"The Map I Want to See"
It's not enough to talk about Big Tech. We need to talk about small newspapers, too.
It was the day after the election, President Trump still led in early returns from key battleground states, and as the ballot-counting continued political obsessives were trying to figure out why polls suggesting a quick and easy Biden win had—once again—been so wrong.
Simultaneously, liberals on Twitter were trying to process the fact that an unpopular, mendacious president whose failures include mishandling the response to a pandemic that’s killed more than 235,000 Americans could be raking in more votes than he received during his first run in 2016.
Theories for Trump’s strange success abounded, among them the continuing suspicion that four years of largely unchecked online misinformation—including from the president’s only recently moderated Twitter feed—had convinced enough Americans that up was down.
This theory and plenty others are certain to be explored through election postmortems that dissect Trump’s historically strong, but ultimately insufficient showing against President-elect Joe Biden. But here’s one theory I think is worth elevating now, because it’s proved less than electrifying in the past and therefore seems likely to get even less attention in the near future, as political analysts dive into sexy things like the “shy Trump voter” phenomenon and the question of whether Democrats had their election messaging all wrong.
This theory was floated the day after Election Day by Tony Haile, the founding CEO of Chartbeat, a digital dashboard that shows journalists real-time data for engagement with their online articles, and it came in the form of a tweeted request for a different kind of election map:
The implied theory is that while polling errors and fights over online misinformation on digital platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter rightly command a lot of our attention, a deeper problem is being missed by the American public.
It’s a problem explored in depth in a government report unveiled to little fanfare a week before the election, as part of that contentious Senate grilling of tech CEOs I wrote about in the last newsletter.
Washington Senator Maria Cantwell produced the report, which bears the not-very-riveting title: “Local Journalism: America’s Most Trusted News Sources Threatened.” It was intended to steer the Senate hearing away from Ted Cruz vs. Jack Dorsey smackdowns and toward a productive discussion of how the rise of digital platforms has led to the decimation of a source of information for Americans that was once ubiquitous and generally reliable: the local paper.
No surprise, the Cruz vs. Dorsey face-off got far more attention. But the report is still there for the reading and during the strange several days between Election Day and Joe Biden being declared President-elect, I gave it a read.
A key finding is that over the last 20 years, local newspapers have seen about 70 percent of their income disappear as Facebook and Google have vacuumed up their ad revenue and “hijacked” the newspapers’ online articles for their own attention-grabbing purposes.
As a consequence, the newspaper industry has been forced to shed 60 percent of its newsroom employees—some 40,000 journalists—since 2005. “Newspapers will likely lay off another 7,000 employees in 2020,” the report states, “leaving only about 30,000 newsroom jobs left nationwide.”
If these trends continue, the report warns, “the local news industry could all but disappear in the next few years.”
The resulting challenges for American democracy, now and in the future, are “compounded,” the report says, “by a lack of public awareness of the crisis facing local journalism.” A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center indicated that 71 percent of Americans assume local media in their area is “doing well financially.” (Not surprisingly, the same poll found that only 14 percent of Americans had “paid or given money in the past year to any local news source.”)
One result of this has been “news deserts” spreading across the land. “Already, 200 counties nationwide have no newspapers covering their communities,” Cantwell’s report says, “and half of all US counties are down to just one, a problem that is particularly acute in the South.”
This is what Tony Hale was talking about in his tweet, and while we don’t yet have final county-by-county maps for how this presidential election went, take a look at any online election results map and then overlay it, in your mind’s eye, with this county-by-county map of America’s news deserts:
As Vox Media’s Erica Anderson wrote on Twitter:
Local news has never been perfect. Neither has the broader American journalism industry, which partly has its own lack of foresight to blame for initially arriving in the digital age without a plan to adapt. If you ask Google and Facebook, they’ll claim they’re actually doing a lot to help local media through a difficult era of transition. Nevertheless, the ongoing problem for the American news consumer remains clear.
If you live in a local news desert and you’re curious about current events, you’re left to get sucked into the melodrama on cable news (probably on FOX, given where America’s news deserts tend to be located); or into the maelstrom of false and otherwise shoddy information on Facebook (73 percent American Facebook users, according to a 2019 Pew study, rely on the platform for news); or into broadcasts from local TV news stations like those owned by the national chain Sinclair Broadcast Group, which in recent years required all of its affiliates to run pro-Trump segments; or maybe even into a new online “newspaper” that’s actually run by political operatives using a pay-for-play scheme to pump out their own propaganda.
In this context, another warning from the Senate report stands out: “The loss of thousands of experienced journalists represents the loss of a highly-valued resource that cannot be easily replaced—these are the professionals with the expertise necessary to sort through news reports to determine what is real, what is fake, and what matters most to the communities served.”
There are a great many reasons Americans regularly say politicians in DC do little that’s relevant to their lives. But perhaps the implosion of local news is an overlooked one. If there are no local journalists to explain how decisions about taxes, immigration, trade wars, infrastructure, or pandemic preparedness really affect local communities, then how’s the average person supposed to make the necessary connections? How are busy, hard-working people supposed to know that what they’re reading about these issues online is rumor or propaganda, not fact-based reporting?
It’s true that plenty of well-meaning, local-news-focused ventures have risen online and elsewhere in recent years. Some of them are making real local impact. But on the whole, this country is still experiencing a massive net loss of local journalists. As the Senate report makes clear, America’s disappeared newsroom jobs “have not been regained in other news-producing industries.”
So what to do?
The report doesn’t offer any big ideas for how to make Americans more aware that their local news outlets are not “doing well financially,” nor does it outline a plan for letting them know this predicament might be playing some role in our often bizarre and fact-free political discourse.
But the report does offer a few proposals for how Congress can take action.
As with all policy ideas in DC right now, the future of the report’s recommendations probably hinges on whether President-elect Biden and the Democrat-controlled US House end up working with a Republican-controlled Senate after the upcoming runoff elections in Georgia, or with a Democrat-controlled Senate.
One set of ideas involves Congress providing “immediate support to stabilize these critical community institutions.” That could involve federal tax incentives, grants, and renewal of the COVID-era “Paycheck Protection Program,” which kept many local publications from going under as the pandemic-related recession hit.
Another set of ideas is about putting the business of American journalism on stronger footing in its negotiations with tech giants. That could involve forcing Facebook and Google to pay news producers for the articles they display in user feeds and search results, perhaps on the model of new regulations in Australia. (Though Facebook has threatened to block all news sharing in Australia if those particular regulations go into effect.) The report also suggests Congress consider allowing local news publishers to band together and “collectively bargain” with tech giants to get fair compensation for the use of their content.
If this sounds like overreach, well, the federal government has long put its thumb on the scale to help American media—for example, by “allowing newspapers and magazines to travel through the mail at extremely low postage rates,” the report says—and it’s done this because of the vital role this country’s founders saw for journalism. As James Madison, one of the founders cited in the report, declared in 1882: “A popular government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy; or, perhaps both.”
Some of the information I’ve had my eyeballs on lately:
• Biden and Big Tech — “My sense is that the Biden team hasn’t developed detailed positions on some of the most urgent questions relating to big tech,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, tells The Los Angeles Times.
• “Five myths about misinformation” — Professor Brendan Nyhan argues in The Washington Post that “ironically,” many of us have been misinformed about misinformation.
• “Why the social media rage machine won’t stop” — Professor Margaret O’Mara says that “tech companies aren’t going to dismantle the systems that are making them billions.”
• “I just want my Instagram to be about me again” — This quote given to Lautaro Grinspan of The Miami Herald is funny no matter how many times I re-read it. But it also says so much about the power and narcissistic allure of social media:
• Did QAnon make the election polls wrong? — University of Southern California researchers, according to The New York Times, think “pollsters may not have captured support for Mr. Trump among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory that has spread widely on Twitter and other social networks in recent months.”
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Photo via Seattle Municipal Archives