Washington Monthly - Starving the News

Policy Director Phillip Longman contributes this piece in a series on how to rescue and revitalize journalism.

Back in the 2000s, influential “thought leaders,” as they had come to be known, peddled the idea that the world no longer needed news organizations. In TED Talks and best-selling books like Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus, Clay Shirky proclaimed that a critical mass of the world’s citizens would rise up from watching TV on their sofas and become hyper-collaborating, hyper-informed news producers on something called “social media.” Shirky and many other techno-prophets in those days predicted—coining a number of new terms in the process—that these “web denizens” would replace the established press by “crowdsourcing” in “frictionless,” “peer-to-peer” networks that would overthrow ignorance and tyranny across the globe. As proof of concept, they pointed to the putative role that social media platforms like Facebook were playing in the Arab Spring and democracy movements around the world.

This vision might seem laughable in hindsight, but it was not entirely wrong. During the flowering of Web 2.0, interactive digital technology enabled what became the blogosphere, a place where ordinary citizens, if they had the talent and energy, could find and collaborate with diverse audiences. These bloggers made important contributions to the nation’s well-being, like documenting the many failures of the George W. Bush administration that elite media outlets were underplaying or getting wrong. Today, the elevation of racial justice issues largely results from ordinary citizens, not professional journalists, documenting instances of police brutality with their cell phones and social media accounts. 

But these are the exceptions. On the whole, the idea that the raging hive minds of social media networks could replace or even reduce the need for an institutionalized free press seems ludicrous. Maybe Facebook could have evolved in ways that had the net effect of checking atavism and advancing the values of the Enlightenment through the wisdom of crowds. But it didn’t. Facebook instead became a corporate giant that used hate speech, conspiracy theories, and fake news to algorithmically generate engagement by users and then micro-target them with ads. Rather than a flourishing of democracy or an age of reason, this has led to pathologies ranging from the subversion of elections by actual and aspiring authoritarians, both here and abroad, to genocidal flash mobs in Myanmar and Ethiopia. 

Shirky, however, was right that the established press would suffer serious damage, even if he missed the major reason why. As Google and Facebook emerged as giant monopolies, they used their domination over advertising markets to steal away the resources required to sustain the kind of diverse and independent press we have never needed as badly as we do today. 

Read full article here.