How media’s money woes threaten democracy | Will Bunch Newsletter

A horrible year for the American news media screamed out for what one might call an Edward R. Murrow moment of truth-telling. We finally got one in Rachel Maddow’s opening monologue on MSNBC Monday, which started with a history lesson about 1930s American fascists like Father Charles Coughlin before attacking her NBC bosses’ “inexplicable” hiring of Big Lie proponent and former GOP party chief Ronna McDaniel. It was a clarion call for journalism to defend democracy.

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The Miami Herald is one of America’s top newspapers — winner of a whopping 24 Pulitzer Prizes, renowned in its heyday for its extensive coverage of Latin America, and publisher of the epic investigative reporting that took down late financier and sex fiend Jeffrey Epstein.

Checking it out Monday, I read the latest on the raids on hip-hop star Diddy’s Miami Beach mansions, a report from Haiti by its longtime, award-winning correspondent, and then on the fourth click I hit the paywall. A subscription would be 99 cents for the first month, then $15.99 a month for this out-of-towner to be able to read South Florida’s best journalism.

But you can still read the Miami Chronicle for free.

The Chronicle’s website is topped by a Gothic-style header that looks borrowed from the Herald’s fonts. A tagline reading “the Florida News since 1937″ seems to have vanished since the New York Times reported the site actually didn’t exist before late this February. The Chronicle’s headlines link to stories from the BBC and other sources.

There’s no “about” page. You have to read the (also paywalled) Times to know that, according to researchers and government officials, the Chronicle and at least four sister sites like the New York News Daily (as opposed to the Daily News) or D.C. Weekly are part of a Russia-backed disinformation network. The paper called the new news sites “a technological leap” forward in Vladimir Putin regime’s goal of fooling U.S. voters, with fears that more deceptive “fake news” will appear on these pages as the November election gets closer.

In 1984, Whole Earth Catalogue hippie guru Stewart Brand said famously, “Information wants to be free.” The reality, 40 years later, is that for millions of internet readers, it’s disinformation — articles that twist facts, offer toxic opinions and, increasingly, include AI-generated deepfake videos, pictures, and audio — that wants to be free.

The truth? That’s probably going to cost you.

You’ve probably heard that 2024 has been an annus horribilis for the American media, even though we’re only 12 weeks into the year. Hard-working journalists — many of them young, and disproportionately people of color — have been laid off or taken buyouts at news organizations such as the Los Angeles Times, Vice Media, Sports Illustrated, and the Messenger, which closed after just a year.

This happened as smaller, local newspapers are shutting down at a rate of two a week, leaving as many as 200 “news deserts” — mostly rural counties with no working journalists — across America. The large Gannett chain of newspapers even announced it was dumping wire stories from the Associated Press so it could use the cash savings to fill “gaps” — which, based on history, could be gaps in Gannett’s top executive pay.

The backstory is that the 20th-century business model for legacy newsrooms — monopoly distribution that was a magnet for advertisers — was obliterated by the World Wide Web. Trial and error, like the mere pennies from digital advertising, convinced leaders of most surviving outlets (including The Inquirer) that the digital subscription/paywall model is the only truly viable option. Personally, I agree with the strategy. Investigating corrupt public officials or sending an actual human to the school board takes money, and it’s better when the community supports this work, instead of either the government that needs investigating, or billionaires with an agenda.

Look, we all know that the big paywalled papers like the New York Times or Washington Post don’t always live up to those high-minded ideals. True, it was a TV network (NBC, which was free, before you needed Xfinity or YouTube TV) that committed the ultimate sin this weekend of hiring GOP Big Lie promoter Ronna McDaniel for $300,000 a year. This as many large newsrooms have been marred by the tunnel vision of “both sideism” in an election that could end American democracy.

Yet it was also the Times that first told you about Donald Trump’s tax returns and secret meetings in Trump Tower. We criticize these large newsrooms because we need them to do even better. But now I’m worried that in the paywall era, the new business model will ensure that only wealthier people who can afford to be paying for news will be reading the best stories.

The great writer Sarah Kendzior got me thinking more about this problem when she replied recently to my X/Twitter post. “Articles containing damning factual information about Trump are paywalled,” she wrote. “Propaganda containing fawning information about Trump is free and often packaged as news. People will read the free article. Until this changes, nothing will.”

Bedraggled city editors lack the budget to send reporters out on a story, but apparently Putin, Xi Jinping, and their fellow dictators have millions of dollars to spend on their brand of “journalism.” Ironically, the Times reported that five mysterious new U.S. websites may be the vestige of Russia’s notorious Internet Research Agency, indicted for interfering in America’s 2016 election and run by the late Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane was blown out of the sky after an aborted plot against Putin. The Times said the recent mix of news on the Chronicle website included a deepfake video of U.S. State Department official Victoria Nuland appearing to say things she never actually said about U.S.-Russia policy.

Of course, the Kremlin isn’t the only player with an interest in promoting disinformation ahead of the 2024 election. The opportunities for our own politicized oligarchs or political-party apparatchiks to launch their own misleading websites have never been greater. And if creating the Philadelphia “Enquirer” or some other fake site is too much trouble, they can always post their deepfake videos to TikTok, where 14% of U.S. adults currently get their news. For free.

I think Stewart Brand got it sideways. The people do want information to be free, but free information wants to be manipulated.

Question: Will the Baltimore bridge collapse become a campaign issue? — Maybeland (@RobMayl) via X/Twitter

Answer: I waited until Tuesday morning to troll for this week’s question, and not surprisingly the stunning middle-of-the-night collapse of Baltimore’s heavily trafficked Francis Scott Key Bridge after it was struck by a giant cargo ship, and the ongoing search for construction workers and motorists lost in the waters below, is the only thing on everybody’s mind. If the past is prologue, some Republicans are sure to rant that the tragedy is some kind of metaphor for what they see as American decline under President Joe Biden. Such a claim would be malarky. It was Biden, after all, who succeeded in finally passing a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure program that Donald Trump failed to achieve after four years of bluster. If there’s anything political about this heartbreaking tragedy, it’s a reminder that you want a grown-up in the Oval Office when the unexpected strikes.

Opinions were somewhat mixed in response to last week’s question about Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s decision to defund needle-exchange programs for people fighting drug addiction. But a majority clearly favored “harm reduction” strategies to fight drug abuse over strict prohibition. John Reilly called harm reduction “a more compassionate approach to human beings, which is what every addict is, and can become. It is a social problem, not a criminal or a medical one.” But Jake Buttery pointed out that current strategies in the Kensington epicenter of the local crisis have failed and “isn’t it time to try disrupt the status quo with a different approach?”

📮This week’s question: Let’s deal with something lighter: baseball. Do you think the Phillies can win the World Series this year by standing pat with their star-studded lineup? Or will they regret not making any major moves in the offseason? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer. Please put “2024 Phillies” in the subject line.

There’s a classic moment in the late Tom Wolfe’s 1987 The Bonfire of the Vanities when the protagonist —Wall Street’s bond-trading “Master of the Universe,” Sherman McCoy — tries and fails miserably to explain to his 7-year-old daughter what he actually does for a living. His wife makes matters worse with her tortured analogy that when a big cake is passed around, financiers like McCoy collect the “golden crumbs.” The scene epitomized the moment in the Reagan era when America went from a nation of folks in work boots making stuff to a universe mastered by obnoxious Sherman McCoys extracting billions from thin air. Today, I’m trying to figure out how an icon of that 1980s bonfire, Donald Trump, is making at least $4 billion, and maybe more, for a company that amounts to less than zero.

Trump Media & Technology Group — which is mainly Trump’s wildly underperforming social-media platform, Truth Social — began trading on the Nasdaq exchange Tuesday morning at a share price that values the company at close to $7 billion, which — although the dollars are not immediately available to spend for the cash-strapped presumptive GOP presidential nominee — could mean a $4-billion-or-more windfall for Trump, who owns a giant stake. This is utterly insane. Trump’s $399 sneaker is a better buy.

Trump Media brought in little more than $3 million (with an “m”) in revenue in the first nine months of last year, mostly from bottom-of-the-barrel advertisers. The company lost $49 million during that time, and its prospects for growth are nonexistent. Did I mention its founder was just found liable in a New York courtroom for massive fraud around overvaluing his assets? Or that he also is currently facing 88 felony charges in four separate cases?

“The stock is pretty much divorced from fundamentals,” Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business, told CNN — in a massive understatement. Investors are paying $50 today for shares that — according to experts looking at the financials — should be trading closer to $2. It’s remarkable to me that there’s not greater outcry over a highly possible future 47th president of the United States at the head of what looks like a pump-and-dump scheme on Wall Street. Yet Trump Media also feels like the culmination of where America’s been heading since 1987, with glorious ancestors like Pets.com of the 1990s dot-com bubble or the flim-flam of mortgage-backed securities that crashed the market in 2008. Now, Trump is donning his gold sneakers to scoop up the very last golden crumbs before the whole rotten cake goes bad.

Trump. Russia. The more things change, the more they stay the same. On this date five years ago, I was reacting to the weekend’s major news: the long awaited released of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s report on dealings between Team Trump and Team Putin, as well as possible obstruction of justice. I was appalled by then-Attorney General William Barr’s effort to suppress the actual report and release a clearly laundered summary. “This is the GOP playbook that was perfected during the 2000 presidential election and the Florida recount,” I wrote. “Declare victory first and as loudly as possible (preferably on Fox) and plow through any real-world uncertainty or facts to the contrary, and make anyone — the media, Democrats — who challenges the Republican version of reality into a bitter, sore L-on-forehead loser.” Read the rest from March 26, 2019: “Russia got the useful idiot it wanted in the White House. Don’t stop fighting to reclaim America.”

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