The new divide in journalism is between the heard word and the written
A writer sentenced to jail once said that a good newspaper, he supposed, is a nation talking to itself. A good local paper, it follows, must be a city, town or village talking to itself. That conversation has now been interrupted. Over the last 15 years more than half the jobs in the news industry have disappeared, with over 40 UK local papers closing down last year alone. What’s left of institutional journalism is faced with many preoccupations: how to cover uncorroborated accusations, whether to add to the hysteria over child disappearances, how many times should Nigel Farage be allowed on Question Time? Etc. While fewer jobs in journalism exist today, those in the profession are required to produce a higher quantity of news than ever before. The BBC, for example, produces three minutes of content for every minute of the day. Most dailies produce a similar amount of content. If one had the inclination to dedicate every minute of every day, without sleeping, they would be able to consume only one third of the content produced by a single news outlet.
This mammoth amount of content has to be consumed in digestible chunks. The public swallow the vital information one messy piece at a time, but the majority misses the plate and ends up on the floor. How many readers are aware of the Jihadi-run camp training kids on US soil? Or about the $22 million UFO investigation programme? Other examples of groundbreaking stories which got lost in 2017 include over one million people contracting cholera in Yemen, accusations of sonic weapons used in Cuba, and a Croatian war criminal's suicide by poison during his trial at the Hague. Remember these stories? No? Not surprising, even if the reader had read one or two of these, it is statistically implausible they were aware of all these incidents. The reason is that we are busy people, and 2017 was a busy year. Not even professional journalists have the time to absorb even a fraction of the news the world is producing. The reach of social media has created a platitude of news tastes so diverse as to create a business model where the supply must necessarily exceed the demand.
What has happened
Since the increase in availability of portable video content, the difference in news consumption has started to divide along class lines as well as political ones. The rise in smartphones has led to the increase in news absorbed through social media and video streaming services.
Print will survive through weeklies such as Private Eye, the Economist, New Scientist - all bastions of good journalism, as well as through free daily newspapers such as the Metro and the Evening Standard which are kept afloat by ad revenue. Radio will continue to trundle along until it is inevitably replaced by podcasts and more modern services, though compared with TV and social media, these news industries are no longer serious competitors.
But first, some statistics: The proportion of people using a computer at work was 80.5% for people in managerial and professional specialty occupations and 70.5% for people in technical, sales, and administrative support occupations, meaning that the majority of people who earn high salaries, unsurprisingly, use a computer at work. These workers thus have access to readable web content produced by mainstream journalists, the majority of which identify as liberal.
At the other end of the spectrum, only about one in five persons used a computer at work in the occupation categories for operators, fabricators, and labourers. In the UK, 2016 signified the year where TV was overtaken by online sources, where blue-collar workers traditionally got their news. These workers have instead begun to get their news from online services, but without the access to a computer.
While this spot has traditionally been held by radio, the same study showed that radio viewership has not increased with the decline in television viewing. This is because an increasing amount of young people in blue-collar jobs combined with the ever-decreasing cost of data services means that video streaming services can now replace traditional radio. Most people who drive for a living, have factory jobs, or work in an industry which requires little face-to-face communication, are able to put headphones in instead of talking to colleagues. This means that an increasing number of people are forming political opinions from online streaming platforms as opposed to traditional news sources.
The conundrum here is not only that these lines are dividing across class, but also across gender as well. YouTube, Reddit and Twitter’s audience is predominantly male, while Facebook, Instagram and particularly Pinterest are visited mainly by women. A gap has grown not only in the way people with different types of jobs absorb information, but also between the ways the two sexes tend to absorb news. This, in recent times, has added to the intensity of opinion surrounding gender and class based issues such as feminism, immigration, racism, and work equality.
These trends point to a division of news consumption where a different style of news is absorbed by working to middle class young men than is consumed by middle to upper class men and women, although these divisions are broad. Notice I say tend to, as hope is kindled in the knowledge that these trends boast many exceptions where creators and users have attempted to bridge the gap. However, the gap exists, and into it have stepped a number of influencers.
This vacuum has been filled by a new style of long-form interview, one which enables listeners to engage with difficult topics and challenging concepts without having to listen to the host verbally tackling the guest at every opportunity. Best of all, it’s free. While radio maintains a steady audience, YouTube has laid itself out as the battleground over which the political hearts of new generations will be fought, and so far the left is giving ground fast.
Most people, when asked to think of tech giants that sway our political opinions, think of Facebook, Twitter or newer arrivals such as Instagram or Snapchat. The 100 million hours of Facebook video watched per day, while no doubt a significant force in shaping our perception of world events, pales in comparison with the one billion hours of content consumed daily on YouTube. An entire one third of all internet users find themselves on the website at various stages. Millennials prefer YouTube two to one over traditional television, while the average length of video consumption increases by 50% year-on-year. As the world’s second largest search engine, YouTube remains Google’s quiet giant, where content creators and political influencers can be directly funded through their large audiences.
While the majority of YouTube video uploads include strategy games, dogs and makeup tutorials, a political movement has taken hold. Many of these influencers have been monolithically termed as the “intellectual dark web” (IDW) by the New York Times, and its collection of sub-influencers respectively named the “alternative influence network” (AIN) by the Guardian. The two new outlets seem to have missed that they are talking about the same audience. Their members include people such as Joe Rogan - whose three-hour podcasts attract such incidents as Elon Musk’s marijuana adventure - Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin, along with several other sub-culture icons.
These influencers attract millions of viewers and address issues such as personal responsibility, free speech, and media bias. These podcasts and interviews have begun to replace the long-form sit down interview which used to prevail on late night television with William Buckley and other benchmark interviewers. The old format was replaced over the last twenty years by a snappy, attention-grabbing spectator sport where the goal is to make the interviewee look as uncomfortable as possible, where they hopefully embarrass themselves enough in the short interval to run a headline worth clicking on.
Audiences want good journalism, but not enough to pay good money for it.
This gap in journalism is being filled by its detractors. Many of these commentators have been outlined by verified-Twitter journos as extreme or at the very least unorthodox. This has elicited a tit-for-tat response where new creators criticise, make-fun-of, and sometimes exhibit contempt for the mainstream media - a phenomenon seen most vividly during the Trump and Brexit elections of 2016. Through this process, an audience has developed that not only does not seek out mainstream journalism, but actively avoids and maligns it. The mistrust on both sides is absolute.
What captures concern over all of this is the level of censorship which has become ever more present as Google tightens its hold on the streaming service and comes to grips with its news audience, censorship which points not only to Google’s willingness to restrict content, but also in its inability to police its own guidelines effectively. Professional conspiracist Alex Jones was forcibly removed from every major social media outlet, including his personal Facebook, his PayPal account, and YouTube, his main platform. The collusion of tech giants is a worrying trend which shows no sign of going away. Do we ban people that call Mohamed a pedophile? European law seems to think so. Climate change deniers/skeptics? Perhaps a few would agree. Deniers of the Armenian genocide? A little less clear. What about skeptics of the Moon-landing? Bush did 9/11? Elvis is alive? The Lizard people? Surly, all conspiracies must now come under the same scrutiny. The already blurry lines between fake news and honest speculation are stamped further into the mud with every strike our tech overlords make against dissident channels.
Perhaps more worrying still is the tilt towards giving national governments further ability to censor content which appears on an already heavily-censored social media. As it stands, 60% of the most popular YouTube videos cannot be viewed in Germany. Theresa May recently announced a need for states to intervene in supporting journalism in the interest of combating ‘fake news’. With the tech conglomerates’ need to retain users on the same platform by feeding them news that confirms their pre-held beliefs, and a national governments’ need to prevent dissident views from sprouting like mushrooms in the online free speech Petri-dishes - the two are a match made in heaven.
What will happen
As outlined, a large audience of predominantly - though not exclusively - young, male, working to middle class news consumers are now becoming completely detached from traditional news and are centering around various cultural icons on a social video platform which is actively restricting their content.
It seems that two options can be arrived at from following the path we have paved ahead:
Censorship becomes the norm, spurring a mass digital migration from one video platform to another - Vimeo and Twitch are possible contenders - which will effectively separate the two strands of modern opinion into two or more distinct platforms. This is an already observable phenomenon. Minds.com boasts itself as a blockchained equivalent to Facebook, while DuckDuckGo is able to advertise itself as the next Google - except it doesn't spy on you - and even Reddit has seen a competitor called Voat burst onto the scene, all advocating themselves as a free-speech alternatives. Gab, a once powerful competitor to Twitter, has recently been dissembled and removed under the pretense of inciting hatred. The question must be begged of how long it will be until the rest of these platforms are taken down. The digital segregation of right from left will lead to inevitable backlash where populist figureheads are elected in order to kick back against a perceived cultural attack. Sound familiar? The war between conservative and liberal will go on forever, an eternal, biblical struggle. Globalist against nationalist. Cavalier against roundhead. Optimate against Populari. Moloch against Kek. More than likely, the national and international discourse will continue to deteriorate to the point where western nations vote purely for their own divided interest groups. Argentina and Malaysia are examples of where our divided political country is likely to head.
On option commonly discussed is to deanonymise internet users across the globe. This move will enable free discourse while forcing people to suffer the consequences of reckless diatribe and hate speech. I will waste no energy discussing the merits of such an idea, as all research shows the task to be an impossible one, likely to result in a lucrative VPN industry where hundreds of fake Estonian IPs are investigated for posting Nazi jokes on unsuspecting government websites.
The only second option is for journalists, political commentators and content creators to attempt to bridge the gap between these budding platforms and their new audiences. This will require a great deal of work for little reward, at first, but older platforms are showing that it can be done.
What can be done about it
The Guardian, one of the first to turn the tide, has begun enabling comments in the wake of the Kavanaugh shenanigans. The BBC, cautious beast that it is, will every now and again dip an algorithmic toe into the murky waters of free discourse by enabling the comments on its YouTube videos. One user, leaving a comment below a video of a Tommy Robinson protest, summed up the change of direction neatly: “Enabling the comments are we BBC? Bold move, we’ll see how it plays out.”
These positive moves show that the breakdown of discourse is at least a concern for journalists at large - speech is their bread and butter after all - though whether that concern will be shared by the tycoons of Silicon Valley is another matter. Bloomberg, among other outlets, has begun offering its paid articles alongside audio versions so that commuters everywhere can enjoy content while at the same time avoiding conversations with strangers and ignoring pleas for spare change. While not solutions, these moves are a step back from the problem, and perhaps resemble a casual head turn towards the way out of this calamity.
James Harding, who led the BBC news desk during Brexit, Trump and other somewhat noteworthy events which took place over the last few years, spoke in London about the state of the news media on 17 September 2018: “You were there for the catchy stories, but you missed the real stories,” was how he paraphrased the criticisms of journalism’s detractors. “You did not see the financial crash happening and you did not see Brexit coming.” He paused, the eyes of many a journalist on him. “I think it is worth reminding everyone that journalists are not in the business of prophecy.”
After his speech, I asked him what stories, if any, he would cover differently if he had the chance to do so again. “The financial crash,” he said, after pondering the question for a moment. “And the disappearance of the young girls, I feel as though we never had an end to that story.” His words eat at the heart of the matter. Readers look for a sense of continuity, which tracks the development of events and allows us to predict the future. But studying history does not make one a clairvoyant, and the same can be said for examining current events. The prevalence of so many threads tying and untying themselves across various news cycles renders it difficult for us to prioritise the most important events likely to affect us down the road. Focusing on reaching a wide array of audiences is something which every commentator and news producer should strive towards, but this responsibility falls on the public as well as the professionals. Fact is not fiction, and journalists do not write with an ending in mind. There are some stories which never conclude, and perhaps the resting place of journalism is one of them.
