Journalism Won’t Be Saved a Link at a Time

Last spring, just as the first surge in the COVID-19 pandemic was peaking, Amy Brothers was busy at The Denver Post covering the fallout across Colorado.

“I really loved my job,” Brothers tweeted. “Going out into our community and telling your stories, on your best days and your hardest always inspired me.” 

But that came to an abrupt end one Friday in April. Without warning, Brothers’ bosses at The Post laid off the video journalist along with 12 other newsroom colleagues, all casualties of the plummeting ad spending that struck local-news operations across the country.

“The interesting thing about covering a pandemic is that it’s a national story, but also completely local,” Brothers later told me. “But with fewer resources, you have to choose between the number of articles you can report and the depth of those articles.”...

(Read the entire story at TruthOut) 

Local Laws Are 'Laboratories' for Taxing Big Tech

Earlier this year, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer spoke about the benefits of taxing platforms like Facebook and Google to help suppress Big Tech’s dominance and spur competition.

Romer said that you can get there by levying a “pigovian tax” on digital ads. In general terms, a pigovian tax is one that’s levied against any market activity that generates “negative externalities” — or bad consequences across society. 

In Romer’s interpretation, such a tax could be progressive when applied to online platforms; the marginal tax rate would increase relative to a given firm’s market dominance. Companies that are becoming more dominant would be taxed at a rate that discourages further control (and the “negative externalities” that result from it). Meanwhile, smaller competitors would pay a far lower rate, fostering their ability to provide an alternative to consumers.

Romer holds up taxation legislation in Maryland as a worthy approach that might inspire other legislatures in the United States and abroad. The state is on the cusp of implementing legislation that would impose a 2.5–10-percent tax on in-state digital advertising.

“It makes perfect sense for them to try and claw back for the citizens of Maryland revenue which has been sucked out of their state and is going to San Francisco, New York, Seattle, and a few other places,” Romer said during a Stigler Center webinar.

In a 2019 Op-Ed for The New York Times, Romer writes that taxing Big Tech is a superior strategy to pursuing antitrust law or regulation. Though U.S. antitrust law may address harms caused by price gouging, he writes, it’s not an effective remedy for other platform harms — such as “undermining the institutions of democracy.”

Laboratories for democracy
There’s a facet of the Maryland tax that Romer doesn’t mention: the funneling of resulting revenues to support a specific remedy. For example, money from Maryland’s proposed tax — estimated to reach $250 million in the first year — will go to the state’s public schools.

While Romer’s version of a pigovian tax might help curb Big Tech’s runaway growth, it’s unclear how that would address many of the anti-democratic harms caused by the targeted-advertising model that forms the economic backbone of online companies big and small.

Maryland lawmakers rightly see better-funded education as a possible fix to the “negative externalities” of Big Tech’s algorithmic amplification — which fuels the spread of disinformation and hate, and incites anti-democratic violence.

Others, including Free Press, believe a tax on algorithmic ad revenues should be levied to support the robust production of news content — with an emphasis on local journalism, noncommercial outlets and other news for underserved communities.

As much as anywhere, the platforms’ negative impacts are felt in journalism: As Facebook and Google have come to dominate the new-media economy, the independent, local journalism that people need to debunk online conspiracies and participate in democracy continues to disappear from communities.

Romer says state legislatures and city councils — and not the executive or judicial branches of the federal government — are the “least bad” ways to do this; they are akin to “laboratories of democracy.”

“If we can allow local taxation we can see some innovation,” Romer adds, “and we can learn from their experience as we approach a kind of national consensus.”

What Maryland is doing should prove a good model for other states to follow and adapt. Congress should pay attention, too.

Free Press Action encourages any lawmakers who take up legislation to tax Big Tech to also consider how the resulting monies should be spent locally. If the impetus for taxes is to make dominant platforms more accountable to the public, the resulting tax money should address the crisis in journalism these companies have worsened.

Cutting Deals with Big Tech Won't Save Journalism

This week, Australia will put the finishing touches on a plan to force Google and Facebook to pay millions of dollars to local news publishers in exchange for featuring their content on their powerful platforms.

Many in the news industry are hailing Australia’s bargaining code as a way to bring Big Tech to the table and save journalism at a time when news outlets are struggling.

And to the table Big Tech has come, but its response hasn’t been helpful.

Last Wednesday, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. announced that it had struck a three-year deal with Google that would provide access to the company’s empire of news content in exchange for “significant payments” from the search giant. That’s a windfall for a conglomerate that’s notorious worldwide for serving its news with heaping portions of disinformation and bigotry.

Facebook responded with the nuclear option: Instead of settling on a fee it prevented any of its users from sharing links to Australian news sources. For several days it was impossible to post news from Australian sources; Facebook’s heavy-handed info blackout extended to government health sites providing critical COVID-19 vaccination information to Australians.

Australia’s bargaining code is an early foray by lawmakers seeking to reset the balance of power between tech platforms and a news industry that’s failing to keep pace with the digital economy. This accounting is important — and governments should be doing more to make these massive online networks compensate for the damage they have done to democratic society — but there are better ways forward for Australia and other countries weighing similar measures to support journalism. Murdoch and others in the newspaper industry are pushing to reintroduce legislation in the United States (what some call “Murdoch’s Law”) which would also force a payment negotiation between powerful U.S.-based news businesses and Silicon Valley.

There are several reasons the Australian experiment won’t work in the United States. If the initial reaction from Google and Facebook is any indication, it doesn’t appear to be working too well for Australia either.

Looming in the background of this debate are major shifts in the economics of news production. The U.S. ad industry has moved away from buying placements in traditional media entities that produced news (like newspapers) toward cheaper, more finely targeted options offered by digital platforms that don’t (like Facebook and Google).

Allowing the most powerful media conglomerates to negotiate payments from the most powerful tech conglomerates is an attempt to rebalance the equation. But giving handouts to News Corp. won’t help the sorts of local, civic-minded news outlets and reporters who have suffered most under this new digital economy. And funding traditional news operations doesn’t meet the needs of communities of color and working-class families, who’ve been long overlooked or misrepresented by U.S. media.

We can’t solve the platform-dominance problem and the journalism-funding problem with a solution that makes both problems worse. Turning every instance of link sharing into a government-mandated monetary transaction would forever alter the fundamental openness of the internet. We need to invest in new journalism — not entrenched corporate power and gatekeeping.

Taxing the attention economy
The best way to do that is by supporting innovations in news production that put journalists back to work, and better connect them with the people and communities they report on. At Free Press Action we’ve put forth better remedies for the United States, including a proposal for a tax on online advertising. The resulting revenue would be placed in a Public Interest Media Endowment and used to fund the kinds of diverse, local, independent and noncommercial news and information that have gone missing.

For example, a 2-percent ad tax on 2020 advertising revenues of the top-10 online platforms would yield more than $2 billion for the endowment. As Facebook’s, Google’s and Amazon’s share of the digital advertising space increases, so would its tax commitment to help save journalism.

Others have put forth ideas for the future of journalism that also deserve attention from lawmakers. We can’t let these be shunted to the side in favor of a legislative proposal that’s being pushed in Australia and the United States by the Murdochs and other media oligarchs.

Instead, we need strong public-media laws that prioritize a free press, civic-minded news production and the interests of the communities news outlets are supposed to serve.

It’s increasingly clear that market-based solutions for news production aren’t helping foster a more equitable and inclusive democracy. In the United States, commercial media share a sizable portion of the blame for the rise of Donald Trump — and, with him, Trump-style white nationalism.

What happened in the 20th century, when local print, radio and TV outlets were the best way for advertisers to target local audiences, was a historical fluke. Attempts to rebuild or insulate that old-media model in the 21st century are a fool’s errand. Future solutions must involve new hybrid private- and public-sector models, or direct public funding for journalism, so long as it includes guardrails to protect the editorial independence of news organizations on the receiving end.

Incentivizing these sorts of funding models is the right path away from a commercial-media system dominated by too few players. While Australia’s proposal is a sincere attempt to make Facebook and Google pay for the harm they’ve caused journalism, it’s not the final word. Nor should it be.

Going Beyond Antitrust to Rein in Facebook and Google

Co-authored with Jessica González

While it’s no secret to anyone watching the stratospheric growth of Facebook and Google over the past decade, the recent congressional report on antitrust and the technology sector made it clear: We have a problem, and its name is Big Tech.

The groundbreaking report, authored by House Judiciary Committee staff, details the abuses that occur when a handful of giant firms dominate almost every aspect of the online marketplace. “To put it simply,” the report reads, “companies that once were scrappy, underdog startups that challenged the status quo have become the kinds of monopolies we last saw in the era of oil barons and railroad tycoons.”

Nowhere is this more evident than in the control that the two companies exert over online advertising. And the consequences have been devastating — not only to the news industry, which has seen its sources of revenue evaporate as advertisers have abandoned traditional placements in print, radio and television, but also to the sort of civil discourse that is the lifeblood of a functioning democracy....

Read the entire Op-Ed at the Seattle Times

Confused by Section 230? So is Donald Trump.

One of the most consequential — and for some confusing — pieces of internet legislation of the past 25 years has been the subject of white-hot political debates in Washington this election year.
And no one seems more confused by Section 230 than Donald Trump, who in May signed an executive order to undermine this seminal law and force social-media sites to amplify his lies and propaganda with little fact checking or contextualizing.

Trump’s move was well timed… for him at least. It came as he and other bad-faith political actors were preparing to unleash unprecedented levels of garbage online in advance of the November election.

What Pundits Get Wrong About the Facebook Ad Boycott

“Yes, but …”

That’s the opening refrain of many media pundits when asked to comment on the phenomenal success of the #StopHateForProfit boycott, which now counts more than 750 companies pausing their Facebook advertising in July to protest the spread of racism on the platform.

Yes, but the monthly advertising budget of these companies is only a sliver of the ad revenues Facebook takes in each year.

Yes, but Facebook’s stock price, which dropped some eight percent at the outset of the campaign, will rebound soon.

Yes, but this is only a temporary public-relations stunt; these companies will return to advertising on Facebook as usual.

Hoboken Bricks and Mortar

Many of you have heard about a demonstration planned for Friday in Hoboken. You may have also seen some of the disinformation and fear-mongering on social media regarding this event. Today, I did something about that.

But first some background.

One of the most common online memes during the nationwide protests is the mysterious bricks conspiracy. It’s not just being repeated by random trolls and bots but has captured the social media accounts of the Trump White House, too.

It goes something like this: “Professional anarchists” are leaving pallets of bricks and stones at demonstration sites. The purpose is to incite protesters to wreak havoc, hurling the projectiles at police and breaking the windows of nearby businesses.

The FCC’s First Amendment Pretenders

Donald Trump’s latest assault on the media’s free-speech rights comes in the form of a defamation lawsuit against a Wisconsin television station that ran liberal political ads that the president’s campaign didn’t like.

A Trump campaign spokesperson said they had “no other option than to use the force of law” to stop WJFW Channel-12 from airing the ads.
Donald Trump’s latest assault on the media’s free-speech rights comes in the form of a

But don’t hold your breath if you’re waiting for FCC Chairman Ajit Pai and Commissioner Brendan Carr to intervene on behalf of this local broadcaster’s rights.

It wouldn’t be the first time these Trump appointees have ducked their duty to defend the First Amendment against Trump’s unceasing attacks on the press.

Trump, the Airwaves, and the Broadcast-Hoax Rule

As COVID-19 spreads from city to city, neighborhood to neighborhood and house to house, misinformation is being spread over the public airwaves by syndicated right-wing personalities and the media conglomerates that air their programs.

In many cases, radio and TV hosts like Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh are simply following President Trump’s lead as he convenes daily press briefings to boast about his supposed expertise, attack those he sees as political foes, demean the press corps, blame the disease’s spread on immigrants and foreigners, and make false claims about the federal response to the global pandemic.

Why Facebook Filtering Will Ultimately Fail

In its content-moderation report released this week, Facebook revealed that it had removed a whopping 3.2-billion fake accounts from March through September 2019.

That’s a lot of disinformation, wrote tech reporter Aditya Srivastava: “To put it in perspective, the number is [nearly] half of living human beings on planet earth.”

Facebook also claims to have removed or labeled 54-million pieces of content flagged as too violent and graphic, 18.5-million items deemed sexual exploitation, 11.4-million posts breaking its anti-hate speech rules, and 5.7 million that violated its bullying and harassment policies.

Facebook’s News Initiative Papers Over a Deeper Problem

Originally published at Seattle Times

On Friday, Facebook unveiled its “News Tab,” a feature that will promote to the social network’s users news articles from a handpicked collection of outlets.

Facebook says it created the feature because “we want new forms of journalism in the digital age, including individual, independent journalism, to flourish.”

In exchange, some of the participating news outlets will be compensated for their content, receiving up to $3 million a year. The social-media giant rolled out the News Tab to a limited subset of Facebook’s 2.5-billion users; the company hopes to expand the feature so it’s available to more people by early 2020.

While the News Tab isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, it doesn’t address a larger issue that’s long festered between Facebook and the news business... [More at Seattle Times]

How Twitter and Facebook Both Get Political Ads Wrong

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s decision to ban political ads from the platform lit up Twitter with praise Wednesday night.

But this issue isn’t as straightforward as many believe.

To his credit, Dorsey’s announcement is a clear rebuke of Facebook’s hands-off approach to campaign ads, which amounts to giving politicians carte blanche to lie and mislead voters.

Can Anyone Stop Facebook from Poisoning Democracy?

Freedom (to lie) isn’t free. For the campaign to re-elect Donald Trump it costs $1.5 million. And that’s just last week’s Facebook tab.

In exchange, Trump’s team gets to spread false and misleading political ads across the social network. This includes a 30-second ad that makes the unsubstantiated claim that former Vice President Biden used his influence to block an investigation of a Ukrainian energy company with ties to his son. CNN rejected the ad, noting it contained inaccuracies. But it passed muster with Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube, where it’s been viewed millions of times.

A Pivot to Digital Shouldn't Spell the End of Local News

Originally published by Common Dreams

By vowing to increase support for public media and dedicate funds to newsgathering, a proposal put forth by Bernie Sanders is raising a question that’s rarely come up in political debates: How can policymakers intervene to help revitalize local news and put journalists back to work?


Last Saturday, the final printed edition of the Vindicator rolled off the presses in Youngstown, Ohio. After 150 years, the city’s last remaining daily closed its doors, handing its subscription list and masthead to the Tribune Chronicle, based in nearby Warren, which has begun to produce a dramatically pared-down online version of the “Old Vindy.”

Exposing D.C.’s Anti-Democratic Opposition to Net Neutrality

Tracking the influence economy that fuels Washington, D.C., is no easy task.

Powerful corporate special interests are experts at concealing their expenditures through dark-money groups, Astroturf fronts, unethical think tanks and other influence-laundering operations.

Powerful corporate special interests are experts at concealing their expenditures through dark-money groups, Astroturf fronts, unethical think tanks and other influence-laundering operations.

Playing Whack-a-Mole with Broadband-Industry Shills

Defending Net Neutrality in the media is like an endless game of Whack-a-Mole.

So many Op-Eds and letters to the editor that oppose the Save the Internet Act are written by people with financial ties to the broadband industry. And far too few of these ties are disclosed in the media.

Time to get the hammer!

The latest mole to emerge takes the form of a misleading letter to the editor in the New York Times. Its author is Ev Ehrlich, who’s affiliated with the ESC Company and the so-called Progressive Policy Institute. But you wouldn’t know that from reading his letter in the Times, as neither he nor the newspaper acknowledges these ties.

Tax Social Media to Invest in Journalism

Originally published at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette 

One of the most remarkable testimonies before Congress occurred in 1969 as the Senate Communications Subcommittee was weighing heavy cuts to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the entity charged with distributing federal money to public television and radio stations.

Subcommittee Chairman John Pastore was skeptical about the need for publicly funded media. He called to testify a soft-spoken Presbyterian minister from Pittsburgh who had recently moved into WQED studios to produce a childrens’ television program for a handful of local stations.

Over the next six-and-a-half minutes, Fred Rogers made such a compelling case for public broadcasting that it gave Mr. Pastore goosebumps. Mr. Rogers ended his testimony with a children’s song. Pastore’s position softened on the spot and he voted to restore funding.

In the 50 years since, public broadcasting has survived similar funding threats. Today, most of the CPB’s annual allotment from Congress (around $450 million) goes to support noncommercial television and radio programming. And while “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” stopped airing in 2001, PBS and NPR programs like All Things Considered, Frontline, Morning Edition and PBS NewsHour remain popular among U.S. audiences.  (....more at the Pittsburgh Post Gazette)

Tax Online Ad Revenue to Fund Local and Independent Journalism

Originally published in the New York Daily News

The past year has been a bumpy ride for Facebook — and even worse for its users. But in 2019 we have a chance to clean up some of the mess Facebook has made by taxing the company to support local journalism.

In the spring of 2018, news broke that data firms and troll farms, including Cambridge Analytica and Russia’s Internet Research Agency, had misused Facebook data to spread misinformation and divide U.S. voters.

In November, an investigation revealed that Facebook executives had orchestrated a multi-year effort to cover up evidence of widespread abuse of their platform and enabled an anti-Semitic smear campaign against the company’s growing list of critics. And just last week, another investigation found the company allowed advertisers to target messages to people with an affinity for Holocaust perpetrators and neo-Nazi propaganda.

Want to Save Journalism? Tax the Attention Economy

Originally published in The Hill

Way, way back in 2009 as Facebook was celebrating its fifth anniversary, CEO Mark Zuckerberg blogged that the company was founded “to give people the tools to engage and understand the world around them.”

In the 10 years since then, Facebook’s user base has multiplied more than 10 times. But instead of giving people the tools to better understand the world, Zuckerberg’s creation has hastened the global spread of misinformation designed to divide populations and manipulate voters.

At the same time, news organizations are laying off scores of hard-working journalists, those we rely on to set the record straight. Since 2004, about 20 percent of U.S. newspapers have stopped printing, leaving nearly 200,000 newsroom employees without work and at least 900 communities without anyone covering local news.

On 'Surveillance Capitalism' and the Fate of Journalism

An interview earlier this week between Recode’s Kara Swisher and Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff is a must listen for anyone seeking to understand the "attention economy" and its threat to democratic society as we know it.

It’s spawned what Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” -- a system that has created massive disparities of power and wealth between those who control it and those upon whom it feeds.

“It’s almost like we woke up and suddenly the internet was owned and operated by private capital under a kind of regime, a new economic logic that really was not well understood,” she tells Swisher.