My style is not big thinking but getting down into the weeds and detail of what’s going on. So in this talk I’ll cover a variety of issues. First an overview of the media industry’s economics and reputation. Then I’ll focus on the NYT as a case of study of where the mainstream media is at. I’ll deal with the wire services like Reuters and their new business model. I’ll provide some Australian context and Finally I’ll look at misinformation laws globally.
Business-wise, the news media are travelling poorly – the old model of ads financing journalism is broken. . In addition loyal readers are ageing, youngsters get their news from social media.
Papers that can’t generate paid on-line subscriptions will fold. In the US 2-3 papers are folding every week. The NYT says it will become on-line only before long. Personally I recently switched to reading the Australian daily on-line. It’s a different way to brief myself.
NYT publisher AO Sulzberger laments what he calls the “Collapse of public confidence in press”
Only 11 per cent of Republicans – who comprise half the population – now trust the media, and only 10 per cent of Americans as a whole trust the media’s reporting on COVID.
In Australia reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers.
Michael Gawenda, ex-editor Age is quite a leftist but disillusioned by journos and union petitions favoring Hamas.
“I think journalism is in crisis. The line between the social justice warriors on social media, and the journalists in the mainstream media, is becoming unclear. That is disastrous for journalism and journalists. And not to be too pompous, for liberal democracy as well.”
I’ve had a good look at The NYT because it is a Goliath of newspapers — Sulzberger owners claim a quarter of the world’s population engages with NYT annually. Two decades ago it seemed in a bad way as its ads migrated online, but now there’s 10m readers paying for on-line vs only half a million getting it in print. It’s profitable ; its market cap has risen ten-fold in 15 years; It’s added 1000 journalists in recent years (half through acquisitions), when elsewhere 10s of thousands of journos have lost their jobs. btw as a greedy journo, I looked up salaries at the NYT — very low, $50k to only $100k for important editors, how do they survive New York cost of living?
The other story is that it only caters for left readership . Even six years ago they were 85% lib-democrat readers — who knows what today?.
The young journos – politely people of color – are dragging it even further left.
I’ll document this in three examples.
Late 2019, NYT staff had a revolt because a headline was just neutral instead of hostile about President Trump. The staff revolt was similar to all these ABC staff revolts and no-confidences over Gaza. Someone at the internal town hall meeting with the chief editor Dean Baquet leaked the meeting transcript. Baquet said, We have to Pivot from Trump Russia collusion to 1619 Project damning US historically for slavery and white supremacy — ie get onto this whole black power/victim narrative. That won almost instant Pulitzer Prizes and brainwashing forays into thousands of US class rooms. It’s now mainstream.
NYT was caught flat-footed by Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary so Sulzberger demanded the paper broaden its range of views. (Bit like ABC having to hire or publish Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson). In 2020
there was the riots over the cops killing George Floyd — 500 violent outbreaks, burning and looting, 30+ deaths including half a dozen cops shot, and way over $2b damage — that was just the insured component.
So the op-ed page editor John Bennet allowed a comment piece by a Republican Senator Tom Cotton saying that as a last resort the military should control rioters. Calling in the military is not outrageous and many precedents for it in post-war US history, including the 1960s deep south school segregations. This caused another revolt of the younger black staff of saying they the Cotton piece put them (somehow) in danger. Management initially backed the op-ed editor then went completely to water and sacked him. They also demoted his deputy back to the news floor and published a grovelling apology
the essay fell short of our standards and should not have been published.
the essay should have undergone the highest level of scrutiny. Instead, the editing process was rushed and flawed, and senior editors were not sufficiently involved
the tone of the essay in places is needlessly harsh and falls short of the thoughtful approach that advances useful debate.
SO much for allowing diverse voices more space in the paper.
One of the NYT political-diversity hires was a Jewish conservative writer called Bari Weiss, who outraged the staff. Just a month after the Riot piece, she quit saying it was impossible to withstand the bullying culture.
She finished, Rule One at the NYT: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. . Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.
the great scandal of the NYT taking China Communist Party money is public record material.
In 2020 Republicans in Congress forced China Daily, run by the CCP, to properly disclose its US influence-peddling as a foreign agent.
It showed up an undisclosed USD 100,000 a month for a decade from China Daily alias CCP for advertorial (pretend news) supplements in the NYT. like Diayou (Senkaku) Islands belong to China. and nice Tibet and HK stories. One 2019 NYT video ad depicted the oppressed Weegurs as happy under Chinese rule. In other words, the Chinese Communists bought coverage in the NYT for a decade for a piddling $10m.
When this came out, 100s of these advertorials vanished from NYT digitised archives, dating back to 1851. The CCP money could have influenced NYT covid coverage dismissing stories the Wuhan lab leak theory. 2 NYT Whistleblowers were told “don’t go near” those stories.
Not many lay people recognise the key role of the media wire services, aggregators of content to thousands of newspapers and websiites globally. They used to take pride in being neutral, not biased. That’s out the window and they’re proud to flaunt their progressive bias.
Agence France Press, Reuters and Bloomberg have literally signed the climate pledge and partnered with 460 other media groups for hyping warming and cancelling whatever doesn’t fit the climate narrative.
This green coalition is called Covering Climate Now (CCN), run by groups like The Guardian and the COlumbia Journalism School. CCN’s founders view fossil fuel executives as criminals against humanity. They also want to “revoke the social licences” of “deniers”.
The worst signatory is probably AFP. Its climate stories are even run by the Australian, coming from AFP journo Marlowe Hood who has laughably self-titled himself “Senior Editor, Future of the Planet”.
And America’s biggest wire service, Associated Press (AP), in a jaw-dropping breach of journalistic ethics, last year hired 20 specialist climate reporters using an $US8 million gift from five green/Left billionaire philanthropies. AP explained candidly that it needed the money:
philanthropy has swiftly become an important new funding source for journalism — at the AP and elsewhere — at a time when the industry’s financial outlook has been otherwise bleak.
AP’s style book is a global guide for publishing. It now prescribes that the term“climate change,” can be used interchangeably” with the term “climate crisis.” Also “avoid false balance” because climate science is settled and near unanimous. It’s taken other foundation money to push the diversity and inclusion line – even after the US Supreme Court struck down affirmative admissions to universities.
I’ve found it costs very little to set up an outfit to bias the climate media. — budgets of just 5, or 10 million dollars. I’ve profiled at least a dozen of them worldwide. The ABC has subscrivbed to at least three of them., One is Trusted News Initiative, launched by the BBC as a global alert system to cancel narratives that don’t suit progressives. Another is Newsguard, which puts a red warning label system on your browser to flag “untrustworthy” sites. The goal is drive advertisers away from those sites. Trusted News is being sued by Robert Kennedy Jr , the Democrat contender, for anti-trust conspiracy.
Others are Earth Journalism Network that bribes LDC journos to write climate propaganda, and Science Feedback (France), that offers ignorant journos expert advice from their tame climate alarmists.
Now for Australia’s main private climate outfit .Tim Flannery’s Climate Council as a case study in successful media manipulati0n. The Council is really a media annex for Minister Chris Bowen. They stood alongside him on the platform – literally – for his first ministerial press briefing.
$8m budget – more money from green left foundations than it knows what to do with. Council Chair is Carol Schwarz, daughter of retailing royalty Marc Besen worth $2.5 billion. Big donor is Chris Morris from Computershare – worth $1.2b.
Its latest annual report boasts of its “drumbeat” of climate calamity. Its 20 media spinners spoon-fed more than 22,000 stories into the media last year to influence “millions” of Australians . That’s 800 items a week.
The Council actually trains reporters with Media Union help to propagate the narrative like bushfires are due to climate change – when globally, wildfires are declining.
The Council is prioritising now the narratives about gas cooking in kitchens being unhealthy and why drivers should be forced into electric vehicles by so-called fuel pollution standards.
The worst threat today is literally government control of the media. Governments are sub-contracting out censorship to the media giants like Meta, microsoft and Google. Australian misinfo bill: 2300 submissions and 20,000 comments. No timeline. ACMA run by Nerida O’Loughlin on $610,000 per year — will impose its own standards. And she is to enforce them with fines literally up to billions of dollars per day. Even ABC and Media Alliance are worried, while our science and tech academies want crackdowns on climate dissent.
ACMA would turn to Fact Checkers ABC/RMIT and AAP FactCheck as arbiters for what’s misinformation. This is asking a wolf to guard the sheep.
Study by IPAs John Storey of all checks since 2019 – 65% show leftist bias . On referendum, 91% bias. On covid, 94% bias. On climate, 81%.
He concludes: “The government’s proposed misinformation and disinformation laws are the single biggest attack on freedom of speech in Australia’s peacetime history.”
OVerseas:US 2022 pre-mid-terms: Biden launched “Disinformation Governance Board” = Ministry of Truth, under Homeland Security
Headed by Nina Jankowicz, who said inn 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop disclosures were foreign disinfo campaign . Truth Ministry Scuttled within weeks after derision and legal challenges on First Amendment.
UK and EC: each with their own sets of rules purporting to benefit online safety and democracy.
I hope all this hasn’t been too incoherent and I look forward to round-table discussion.
No B-S here (I hope) 