{"id":22996,"date":"2017-11-07T09:00:35","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T13:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22996"},"modified":"2018-01-30T21:27:02","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T01:27:02","slug":"want-to-end-fake-news-stop-subsidizing-journalism-with-advertising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/11\/07\/want-to-end-fake-news-stop-subsidizing-journalism-with-advertising\/","title":{"rendered":"Want to End Fake News? Stop Subsidizing Journalism with Advertising"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Daily Beast <\/em>ran a story<\/a> last week with this lede: \u201cRoseanne Barr and Michael McFaul argued with her on Twitter. BuzzFeed and The New York Times cited her tweets. But Jenna Abrams was the fictional creation of a Russian troll farm.\u201d Abrams, the story goes, was a concoction of The Internet Research Agency, the Russian government\u2019s troll farm that was first profiled in New York Times Magazine by Adrian Chen<\/a> in June 2015. During its three-year life span the Abrams account was able to amass close to 70,000 followers on Twitter and was quoted in nearly every major news outlet in America and Europe including The New York Times, The BBC, and France 24.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Abrams Twitter account was a well of viral content that over-worked listicle writers couldn\u2019t help but return to. Once the account had amassed a following the content shifted away from innocuous virality to offensive trolling: saying the civil war wasn\u2019t about slavery, mocking Black Lives Matter activists, and jumping on hashtags that were critical of Clinton. \u201cWhen Abrams joined in with an anti-Clinton hashtag,\u201d The<\/em> Daily Beast <\/em>reports,\u00a0\u201cThe<\/em>\u00a0Washington Post\u00a0<\/em>included her tweet\u00a0in its own coverage<\/a>.\u00a0One outlet<\/a>\u00a0used an image of a terrorist attack sourced from Abrams\u2019 Twitter feed.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Abrams account, they write, \u201cillustrates how Russian talking points can seep into American mainstream media without even a single dollar spent on advertising.\u201d This framing portrays journalists as passive filters that automatically parrot whatever popular Twitter users say. Journalists are supposed to be critical fact-checkers and the last defense against misinformation entering the public sphere. The rate at which false information keeps \u201cseeping\u201d in seems to be growing, and so it is worth asking: are there structural reasons that fake news keeps making its way into reputable news sources?<\/p>\n

Jay Rosen is the obvious person to answer this question, and to some degree he did answer it last March when he announced<\/a> a partnership with the Dutch news site De Correspondent<\/em>: \u201cif you\u2019re doing public service journalism\u201d he wrote, \u201cand trying to optimize for trust, it helps immensely to be free from\u00a0the business of buying and selling people\u2019s attention.\u201d Not having commercial sponsors also means, \u201cnot straining to find a unique angle into\u00a0a story that the entire press pack is chewing\u00a0on, it\u2019s easier to avoid clickbait headlines, which undo\u00a0trust. Not chasing today\u2019s splashy story can hurt your traffic, but when you\u2019re not selling traffic (because you don\u2019t have advertisers) the pain\u00a0is minimized.\u201d<\/p>\n

It is frustrating that prominent public radio personalities like Ira Glass are running in the opposite direction. Glass, talking to an AdAge <\/em>reporter in 2015 confidently stated<\/a>, \u201cPublic radio is ready for capitalism.\u201d This is dangerous because much of Russia\u2019s disinformation campaign and Trump\u2019s home-grown trolling relied on the capitalist attention economy that governs every major media outlet. Breitbart <\/em>and InfoWars <\/em>republished Abrams\u2019 tweets, but so did The Washington Post <\/em>and The Times of India. <\/em>The only thing these news organizations have in common is their advertiser-centered business model.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no secret that most staff writers are underpaid and over-worked, and they are the lucky ones. There are thousands of wildly talented freelance writers that spend half their time writing and reporting and the other half chasing down their overdue paychecks. Reporters with no research budget and a huge publishing quota are understandably going to do a bit of Googling, pull a quote from Twitter, and call it a day. Over-worked and under-paid journalists are the weakened immune system that lets viral fake news take over the body politic.<\/p>\n

Herman and Chomsky, in their famous book Manufacturing Consent, <\/em>pointed to the high cost and time-consuming nature of good journalism as one of the five \u201cfilters\u201d that discourage critical reporting. Instead of going to the source of the story, journalists go to police departments and corporate PR offices to grab quotes. This is not because they are lazy, but because they lack the time or money to report the story from scratch. PR offices and police departments\u2019 spokespeople offer one-stop-shops for an official account of what happened in any given story.<\/p>\n

The Yes Men\u2014two artists who, for example, will pose as the spokesperson for Dow Chemical and tell a BBC reporter that they take full responsibility for the Bhopal Disaster<\/a>\u2014 know that news agencies are more likely to report on something if they are handed a media package or are offered access to a talking head from a well-known organization. Their hoaxes have real consequences: sending corporate stocks temporarily tumbling and attracting mainstream attention to ignored environmental disasters.<\/p>\n

Twitter affords a similar shortcut to newsworthiness. Putting someone with a high follower count (to say nothing of a blue checkmark) in your story increases the possibility of reciprocal attention: you click my content and I\u2019ll click yours. When someone with 70,000 followers says something controversial to their substantial audience, that\u2019s worth a shout out in your news story, especially when that story is little more than a survey of what people are talking about. That Twitter user, after seeing a spike in followers and \u00a0mentions related to the article, will share it themselves sending off a quick, \u201cwas included in this thing, haha.\u201d This is the mundane, reciprocal manufacturing of attention that feeds micro celebrity and now, apparently, geopolitics. Anything with a decent follower account is low-hanging fruit for finishing a reporter’s daily content quota.<\/p>\n

What is absolutely maddening is that the demands and responses to the fake news phenomenon have centered on social media and the algorithms that govern their behavior. Some of the solutions out there \u2014cough Verrit<\/a> cough\u2014 are either so absurd that they can only be explained as either the product of cynical opportunists looking to make fact-flavored content, or the result of too many well-connected people not understanding the nature of the problem they are facing. Both seem equally likely. The intent barely matters though, because the result is the same: a more elaborate apparatus to churn out attention-grabbing media for its own sake.<\/p>\n

Social media has exacerbated and monetized fake news but the source of the problem is advertising-subsidized journalism. Any proposed solution that does not confront the working conditions of reporters is a band aid on a bullet wound. The problem is systematic, which means any one actor \u2014whether it is Mark Zukerberg or Facebook itself\u2014 is neither the culprit nor the possible savior. So long as our attention is up for sale, people with all sorts of motives will pay top dollar.<\/p>\n

Image courtesy Free Press<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Daily Beast ran a story last week with this lede: \u201cRoseanne Barr and Michael McFaul argued with her on Twitter. BuzzFeed and The New York Times cited her tweets. But Jenna Abrams was the fictional creation of a Russian troll farm.\u201d Abrams, the story goes, was a concoction of The Internet Research Agency, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1512,"featured_media":22997,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967,892],"tags":[98,95756,118,1426],"class_list":["post-22996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","category-essay","tag-capitalism","tag-fake-news","tag-journalism","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2017\/11\/6641427981_6296af68e1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1512"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22996"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22998,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22996\/revisions\/22998"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22997"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}