans—not just foreign enemies—are being deprived of important information about what their own government is doing.
"This bill is a no-brainer to protect free press in America, but I'm not giving up. I'm going to keep fighting until we get this across the finish line," Wyden tweeted after Cotton blocked the bill. Wyden's office did not respond to a call from Reason for an update on the bill's status.
The current (sometimes miserable) state of the press shouldn't distract from the fact that we all benefit from press shield laws, as they help journalists reveal to the public what people with power are doing. This bill is particularly good because it protects not just "professional" journalists who work for major media outlets, but anybody who engages in the act of journalism.
The post A New Federal Press Shield Bill Falters Just Before the Finish Line in Congress appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Publishing is not a crime," the editors and publishers of The New York Times and four leading European news outlets say in an open letter released on Monday. While that statement might seem uncontroversial, the U.S. Department of Justice disagrees, as evidenced by its prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange for obtaining and disseminating classified material.
In urging the Justice Department to drop that case, the Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País implicitly acknowledge that freedom of the press is meaningless when the government decides who is allowed to exercise it. Although that point also might seem obvious, journalists who take a dim view of Assange have long argued that attempting to imprison him for divulging government secrets poses no threat to their work because he does not qualify as a member of their profession.
That position is profoundly ahistorical. As scholars such as UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh have shown, the "freedom…of the press" guaranteed by the First Amendment protects your right to communicate with the public through the printed word and other tools of mass communication, regardless of whether you do that for a living or work for a mainstream news organization.
The Assange exception to the First Amendment is also dangerously shortsighted. As the Times et al. emphasize, the conduct at the center of the case against him is indistinguishable from what professional journalists do every day when they reveal information that the government wants to conceal.
Twelve years ago, those newspapers published a series of startling stories based on confidential State Department cables and military files that Assange had obtained from former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. Those documents, the open letter notes, "disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale."
As the Times put it at the time, the records told "the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money." The revelations, Times reporter Charlie Savage notes, included "dossiers about Guantánamo Bay detainees being held without trial" and "logs of significant events in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars" that showed "civilian casualties were higher than official estimates."
All but one of the 17 counts in the latest federal indictment of Assange relate to obtaining or disclosing such "national defense information," a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison under the Espionage Act of 1917. Once the U.S. has completed his extradition from the United Kingdom, Assange will face a maximum sentence of 160 years on those counts alone.
Journalists who reported the information that Assange obtained are guilty of the same crimes, a daunting fact that poses an obvious threat to freedom of the press. Largely for that reason, no publisher of previously secret government information has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act until now, and the Obama administration, which hardly looked kindly on Assange, declined to establish that chilling precedent.
The Trump administration took a different view. John Demers, then head of the Justice Department's National Security Division, assured reporters there was no cause for alarm, because Assange is "no journalist," and it "has never been the department's policy to target" officially recognized journalists "for reporting."
The Times et al. are not blind to Assange's deviations from journalistic norms, which included his alleged involvement in Manning's unauthorized use of government computers and his publication of unredacted documents that may have endangered intelligence sources. But they recognize that the Justice Department's position means prosecutorial discretion is the only thing that protects "real" journalists, however that category is defined, from a similar fate.
So do Reps. Ro Khanna (D‒Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R‒Ky.), who last summer introduced a bill that would amend the Espionage Act to protect journalists and whistleblowers. "The ongoing attempts to prosecute journalists like Julian Assange under the Espionage Act," Massie said, "should be opposed by all who wish to safeguard our constitutional rights."
© Copyright 2022 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post 'Real' Journalists Recognize That Prosecuting Julian Assange Poses a Grave Threat to Freedom of the Press appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It has been five years since police in Laredo, Texas, mocked and jeered at Priscilla Villarreal, a local journalist often critical of cops, as she stood in the Webb County Jail while they booked her on felony charges. Her crime: asking the government questions.
That may seem like a relatively obvious violation of the First Amendment. Yet perhaps more fraught is that, after all this time, the federal courts have still not been able to reach a consensus on that question. Over the years, judges in the 5th Circuit have ping-ponged back and forth over whether jailing a journalist for doing journalism does, in fact, plainly infringe on her free speech rights.
The U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas awarded those officers qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that allows state and local government officials to violate your constitutional rights without having to face federal civil suits if that violation has not been "clearly established" in case law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit forcefully overturned that: "If [this] is not an obvious violation of the Constitution, it's hard to imagine what would be," wrote Judge James C. Ho.
Last week, the full spate of judges on the 5th Circuit voted to rehear the case in a rare move that signals some discontent with Ho's majority conclusion. Put differently, it's not looking good for Villarreal, nor for any journalist in the 5th Circuit who would like to do their job without fear of going to jail for it.
In April 2017, Villarreal, who reports near the U.S.-Mexico border, broke a story about a Border Patrol agent who committed suicide. A month later, she released the surname of a family involved in a fatal car accident. The agency that confirmed both pieces of information: the Laredo Police Department. The agency that would bring felony charges against her six months later for those acts of journalism: the Laredo Police Department.
At the core of Villarreal's misfortune is a Texas law that allows the state to prosecute someone who obtains nonpublic information from a government official if he or she does so "with intent to obtain a benefit." Villarreal operates her popular news-sharing operation on Facebook, where her page, Lagordiloca News, has amassed 200,000 followers as of this writing.
So to jail Villarreal, police alleged that she ran afoul of that law when she retrieved information from Laredo Police Department Officer Barbara Goodman and proceeded to publish those two aforementioned stories, because she potentially benefited by gaining more Facebook followers. Missing from that analysis is that every journalist, reporter, or media pundit has an "intent to benefit" when she or he publishes a story, whether it is to attract viewers, readers, or subscribers. Soliciting information from government officials—who, as Villarreal's case exemplifies, sometimes feed reporters information—is called a "scoop," and it's not new.
Yet it was an argument that, in some sense, resonated with Judge Priscilla Richman, the chief jurist on the 5th Circuit, who almost certainly voted in favor of reconsidering the court's ruling. "In fact, Villareal's [sic] Complaint says that she 'sometimes enjoys a free meal from appreciative readers, . . . occasionally receives fees for promoting a local business [and] has used her Facebook page [where all of her reporting is published] to ask for donations for new equipment necessary to continue her citizen journalism efforts," she wrote in August, rebuking Ho's conclusion. "With great respect, the majority opinion is off base in holding that no reasonably competent officer could objectively have thought that Villareal [sic] obtained information from her back-door source within the Laredo Police Department with an 'intent to benefit.'"
Such an interpretation would render the media industry an illegal operation, and everyone who participates—whether they be conservative, liberal, far-left, far-right, or anything in-between—criminals. "Other journalists are paid full salaries by their media outlets," writes Ho. Can confirm. Is that somehow less consequential than receiving free lunch or getting a new spike of followers on a social media platform (which is something that many journalists employed full time also set out to do)? "In sum, it is a crime to be a journalist in Texas, thanks to the dissent's reading of § 39.06(c)," Ho adds.
Debates around free speech are often polarized along predictable partisan lines. More specifically, they're often polarized by the content espoused. It's an easy task to support the idea of free speech when you enjoy what's being said. But the First Amendment does not pertain solely to popular speech, which, by nature of common sense, needs considerably less protection than the content deemed unpopular by the majority.
"It's not about just one person, it's not about just one case," says J.T. Morris, a senior attorney at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which is representing Villarreal. "It's about the First Amendment rights of all citizens to ask their public officials questions."
This appears to be something Judge Ho understands. Appointed by President Donald Trump, he has drawn headlines in recent weeks for his critiques of cancel culture at Yale Law School, where left-leaning students have developed a reputation for petulantly shouting down those with differing views. In our current partisan landscape, then, Villarreal might seem like an odd character for Ho to sympathize with; it's safe to say she would more likely qualify as a left-leaning hero than a right-leaning one. The journalist doggedly covers law enforcement with profanity-laced commentary: She once published a video of an officer choking someone at a traffic stop, and railed at a district attorney who dropped criminal charges against someone for animal abuse—a pattern which perhaps explains why police were eager to use the force of the law against her, the first time they ever invoked the statute in question.
But to make an about-face based on the content fundamentally confuses the meaning of free speech. Put differently, if you're upset that some students at Yale Law School are not mature enough to engage with those who think differently, or that social media vigilantes unfairly derail careers for WrongThink, then so too should you care that a woman in small-town Texas spent time in jail for promoting a message that might make you uncomfortable.
It's a problem of principle, and it's one that may also pervade the judiciary. "It should go without saying that forcing a public school student to embrace a particular political view serves no legitimate pedagogical function and is forbidden by the First Amendment," Ho wrote in Oliver v. Arnold last year. The case, which went under the radar, pertained to a conservative teacher who discriminated against a liberal student, temporarily turning the discussion on bias in education on its head. That student, Mari Leigh Oliver, won—by the skin of her teeth. Seven judges wanted to rehear the case, suggesting they disagreed with the ruling, while the remaining 10 declined.
Addressing some of the judges who would side against Oliver, Ho wrote that "it's unclear why they think [other] claims should succeed, and only Oliver's should lose." After all, the roles are typically reversed; conservatives are frequently the ones outweighed in academic settings. But if you only apply your principles when they suit you—if you only stand against the illiberal Yale students and not for the Villarreals or the Olivers—then you are sure to eventually find yourself on the losing end. And then what?
The post This Court Case Could Make It a Crime To Be a Journalist in Texas appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>About 42 percent of Americans now actively avoid news coverage, according to the Reuters Institute's 2022 Digital News Report. That's up from 38 percent in 2017. Nearly half of Americans who've turned away from the news say that they are doing so because it has a negative effect on their mood. As it happens, a new study in the journal PLoS One tracking the headlines in 47 publications popular in the United States reports that they have trended decidedly negative over the past two decades. Coincidence?
In their study, the team of New Zealand-based media researchers used a language model trained to categorize as positive or negative the sentiments of 23 million headlines between 2000 and 2019. In addition, the model was finetuned to identify Ekman's six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise), plus neutral, to label the headlines automatically. Using the 2019 Allsides Media Bias Chart, the publications were ideologically categorized as left, right, or center. For example, The New Yorker, the New York Times Opinion, and Mother Jones were identified as left; National Review, Fox News Opinion, and The New York Post as right; and A.P., Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal as center. (Reason was pegged as right-leaning.)
After turning their language model loose on the millions of headlines, the researchers found "an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000."
Overall, the researchers find that the prevalence of headlines denoting anger since the year 2000 increased by 104 percent. The prevalence of headlines denoting fear rose 150 percent; disgust by 29 percent; and sadness by 54 percent. The joy emotional category had its up and downs, rising until 2010 and falling after that. Headlines denoting neutral emotion declined by 30 percent since the year 2000. Breaking these down by ideology, headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets.
Why are negative headlines becoming more prevalent? "If it bleeds, it leads" is a hoary journalistic aphorism summarizing the well-known fact that dramatic, even gory, stories engage the attention of news consumers. In other words, journalists are supplying news consumers with what they want. Given the global reach of modern news media, there is always some attention-grabbing horror that occurred somewhere that can be highlighted between weather and sports on your local TV news.
Journalistic catering to people's negativity bias ends up misleading a lot of their audiences into thinking that the state of the world is getting worse and worse. However, looking at long term trends, the opposite is the case. Yes, yes, there are wars in Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Yemen and, of course, a global pandemic during the past two years has killed around 6.5 million people so far. "For reasons I have never understood, people like to hear that the world is going to hell, and become huffy and scornful when some idiotic optimist intrudes on their pleasure," wrote economist Deidre McCloskey. "Yet pessimism has consistently been a poor guide to the modern economic world."
As one of those idiotic optimists, I have spent much of my reporting life refuting apocalyptic claims and pointing to the enormous amount of progress humanity has made since the Enlightenment. For example, my co-author Marian Tupy and I cite uncontroversial data in Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know showing the enormous and ongoing increase in human wellbeing that has occurred over the past 100 years. For example, global per capita income rose (in real dollars) from $2,000 in 1900 to nearly $15,000 by 2016. Consequently, the proportion of global population living in absolute poverty ($1.90 per day or less) has dropped from 84 percent to under 9 percent. In addition, global life expectancy more than doubled from an average of 30 years in 1820 to 72 years now. And deaths from natural disasters have declined by nearly 99 percent since the 1920s. With respect to the U.S. we document, among other trends, the steep decline in racist attitudes, e.g., between 1958 and 2002 the percentage of whites who said that they approved racial intermarriage rose from 4 to 90 percent. In addition, while the U.S. economy grew more than 250 percent since 1970, overall air pollution fell by 74 percent.
In any case, the New Zealand researchers ultimately say that their study cannot tell whether the increase in negative news media headlines expresses a wider societal mood or if they are instead reflecting sentiments being pushed by those creating news content. "Financial incentives to maximize click-through ratios could be at play in increasing the sentiment polarity and emotional charge of headlines over time," they speculate. "Conceivably, the temptation of shaping the sentiment and emotional undertones of news headlines to advance political agendas could also be playing a role." Both seem likely.
Of course, these trends and incentives are likely activating a pernicious positive feedback loop in which a sour social and political mood engenders dismal headlines which in turn further demoralizes people and so forth. No wonder more Americans are actively avoiding the news.
The post U.S. Headlines Expressing Anger, Fear, Disgust, and Sadness Increased Hugely Since 2000 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"The present state," the editors wrote, "seemed to require some extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom."
The writers linked what they described as the sorry state of the world to the deteriorated state of the press. "There have been times when such a condition of affairs would not have occurred, and in which, if it had occurred, it would not have been long endured." In those earlier days, "an unpurchased, unshackled press existed," and editors "breathed the spirit of freedom."
Among the problems requiring the editors' effort were runaway taxing and spending, creating a drag on the economy. "The weight of taxation, and an obstinate adherence on the part of Ministers to the same profligate waste of the national resources…precludes all hope of returning prosperity," the editors wrote.
They saw an opening "for a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom." They "resolved to exert ourselves to answer that call, and to execute to the best of our zeal and talents, a task more requisite to the liberation and happiness of mankind, than any other."
The quotes are from a "To Our Readers" message on the front page of the Sunday, October 20, 1822, of The Sunday Times of London. They were republished Sunday, October 16, 2022, for the 200th anniversary edition of that newspaper.
The message is striking for being applicable today just as it was two centuries ago. Beyond that, what's lovely is the understanding is that asserting the freedom necessary for the "liberation and happiness of mankind" is the responsibility of the newspaper. The editors aren't waiting on the sidelines wishing to be rescued by some brave politician. They understand that it is their own job to lead the way.
The illustration elsewhere in Sunday's Times makes the same point. It does not feature a collection of Times reporters chasing the news, nor does it portray the editors serving as dutiful stenographers to powerful newsmakers. Rather, it pictures a crowd of caricatures of British Prime Ministers all gathered together reading the paper.
The image was a reminder of the ups and downs of that cause of freedom over the past two centuries, and of the important role that Great Britain has played. There is Winston Churchill, whose courage and determination helped to defeat Adolf Hitler in World War II. There is Margaret Thatcher, who helped to rebuild the British economy from the socialist slump by transforming it in the direction of freer markets. There is Boris Johnson, the champion of Brexit, who helped to liberate the United Kingdom from the oppression of Brussels-based European Union bureaucrats.
Newspapers surely deserve some of the credit for the considerable expansion of freedom over the past 200 years—from Frederick Douglass's North Star in the fight against slavery, to the role of The Wall Street Journal editorial page under Robert L. Bartley in winning the Cold War, to the journalistic work of Theodor Herzl and Vladimir Jabotinsky that paved the way for a Jewish state in the land of Israel, to Milton Friedman's 121 Journal opinion pieces and 300 columns in Newsweek that helped make the case for economic freedom.
The corollary to that, however, is that when freedom has been in retreat worldwide over the past decade or more—as the watchdog group Freedom House says it has been—then part of the blame belongs, also, to a press that has lost its credibility. Some press outlets have sold out, chasing declining revenues or idolizing partisan political figures instead of breathing the spirit of freedom.
The Sunday Times itself, like so many legacy newspapers, is in a diminished state. Its print circulation is far below its historic peak, and its journalistic reputation, in a crowded market, is less than what it was in its glory days from 1967 to 1981 under editor Harold Evans. The media mogul who controls it, Rupert Murdoch, is considering consolidating it and his other newspapers, including the Journal, now housed within News Corp., with Fox, the company that includes Fox News and Fox Sports.
If the current conditions are to improve, it will, today too, require "extraordinary effort in the cause of freedom" from a range of news organizations—200-year-old ones, younger publications, and new ones yet to be founded. The technology has changed, but two centuries later, the "liberation and happiness" of humankind depends as surely as it ever has on "a firm, stanch, and resolute assertion of public freedom."
The post The Press Idolizes Politicians. Instead, It Needs To Hold Them Accountable. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Russia's crackdown on information about its Ukraine invasion may prompt some rethinking of anti-encryption positions. Last Friday, Russia announced plans to block Facebook access and enacted a law banning "fake" coverage of the country's invasion of Ukraine. Though pitches as an attempt to ban misinformation, the new law actually prohibits various types of truthful language about Russia's "special military operation," which Russian authorities say should not be called an invasion.
In response to the new law, outside media outlets and tech companies—from CNN to TikTok—said they'll cease operations in Russia or block Russian accounts from posting.
2/ In light of Russia's new 'fake news' law, we have no choice but to suspend livestreaming and new content to our video service while we review the safety implications of this law. Our in-app messaging service will not be affected.
— TikTokComms (@TikTokComms) March 6, 2022
To circumvent such censorship attempts, some outlets are embracing the dark web and encrypted communications. For instance, the BBC is instructing people on how to access its coverage through the privacy-enabling Tor browser or through Psiphon. (Tor reported recently that its use in Russia and Ukraine has been surging.)
The British government has often been hostile to privacy-enabling tech like Tor and encrypted communication. Now the British-government-funded broadcaster is promoting its dark web Ukrainian- and Russian-language sites.
Old enough to remember when the UK government wanted to outlaw Tor. https://t.co/D2aJpTbxSp
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick) March 4, 2022
Meanwhile, the United States' government-owned broadcaster, the Voice of America, has said that it "will continue to promote and support tools and resources that will allow our audiences to bypass any blocking efforts imposed on our sites in Russia." And the U.S.-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty has "directed people to nthLink, a free VPN service supported by the Open Technology Fund," reports The Washington Post. It "also provided a link to its website on the Tor browser…and encouraged people to join its channel on Telegram, an encrypted messaging platform that Russia tried to ban in 2018."
These are heartening developments. These governments' support for letting ordinary people use private communications may not outlast this particular conflict. But it's another reminder why encrypted communications and cryptocurrency—which has proved similarly useful in aiding people oppressed by Russia—are not just the tools for crime that privacy-hating politicians often make them out to be.
The recent trucker protest in Canada offers another case study. The Canadian government seized money raised for the protesters on crowdfunding sites and threatened to invade protesters' bank accounts. Whether or not you agree with the protesters' cause, it should be frightening to see demonstrators subjected to such overreach. "A financial police state is an effective means for officialdom to muzzle opposition without breaking a sweat," J.D. Tuccille wrote last month.
Decentralized, private communications and transactions are vital ways to circumvent crackdowns and protect people's right to chat, trade, get information, support political causes, and provide aid without government interference.
Elon Musk says his Internet service will not block Russian news sources:
Starlink has been told by some governments (not Ukraine) to block Russian news sources. We will not do so unless at gunpoint.
Sorry to be a free speech absolutist.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2022
More on Starlink here.
The curious logic of "Buy American":
We cripple the Russian economy by forcing them to buy Russian yet claim to be strengthening our economy by forcing ourselves to buy American.
— Neoliberal ???????? (@ne0liberal) March 5, 2022
• "Russia announced yet another cease-fire and a handful of humanitarian corridors to allow civilians to flee Ukraine starting Monday, although the evacuation routes were mostly leading to Russia and its ally Belarus, drawing withering criticism from Ukraine and others," reports the Associated Press. "The Ukrainian government instead proposed eight routes that would allow civilians to travel to western regions of Ukraine where there is no Russian shelling."
• Dnipro resident Nikolaus Sires talks with Nancy Rommelmann about life on the ground in Ukraine.
• Why was the Food and Drug Administration so slow to warn of possibly tainted baby formula?
• A U.S. trucker's convoy circled Washington, D.C., this weekend. For whatever reason—small size, poor timing, lack of actual disruption—the protest made little splash.
• Virginia's legislature has passed a measure that will allow banks to provide cryptocurrency custody services.
• The new Violence Against Women Act includes some measures to protect women against violence by government actors. The bill addresses the treatment of women in federal prisons and the sexual assault of people in police custody.
• What happened to Hamilton's Pharmacopeia producer Justin Clark? His "death shook many of his friends, not despite his open use of illicit drugs but because of it: Few people they knew were better equipped to understand the effects of such obscure substances," writes Christopher Robbins at Intelligencer.
• "First Amendment Auditors" target libraries.
The post State News Networks Embrace Encryption as Russian Censorship Worsens appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Imagine a business model where people's outrage is exploited for clicks, where emotions like affection and anger are valuable to tease out, and where, if people seem uninterested, you know you've done your job poorly.
Of course, this describes both Facebook and the news media criticizing it. Journalists, foaming at the mouth from so-called whistleblower Frances Haugen's innocuous revelations, want you to believe that this model is unique to social media sites, gripped by the pursuit of the profit that accompanies expansion. The Washington Post, for example, published a report this week on how Facebook's algorithms classify "angry" react emojis as more valuable than regular old "likes." This pushes "more emotional and provocative content into users' news feeds":
Starting in 2017, Facebook's ranking algorithm treated emoji reactions as five times more valuable than "likes," internal documents reveal. The theory was simple: Posts that prompted lots of reaction emoji tended to keep users more engaged, and keeping users engaged was the key to Facebook's business.
But what the Post and others fail to emphasize is that Facebook algorithms also rank the "love" emoji as more important than the "like" emoji when determining which content other users see. "Love" reacts were used far more commonly than "angry" reacts (11 billion clicks per week vs. 429 million). The algorithm, which assigns each post in a given feed a score, translating to placement in the news feed, was built to value people expressing strong emotions and show that type of content to others.
This completely changes the story! It turns out that the "love" react is ~25x as important as "anger" in deciding news feed content. pic.twitter.com/7ATJD4WNXL
— Byrne Hobart (@ByrneHobart) October 26, 2021
You have to love the irony of the negative framing here, what's not said, is that the love&care emojis also get 5x value.
A deeper data science point is that these are treated as "higher value" because they are rarer, so it is a stronger signal from the user https://t.co/ygGcc4cx6b
— Aishvar (@AishvarR) October 26, 2021
So, pretty similar to how the news media work: Online publications have strong incentives to write headlines and promotional materials that compel readers to click on their piece in a crowded marketplace, to prompt readers to spend as many minutes as possible actively engaged with the content. These basic incentives are at play for Facebook engineers designing algorithms. But the Post and others have treated these revelations as somehow explosive, portraying Zuckerberg as Frankenstein and Facebook as his monster. This narrative—that Facebook deliberately sows division in such a profound way that it ought to be regulated by Congress—is one with plenty of staying power. The media realized that when choosing how to format coverage of Russian interference and the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2016–2018. (Ironically, covering Facebook in such a negative way might drive traffic for some of these news sites.)
Favoring "controversial" posts—including those that make users angry—could open "the door to more spam/abuse/clickbait inadvertently," a staffer, whose name was redacted, wrote in one of the internal documents. A colleague responded, "It's possible."
The warning proved prescient. The company's data scientists confirmed in 2019 that posts that sparked angry reaction emoji were disproportionately likely to include misinformation, toxicity and low-quality news.
But there are lots of items that could feasibly appear in someone's news feed that could cause justified anger: videos portraying police abuse of innocent citizens; government suppression of protest movements like that in Hong Kong; or revelations about data breaches or unlawful snooping by the state. In each of these cases, the strong reactions evoked could've even played a role in the news item going viral.
Haugen told the British Parliament earlier this week that "Facebook has been unwilling to accept even a little sliver of profit being sacrificed for safety," and that "anger and hate is the easiest way to grow on Facebook." She should probably add that that's true for media organizations, too.
The post If You Think Facebook Is Full of Dubious Outrage-Bait, Wait Til You See the Company's Critics appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When you're a kid, you love the comics. A few years later, you read the sports or the style section first. As you age and mature, browsing the "A" section every morning becomes routine, as it becomes more pressing to learn the vital news that orients the world. Soon thereafter, reading favorite columnists on the op-ed page becomes habitual. Then, once you've ripened to a certain age and mortality's horizon draws near, you check the obituaries first. They're the only newspaper stories that wrap up neatly: All obits have a beginning, a middle, and an end.
I found myself pondering the classic progression in newspaper readership after I learned The New York Times would be discontinuing my favorite newspaper feature: the op-ed. Henceforth, opinion pieces submitted by outsiders will be known as "guest essays." I heard of its demise shortly before it became public, because I once researched and published a brief history of the feature, and the Times's editorial page editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, was kind enough to notify me of its demise. Employees at the Times had used my scholarship for historical context as they deliberated the feature's future.
So now the story of op-ed has a beginning, a middle, and an end. But what follows isn't an obituary, because I'd rather celebrate the promise of this idealistic newspaper feature by reconsidering its hopeful origins rather than recount what it actually became. For the op-ed page that's being dropped by the Times after 50 years isn't the op-ed page as originally conceived.
I've always loved, and been fascinated by, the op-ed as a genre. Though I study other aspects of media history, years ago—when I discovered nobody had ever written a history of op-eds—I decided to research its origins as a side project. Over several years I found time to "collect string," as they say in journalism. I made occasional side trips to archives, where I took photos of documents or hastily transcribed old memos, and on the web I would bookmark interviews and relevant digital sources.
The results were published in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly in 2010. My article traced the origins of The New York Times's op-ed page, which was more of an innovation than an invention; it resolved some debates about the feature's origins by crediting John B. Oakes, the legendary Times editorial page editor, who first envisioned the page approximately 15 years before it came into existence in 1970.
Oakes's original plan was not the op-ed page to which we've grown accustomed. It had no house columnists. He proposed four central elements: a daily poem, provocative but thoughtful avant-garde artwork (distinct from traditional editorial cartooning), excerpts from overlooked speeches and legislation, and essays contributed by outsiders. Regular employees of the New York Times Company would be excluded from Oakes's page. This was Oakes's primary innovation, for the old New York World had an op-ed page (called "Op. Ed."), but it was populated by famous house columnists such as Alexander Woollcott, Franklin P. Adams, and Heywood Broun. By curating space reserved only for outsiders, and cultivating new modes of communication and composition unavailable elsewhere in the Times, the newspaper's corporate distance from the op-ed page would be obvious—and reconfirmed daily.
I think Oakes's original plan was far better than what the page actually became. But Oakes was forced to compromise his vision, and to accept the imposition of columnist Anthony Lewis, as the price for seeing it born. Lewis's presence occurred at the insistence of publisher Arthur Ochs ("Punch") Sulzberger—Oakes's cousin.
The Times's op-ed page was the product of cacophonous times. Born on September 21, 1970, it attempted to render the bitter divisions of the 1960s in text and image on newsprint. It emerged during an era of remarkable innovation and experimentation in U.S. media. For American journalism, this period included new modes of media criticism, a maturation of broadcast journalism that made TV news more diversified in both outlook and personnel, and the flourishing of youth-oriented "alternative" newspapers that had begun evolving into serious investigative vehicles with first-rate reportage.
Even during this vibrant and transitional era, the Times op-ed page stood out for its distinctive contributions. This can be largely credited to the two people most responsible for shaping it: Oakes and Harrison Salisbury, a decorated foreign correspondent who became a widely esteemed editor. Despite some shared stodginess, the two men energetically embraced the op-ed ideal with creative fervor. Reading their archived correspondence provides fascinating insights into how editors create a new team, originate ideas, and foster a new arena of public discourse intended to facilitate debate.
They both considered what types of essays, and what sorts of subjects, might prove most attractive to readers—and which ones might drive them away. They agreed that allowing the page to become too pedantic or scholarly would be a mistake. Oakes, especially, remained wary of professors. His attitude was pithily summed up in notes for a speech I found in his papers. "Ivory tower," he wrote, "equals ivory head."
My favorite notes and memos came from the Salisbury papers held at Columbia University. One in particular haunted me but never actually made it into the article. It was sent by John Van Doorn, an editor assigned to the page in its developmental era, to Salisbury in October, 1971. Here it is in its entirety:
Since you mentioned it I have thought a lot about finding a young, black female to work here, but I don't know any and am a little unclear about where to look.
However, one has come in the door.
She is:
She would fit right in and, I think, make a valuable addition. It seems to me that she could provide us with names and so forth, but even if she couldn't, her ideas and insights would be really helpful.
I'm not sure she'd want to work here. She wants her life to have some meaning; she wants to feel that she is sending the movement forward. But I think we should give it a try. Will you talk to her?
Her name is Afeni Shakur.
Yes: Tupac Shakur's "Dear Mama" came tantalizingly close to working for the New York Times op-ed page. But I couldn't locate any additional materials to corroborate what followed this remarkable encounter, so it remained in the realm of what could have been.
Van Doorn's memo (and similar ones) signaled the original op-ed team's interest in diversity. Other materials illustrated the ways the editors thought broadly and creatively across ideological lines. One hand-written, undated note in Salisbury's papers listed some of his ideas. They included:
Theodore Roszak… "the counter culture of youth."
Andrew Hacker… "Come, Come is U.S. Really Going to Hell in a Handbasket?"
Vladimir Nabokov: "What does America look like to a novelist from afar?"
Gus Hall (CPUSA): "What are the US Communist priorities these days?"
Miss Angela Davis… "Is Black nationalism a viable perspective?"
Robert Welch: "The John Birchers are Flourishing, Yes?"
Robert Penn Warren—on the South of Geo. Wallace.
In a note to Herbert Mitgang, another key editor in the feature's launch, Salisbury suggested Mitgang solicit an essay from the esteemed naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison "on Columbus as the first Astronaut." "This would be comparing the negative reaction and the lack of support which was Columbus's fate after returning from his great adventure with what has happened to our space program after it has achieved its great success," he wrote.
Mitgang's correspondence, held by the New York Public Library, is filled with similar wonderful exchanges. Mitgang wrote to several famous figures requesting op-eds before the page began, which caused some confusion among the game if uncertain essayists. "I think I'd be very glad to do such a piece for you," the novelist Walker Percy wrote Mitgang. "I need only to know what an op-Ed [sic] page piece is, or better still, to have a couple of tear-page examples of the same." Mitgang responded by precisely defining the new genre of essay: "These essays run 700 words, for which payment is $150, and appear opposite the editorial page of the Times. The most successful pieces have been highly individualistic, opinionated, and pungent. You will not get arrested if the piece is also witty." Percy encountered problems fitting the essay's tight constraints. "I wonder if there is some way that you could strengthen it for our peculiar opinion format," Mitgang responded upon seeing a draft. "I think it is a bit too gentle for most readers, who might miss your subtleties while hanging onto a subway strap." Percy didn't appreciate the editing. "I can't understand what you're telling me… In any case it might be better to forget the whole thing," he responded.
Walker Percy was not alone in having difficulties grasping the new mode of essay. An exchange with Noam Chomsky didn't end well when Mitgang suggested cuts, additional paraphrasing, and summarizing, while also asking for a "more pointed conclusion about what the scientific community can do about the 'new mandarins' in American society." "I am afraid that I will have to abandon the project, reluctantly," Chomsky responded. "For some reason, I find it enormously more difficult to write 700 words than 7000—a typical professorial defect, I suppose."
Despite such difficulties, most of the archival materials revealed a palpable joy in the daily labor of these editors. Their memos radiated energy and vitality, as evidenced not only in the creativity of their ideas but even in their jargon. Charlotte Curtis, another important early editor, suggested the page solicit an essay from Susan Sontag. Sontag, Curtis wrote, was a philosopher "who may or may not be able to tell us where it's at in a way we can understand." Hiring philosophers and feminists, revolutionaries and reactionaries, radicals and conservatives, to "tell us where it's at" seemed like a very fun job to me as I read through these missives.
The Times editors could be admirably candid. On the page's first anniversary, Salisbury and Oakes asked the team for evaluations. One shared critique would never be remedied in the long history of the feature, and it would remain perhaps its biggest flaw. "My single biggest complaint is our propensity towards 'names,'" wrote one editor. "I do understand the need for establishment opinion, but we do have too much of it. It is usually of very poor quality. Considering the large number of excellent articles that sit around for months, it is a shame that we run so much junk by the famous." John Van Doorn seconded that criticism. "I would like to insist upon excellence from all comers as the standard for getting on the Op-ed Page," he wrote. "I think it is hard and embarrassing to give unknowns a lot of big-time editor talk on sharpening up their material, and then to turn around and run, with absolute straight faces, such inept material as U Thant provides, or the Rostows, or Goldberg, and all the others that we suffer with. I think we should forget about names as names—and pursue good writing."
Unfortunately, the Times's op-ed page never did abandon "junk by the famous." But over the last decade, much of its original and experimental spirit of exchange and debate has sadly eroded. In its first two decades, the op-ed page fearlessly printed essays that were unquestionably offensive, dehumanizing, and even occasionally vile. Oakes and Salisbury, and the editors that followed, all took it for granted that publication did not equate endorsement and that the Times's readership would be cognizant that some opinions were published in the spirit of inquiry, exposure, or confrontation rather than agreement. When the page published a posthumous call for armed insurrection throughout the United States by Black Panther Fred Hampton, or when the page published a column supporting Pol Pot's murderous regime in Cambodia, I doubt most readers believed that Times management endorsed such opinions. More recently, when the Times published an op-ed by Russian President Vladimir Putin directly contradicting its own reporting from Syria, I doubt readers concluded that the newspaper now valued the Russian dictator's opinions over its own on-the-scene reportage. Putin's column was simply more "junk by the famous."
The great transformation that has seemingly doomed the old op-ed page sensibility centers upon the growing idea that no responsible organ of opinion might ever publish an idea, perspective, or proposal that it might find morally repugnant, offensive, or dangerous. Kingsbury's announcement specifies that the new version of the opinion page would henceforth carefully vet future "guest essays" with an eye toward "progress, fairness and shared humanity." Publishing offensive commentary these days is not simply seen as inflammatory in the old sense; many people consider it intentionally malicious, if not felonious. Any denial to the contrary—any defense of the old-fashioned marketplace of ideas, or calls for widening diversity of opinion—is widely viewed as little more than disingenuous subterfuge. After all, if Sen. Tom Cotton's vile prescription for violently subduing protests can be published immediately adjacent to columns by full-time Times employees such as Maureen Dowd, Thomas Friedman, or Bret Stephens, how can any arms-length distance be plausibly asserted? For many Times readers (and even employees), the page looks like a unified platform or singularly powerful megaphone, and therefore anyone given access must be pre-approved and judged endorsement-worthy. Kingsbury's announced standard only reinforces this assumption.
And that's how one of the very first management decisions ultimately doomed the feature. It's a case of finis origine pendet: The end of the Times op-ed depended upon its beginning. If the Times itself failed to consistently make explicit that outside voices did not represent the Times in any way, then how could readers be expected to maintain this separation? Had the page been solely outsiders from its inception, if the feature's imperative to encourage interchange and incite debate been more consistently stated, then it might have stood a chance to survive the constrictions of our contemporary media universe. But we'll never know. Because The New York Times didn't do that, nor did it fire all its columnists to try out Oakes's original vision. It killed the op-ed instead.
The demise of the original impulse that animated the Times op-ed page, sadly, is not simply about a newspaper feature disappearing. This isn't Marmaduke or Mark Trail being dropped from the comics page. It says something telling about our society, culture, and politics. Democracy is premised on the interplay of ideas in a common venue of disputation, where a citizenry might be exposed to a diversity of perspectives—some even unpleasant or distasteful—in order to become more educated and informed. I'm reminded of the haunting words John Oakes said in a speech at Princeton, words that perfectly encapsulate his motive for launching the op-ed page. "Diversity of opinion is the lifeblood of democracy," he said. "The minute we begin to insist that everyone think the same way we think, our democratic way of life is in danger."
The post Elegy for Op-Ed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Economists have long warned that a great deal of regulation that is supposedly in the public interest acts in practice as a transfer of wealth from one private interest to another. Policy makers are usually demure enough to hide this. It is rare that rent-seeking is as explicit and open as the Australian government's current attempt to expropriate money from Facebook and Google—money that will be directly paid to the traditional news outlets that these tech companies have disrupted.
This is much more than just a regional policy fight; what is happening in Australia tells us a lot about how the changing economics of media are feeding the bipartisan war on the tech industry in the United States and globally. Much of what is dressed up as populist anti-tech policy is in fact an attempt by legacy media companies to weaponize confused regulators against their competitors.
The Australian government wants Facebook and Google to sign onto what they call a "News Media Bargaining Code," which will require tech companies to pay news organizations when news content is "included" on the digital platforms. The exact price to be paid is meant to be negotiated by media companies and digital platforms. The rationale offered by Australian antitrust regulators is that there is a "bargaining power imbalance" between tech and media companies, hence the need for government action to get negotiations started.
You may be tempted to read that paragraph again. Don't bother. The government's argument is euphemistic and its reasoning is obscure. The most obvious problem is that neither Facebook nor Google "include" news content on their platform. The dispute is not about intellectual property theft; all tech companies are doing is linking to news sites. Facebook allows users to share links. Google offers links through its general search function as well as its Google News search service. The upshot is that the Australian government wants Facebook and Google to pay news organizations for the privilege of linking to their content.
Unsurprisingly, Facebook has said if it is forced to pay it will simply block Australians from sharing news links. Google might also shut down its Google News service—that's what happened when a similar policy was introduced in Spain in 2014.
Much like the U.S., the Australian media sector is in economic freefall. And like the U.S., both Australian progressives and conservatives have been regarding tech companies with increasing skepticism. We usually think of anti-tech skepticism as ideological—conservatives are at odds with socially liberal Silicon Valley types while progressives look at Silicon Valley as the new robber barons. But in Australia, it is strikingly obvious how the economic collapse of traditional media causes anti-tech sentiment.
Throughout the 20th century, the newspaper business model was simple: Newspapers sought to match readers with advertisers. Advertising paid for journalism, which attracted readers, which then attracted more advertising, and so on. The more readers the better. So newspapers tried to appeal to the median reader.
The history of the media in the last two decades is the slowly unfolding consequences of advertising migrating from the print media to the internet. This creative destruction not only undermined business models that paid for mass-market journalism, but reshaped how public debate is conducted. The growth in media partisanship in recent years could be because media outlets no longer try to appeal to the median reader—they try to engage a passionate few who will stump up a subscription fee. That is, media partisanship has economic causes.
The other consequence is political backlash against the big tech companies.
For generations, the art of politics involved serenading the local press, getting an audience with the regional media mogul, or building a relationship with a sympathetic journalist who could be relied on to get a political message out.
Now those friendly moguls and journalists are on the backfoot, shocked by the extraordinary growth of the digital platforms that seem to have ripped both the economic high ground from under them. And the political class is starting to respond to the new media normal the best way they know how: with threats of regulation.
It is easy to laugh at the odd populist attempts to tame digital platforms, such as Sen. Josh Hawley's (R–Mo.) 2019 proposal to ban autoplay videos and infinite scrolling. But the Australian experience shows that the greater threat to digital platforms comes from antitrust regulators, dressed up in bizarre claims about "bargaining power imbalances."
Antitrust policy in the 21st century is particularly vulnerable to this sort of strange thinking. Antitrust was conceived in a world of monolithic corporate hierarchies—factories that built physical things and distributed those things using physical infrastructure like rails and ports. Digital platforms are hard to understand through the traditional antitrust lens.
The more users a digital platform has—the more it dominates a market segment—the more valuable that platform is to those users. We want to use the social media network that everyone else is using. And to get more users, platforms often provide access to one side of the market for free. For regulators used to hunting for predatory pricing, this just looks weird. At the same time these digital markets are highly dynamic; firms tend to dominate them, but not for long. This too leaves regulators in a bind. They've spent more than a century warning of the dangers of monopolies, but now they're struggling to identify the actual harm these digital platform "monopolies" are causing.
Australian regulators are confused as to what to do and have proposed everything from regulating Facebook and Google's algorithms, to enacting new privacy laws, to giving more money to public broadcasters.
It's clear that U.S. regulators are confused too. In early September, The New York Times reported that while the Department of Justice plans to imminently bring an antitrust case against Google's parent company, Alphabet, there is much internal disagreement about what the grounds of the government complaint should be.
As the Australian experience shows, this combination of confused regulators and aggrieved, politically connected industries is a dangerous thing.
The post Australia's Confused Tech Regulators Are Cracking Down on Google for Using Links appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>What if disinformation, defamation, and deep fakes aren't the central problem of "fake news," either on the internet or in other media? What if they're actually part of the solution?
These questions get raised in an early chapter of Neal Stephenson's new novel, Fall, or Dodge in Hell, and the author's answers are eerily persuasive. They're also a weird echo of creative thinking pioneered by the cypherpunks more than 20 years ago—a group that Stephenson, then working on his encryption-centric opus Cryptonomicon, frequently hung out with and consulted. (Cypherpunk creativity, which nowadays deserves credit for things like cryptocurrency, is a gift that keeps on giving.)
I confess I haven't yet finished Stephenson's latest 800-plus-page tome, which so far might be characterized, although not necessarily captured, by the term "near-future dystopia." But when I came across Stephenson's depiction of how automated disinformation could actually remedy the damage that internet-based "doxxing" and fake news inflict on an innocent private individual, I paused my reading and jumped down the rabbit hole of tracing this idea to its 1990s roots.
What caught me was a passage about the character Maeve, an Australian who becomes involved with Corvallis, a cloud-computing engineer who's quasi-famous. When both appear in video news coverage of a presidential speech, they become obsessional objects of internet gossip, which Stephenson refers to with some justice as "Crazytown": "For he had been identified by name, on national television, by the president of the United States, and had been a reasonably well-known person to begin with. And she had been standing next to him."
The result, per Stephenson, is predictable:
"Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation. Toward power it felt some combination of fear and admiration, and Corvallis was powerful. Toward vulnerability it was drawn, in the same way that predators would converge on the isolated and straggling. Within a week, Maeve—who suffered from the fatal combination of being mysterious, vulnerable, and female—had been doxxed."
All that could have happened yesterday, or anytime in the last decade. But then Corvallis's friend Pluto shows up, joins Corvallis and Maeve on a private jet flight to Australia, and offers Maeve a solution:
"It came to my attention that you were being abused on the Internet," Pluto said, "and so I am here to destroy it."
"Destroy what?" Corvallis inquired.
"The Internet," Pluto said. "Or what Dodge referred to as the Miasma. Does your jet have Wi-Fi?"
"Yes, but it doesn't work over the Pacific Ocean."
Pluto sighed. "Then it will have to wait until we have reached Australia."
"I didn't like your friend at first," Maeve said, "but I'm warming up to him."
"That is convenient, Maeve, if I may take the liberty of addressing the lady by her Christian name, because I will require your permission. Your complicity in utterly destroying your reputation."
"It's already destroyed, haven't you seen a bloody thing?"
"It is not sufficiently destroyed yet," Pluto said. He glanced at the screen of his laptop.
"The total number of unique slanderous and defamatory statements that have been made about you, on all of the blogs, boards, and social media networks being tracked by my bots, currently stands at a little more than seventy-three thousand."
Pluto's solution is to release a troop of bots designed to defame a person randomly.
"This kind of thing has to be gone about in a systematic way, so that nothing is missed," he said, now staring out the window at a fuel truck. "Partly through direct study of dictionaries, thesauri, and so on, and partly through brute-forcing archives of defamatory Miasma postings, I have compiled what I think is a pretty comprehensive ontology of execration. A mere lexicon doesn't get us anywhere because it's language-specific. Both in the sense of relating to only one language, such as English, and in the sense that it only covers defamation in a textual format. But many defamatory posts are now made in the form of images or videos. For example, if you want to call someone a slut—"
"We don't need to go there right now," Corvallis said.
"'Slut,' 'bitch,' 'hag,' 'fatty,' all the bases need to be covered [but if] it's all skewed toward, say, 'feminazi,' then the impression will be created in the minds of many casual users that the subject is indeed a feminazi. But if an equal amount of traffic denounces the subject as a slut, a bitch, a whore, an attention seeker, a gold digger, an idiot […] then even the most credulous user will be inoculated with so many differing, and in many cases contradictory, characterizations as to raise doubts in their mind as to the veracity of any one characterization, and hence the reliability of the Miasma as a whole."
Later, Pluto explains how Maeve would take advantage of the disinformation efforts:
"It's an open campaign. We would announce it. Publish statistics on how it's going. You could do press interviews, if you wanted. The sheer magnitude of it would make it obvious, even to the most credulous user of the Miasma, that it was all a bunch of nonsense. Afterward, no one in their right mind would ever believe anything negative about you that had ever been posted on the Miasma. But because it is all technically slanderous, you would have to promise not to sue me."
Maeve asks him how this particular campaign would "destroy the Internet," and Pluto explains that he's going to "open-source all the tools" and combine them with "an easy-to-use graphical interface."
This whole chapter rang many bells for me, not least because it paralleled a discussion I had with a law professor at a conference last year when I pitched the idea of a "libel service." Basically, you'd hire a "libel service" to randomly defame you on the internet, so that whenever anyone says something bad about you on Twitter or Facebook, or in the comments area of some newspaper, you could just say "that's probably my libel service." No one would know whether the defamatory statements were true or not, and people would be predisposed to doubt anything too terrible that's said about you.
The professor was skeptical—why would anyone actively seek to be defamed?—but I said, wait, the cypherpunks were talking about this idea 25 years ago, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't work. I'd first heard the notion explained by Eric Hughes—a mathematician and programmer who, along with John Gilmore and Tim May, was a founding member of the cypherpunks movement—at some conference or other back in the mid-1990s. Hughes's idea, as he spelled it out back then, was remarkably like Pluto's exposition in Stephenson's novel, except that Stephenson, of course, turned the idea's volume up to 11.
Did Stephenson get the idea from Hughes? I hadn't spoken to Hughes in at least ten years, but I'm in contact with Stephenson from time to time—I've reviewed him and interviewed him for Reason—so I sent him a query about it. At the same time, I asked around to see if anyone I know had contact information for Hughes; it turns out he's now in Salt Lake City, the principal of a contract-programming company. Hughes got back to me first.
I asked him if he remembered the conversation we had in the early 1990s about the libel service. Was it his idea?
"It could have been mine," Hughes told me. "I know I talked about it to different people, but the idea of a disinformation service to protect people from damaged reputations was in the air. It's possible I came up with it and then Neal heard it from someone who heard it from me."
Stephenson got back to me next, and I asked him if he'd gotten his character's deliberate-defamation scheme from Hughes. "It's linked in my mind with Matt [Blaze] and Encyclopedia Disinformatica," Stephenson said, "but now that you mention it, I do remember Eric talking about similar ideas around the same time."
I know Matt Blaze, but I didn't remember Encyclopedia Disinformatica, so I had to query him about that idea and its connection to Stephenson's novel. (It bears mentioning that, like me, neither Hughes nor Blaze has finished the novel, but both recognized the cypherpunk roots of Pluto's disinformation scheme.)
The theoretical encyclopedia in question is one that, as Blaze describes it, would have lots of true information in it but also plenty of false information in it, too. Its function would be to demonstrate that even content that sometimes appears to be mostly true needs to be questioned and independently verified. Blaze's idea was that this would be a kind of perverse media-education project, one that (one hopes) would seed some skepticism about what we encounter on the internet and elsewhere. But it's not quite the same as the project that appears in Stephenson's novel.
In tracing this idea back to its roots, I realized there was an early recognition, at least among people who were thinking about the implications of a wide-open internet, that disinformation—sometimes computer-assisted or computer-enhanced—was going to be a problem we'd need to think about before it became, well, a problem.
But Stephenson's new book adds another takeaway: In the novel, Pluto's automated-defamation scheme does actually work for some high percentage of the population, who learn to think more critically about stuff they came across on the internet and elsewhere in our media culture. (In the near future, they hire their own editors to cull the digital information overload for them.) But there's also an irreducible fraction of people who continue to cherry-pick narratives, whether true or false, solely on the criterion of whether the narratives confirm their cherished beliefs. They won't be newly sophisticated media skeptics or discriminating news consumers—instead they'll commit to the path of confirmation bias, which Cato's Julian Sanchez described a few years back as "epistemic closure." (And, yes, these people will hire their own editors too, picked to serve up content that confirms their biases rather than challenging them.)
In the novel, we see a far more fragmented United States, in which different populations use their digital tools and networked devices to protect themselves from other American subcultures. It will be weird and dangerous, and even successful cypherpunk hacks like Pluto's defamation scheme ultimately will be only stopgap measures. The problem isn't disinformation, defamation, or deep fakes—it's self-deception, a deep-rooted and likely ineradicable human vice. All this sounds like a near-future dystopia, all right, but right now I'm only at page 200. I've got to drive on to page 883 to find out if that's a fair assessment after all.
The post What If Widespread Disinformation Is the Solution to Fake News? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chancelor Bennett, known by his stage name, Chance the Rapper, recently announced that he is the proud new owner of Chicagoist. The purchase was announced in "I Need Security," one of four new songs that he released late Wednesday evening.
4 new songs at https://t.co/m5rYnxzNGY pic.twitter.com/yLWFHnRTy8
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) July 19, 2018
Chicagoist was part of the local news empire that started with New York City's Gothamist, founded in 2003. The group of sites was purchased by billionaire Joe Ricketts in 2017, who shuttered the suite later the same year after employees voted to unionize. The closure affected 115 journalists, including those who worked for Chicagoist, DCist, LAist, and similar city publications. Three of the publications affected—Gothamist, DCist, and LAist—were relaunched in February by New York public radio station WNYC.
According to Gothamist, Chance's Social Media LLC purchased the Chicagoist website from WNYC.
"I'm extremely excited to be continuing the work of the Chicagoist, an integral local platform for Chicago news, events and entertainment. WNYC's commitment to finding homes for the -ist brands, including Chicagoist, was an essential part of continuing the legacy and integrity of the site. I look forward to re-launching it and bringing the people of Chicago an independent media outlet focused on amplifying diverse voices and content," he reportedly said in a statement. Or as he rapped in song form, "I bought the Chicagoist just to run you racist bitches out of business."
It would appear that Chance is already getting into the investigative spirit with a set of lyrics directed to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel:
And Rahm you done I'm expectin' resignation
An open investigation on all of these paid vacations for murderers
(As Genius notes, Chance's anger is motivated by Emanuel's 2017 proposal to spend $95 million on a police and firefighter training center in response to a Justice Department investigation that concluded excessive force was disproportionately used against black residents. In November, Emanuel walked out of Chance's speech to city council when the rapper suggested that the city should put the resources into public schools and mental health programs.)
The move is in sharp contrast to a news experiment currently being explored by the state of New Jersey. As Reason's Joe Setyon previously reported, New Jersey has put aside $5 million to subsidize local news in response to a "growing crisis" in local coverage. If the concerns associated with such a move being carried out by one of the most corrupt states were not obvious, Politico's Jack Shafer explains:
Even if the consortium stays clean, won't it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they're too compromised to lead.
Chance's venture into local media is consistent with his recent embrace of political activism. He met with Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner (R) in 2017 to talk about Chicago public schools and later reported disappointment with the governor's vague answers. Just a few months ago, he tweeted that black Americans were not required to vote for Democrats.
The post Chance the Rapper Buys <em>Chicagoist</em>, Promises to Investigate Rahm Emanuel appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The State of New Jersey is about to spend $5 million to tackle a "growing crisis" in local media coverage. More specifically, it is about to spend $5 million subsidizing the press.
The legislation in question creates a nonprofit group, the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium, charged with approving grant applications for local news. The bill has passed both houses of the state legislature; Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, has not yet signed it, but on Sunday he did sign a state budget that sets aside the money.
The liberal Free Press Action Fund has been pushing for such legislation for years. The group initially asked for a much larger endowment of $100 million, but it still greeted the news with pleasure. "Never before has a state taken the lead to address the growing crisis in local news," State Director Mike Rispoli said in a statement, calling New Jersey "a model for the rest of the nation."
Rispoli's group fears that because New Jersey stands between two major cities, Philadelphia and New York, there's less focus on local news in the state. The organization argues that recent layoffs and consolidation in the news industry have made this situation worse. And it is pleased that the legislation "emphasizes the importance of fulfilling the information needs of communities of color. Mainstream media outlets have long underserved people of color, who have also been misrepresented in news coverage of their communities."
But is state-funded local news coverage really the answer? New Jersey is among the nation's most corrupt states, so there's a lot for journalists to investigate. But as Politico's Jack Shafer points out, it's hard to believe a state-funded journalism initiative will actually do that:
Even if the consortium stays clean, won't it avoid politically charged stories of great watchdogging potential because it will fear to bite the hand that feeds it? Government-funded news outfits like NPR and PBS, ever fearful of offending their funding sources, avoid hard-hitting government news for this reason. Public media may follow the news pack on a story about government corruption, but generally, they're too compromised to lead.
Local news is important—too important to be left to state media.
The post New Jersey's Experiment in State-Funded News appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In honor of the Bill Murray classic Groundhog Day, Reason releases this horrifyingly relevant parody about a cycle that never stops.
Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton. Featuring Austin Bragg and Andrew Heaton. Produced by Austin Bragg and Meredith Bragg. Edited by Austin Bragg.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Like us on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
The post <em>Groundhog Day</em>: 2018 appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Ever since the 2016 presidential election, the problem of "fake news" has dominated the national political conversation. Both Republicans and Democrats have railed against what they see as an epidemic of made-up or factually inaccurate stories and the influence they believe those stories have when it comes to swaying public opinion.
Educators, fact checking sites, and even government officials are taking action to fight back against fake news, which some see as threatening democracy. Now, California lawmakers have introduced legislation to require media literacy courses to be taught at the state's middle and high schools, according to the Associated Press.
Some 64 percent of Americans believe that fake news stories are causing a notable amount of confusion, according to Pew Research Center. However, a majority of Americans are somewhat (45 percent) or very (39 percent) confident in their own ability to identify fake news.
Young people often struggle with recognizing non-credible news, a group of Stanford researchers found. They tested middle school, high school, and college-level students on their news literacy skills through a series of tasks. "More than 80% of students believed that the native advertisement, identified by the words 'sponsored content,' was a real news story," the Stanford History Education Group study, which was conducted in early 2016, claims. "Some students even mentioned that it was sponsored content but still believed that it was a news article."
Social media has been blamed for the spread of fake news by many observers. And indeed, Pew Research Center has found that 62 percent of Americans get news on social media, and nearly one in three Americans say they see fake news often online. Of course, as Reason's Jesse Walker has pointed out, the internet also makes it far easier to debunk myths and fact check dubious claims.
For more on the truth about fake news, check out this piece from the March issue by the University of Miami political scientist Joseph E. Uscinski.
The post California Schools May Try to Tackle Fake News appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A mother is puttering in the kitchen, waiting for her daughter to come home from school. We see the clock on the wall. We see her expression grow from cheer to terror. And somewhere in the streets below, we see a man buy a little girl a balloon.
If your pulse is racing already, thank Fritz Lang, director of M, the 1931 picture that taught filmmakers everywhere to hook audiences with the primal emotion of heart-stopping fear for our kids.
The latest iteration of this formula is Kidnap, wherein loving, gorgeous Halle Berry takes her loving, gorgeous son to the park, where they decide to play hide-and-seek. "Marco!" calls the beatific mother. "Polo!" replies her cherub, peeking around a post. "Marco!" calls Berry. "Polo," comes the child's reply. "Marco!…Marco?…MARCO!"
"The majority of child abduction movies suggest that a child can disappear if you look away for a moment," says Pat Gill, professor emeritus of communications at the University of Illinois. It's a lesson audiences have so taken to heart that I once heard from a mom who'd been reading a book on her lawn while her children frolicked around her. A woman passing by screamed, "Put down that book! Don't you realize your kids could be snatched at any moment?"
That is society's mantra, repeated by cops and child protection officials as they arrest parents for letting their kids wait briefly in the car. And a small handful of movies may be responsible for it.
There's Adam and Adam: His Song Continues, two films about real-life abducted child Adam Walsh. There's Taken, the first of the franchise starring Liam Neeson. And there's Room, the bleak independent picture about a kidnapped teen who has a child by her abductor and then raises that child in captivity.
But M is the picture that started it all. After bad guy Peter Lorre murders the girl he bought the balloon for—all off camera, so viewers can imagine the worst—the city rises up to hunt him down.
He nonetheless manages to befriend another child on the street. But just as he's leading the happy little girl off to buy candy and a toy, her mother appears. Though the child normally walks home by herself, today mom decided to meet her halfway. Hallelujah!
And that, in fact, is the moral of the story: Unless you want your children to get murdered, you simply cannot let them be outside on their own. Lang himself said he made the movie "to warn mothers about neglecting children."
"It almost feels like those hygiene films that warned you to brush your teeth," says Robert Thompson, a professor of pop culture at Syracuse University. "That's what I think Adam did as well."
Adam is the made-for-TV picture that came out two years after the 6-year-old's abduction from a Florida department store in 1981. Even more than M (which was, after all, German), it's the movie that branded stranger danger onto the collective American brain.
Until then, says Gill, the majority of child abduction movies were either police procedurals or family melodramas. "In some way, the child is an abstraction—the 'time-is-ticking-away' prompt. You often don't see the child at all, or if you do, it's got some gangster's moll taking care of the kid. He's not tied up or anything."
But Adam changed all that. "There was a Greek-tragedy quality to it," Thompson says, "because by the time that movie came out, we all knew how it ended." (The child was beheaded.)
The two-part mini-series broke all records, and the media world began ordering more kiddie kidnappings, on the double. It also introduced the five little words that would change TV forever: "based on a true story."
Tales ripped from the headlines are pre-sold to the public, which is a great business model. ("The news cycle does the marketing for free," Thompson explains.) That's why we've gotten flicks about everyone from teenage abductee Elizabeth Smart to toddler murder victim JonBenét Ramsey to Amber Hagerman, for whom the Amber Alerts are named. Not to mention all those Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episodes that swirl together true crime and Hollywood horror.
In the 1986 sequel Adam: His Song Continues, we witness the birth of the modern-day abduction-obsessed nation, as Adam's dad crisscrosses the country, testifying about all the children being kidnapped and killed. He even visits a dairy and convinces the owner to put missing kids' pictures on milk cartons. The film doesn't mention that the vast majority of such children are taken in custodial disputes or simply run away.
In the movie's opening scene, a kid on a bike throws a newspaper onto the Walshes' porch. It's meant to be prosaic. But in another decade or two, there will be very few newspaper boys left—not because they've been kidnapped, but because of the fear sown by this film.
In 2008 we got Taken, the megahit in which Neeson is convinced by his pushy ex-wife to let their 17-year-old daughter and her slutty friend travel to Paris without supervision. The girls land and immediately meet a cute but skeevy guy who asks to share their taxi. Moments after he drops them off, he and his gang of sex traffickers show up to nab them.
Neeson's daughter sees the men grab her friend in the next room and dials daddy—a Special Ops type—for advice. Matter-of-factly he tells her, "You will be taken."
So will you, dear viewer, on what is basically an excuse for vigilante sadism as Neeson hightails it to Paris. Without a hint of jetlag, he takes on an international team of traffickers, allowing the audience to enjoy all sorts of cruelty—think bad guys getting electrocuted—while feeling morally superior, since it's being done in the name of stopping something evil. It's virtue signaling, with popcorn.
And it gave parents something else to be terrified of. A mom at a PTA meeting once solemnly informed me that there are more girls sex trafficked in America today than there were slaves before the Civil War.
Sex trafficking happens. But in reality, not all human trafficking involves sex and not all sex work involves coercion. When a woman billed as a "sex trafficking victim" took the podium at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, she turned out to have been forced into unpaid housework, not prostitution. But there is no Liam Neeson franchise about maids.
Room, by comparison, is a Serious Film. We know this because the lead actress, Brie Larson, won an Academy Award for playing the mom who raises a son within the confines of a backyard shed. Her fictional character was taken at age 17 when she was kind enough to help a man who said he'd lost his dog.
In all these pictures, a mom is overtly or subtly at fault: The mother in M, who didn't escort her child home from school. The mother in Adam, who didn't keep her son by her side at Sears. And the mother in Taken, who sends her daughter to Europe unchaperoned. Even the one movie that shows us the world's greatest mom, Room, depicts Larson yelling at her own mother because maybe if she'd taught her to be a little less nice to strangers, she wouldn't have been snatched.
The movie industry has realized what newspaper editors, cable TV producers, and grandstanding politicians already know: There's no business like woe business, and most woeful of all are stories about missing children whose mothers could have saved them.
M concludes with a lesson: "One has to keep closer watch over the children." But how much closer can we watch?
The post 4 Movies That Gave America Its Stranger Danger Panic appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In 1644, the English poet John Milton made an eloquent case against censorship. Freedom of thought and inquiry was not only a God-given prerogative but also the best protection against error: "Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?"
Milton was fortunate enough to live before the internet. It has shown that among many people, truth doesn't have a chance in an encounter with manufactured falsehoods aimed at not only smearing enemies but obliterating the idea of objective reality.
There is now a bustling industry of websites and Twitter accounts whose chief product is fiction masquerading as fact. Their success was both cause and effect of the rise of Donald Trump, who went beyond any previous major presidential candidate in saying things that were utterly baseless and easily refutable.
He didn't have to wait to reach the White House to fulfill his promise to create new jobs. His campaign generated a new demand for fact-checkers, who found that trying to expose his lies was like trying to stay dry in a hurricane. The torrent was too big, fierce and persistent to overcome.
Trump peddled bogus information and profited from that spread by others. Of the 20 most read phony election-related stories circulated on Facebook during the campaign, 17 made him look good or Hillary Clinton look bad. The top two: the pope's endorsement of Trump and Clinton's selling arms to the Islamic State, neither of which contained a particle of truth.
Trump voters are not the only ones with a penchant for believing things purely because they are convenient. The website Vox reported that most of Bernie Sanders' followers want universal health care and free public college tuition but aren't willing to pay anything close to what they would cost in higher taxes. Most Americans can't name their member of Congress or the three branches of government.
It's no accident that so many Americans choose to be uninformed or misinformed. Educating yourself about candidates and their platforms by getting reliable information has little payoff. Your vote, wise or foolish, rarely makes a difference in the policies that affect you.
Being wrong about candidates generally costs you nothing, unlike being deluded about more practical matters. If you think you can fly, you will get a painful lesson when you leap off your roof. But if you believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim—as more than half of Republican primary voters did—you suffer no injury from indulging that fantasy.
In fact, you gain something: a powerful sense of connection with others who share your outlook. For most people who have great interest in politics, argued George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan in his 2007 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, ideology is a form of religion, and its disciples act more on faith than on evidence.
"Human beings want their religion's answers to be true," he wrote, and stick to them in the face of contradictory information. We have little reason to behave differently on Election Day. "Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can't change the outcome?" asked Caplan.
Conventional politicians shade and embellish the truth, but within established bounds. They have enough respect for voters to ration their deceptions.
What made Trump different was his conviction that most people are happy to be fed nonsense as long as it is palatable. He lied without reservation or limit, about topics big and small, and he got away with it. Among his followers, some believed he was telling the truth and some didn't care.
"Fake news" sources exploit the same cynical strategy, confident that many readers will seek out anything that confirms their prejudices and reject anything that doesn't. The news media have discovered that while there is a demand for accurate information, there is also a market, possibly bigger, for malignant myths. No lie is too big or absurd to find a gullible audience.
Not only that, fake news sites have a competitive advantage. Honest press outlets often present information their readers find unwelcome. Dishonest ones offer their customers the promise that their illusions will be preserved no matter what.
Our system of government rests on the assumption that in the long run, the truth will prevail over falsehoods. We have yet to consider what to do if our faith in the truth turns out to be false.
© Copyright 2016 by Creators Syndicate Inc.
The post The Triumph of Falsehood appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Network TV continued to take a beating in 2015, but audiences were up for cable news programs, online content, and podcasts, according to a new report on media trends from the Pew Research Center. Some of last year's biggest media winners included CNN, which saw a 38 percent increase in prime-time viewers last year, and The Nation magazine, which saw a 68 percent increase in newstand sales. And some of last year's biggest losers? The Today Show, National Review and Wired magazines, news magazine programs such as 60 Minutes and Dateline, and the newspaper industry as a whole.
Last year was "the worst year for newspapers" since 2009-2010, according to Pew, with daily circulation falling an average of 7 percent, employment down 10 percent, and advertising revenue down 8 percent. And while digital advertising is up overall, newspaper websites haven't been big beneficiaries. Rather, almost two-thirds of digital advertising spending last year went to just five companies: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Twitter. For publicly traded newspaper companies, digital ad revenue fell 2 percent in 2015.
Network news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC) also fared badly last year. While viewership for ABC, CBS and NBC evening newscasts was up one percent, overall "viewership data collected by Nielsen Media Research shows that in 2015 network affiliate news stations (ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC) lost viewership in every key timeslot–morning, early evening and late night," Pew reports. Morning and evening audiences were down 2 percent, with late-night and mid-day audiences each down 5 percent.
But cable news is kicking ass, with viewership up eight percent in 2015 over 2014. "Cable-hosted presidential candidate debates helped drive some of the surge in viewership," notes Pew. Yet daytime cable-news programs also saw bigger audiences.
Of the major cable news networks, CNN saw the biggest audience gains, with viewership up 17 percent during the 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. hours and 38 percent for prime-time programming. Fox News audiences increased by 7 percent during the day and 3 percent during primetime.
Smaller cable-news networks had a good 2015, too. Fox Business Network revenues were projected to grow by 15 percent in 2015, with CNBC revenues expected to grow 4 percent and Bloomberg TV revenues by 3 percent.
Another media bright spot comes from podcasts and streaming radio. Around one-fifth of U.S. residents ages 12 or older said they had listened to at least one podcast in the past month, up from 12 percent in 2010, and 36 percent had ever heard a podcast, up from 23 percent six years ago. Meanwhile, the number of people who had listened to streaming radio in the past month jumped from 27 percent in 2010 to 57 percent last year. And "this growth hasn't necessarily cannibalized the audience for traditional radio," notes Pew. NPR's major news programs attract around 12 million listeners, and 91 percent of Pew survey respondents aged 12 and up said they had listened to traditional radio in the past month.
Digital content is doing okay, too, despite the lackluster status of ad revenues. It's a major source for U.S. political news, with 65 percent of respondents in the Pew study saying they had learned about the 2016 presidential election from a digital source in the preceding week (48 percent from news sites or apps, 44 percent from social media). This is up substantially from 2012, when a mere 17 percent of U.S. adults said that they regularly turned to social media for election news and just 36 percent turned to any digital news source for campaign coverage. From Pew:
Indeed, for each of the four sectors studied in this analysis–newspapers, news magazines, national television news outlets and digital-native publishers–a majority of outlets (77 out of 110) grew their average monthly total digital audience in the fourth quarter of 2015, compared to the same period in 2014. For the 50 newspapers studied, 33 grew their average monthly unique visitors, and for the 12 news magazines, nine did. Looking at the eight national television news outlets, including the major networks, cable channels and Hispanic broadcasters, six increased their traffic. Finally, 29 out of the 40 digital-native news sites studied here experienced growth.
It's a mixed bag for print news magazines. Of the 14 magazines Pew studied, print sales figures ranged from a rise of 65 percent (for The Nation) to a loss of 37 percent (for National Review). Other losers included The Week (down 35 percent) and Wired (down 25 percent). Sales of New York magazine, meanwhile, were up 44 percent. The Atlantic experienced the biggest overall circulation increase: 2 percent.
On average, single copy (i.e. newsstand) sales for news magazines were down 3 percent in 2015 and subscriptions were down two percent. "All but four of the 14 news magazines studied experienced overall circulation decline," Pew notes. And while web traffic for these magazines was up in 2015, the average time spent on the sites was down.
A few more interesting tidbits from the Pew report:
The Brits are coming for our web traffic: American web traffic to dailymail.co.uk and theguardian.com would put these U.K. papers in the top five U.S.-based papers by web traffic.
Mobile trumps desktop: Desktop digital traffic fell for 39 of the 50 newspaper websites studied, but mobile traffic rose for 43 of the 50 papers.
Business booming for cable news stations: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC were all projected to grow their profits in 2015, with Fox News profits up by about a fifth (to $1.5 billion), CNN up 17 percent (to $381 million), and MSNBC up 10 percent (to $227 million).
Mixed news for morning news programs: The Today Show viewership has declined 17 percent since 2008, but audiences for ABC's Good Morning America and CBS's This Morning are up 15 and 17 percent, respectively.
Face the Nation reigns on Sundays: Audiences are up for the Sunday political shows on non-cable stations, including CBS' Face the Nation, ABC's This Week, and NBC's Meet the Press. Of these, Face the Nation is the highest rated, followed by Meet the Press, which had a 13 percent viewership increase in 2015. Fox News Sunday viewership was up 10 last year over the previous year.
"News magazine programs" falling out of favor: Combined viewership for six network news-magazine programs (60 Minutes, 48 Hours, 20/20, Nightline, Dateline Friday, and Dateline Sunday) were down 5 percent last year over 2014 and 16 percent since 2008.
Alt-weeklies also floundering: Circulation is down 11 percent from 2014 to 2015 at the top 20 newsweeklies across America. "While much of this year's change was driven by substantial drops at large publications like The Village Voice and LA Weekly, circulation did decline across the board," notes Pew. Just two alt-weeklies saw an increase in circulation of more than 1 percent, and neither increase was more than 4 percent.
The post Presidential Politics Pays Off for Cable News, But Networks and Newspapers Continue to Flounder appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders has issued the 2016 edition of its annual World Press Freedom Index. Let's just say that the news is not good. Dictators, party hacks, caudillos, kings, petty bureaucrats, spy agencies, and even the Obama administration just want reporters to shut up.
Republican presidential candidate frontrunner Donald Trump wants to "open up our libel laws so when they [reporters] write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money." Shades of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which, as USHistory.org explains, "prohibited public opposition to the government. Fines and imprisonment could be used against those who 'write, print, utter, or publish . . . any false, scandalous and malicious writing' against the government."
Of course, the kinds of government pressures and harassment faced by journalists in the U.S. and most other industrialized countries is small potatoes when compared to the deadly dangers faced by reporters in China, the Arab World, much of Africa, and in many Latin American countries.
Reporters Without Borders notes that its 2016 edition of the World Press Freedom Index…
…shows that there has been a deep and disturbing decline in respect for media freedom at both the global and regional levels. Ever since the 2013 index, Reporters Without Borders has been calculating indicators of the overall level of media freedom violations in each of the world's regions and worldwide. The higher the figure, the worse the situation. The global indicator has gone from 3719 points last year to 3857 points this year, a 3.71% deterioration. The decline since 2013 is 13.6%.
*
The lower the score, the greater the press freedom found in a country. For example, Finland has the lowest score at 8.59. In the latest report, the U.S., with a score of 22.46, stands at 41st out of 180 countries ranked. With regard to the U.S., Reporters Without Borders notes:
Freedom ends where national security begins
US media freedom, enshrined in the First Amendment to the 1787 constitution, has encountered a major obstacle – the government's war on whistleblowers who leak information about its surveillance activities, spying and foreign operations, especially those linked to counter-terrorism. Furthermore, US journalists are still not protected by a federal "shield law" guaranteeing their right not to reveal their sources and other confidential work-related information.
While any score below 25 is considered satisfactory, our country could do a lot better.
*Where is Greenland?
The post Governments Hating On Press Freedom More, Says Reporters Without Borders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Today The Huffington Post announced that it would no longer file news related to 2016 presidential "sideshow" Donald Trump under its politics vertical, instead relegating it to the entertainment section. "After watching and listening to Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy for president, we have decided we won't report on Trump's campaign as part of The Huffington Post's political coverage," wrote Ryan Grim, the site's Washington bureau chief, and Editorial Director Danny Shea.
"Our reason is simple," they continued. "Trump's campaign is a sideshow. We won't take the bait. If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you'll find it next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette."
On Friday morning, The Huffington Post broadcast the decision on the front page of the site:
With all due disregard for the seriousness of Trump's ambitions or potential—and 75 percent of respondents in a recent nationwide poll agree that the man Matt Welch has deemed "the Idiocracy candidate" is not a serious presidential contender—is this really the right call?
Ignominious as Trump's candidacy may be, he also led the GOP pack in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll and the latest poll from Fox News. Among a not insignificant number of voters, Trump is very much a serous candidate, or at least more appealing than more realistic options like Jeb Bush or Sen. Rand Paul. That alone is political news. (If Kim Kardashian were polling at 17 percent among likely GOP voters, that would seem politically relevant, too.)
Journalists of various political persuasions have been critical of The Huffington Post's decision. "Whoa this is crazy. He's an actual candidate. He's polling second," offered The New York Times' Farhad Manjoo on Twitter. At Poynter's MediaWire blog, James Warren called the decision "especially dubious in an era where the nexus of entertainment and politics is often quite obvious and growing."
"ok that huffpo post triumphantly declaring trump a sideshow & not real political news discounts the fact that it is actually political news," Asawin Suebsaeng of The Daily Beast tweeted. "i wish we could discount all candidacies we think are ridiculous and dump them in the entertainment section, but that's not how this works".
"If Trump were still polling at 1 or 2 percent and reporters were covering his every utterance for clicks, okay. But he's near the top," echoed Washington Examiner Politics Editor Jim Antle. "Trump is a particularly extreme manifestation of the political-entertainment complex, but he's not the only example."
"What The Huffington Post is really saying here…is that the opinions of thousands of Americans don't matter to them," tweeted The Daily Beast political reporter Olivia Nuzzi. "It is not up to The Huffington Post or any other publication to decide which candidates are legitimate."
"Whatever you think of Trump coverage, refusing to cover him at all means ignoring a major GOP storyline. Disagree," wrote Snapchat news head Peter Hamby.
Perhaps the most asute take, however, comes from Mother Jones reporter Max J. Rosenthal: "You all realize this HuffPost/Trump announcement is just a wildly successful PR/traffic stunt in itself, right?"
The post Does Donald Trump News Belong in the Entertainment Section? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Wars, plane crashes, mass murder—it's easy to report news that happens suddenly. Reporters do a good job covering that. But we do a bad job telling you about what's really changing in the world, because we miss the stories that happen slowly. These are usually the more important stories.
Recently, President Barack Obama was mocked for saying: "The world is less violent than it has ever been. It is healthier than it has ever been. It is more tolerant than it has ever been. It is better fed than it's ever been. It is more educated than it's ever been."
Although these comments received criticism, he was absolutely right. Despite the current violence in the Middle East, the world today is actually less violent than it used to be. In the 21st century, about 50,000 people a year died from war—about a third the number who died each year during the Cold War and half the number during the 1990s, a decade thought of as a time of peace and prosperity.
People today are healthier. Death rates from nearly all diseases are down so much that we now live, on average, nearly twice as long as people did just over a century ago.
People are also better fed and better educated. (Also, thanks to free markets and capitalism, people are richer. Millions lifted themselves out of poverty. Of course, Obama left that improvement out; it doesn't fit his big-government vision.)
Let's consider the other improvement the president cited: The world is "more tolerant than it has ever been." Tolerance is harder to measure than changes in poverty or deaths from war, but there is little doubt that, in America at least, people are much more tolerant.
In just a few decades, life has improved dramatically for blacks, gays, and women. When I started reporting, women still had to get a husband's or father's permission to get a credit card. Gays were ostracized. Interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 states. Anti-sodomy laws were on the books until 2003.
Early last century, wife beating was routine. A North Carolina newspaper from 1913 carried a front-page story titled, "For and Against Wife Beating." Most "expert" commentary was in favor of it. One doctor argued, "Beat her, she needs it," and a female advice columnist declared, "It's well known that women love most the men who are cruel."
Today, no newspaper would do a feature story on "whether to beat your wife." Attitudes changed dramatically. But how would a reporter cover that? I suppose one might say, "Today in Pittsburgh, six people changed their opinion about wife beating." But no reporter would write that. He wouldn't know who those people were. Even if he did, such gradual change is not what people consider news.
A car crash that kills a family is terrible news. But gradual improvements in driver behavior, car and road safety, and attitudes about drunk driving should be even bigger news. Driving remains one of the riskiest things we do, but far fewer people die now.
Science that lengthens lives, innovation that enhances them, increased tolerance, and fewer deaths in wars are great news. But, day by day, reporters barely cover that. Where would we point our cameras?
The news is biased not just because reporters are politically biased but because most good news happens gradually. We instinctively perk up and take notice if someone says, "The White House made an important announcement today," even if that announcement is trivial compared to slower social changes.
We use the phrase "slow news day" almost as an insult, as though important things aren't happening. This, in turn, affects the way we think about politics. While life incrementally improves, activists promoting almost any cause angrily chant: "When do we want it? Now!"
Bad things happen in an instant. The good news usually takes time. Reporters are usually clueless about it.
The post Bad Things Happen in an Instant, But Good News Takes Time appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."—Barack Obama, 2009.
Which Barack Obama is telling the truth here? Writing as a U.S. senator from Illinois, Obama laments that there will always be a barrier—the independent media—between him and the people he serves. As a public figure, his identity will be created by reporters and critics that he cannot control, distorted by the lenses of photographers who don't answer directly to him.
Only three years later, as commander in chief, President Obama took a far more trusting tone with the media. In his earliest speeches, he promised an administration of unparalleled openness, access, and integrity. Indeed, he asserted he was running "the most transparent administration in history" just four months before Edward Snowden spilled the beans on the National Security Agency.
"The White House has effectively become a broadcast company," says Michael Shaw, publisher of Bagnewsnotes.com, a site dedicated to the analysis of news images. Shaw explains how strategically composed photos, taken by official White House photographers, travel from social media sites that are controlled by the administration to the front pages of newspapers around the world.
The press publishes the official White House photographs because independent photographers and videographers are increasingly barred from covering the president. This practice has diminished the power of the independent media as an exclusive distribution channel while empowering official photographers such as Pete Souza, who are on the presidential payroll.
And so, says Shaw, the public has been fed a steady diet of whatever kind of president the news cycle demands. When conspiracy theorists questioned Obama's patriotism, we saw images of Obama the American everyman. To celebrate the anniversary of Rosa Parks' 1955 refusal to move to the back of a public bus in Montgomery, Alabama, we saw Obama reenact her famous image. Time and again, we see Obama striking poses out of John F. Kennedy's repertoire. The official White House photographers have created a presidential identity for every conceivable occasion—as long as the image is flattering, and almost always, larger than life.
While presidents have always sought to control their image, Shaw and many in the press say that Obama has restricted media access to an unparalleled degree. As the AP's director of photography wrote last year in The New York Times, the Obama administration has "systematically tried to bypass the media by releasing a sanitized visual record of his activities through official photographs and videos, at the expense of independent journalistic access."
Media boycotts of official photographs have been ineffective in persuading the president to live up to his promise of transparency. It is only by a tradition of public openness, not law, that photographers have enjoyed access to the official business of the president. So we could revert to the practice before the JFK administration, when photographers were mostly kept away from the inner workings of the White House.
Short of generating public outrage, there is little the independent media can do. "Because [the White House] can distribute directly through all these different [new and old media] channels," says Shaw, "there's really not much downside to it, there's not much accountability."
All over the world, heads of state are producing idealized versions of their own identities on social media, a technology that empowers leaders every bit as much as the rest of us. Heads of state and politicians are increasingly free to project their own self-image directly to the public, with less accountability than ever from an independent press. From the White House on YouTube to Ten Downing Street on Flickr to Bashar al-Assad's Instagram page, we may never see our politicians in the way that we did just a few years ago.
About 12 minutes.
Produced, shot, and edited by Todd Krainin.
All still photography from the White House.
Music by Chris Zabriskie, Lee Rosevere, Kevin MacLeod, and Setuniman at FreeSound.
Scroll down for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive notification when new material goes live.
The post Reality Show President: Inside the White House PR Machine appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>