Journalism

[Commentary] If we want to reduce the dangers of political ignorance and deception, we should focus less on the details of technology and more on the structure of incentives we have created for voters and political elites. The painful truth about online fake news is that it is just a new symptom of a longstanding problem.

[Ilya Somin is Professor of Law at George Mason University.]

Every outlet and journalist wants to plant a flag; this story has proven to be a good way to do that. The result is that stories may be overhyped as important, just as happened with the Clinton e-mails and the WikiLeaks revelations. That builds a sense of growing scandal when what’s actually happening is the picture is being fleshed out. When you overlay that with an audience looking for a growing scandal — either from Clinton before the election or Trump after — that effect is magnified. And media outlets are rewarded for hyping things more than they ought to.

Again, none of this is to argue that there weren’t serious revelations uncovered and reported both before and after Election Day. It is, instead, to argue for more caution in evaluating the importance of a story you see on the Internet. Which, at this point, is admittedly a bit like arguing that we ought to close the doors of barns built in 1832 so that long-dead farmers don’t lose their long-dead horses.

[Commentary] On Oct 27, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that the FCC would vote as soon as November on a proposal to eliminate the cross-ownership rules and usher in a new era of media monopoly. For the better part of two decades, efforts to gut the rules have been blocked by grassroots groups representing consumers, journalists, and democracy advocates. But Pai is moving quickly in hopes that he can avoid the sort of mass mobilization of citizens that—with an assist from the federal courts—derailed an effort by the Bush administration to overturn the cross-ownership rules. Former FCC commissioner Michael Copps, who writes for the Benton Foundation and now advises Common Cause on media issues, calls Pai’s proposal “a virtual death sentence for local media."

The assault on cross-ownership rules is the ultimate government intervention, as it will clear the way for large corporations to gobble up media outlets, consolidate newsrooms, and diminish competition. The current rules seek to encourage genuine competition and robust debate by supporting a diversity of ownership and—by extension—diverse journalism that offers differing coverage and differing perspectives on the news. Pai’s intervention will diminish competition in communities across the country and benefit monopolistic corporations.

[Commentary] On their podcasts, our representatives are doing something almost journalistic: They’re moderating discussions with other political figures, interviewing experts on North Korea or monopoly power and staging interactions with the public. Except there are no actual journalists around to ask any pesky questions. The lawmaker podcast boom is just another way that our political news is becoming less accountable to the public and more personality driven. But that’s not the only thing wrong with it. The podcasts are also boring.

If politicians really want to excel at podcasting, maybe they should quit their day jobs. For lawmakers, the podcast is rarely undertaken in the legitimate pursuit of good content but is instead a dull, modern version of constituent outreach. These shows are an attempt to signal that they are listening to us. But that doesn’t mean that we should listen to them.

[Commentary] It struck me after a number of casual conversations with local Republicans over the past few weeks that they seldom mentioned the Democrats when discussing President Trump’s adversaries. Almost all conversations about roadblocks President Trump faces or opposition to his initiatives centered on what was perceived as the media’s biased portrayal of him and his administration.

Republicans and conservatives have grumbled about unfair coverage from the “mainstream media” for decades. But the Trump era has brought us to a new plateau, one where the media has moved from adversarial to oppositional. Many observers, on both right and left, have come to see the media as the leader of the resistance. If you care about journalism, it’s a disturbing trend. Many in the media would undoubtedly lay much of the blame on Trump’s “fake news” attacks. But peruse the pages or websites of most of our nation’s leading news providers, and it’s easy to understand why such a perception has taken hold, apart from Trump’s claims. We are at a dangerous precipice in how Americans receive and digest information and, ultimately, form opinions. The influence of social-media feeds, which — through user choice or outside meddling — provide only a narrow flow of information, makes the credibility of news organizations more imperative than ever.

President Trump and the Republicans will survive the media’s resistance, and perhaps even flourish. The bigger question is, can the media survive on this path? Perhaps, but not in its traditional role. Instead, it will be viewed as just another partisan special interest.

[Gary Abernathy is publisher and editor of the (Hillsboro, Ohio) Times-Gazette.]

[Commentary] Soon, a new law against hate speech will go into effect in Germany, fining Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social media companies up to €50 million if they fail to take down illegal content from their sites within 24 hours of being notified. For more ambiguous content, companies will have seven days to decide whether to block the posts. The rule is Germany’s attempt to fight hate speech and fake news, both of which have risen online since the arrival of more than a million refugees in the last two years. Germany isn’t alone in its determination to crack down on these kinds of posts. For the past year, most of Europe has been in an intense and fascinating debate about how to regulate, who should regulate, and even whether to regulate illegal and defamatory online content.

Unlike the US, where we rely on corporate efforts to tackle the problems of fake news and disinformation online, the European Commission and some national governments are wading into the murky waters of free speech, working to come up with viable ways to stop election-meddling and the violence that has resulted from false news reports.

[Anya Schiffrin is the director of the Technology, Media and Communications specialization at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.]

Press groups including the Radio-Television Digital News Association have called on the mayor of St. Louis to include the treatment of reporters in the city's investigation of how police handled riots there. That came in a letter to Mayor Lyda Krewson.

The mayor pledged to investigate police conduct during protests in mid-September of the acquittal of a former police officer's shooting of a black man, Krewson has also called for a separate investigation by the US Attorney's office. The press groups applauded those, but added that "thorough consideration" of press treatment needed to be part of the equation. The Committee to Protect Journalists said 10 members of the press were arrested while covering the protests according to a database that tracks press freedom.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai got a grilling from Democratic members of the House Communications Subcommittee, who were unhappy with his deregulatory thrust and his perceived failure to sufficiently parry the President's threats against TV licenses. Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone (D-NJ) was among a host of Democrats who upbraided the chairman for what they said was a delayed, and "tepid," as Rep Anna Eshoo (D-CA) put it, response to the President's tweeted threats against TV licenses and NBC over a news story he called fake.

Chairman Pai said he had repeated "again and again and again" that the First Amendment must be and would be at the heart of the FCC's work, including journalists reporting as they see fit without government interference. He said that was why he opposed a news diversity study under his predecessor. Chairman Pai said his record is clear, but that presidential attacks on the press were not new. But it was not as clear to Democrats that the chairman was not leaving room in his past statements for actions beyond just not pulling licenses. Pressed for more clarity from Pallone, Pai committed to not affecting license transfers in other ways due to the content of newscasts, not to launch investigations based on the content of newscasts, and that the FCC would not retaliate against companies based on the content of newscasts.

[Commentary] Kenyans go to the polls for the second time Oct 26 to stage a redo of the country’s presidential election in August. In the months leading up to the initial vote, Kenyans faced a barrage of misleading information through print, TV, radio, and social media. The atmosphere, fraught with memories of violence during 2007 presidential election, peaked with the torture and murder of an election official just days before the polls opened.

Days before the August election, Facebook rolled out an educational tool to help Kenyan users spot fake news: quick tips for spotting fake news, such as, “be skeptical of headlines” or “some stories are intentionally false.” Facebook is an important information channel in Kenya, reaching six million people, out of an estimated 37.7 million internet users, and Kenyans desperately needed the critical-thinking skills to better navigate misinformation. But the platform’s last-minute tool paled in comparison with the long and contentious election run-up.

[Bebe Santa-Wood is a recent graduate of Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, specializing in Human Rights and Communications. Tara Susman-Peña is senior technical advisor in the Center for Applied Learning & Impact (CALI) and the Information & Media practice at IREX.]

Facebook has been criticised for the worrying impact on democracy of its “downright Orwellian” decision to run an experiment seeing professional media removed from the main news feed in six countries. The experiment, which began 19 Oct and is still ongoing, involves limiting the core element of Facebook’s social network to only personal posts and paid adverts. So-called public posts, such as those from media organisation Facebook pages, are being moved to a separate “explore” feed timeline. As a result, media organisations in the six countries containing 1% of the world’s population – Sri Lanka, Guatemala, Bolivia, Cambodia, Serbia and Slovakia – have had one of their most important publishing platforms removed overnight.

“The Facebook explore tab killed 66% of our traffic. Just destroyed it … years of really hard work were just swept away,” says Dina Fernandez, a journalist and member of the editorial board at Guatemalan news site Soy502. “It has been catastrophic, and I am very, very worried.” For those who rely on Facebook to campaign politically, share breaking news, or keep up to date with the world, that might be a concerning thought. “I’m worried about the impact of Facebook on democracy,” said Fernandez. “One company in particular has a gigantic control on the flow of information worldwide. This alone should be worrisome. It’s downright Orwellian.”