Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

I was hoping Roger would respond to Mike's very important points. This is
where the rubber meets the road.
  

    
Whatever the merits of Mike's arguments, the news around FB these
days is not good. This link to a Forbes article (posted over in
<media>) makes the case that the Cambridge Analytica controversy is
but one of many questionable incidents of data misuse:
<https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2018/03/19/the-problem-isnt-cambridg
e-
analytica-its-facebook/#7fe4b43658a5>. The point of the piece is
that FB is a big part of the problem.
  

    

But I think you have to define what the problem is in a way that we all (or
mostly) agree on. Singling out Facebook is the kind of single-root-cause
theory of what's wrong with everything that appeals to us as human beings,
but that doesn't mean it's correct. Other internet services harvest our data
too. It is difficult to say they never should do so, and it's difficult to
frame the contours of what best practices should be. That discussion needs
to take place, but I don't think scapegoating Facebook (rather than
Cambridge Analytica) gets you much further into a deep understanding.
  

    
THank you, Mike.
  

    
I agree with 178, but it's pretty clear that the main parties to
that proposed discussion aren't so interested in having it. They
make money by harvesting our data, so the pressure has to come from
somewhere else. As for scapegoating Facebook, sometimes you have to
raise the subject excessively before anything productive can happen.
And Facebook is one way to do that, even if other companies do much
the same thing.  

BTW, I recommend Robert Scheer's 2015 book, "They Know Everything
About You." Its vintage shows that the conversation isn't moving
along swiftly. 

http://www.nationalmemo.com/book-review-they-know-everything-about-you/
  

    
Well, I think Facebook actually is interested in having that
discussion--there's lots of evidence to that effect, and it
post-dates Scheer's 2015 book. (And, really, any book published in
2016 and, so far, in 2017.) 
  

    
Dean Baker on regulating Facebook et al.

http://cepr.net/publications/op-eds-columns/facebook-the-sorry-company 
  

    
Enforcing anti-trust provisions would definitely be a good start,
but then we might have to start enforcing them more generally, which
we haven't done in decades.
  

    
Agreed, Mark. That's a no-brainer. 

Sorry I'm so late with this, but I want to mention one of Mike
Godwin's points in 168. 

"Is advertising itself bad? Maybe it is! But that's a much larger
question than the question about what to do with Facebook. It seems
worth pointing out that journals we value (for example, I subscribe
to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Wired, among others)
simply cannot exist without advertising."

That's true as far as it goes but raises two more interesting
points. First, we've had political journalism a lot longer than
we've had ad-based political journalism. Before the ad age, the
government subsidized newspapers quite lavishly--through
preferential postal rates, for example. It was understood that
political journalism was what we now call a public good. The market
wasn't going to provide the right stuff at scale, so we used public
dollars to make sure we had more of it.  

Second, it's outfits like Facebook that BROKE the newspaper's
ad-based business model starting two decades ago. And it's not
coming back. If we want strong news organizations, we should fund
them with public dollars--as practically every other industrial
democracy figured out a long time ago. 

What the correct level of funding is, or how that would work, is up
for debate. We now spend about $1.50 per capita on all forms of
public media. Canada spends 20x time that, Britain 50x, and Germany
even more than that. Actually, we spend more than that if you count
the amount of programming that goes to OTHER COUNTRIES through the
Voice of America, etc.. All on the public dime, of course, as long
as Americans don't get any of it. 

Returning to Mike's point, we should stop saying that news
organizations "simply cannot exist without advertising." That's the
way it worked for a while. It doesn't work nearly as well as it used
to, and all we have to do is look around to find better models. Kind
of like health care that way. 



 
  

    
THank you, Peter.
  

    
With regard to mcdee's suggestion on antitrust:

There's nothing wrong with discussion of antitrust remedies, but
nothing in antitrust law relates to the claims of "brain hacking"
that have informed Tristan Harris's and Roger McNamee's critiques
and suggestions. To put this another way, even if there were an
antitrust theory that let to the breaking up of Facebook, nothing
would prevent the resulting companies from engaging in the same
strategies of "brain hacking" that these guys say is the problem. 

Peter writes:

"First, we've had political journalism a lot longer than
we've had ad-based political journalism. Before the ad age, the
government subsidized newspapers quite lavishly--through
preferential postal rates, for example."

The preferential postal rates still exist. They haven't gone away.
But preferential postal rates, like Congress's superpower to
subsidize postal roads, may not be relevant in the internet era,
when fewer people get their journalism from paper and more get it
from internet-delivered bits.

More importantly, the institutional journalism that we see in The
New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post
(among others) require an immense amount of capital to operate--if
you've ever visited any of these journals' newsrooms, you know that
these large-scale news organizations can't have been built by the
cost savings of media-mail postage rates. If you want to have a lot
of working journalists, all of whom earn enough to support
themselves and their families, you need more than U.S. Post Office
support.

"Second, it's outfits like Facebook that BROKE the newspaper's
ad-based business model starting two decades ago."

Well, no, that's inaccurate. Facebook didn't exist two decades ago.
(Nor did its predecessors like MySpace and Orkut and Friendster.)
You're probably trying to talk about the effect that classified-ads
services like Craigslist had on the classified-ads income that
subsidized traditional print journals. (Craig, if he's here, has
protested such claims, and I'll defer to his experience.) But
classified ads didn't cause the decline of traditional journals'
revenue--what caused it is the internet itself, mediated by the
search engines, starting with Alta Vista and Yahoo! (which actually
did exist 20 years ago). Once you can use search engines to find
your news in a hurry, newspapers seem slow, and you end up
consulting them less, and then buying them less. David Simon, the
former newspaper reporter who later created great TV shows like "The
Wire" and "Treme," thinks the problem is actually attributable to
newspapers themselves, which opted to put all or most of their
content online for free in the early days of the public internet.
(One notable exception: the Wall Street Journal, which offered
unique business-related information and kept its paywall throughout
the switch.) Once people got used to getting headlines from the
internet (through, e.g, Yahoo! or Google News), the pitch for
newspaper subscriptions got weaker. 

But blaming newspapers' woes on Facebook is ridiculous, because
their woes began before social media platforms existed. When I was a
fellow at the Media Studies Center in 1997-98, it was clear that
newspapers were in trouble, and Google itself wasn't even a blip on
the radar.

'If we want strong news organizations, we should fund
them with public dollars--as practically every other industrial
democracy figured out a long time ago.'

Are you familiar with the United States Congress and with the U.S.
Executive Branch? Even if they could be persuaded to subsidize
institutional journalism in the way you describe--and I'll note that
the other industrial democracies that I've visited publish
newspapers with advertising in them--do you really imagine that
you'd get the Times and the Post that way?

'Returning to Mike's point, we should stop saying that news
organizations "simply cannot exist without advertising." That's the
way it worked for a while. It doesn't work nearly as well as it used
to, and all we have to do is look around to find better models. Kind
of like health care that way.'

Once you come up with an alternative model that gives us the New
York Times or the Washington Post news organizations but doesn't
depend on advertising, let us know. You might want to patent it
first, because it would make you rich.
  

    

Wait, preferential postal rates (e.g. second-class mailing of periodicals)
went away some years ago, if I recall correctly. Dealt a big blow to
monthlies etc.
  

    
What I remember is.that.fourth class.mail.for non-time-critical
printed materials went away.
  

    
Mike, I was giving an example with the preferential postal rates,
not suggesting that we return to that model. But if you put those
historical subsidies in per capita real dollars, the funding levels
are very significant. About what the Brits collect through their
television tax--$75 per capita annually instead of the $1.50 that we
spend. 

As for what can be achieved with that approach: Are you familiar
with the BBC? 

Yes, OK, the Internet broke the business model for newspapers. (I
said companies like Facebook.) 

As for the U.S. Congress, I've heard that comment many times before.
You don't get things you don't push for. We now spend more on the
Voice of America than we do on all forms of domestic public media.
We also spend more on military bands. And MUCH more on Pentagon
public relations. This is a simple question of national priorities. 

My claim is that we have a better chance of expanding public media
than we have of finding a new business model for political
journalism, which has always been subsidized in one form or another,
here and elsewhere. 
  

    

'Mike, I was giving an example with the preferential postal rates,
 not suggesting that we return to that model. But if you put those
 historical subsidies in per capita real dollars, the funding levels
 are very significant. About what the Brits collect through their
 television tax--$75 per capita annually instead of the $1.50 that we
 spend.'

If you think 18th-century newspapers can be the Times or the Post, that's
interesting, but I think you're wrong about that.

As for the television tax, you try passing a television tax in the United
States and then tell me how that works out for you. If you're trying to
say we should reform the American political system so that such a tax
would be more likely to pass, I think that's a fine idea, but if you can
that you can fix much bigger problems. My view is that the notion that
this can be done if we just magically summon up the political will to do
so requires more sources of magic than you've provided. 

"As for what can be achieved with that approach: Are you familiar
 with the BBC?"

Yes. But even if you got the BBC out of a television tax in the United
States (fat chance), you don't get the Times or the Post or the Wall Street
Journal or any other newspapers out of it. In the United States, the BBC
itself is supported by advertising, at least sometimes.

'As for the U.S. Congress, I've heard that comment many times before.
 You don't get things you don't push for. We now spend more on the
 Voice of America than we do on all forms of domestic public media.
 We also spend more on military bands. And MUCH more on Pentagon
 public relations. This is a simple question of national priorities.'

Voice of America spends a bit more than $200 million a year to reach an
estimated 240 or so people around the world. You could run a much smaller
version of the New York Times company for that amount and reach far fewer
people. Forget about the other newspapers. Forget about long-term
investigative reporting. Don't get my wrong--I love Voice of America, and
I have friends who work there, and I've been a source for VOA content.
(They also took the best recent picture of me, which is here:
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mike_Godwin_photographed_by_Voice_of_A
merica_(Cambodia),_September_2017.png>).

I suppose you imagine that I'm unfamiliar with the newspaper business or
with the journalism business generally. That's not true, though. The numbers
don't support your notions here. They don't even support them in Canada or
in the UK. I think part of your difficulty here is that you imagine if we
had a BBC equivalent here, funded by a television tax, that would fix
everything journalistically. But the numbers don't add up. And the BBC,
good as it can be, is hardly in itself a substitute for a whole world of
institutional news media. To get the latter, the only way that's ever been
shown to do it in the technological era is to fund it with advertising.
  

    

> Voice of America spends a bit more than $200 million a year to reach an
 estimated 240 or so people around the world.

240 people? That's gotta be a typo!
  

    
Or sarcasm. I'm not convinced they reach a lot of people these days.
  

    
Sorry, Mike, I could have been clearer about the numbers. The annual
budget for the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia,
and the Middle East Broadcast Networks is $800 million.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/donald-trump-voice-america-234078

We spend about $450 million on all forms public media in this
country. That's a little more than the budget for military bands
($437 million). The marching bands are safe, evidently, but
President Trump would like to zero out public broadcasting. In 2015,
the Department of Defense spent $591 million on public relations.
https://reason.com/blog/2016/10/10/the-pentagon-accounts-for-more-than-half

I make no assumptions about your expertise, but I notice you've
declined to address my main point: that political journalism is a
public good and should be funded accordingly. 

I once heard an accomplished Stanford business school economist
present her research on ad-based digital journalism. If memory
serves, Microsoft funded the research. After her presentation, I
asked whether she thought political journalism was a public good. Oh
yes, she said. But Congress would never increase that budget, so why
even bring it up? So we keep searching for the ever elusive new
business model, two decades after the Internet began decimating the
nation's newspapers. 

Perhaps you will concede that this isn't difficult stuff
conceptually. We already have some publicly funded political
journalism, just not at scale. Ten times more spending wouldn't be
difficult from a budgetary perspective. And who knows where the
political winds will blow? Ten years ago, few predicted that Donald
Trump would be president.   

To be clear, I'm not talking about business journalism, sports,
celebrity news, etc. Those areas are doing fine by comparison. But
political journalism isn't just another product. Or rather, it's
just another product like oxygen is just another gas. 

Also, I'm not talking about the newspaper business only. I think it
makes more sense to talk about news organizations, regardless of the
delivery system. I'm not against advertising as such, just noting
that it's not the only (or best?) way to fund political journalism
now. Also, I didn't say we should pass a television tax. I said
that's what the U.K. has done to support the BBC. This was in
response to your claim that without advertising, our great
newspapers simply wouldn't exist. 

I would love to discover our common ground here, if it exists.