White voters heard here

July 24, 2024 | 3 Comments
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On MSNBC this morning, I watched Elise Jordan’s focus groups from Green Bay, Wisconsin — the first after the nomination of Kamala Harris. I was honestly shocked that, after the start of this unprecedented presidential campaign by a Black and Asian-American woman, the first voices we’d hear would be from Trump voters. The next group was “right-leaning swing voters.” I was all the more shocked that all the voters in both groups were white. I debated whether to sermonize on this offensive lapse of judgment but instead went light, posting screen grabs of both groups on the socials and asking who might be missing. Enough said, I thought.

Then I got a Twitter DM from Jordan:

This was terribly upsetting. Race-baiting? For pointing out the complete lack of diversity in her focus groups? I responded:

Having been accused of ignorance of Green Bay demographics, I looked them up.

She responded:

I replied:

I thought she might back away from the keyboard, but she did not. She escalated.

Morons like me. Dooming democracy. I didn’t want to see this escalate further. I should have replied, “Bless your heart.” Instead I just said:

There it ended. I’ve given this a few hours to settle but I cannot ignore it for a number of reasons.

First, I depend on MSNBC. I’ve lamented that The Times is broken, The Post has been invaded by Murdochians, CNN and NPR are scared and rudderless, Murdoch’s media are victorious with Sinclair on their side, newspapers are mostly in the clutches of hedge funds. We need MSNBC, now more than ever, as the sane network, not afraid of at least speaking with a liberal and diverse public. It is honestly all I watch all day (other than HGTV). But after the MSNBC post-Trump-shooting and Ronna McDaniel debacles, we need to hold to account the executives in charge of the network — executives from a corporation that, as one insider schooled me, “is a Republican company.” My post was my way of saying: I’m watching, MSNBC. Do better.

Second, I have written in my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, about the damage to public discourse done by public-opinion polling as well as focus groups, which I’ll quote:

Jordan’s focus groups are all-too-appropriate exhibits for what is wrong with these means of appearing to listen to the body public while instead revealing more about the worldviews of those who pose the questions.

Choosing to lead this first day of focus groups with Trump and “right-leaning” voters showed the judgment of Jordan and her producers. In this unprecedented moment, I’d far rather have heard from some of the 44,000 Black women who gathered on Zoom this week, for they the ones who will decide this election. To lead with white, conservative voters was an explicit choice. It was bad news judgment and a slap to MSNBC’s audience. And there is no transparency into how these individuals were selected.

Jordan’s first question to the Trump voters was whether the nomination of Harris changes the odds of Trump winning. “Everybody’s excited about it and that scares me,” one of the women said. One woman volunteered of the Vice President, “I think she’s an idiot.” To which Jordan asked, “Why do you think she’s not that bright?” And the answer: “Because she hasn’t done anything… she’s not real smart.” Another piped in: “No one respects her.”

None of that is surprising: Trump voters don’t like Kamala Harris. No news there. Wasted airtime. What is surprising is that Jordan only opened the door for further insult.

In what was shown to us, Jordan did not ask them about their own candidate’s intelligence, felonies, sexual predation (this was a group of women), and evident dementia. She did not press them on what they know about the Vice President, only their bad opinions of her.

Next came the so-called swing voters. I am on record doubting that undecided voters are undecided; my theory is that they like attention, such as this. Jordan’s first question to them was to share one concern about Trump and one about Harris — not a positive characteristic of either, but leading with the negative.

“Who do you blame for President Biden’s being in office in this condition?” Jordan asked the group. “Who deserves the blame?” Hang that in the museum of dead journalism, in the collection of leading questions.

One of the participants followed Jordan’s lead, spouting a budding conspiracy theory that, as best as I could interpret it, will end up with Biden leaving office entirely before the election. “If she’s willing to hide that kind of information…. Is is it a power grab or…?” Jordan then asked the group whether this calls into doubt the vice president’s judgment. Objection, your honor. Leading the voters.

To sum up, Jordan and her producers picked two cadres of white, conservatives to give MSNBC viewers their first sense of voters’ worldview in a state and city that Biden won in 2020, if narrowly, and then asked a series of negative and leading questions about the first Black and Asian American women to run for President.

In Jordan’s attack on me in Twitter DMs, she says that it’s morons like me (how’s that for network marketing?) who doom saving democracy. My assumption is that she thinks it is my obligation to hear the ignorant ravings of people known to already hate Biden and Harris or are quick to come to conspiracy theories about them while admitting that they know little about the Vice President.

I believe strongly that journalism must be better at listening to the public it serves. This is why I helped start a degree program in Engagement Journalism and why I am working to expand its reach to more universities. Focus groups and opinion polls are not exercises in proper listening. They are about promulgating the views of the pollsters and about sequestering people into their stereotypes. Indeed, Jordan’s focus groups are, if anything, unfair to the voters they portray by selecting extreme caricatures of Heartland citizens and setting them up for ridicule.

I am empathetic to them for what media does to them — and today’s focus groups are an example. If we are a divided nation, it is media that divides into its demographic and psychographic buckets, red or blue, robbing us of all of nuance and intelligence and reducing public discourse to gotcha bites.

Said one self-reported Trumpist on Twitter in response to the photo of the Trump group above:

Another apparent Trumpist:

An independent:

A lifelong Democrat opined:

And a self-identified centrist independent offered:

At the end of the day, that is the issue: Was this in any way informative? Is public discourse better off for it? Are voters themselves more informed because of it?

Here’s what a journalist I greatly respect said in response to my tweet:

Here’s the video. Is this journalism? Or am I a moron? You decide.

In mass media’s death throes

July 13, 2024 | 1 Comment
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The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread:

In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been criticizing him, Jay Caspian Kang shares an important insight about the falling power of the press. But I come to a different conclusion.

Kang says that media are weakened and that’s what makes it easy for Trump and now Biden alike to attack them. I say what it shows instead is that as media realize they have lost the ability to set the agenda, their response is to shout louder and more often. That is what we see every day in The New York Times.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I chronicle — nay, celebrate — the death of mass media and the insult of the idea of the mass. Kang makes me see that I next need to examine mass media’s behavior in their death throes. They are not accustomed to being talked back to, by their subjects or by the public. They respond with resentment. They dig in. 

Journalists have never been good at listening. That is why Carrie Brown and I started a program in Engagement Journalism at CUNY (now moving to Montclair State): to teach journalists to listen. In all the wagon-circling by The Times’ Kahn and Sulzberger, The Post’s Lewis, The New Yorker’s Remnick, CNN’s Zaslav, we see a failure from the top to listen to and learn from criticism.

Kang likens Trump/right-wing and Biden/liberal press criticism but they could not be more different. Trump et al want to destroy the institutions of journalism, education, and government itself. Biden and liberals wish to improve the press. We are begging for a better Times. But The Times can’t hear that over the sound of wagons circling. 

As I also write in Gutenberg, we find ourselves in a paradoxical time when the insurrectionists formerly known as “conservatives” try to destroy the institutions they once wished to conserve, putting progressives in the position not of reforming but instead of protecting those institutions. 

When I criticize The Times —and Kang quotes me doing so — it pains me terribly, for I have devoted my life to journalism and long held up The Times as our standard. No more. It is failing journalism & democracy. I fear the incumbents may be beyond reform & require replacement.

By the way, the incumbents of journalism know this. That is why they invest in lobbyists to pass legislation in New York, California, Washington (State and next DC), Canada, and Australia to benefit themselves at the expense of the media — community, nonprofit, startup, digital — that would replace them. More on that another day. 

So I am glad that Biden is finally criticizing The Times and its mass-media peers, if not yet by name. I am glad he rejects the fair-weather platformed pundits, moneyed executives (corporations), and elites (Clooney) who reject him now. In trying to dismiss him, they only make him more progressive.

The New Yorker headline over Kang’s column calls Biden’s criticism of the press “cynical.” It is anything but. It is an overdue and proper response to the cynical exercise of — as Kang makes me understand — the dying power of The Times et al. No one elected Sulzberger, Kahn, Lewis, Zaslav — or Remnick — to run the nation. Millions of us voted for Biden to do so. 

Some on the socials insist that The Times etc. want Trump to win. I’ve said that is a simplistic conspiracy theory. I’ve thought they want chaos: something for them to cover. Now Kang makes me think instead they want to recapture their lost agenda and influence: their power. 

Kang closes: “If Biden believes he is the last chance for democracy in America, perhaps he should start acting like it.” That should be said of those in charge of America’s legacy mass media: If you think you can save democracy, then start acting like it.

As complicated as Black and white

July 4, 2024 | Comments Off on As complicated as Black and white
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Here are two attempts to redraw the binary political taxonomies of today:

  • In the FT, Gideon Rachman argues that after the “liberal false dawn” of Obama, “In the US and France, centrists and liberals are in full panic mode. Nationalist populism now looks like a permanent feature of Western politics, rather than a temporary aberration. The old left-right divide of the 20th century has given way to a new cleavage between liberal internationalists and populist nationalists.”

Yet he offers a balm for the nerves: “But liberals should not panic. Dismantling American or French democracy would be no simple task. The hopes of a decisive victory over nationalist populism — stirred by Macron and Obama — proved to be an illusion. But the fears of a decisive defeat for the liberal, internationalist cause are also probably exaggerated.” I’ll have whatever he’s taking.

  • In Die Zeit’s new political Feuillton, Thomas Piketty contends to Nils Markwardt that the center is kaput (or kaputt if you prefer the German original) and that — at least in Europe — the only solution is to pit farther left against far right. “A return to the bipolar left-right system will take time, but it is absolutely necessary if we want to restore trust in democratic institutions and enable political change.”

Markwardt continues (with help to me from Google Translate): “In doing so, Piketty is following, whether consciously or unconsciously, a concept of politics that was recently shaped above all by the Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe. Her core thesis is that politics is always antagonistic, it consists of the clash of different world views and programmatic contradictions that can never be completely resolved. Wanting to resolve these contradictions in a ‘third way’ or a ‘new center’, as Tony Blair or Gerhard Schröder promised before Macron, is a mere illusion. Because in the end this only creates a feeling of post-political lack of alternatives among the majority of voters, which in turn increases the need for real alternatives — from which right-wing extremists in particular benefit.”

  • I’m not sure how either applies to the American two-party trap we are in. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I assert that roles of right and left are inverted: Conservatives no longer conserve but now seek to destroy institutions as insurrectionists, putting progressives in the position not of reforming institutions but instead protecting — conserving — them. 

In all of this, it is clear to all that the old labels of right and left are useless.

The too-often-unspoken truth of what is happening everywhere but especially in the US centers on racism. That is occasionally touched on in pieces such as these — as the Europeans grapple with immigration — but it must be seen as the central factor. In the American election, that means that the Democratic Party steamrolls past its Black vice president and ignores the Black voters who saved us in 2020 at its and democracy’s mortal peril. 

In the US, the taxonomy needs to be seen as white “Christian” nationalist vs. Black and liberal coalition (I hope). 

In Gutenberg, I suggest that “the internet’s emancipation of the individual enables under represented communities to speak, organize, and act, enabling movements — reformations, even revolutions in the name of racial, gender, economic, legal, and environmental equity and justice. The existing, white power structure — in the person of the far right — counterattacks, burning the fields so as not to share their harvest with those who follow. They undermine the institutions of journalism, science, education, free and fair elections, democracy itself, and civility.”

In the US, the taxonomy that informs is Black and white. 

It is no coincidence, then, that the two dissenters from The Times’ rush to guillotine Biden are Black men — see Jamelle Bouie and Charles M. Blow — and the lone supporter of Kamala Harris as a substitute is a Black columnist, Lydia Polgreen. In his immensely practical argument, Bouie said:

I have noticed that only a handful of calls for Biden to leave are followed by “and Vice President Harris should take his place.” More often, there is a call for a contested convention. But why, exactly, should Harris step aside? Why should Harris not be considered the presumptive nominee on account of her service as vice president and her presence on the 2020 ticket? And should Harris be muscled out, how does this affect a new nominee’s relationship with key parts of the Democratic base, specifically those Black voters for whom Harris’s presence on the ticket was an affirmation of Biden’s political commitment to their communities?

Blow speaks similarly:

Yet if Biden did stand aside and Harris was passed over in favor of another candidate, there would very likely be strong protest from her legions of Democratic supporters, many of them Black women, a voting bloc that is essential to a Democratic victory.

On top of that, a free-for-all selection process would be sheer chaos. Factions would fiercely compete, egos would be bruised and convention delegates would select a candidate, effectively bypassing direct participation by Democratic voters.

All the while, a mob of white columnists, editorialists, reporters, and commentators rush past them, proposing various white substitutes for Biden, giving glancing mention to the Black vice president. This is how the Democrats will lose democracy, by not at last facing the centrality of race.

How to save news?

June 28, 2024 | Comments Off on How to save news?
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There is still hope that California’s perilous, protectionist legislation for news could be reformed, but not without effort. 

I just returned from Sacramento, where I was invited to testify (video below) in opposition to an Assembly bill by Buffy Wicks, which I analyzed in depth in this paper and later criticized as amended. It has passed the Assembly and the Senate Judiciary Committee. A competing bill by Sen. Steve Glazer, which I also criticized, just passed the Senate. 

So now there are two bills in play for a long, hot summer of negotiation in Sacramento — not versus each other but versus a counterproposal from Google, which I’ll describe below. The good news is that Wicks made clear in her testimony before mine that her bill — though well along in the process — is a work in progress, and she is open to change. She and Glazer appeared together in the hearing to show unity of purpose. 

I continue to have problems with both bills. The Assembly bill is a tax on “accessing” content — thus a tax on reading. The Senate bill is a tax on gathering data — thus a tax on information. They each would benefit the hedge funds that are destroying the 18 of the top 25 newspapers in the state that they control. If anyone should be held responsible for the death of newspapers and taxed for it, it should be the hedge funds. Instead, the bills blame Google and Meta for news’ decline and hold them singularly responsible for its fate. The Assembly bill requires an unwieldly process of arbitration. They are each constitutionally questionable and could spend years in courts before a penny is paid. 

A negotiated agreement would be preferable. Google has proposed an alternative involving unused tax credits and a $30 million contribution to a fund for journalism. In my testimony, I say that I favor a fund, like the Civic Information Consortium in New Jersey. Rather than distributing money indiscriminately to hedge funds and out-of-state media conglomerates as both bills would, an independently administered fund could grant money based on goals and merit, with accountability. Rather than feeding corporate bottom lines with no assurance of supporting journalism, a fund could support specific efforts such as KQED’s quality news- and ad-sharing network; it could foster the creation of support networks like the NJ News Commons at Montclair State; it could invest in news startups such as Lookout Santa Cruz, which just won a Pulitzer; it could most importantly support coverage for underserved communities.

The negotiation should not — cannot — be just with Google, for it is ridiculous to hold a single company responsible for the fate of another entire (generally mismanaged) industry. Who else might join in such a fund is a crucial question. Before I testified, I reached out to Meta, which still insists that if a bill passes it will pull news off its platforms as it did in Canada, where — despite spin from publishers’ lobbyists — the situation is now dire. Meta is also ending the deals it was forced to make under Rupert Murdoch’s legislative gunpoint in Australia, threatening to ban news there. That would be catastrophic in California, for I fear it would give Meta an excuse to take down news across the U.S. Passage of one of these bills requiring payment would also lead to the death of voluntary contributions made through the Google News Initiative, which has done much good. 

I hope that Meta can be convinced (pressured by its home-state politicians) to contribute to a fund and bring news back to Facebook and Instagram just when democracy needs it most. I’d also like to see Amazon and Microsoft contribute. 

It shouldn’t just be tech companies taking responsibility for the health of the news and information ecosystem. It’d be great if Press Forward, the journalism megafund, would partner in a California fund, along with any of the state’s many billionaires. State and local governments could contribute as well, devoting large shares of their advertising budgets to quality local news media. 

On the other side of the table, negotiations must not be monopolized by legacy newspaper companies and their lobbyists. The hedge funds’ papers are zombies. The L.A. Times has a market penetration in L.A. County under five percent, but I hear that its billionaire owner thinks he’s owed an absurd payoff from Silicon Valley. They hardly matter anymore. As I told one legislator, you need no longer be intimidated by the people who bought ink by the barrel for they now buy it by the pint. Any discussion must include Black newspapers, Latino news organizations, not-for-profit news media, independent news organizations, and digital startups, all of whom should step up to be heard. 

At the end of my testimony, I urged the legislators to foster collaboration between news and technology, rather than divorce. California of all jurisdictions — as the headquarters state of the internet — should set an example for journalism and technology working together, especially as AI looms on the horizon (and so does fascism). 

Google and other tech companies can help in other ways. I’d like to see them develop statewide and regional ad networks for news and specifically for Black media, Latino media, and so on. They could collaborate on development of appropriate uses of AI in news (not to manufacture clickbait). Google and Meta have supported training for journalists in product and audience development (full disclosure: at my former school); I’d like to see that continue and grow.

How much better it would be to encourage such collaboration instead of extracting a pound of digital flesh from tech companies to reward the lobbying of hedge funds and investors. 

Who knows what will come out the other end of the legislative sausage extruder, for there are many other cards to be played, including what I think is terrible legislation trying to regulate AI from the wrong end and privacy. 

For more details on the Assembly bill, see an excellent and fair analysis of from the counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee here.

And here is what I had to say in my three minutes in Sacramento. 

Disclosure: My expenses for two trips to Sacramento — one for meeting with legislative aides and the other to testify — were paid or by the California Foundation for Commerce and Education, affiliated with the California Chamber of Commerce, which also commissioned my paper.

The new pyramid of discovery

June 15, 2024 | 1 Comment

I’ve just started using Perplexity’s Discover news application and have to say it is impressive, compiling multiple news reports on a topic and producing a well-organized summary and explanation, giving users the opportunity to query the topic — and providing citations and links to news stories (revealing, by the way, just how repetitive they are). See this example on the Pope and AI.

Perplexity is doing to news organizations what news organizations have long done to their sources, which should make journalists reconsider their relationship with information and public need. Should. 

Journalists have, predictably, started screaming bloody murder, crying that the AI company is stealing and repurposing their valuable content. (I am amused it is Forbes leading this charge given that it has long since become a joke; I confess to laughing out loud every time I encounter its paywall. But it does have some good staff reporting among contributors’ output and the story at hand about military drones is one example.)

I’ve been asking lately what happens if the web is destroyed by all of media’s clickbait and now AI’s endless copies of it. And what if the web is superseded should chat and soon AI’s agents become primary means of discovery of information? Will authoritative news sources then need to make themselves discoverable through AI — as they had to through search and social? By that I don’t mean make deals with OpenAI, et al (Springer’s, Murdoch’s, Diller’s, The Atlantic’s, and others’ money grabs are not about licensing content but instead about selling their silence in lobbying and PR). Rather, I’ve been suggesting the news industry as a whole should look at creating an API for news and negotiating terms: payment, credit, links. See, for example, Tollbit; see also Norwegian media banding together to build a native-language LLM. 

All this is making me ask questions about the role of news media in the larger information ecosystem. What I’m about to discuss is basic media and communication theory, but the current row over Perplexity puts it in a new light, for it makes me see how news media have played precisely the same role with source information that Perplexity is playing with them.

News media insist on looking at this new reality from their perspective, as content creators and copyright holders. But now that the shoe is on the robot’s foot, let’s look at it the other way around, from the perspective of original sources of information, research, content, creativity, opinion, and art — and from the perspective of the public: individuals and communities that need or want access to all that. Since the birth of the newspaper in 1605 (see my Gutenberg Parenthesis), everyone who has wanted to reach the public has had to go through the gatekeepers of media. Today the gatekeepers of media have to go through the new gatekeepers of search, social, and AI. Who is adding value and who is adding friction?

Take, for example, Becca Rothfeld’s excellent review of John Ganz’ new book, When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, in The Washington Post. From The Post’s perspective, it did Ganz and his publisher, FSG, a huge favor, covering the book and even linking to it (through which both The Post and its owner profit every time a copy is bought). 

If Ganz and FSG thought like news organizations do when confronted with Perplexity, they would be in their rights to complain that Rothfeld took Ganz’ ideas, reporting, and research and repurposed it for the purpose of creating her essay, while the paper profited through advertising and audience attention and subscription. They would also, as newspapers do, ignore the value of citation and links. 

So The Post does to a content creator what news organizations complain Perplexity does to them. This is what news organizations have long done to authors, scientists, researchers, experts, theorists, and people who have useful experiences or ideas: extract, repurpose, and exploit. How’s it feel, guys, now that it’s being done to you?

Now, of course, Ganz wants to be discovered and not just to sell books but also to have his ideas spark larger public discourse. So it is a bargain I am sure he is more than willing to make. He and FSG have something to sell. 

But what of the people who simply have information that may be relevant and valuable to others and see their ideas, research, or experience taken and used by news media (often misshapen in the process)? Once sources speak to a reporter, they lose control of what they have to say. More than that, the reporter then asserts ownership of the result. The reporter now claims it as “my content” and cries when other reporters rewrite it without credit (to the reporter; nevermind the source) and when search and social quote it (while linking to it, for the benefit of the news organization). They are complaining now when Perplexity reads, summarizes, and links to their articles. Their publishers are not only suing AI companies but also lobbying for legislation to extend copyright and diminish fair use when it comes to technology.

Note well that copyright at its birth in the 1710 Statute of Anne did not cover newspapers and magazines. In its suit against Open AI, The New York Times claims that “since our nation’s founding, strong copyright protection has empowered those who gather and report news to secure the fruits of their labor and investment.” That is simply false. The US Copyright Act of 1790 protected only books, maps, and charts. Newspapers and magazines did not fall under copyright’s purview until the Copyright Act of 1909. As I explain in The Gutenberg Parenthesis [hey, I, too, want to be discovered and sell books; discount codes are here] the Postal Office Act of 1792 enabled newspaper publishers to trade copies through the mails for free to allow them to share stories — leading to the creation of the wonderful job title of “scissors editor” — with the explicit intent of creating a national network for news and with it, a nation. As I explain here, even in the infamous hot news decision favoring the Associated Press, the Supreme Court refused to grant a property right to news. 

Yet newspapers act as if news, information, ideas, and opinions are their property as content. No, they merely borrow it to exploit it for their own purposes, locking it behind their paywalls to sell subscriptions and using it to attract and sell attention to advertisers. 

How dare Perplexity do unto them as they have done unto others?

Now, before you @ me, let me make clear that I well understand the need to support journalists and their reporting. I spent a good deal of my career in the industry and the academe exploring business strategies. Journalism is a public necessity. 

But the real necessity is an informed and educated public. That means that authoritative, expert, useful, and relevant information needs to get to the public with as little friction as possible. Today, though, every effort is going into increasing friction: paywalls, link taxes, demands to take content down, and flooding the zone of good information with bad information: propaganda, spam, and clickbait. 

Am I suggesting that news should be a public utility? No. That is an impossibility given that news should operate on the public’s behalf to check power, not to lobby for favors from it. I believe that whatever we come to think of as journalism in the future must coexist in private for-profit and not-for-profit entities alongside technology, also in private but one hopes open entities.

And what is this journalism of the future? I cannot yet say. Our envisioning of it must begin not with concern for the claims of property rights to information. It must start instead with rethinking how best to make information available to the public: not to the imagined mass (that deformed creature I decry in The Gutenberg Parenthesis) but instead to each of us as individuals and members of communities.

Perplexity Discover is a nice presentation of news, richer and more compelling and convenient (because it brings much together) than Google News or even, dare I say, a newspaper. (“Reading a newspaper,” said Benedict Anderson, “is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.”) I haven’t used Discover long enough to come to conclusions about it. And as it is generated by AI, I have no doubt it is filled with errors and thus is unreliable and unusable as a primary source of news. None of this is intended as a recommendation to switch one’s news diet to Perplexity. 

But this moment does provide the opportunity to rethink the architecture of our news and information ecosystems. The goal should not be to support legacy institutions and their ways. The goal must be to improve the means by which quality, credible information is made available to the benefit of individuals and communities in the public and to the credit of the sources of that information. Intermediaries — whether newspapers or search engines or social platforms or AI companies — must add value or get the hell out of the way. 

(I asked Google Gemini, atop this post, and Meta.ai, here, to draw me a pyramid with “you, Intermediaries, and sources.” These are the results. AGI is nowhere near.)