Autocracy versus trusted news sources

Why would Jeff Bezos cancel the The Washington Post's presidential endorsement, fully knowing that the cancellation would be a bigger story than any such endorsement? My guess or at least fear: because the (dis)information age is elevating the importance of reliable sources of news, and he wants more control over one. AI via targeted advertising has made journalism more susceptible to such influence by siphoning its revenue from news media to Google and Meta. We have substantially weakened journalism over two decades, so it shouldn't be surprising that it's easier to be an autocrat now.

The below blogpost was written 27 October 2024, expanding from several then recent social media posts, each of which I considered important to the overall picture. (If you've read one already, please scroll down because I guarantee you really want to read at least the last one, which you'll have missed unless you are on Mastodon, and is tremendously entertaining. There are clear headings demarking the boundaries.)

I've edited this lead section on 9 November 2024 (from Berlin) because Will Oremus, writing about a similar article, asked for answers. I see two answers:

• Education: we explicitly teach and continue modelling the use of trustworthy sources. I've noticed for years that there are social media influencers with millions of followers who are "expert" on AI, but their ideas aren't written into legislation and getting enforced. There is an elite, but it's not a conspiracy, anyone can through some combination of luck, work, talent, and willingness to accept low wages access conventional power through academia, journalism, or (other) public service.
• Funding: we do have to get real about finding alternative ways to fund reliable news. A couple of suggestions: 
• Taxing what is being made by digital ad exchanges.
• Domiciling journalists / press organisations on university campuses. We probably won't need as much built university infrastructure anyway, and most governments have some publicly funded universities that are largely independent. Journalism and academia require many of the same resources to do their jobs of researching. And we need to have each others' backs.

Present scales of (dis)information require we fall back to using well-known, reliable information sources

Fig. 1: WashPost opinions, 
all condemning Bezos'
decision. Via AndyCraig.

The Washington Post seldom publishes anything but well-verified factual information, even online. This makes it hard to hide what is happening, e.g. in Lebanon and Gaza right now, or Europe and Ukraine. Or Xinjiang. It also makes the WP, unlike the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, less likely to feed into Kremlin misinformation machines. The Kremlin spends less time creating disinformation than promoting even very occasional misinformation from sites people recognise as legitimate. I come back to the  problem of providing such material in the next section. This section is about why we need reliable institutions in the first place.

The tools of the information age – including AI – have the potential to give us more transparency, and more democratic legitimacy, than ever before. But right now, before we have constructed sufficient such tools for the purpose (including institutions and public education concerning their use) we are increasingly having to fall back on trusted authorities to ensure we know what is really happening. For example, this semester I've used in-class exams for the first time since arriving at Hertie School. This is because I don't want to risk doing a bad job of marking exams on ethics (which is ironically not my specialty – I've never had a philosophy course) that were created by LLM. Forcing students to perform under time durres, or only trusting the news outputs of a few well-known URLs, are both in many ways regressive. We want to use digital tools to be more inclusive, not less. Again, we should be able to build tools to address these problems eventually, but we haven't yet. Falling back though is a strategy you sometimes  are forced to use even in a war you eventually decisively win. And this is an information war.

Jeff Bezos choosing to a) undermine the authority of the Washington Post right before the election, and b) lead it to shed 100,00 mostly liberal subscribers, reminds me of the time then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson threw 29 relatively moderate elected legislators (MPs!) out of his party right before an election. It seemed mad at the time, but it helped him consolidate control, at least for a while. Such control based not on quality of institutions and people, but on blind loyalty is brittle. Under-regulated times like the present lead to exceedingly high volatility even for the elite. Even the capacity to maintain power is undermined without regulation. (Of course, Bezos is also reminding me of what Musk is doing to Twitter.)

Note that the entire rest of the Washington Post (including its guild) is openly publishing the truth, even about this event, even on their front page – the endorsement that would have happened, the facts around the case. Not just the journalists but the opinion writers are still giving us valid news. Please support them. If you want to punish someone for this episode, stop using Amazon, including Amazon Web Services (AWS).  Undermining newspaper funding only gives owners like Bezos more power over the editors. It also helps achieve one of the first three things autocrats want to do to consolidate power: undermine courts, elections, and the press. Fourth might be academia – autocratic leaders from Russia through Hungary and now the Netherlands, and into New York, Wisconsin, and Florida seem to consider academic freedom and authority a threat.

AI has weakened journalism via its revenue

Figure:  Thomas Baekdal

Of course journalists have been losing their jobs and newspapers closing down all over the world, for years. This is not so much because they are being replaced directly by AI, but rather because they no longer have any money. Google & Facebook took all the money that used to support print media, via targeted advertising.. It's not even clear that targeted advertisements really improve sales, but companies believe they want data on their customers. Regardless, when we look at the assaults on journalism we see now, I think it's essential we remember that those working against the general public good have always preferred the public not know that, and therefore tried to control media stories. What has really changed is the economic weakening of journalism. Targeted advertising is facilitating the shift in power towards fascism.  

More generally, "reality" television to some extent replaced more artistic, scripted television replaced film theatres and radio which replaced plays replaced books replaced talking to neighbours. All of these ways of spending time still exist, but the impacts on democracy of mass media transitions has been striking. I once met the widow of an early 20C UK MP. She said when he'd first run for office the entire town would come to any debate, because there was nothing else to do. And that debates were far more interesting and robust back then, with full participation.

Can it ever make sense to cancel a paper? (Disinformation II)

NYT via Will Lowe and Jeff Yang.

My husband and I did actually cancel our New York Times subscriptions in 2016, and I stand by that. We immediately invested more in journalism by subscribing to three other papers, including the Post. But why did we do it? Despite the awesome reporting the NYT do, they were repeatedly in 2016 doing things that fundamentally assaulted democracy, like putting Trump on the front page 2-3 days a week after he won the GOP primary. Whereas they put Clinton there just once a week all year. Before the Democratic primary, they only had Sanders there at most once a month.  So they clearly knew the importance of their front page, above the fold. Yet after the election they wrote editorials asking why anyone could think Trump seemed even remotely presidential. What's more presidential than having your picture regularly on the front page of the nation's leading newspaper?  A lot more people look at newspaper front pages than read editorials. In contrast, the Washington Post ran their own failure to make an endorsement as front page news, including naming who they had intended to endorse.

I mentioned before that it's been documented by British and American agencies that Russia uses selective amplification of mainstream media articles in its propaganda.  Now look at this openly inflammatory NYT figure from yesterday, the same day Trump rallied with open racism at Madison Square Garden. Ask yourself, how did the NYT choose exactly which categories' lines to include in that figure? Where are the women without college degrees, and the White men with them? Why don't we get to see male Asians, Hispanics, and Blacks with and without degrees? And why are they running this story that day? 

If you want to see what those other lines looked at, look at this next figure below. I get that it may seem inconsistent to favour the Post over the Times, but this is about trustworthy media, and how can you trust a newspaper that sometimes produces data journalism like this? Here's the corrected graph, correction by Philip N. Cohen. 

My partner and I put double the money we'd previously spent on the NYT into the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and the Guardian. So far I haven't seen NYT style misinformation anywhere from those papers.  

I was actually in New York City and read an actual NYT several days in August this year. Those were great papers. But doing this kind of misinformation only online not only puts it where it can be promoted on social media, it also drives a wedge between NYC and the rest of the country, as NYT subscribers defend a different paper than the one those on social media see.

Someone doesn't want you to know how the Rolling Stones stood up to Trump in 1989

At first I thought Bezos might be pandering to Trump – he must have known that failure to endorse would be a bigger story than the endorsement would have been? But maybe he (and Trump) also anticipated the hemorrhaging of subscribers, further weakening the newspaper and making it even more dependent on its owner. Also, not just any subscribers, the ones most likely to demand truths apparently inconvenient to monopolists.

But on the other hand, maybe it was just because Trump visited him at his space company, Blue Origin, and demanded a show of loyalty. Maybe Bezos is failing to show the good sense and guts the Rolling Stones did in 1989, when they refused to be seen on the same stage with Donald Trump, even if it meant losing huge amounts of money. Which incidentally, is a story someone doesn't want you to know about. You have to read the story of the Rolling Stones' stage crew going up against Trump's goons on the Internet Archive / WayBack Machine. Which the WayBack machine is of course this year has come under legal and technological assault.  (My husband and I also donate to them monthly.) 

The WayBack machine also documents that it tracked this article from 3 days after it was written (in 2015) until April this year (2024). It's now disappeared from the original site, pollstar.com though that site still exists.

I therefore include a couple of final figures, just in case the archive goes down again (but Google stays up...) But really, read the whole story, it's amazing. Don't start with this.