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Dear Reader,
We’re about 25 years into the digital news revolution, and here’s a quick rundown of what it looks like to me: when the tech giants started chipping away at newspaper ad revenues, the commercial news organizations tried to compete with what the social media companies were producing by diluting their content and prioritizing tabloid stories over substantive ones. And even then, the commercial news sites failed to pull in the audiences that social media could, and started cutting their staff and producing increasingly useless, ad-filled content.
The tech giants were pretty indifferent to what information ran through their platforms, as long as it was generating ad revenue, and created new problems by fostering a wide audience for misleading information, from politics to nutrition. Not only this, but the tech companies ended up monopolizing the entire online ad business. The billionaires who cornered various markets and who now own the most influential social media companies have had an abysmal record of supporting the public interest journalism that this country desperately needs; could it be because their wealth is utterly predicated on a monopolistic and overwhelming abuse of their power. After all, it’s the very thing that good journalism would expose
Meanwhile, TV news went increasingly down the drain, offering less and less useful information to the public. Take your pick of a cable news network channel, keep it on for a few hours, and I will wager you will not see a single substantive segment on an issue that ranks in the top 20 concerns of the public. Most of the big issues—like the state of K-12 public education, climate change, and immigration—require at least 30 minutes to broadly explain. Cable offers hundreds of channels—and yet there is hardly any TV journalism about the things that matter to society.
Visiting the websites of the few large news-gathering organizations remaining, a reader has to spend a good percentage of the time avoiding aggressive advertising or paywalls to see if there is anything worth learning. The content itself on foreign affairs is through a totally distorted lens that advances the interests of global finance; the op-ed writers are stenographers for an array of corporate think tanks or intelligence agencies that prioritize the growth of their budgets above all else. The experience of trying to nail down basic facts in the last 10 months about COVID-19 has been tricky; members of the public have had to sift through a wide array of material to get to the bottom of a simple question like “how likely is reinfection?”
Journalism in the U.S. has never been paradise, and while it’s tempting to gripe endlessly about it, the better inclination is to produce it, and get it to the broadest audiences possible. The extremely talented and dedicated journalists we work with at the Independent Media Institute are plugging away—you’ll see the recent stories below—on work to be proud of, work that deserves to be at the forefront of our national conversation.
We do our very best to keep the flame going. The thing is, there’s one more dispiriting thing: philanthropists generally have a hard time understanding the point of funding media, not just IMI—I mean media in general. It gets a fraction of the support that it deserves. There’s a host of understandable reasons for it—I’ve come to believe one problem is that it’s not tangible, not an immediate deliverable like a lot of things that philanthropy can produce; a homeless shelter, a playground, a protected wilderness. And there are other barriers that are still understandable but, politely said, are disagreeable, like the fear of change, the fear of breaking out of a culture that worships the prerogatives of its wealthiest members.
The outcomes of a society that doesn’t produce much good journalism, and even worse is losing its appetite for good journalism, are quite apparent—there are tens of millions of credulous citizens who will believe anything a demagogue tells them to, even if it upends their system of government. We got a vivid illustration of that over the past four years, culminating in the scene at the Capitol on January 6.
Good journalism is always on the frontlines of making change. We can’t have a democratic culture without good journalism, or the many people and organizations that are required to produce it and distribute it.
I hope you might consider this a bit—and join us by supporting our work.
Thanks from Jan Ritch-Frel and the rest of the IMI team
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