censorship

After I read an article detailing the illegal censorship acts committed by major cell phone companies I was shocked, although I shouldn't have been. These kinds of acts have become increasingly commonplace, and it really is "shrivelling the first amendment." 

The details are as follows. Verizon has a legal and standard program to ensure that spam text messages are not sent out to users. NARAL is a text message service which gives information about abortions to those individuals who subscribed to it, this is legal and standard. What is not standard is that Verizon consciously sensored these messages, ensuring that they never reached the subscribers.  This was a highly risky maneuver done to harm the pro-choice movement, and stop the spread of information about abortions. This made me cringe. 

One can only imagine similar cases that are currently ongoing, which have yet to be disclosed. 

WIll Jacobson and "Legal Insurrection"

Today I spent some time listening to William Jacobson, the founder of Legal Insurrection.  He talked about the beginning and journey of his blog. The topic of this post will be to discuss how he deals with advertising, and his attitudes about it.

He generates a couple thousand dollars every month from his website. Most of this revenue comes from advertisements of various kinds. Except for a few deliberate promotions of Amazon, virtually none of the advertisements on this website are under his control.  They are chosen for him by algorithms with one ethic:profit.  They are specifically designed in various ways to select and show the ads that will pay the most at any given moment.

For me this raised ethical issues, but Jacobson is content with this modus operandi.  I didn't get a chance to ask him if there were any corporations that he didn't support. Perhaps he had issues about McDonalds' suggestion to its starving employees to "break food up into little pieces" to feel more full. Or perhaps he took issue, like I did, with Walmart's notoriously poor working conditions overseas.

The algorithms which select which companies to advertise for, and therefore support, don't take these moral issues into account. I wonder if Jacobson does.

Indy media is susceptible to cave to the donors?

For, Harry Browne of the Dublin Institute of Technology "both nonprofit news and commercial news often find themselves constrained by the hidden agendas of their masters. Just as commercially supported journalists often find themselves dispatched to investigate the owners' hobbyhorses, nonprofit newsers are frequently assigned to 'chase after the idiosyncratic whims of funders.'"Source

This was a troubling line and I'd like to take a moment to respond. It is not the case that independent media, by and large, will alter their content, especially their journalistic ethics or beliefs, in order to gain funding. My argument has to to with the order of the institution and the funding. 

In mainstream media, the funding made the station/outlet/paper possible.  Independent media often start out with no money at all, they begin as side-jobs, hobbies etc. They blossom once they realize there is significant support for what they are doing, and they can then rely on donations from those supporters for their livelihood. 

Furthermore, a donor need not shift and change and bargain with indy outlets to get them to publish material that the donor wants. The breadth of indy media is incredibly large, and virtually any donor can simply give to whichever outlet suits him or her. It's cheaper, smarter and more realistic to do this than try and change an established institution. 

In this way content drives funding/donations. In mainstream media, funding drives content. 

This is not to say that Indy media is not responsive to their audiences (Actually in some important ways they are on the cutting edge of interacting with their audience). They will spice up their websites, their formatting, improve, develop, and compete with other indy sites with similar angles to be the best etc.

Blogs and Money

     I just read Josh Marshall's keynote lecture at Ithaca College and it was striking for a number of reasons. The first point that was noteworthy was that TPM was basically an accident. Though his blog began in 2000, it really got going in early 2003, and at some point a friend of his suggest that he charge advertisers to be on his blog. By 2004 that was his primary revenue.  In the following years he had a staff and a wildly popular and innovate news site.
     Innovation was the next point that I want to highlight about TPM.  He began doing something called collaborative journalism which is when you ask your readers to not only view, but contribute to the discussion that your article, video, or image brings up.  Collaborative journalism is beneficial for a small blog in a few ways.
     Firstly, any mistakes that are made are quickly corrected–something that would be a near impossibility in print journalism.  Secondly, another advantage over print that TPM utilizes is the ability to make the readership feel like they have a functioning relationship with the paper. From a PR point of view, the best thing you can do is get your customer to identify with the brand.  In less perverted corporate terms, the readers feel like they are a part of a community doing something special – and they are.
     With a staff of roughly 6-10 individuals, and a monthly revenue of 45,000 dollars, TPM is a wild success in terms of the money it is making. This can have a couple of interesting effects on not only TPM, but other comparable blogs. With that much money, employees can be paid a living wage, not only that TPM can afford the best employees for the job.  Complimentarily, the content can improve due to the funding behind stories/reporting.
     I think one of the best points of his lecture was the comparison between independent media and mainstream media.  Whereas mainstream media are preoccupied with a conception of balance, independent media can prioritize around accuracy. He gives a number of examples were these two principles seem to be in conflict in ways that I had not thought about before.

Diversity in media

Ben Bagdikian, a leading scholar on the topic, has been studying corporate news ownership for decades. In his 1982 book, The Media Monopoly, he reported that 50 corporations owned half or more of the media business. By the early 1990s, that number was trimmed to 20, and is now well under 10. With such ownership comes bias, and news content now reflects a narrow "range of politics and social values from center to far right," Bagdikian writes, leaving the American audience with a press that covers "a narrowing range of ideas."

Breaking Through The Information Blockade 

Independent Media Centers revolutionize the online alternative press

by Gene Hyde

Media consolidation has become the dominant trend in mainstream media for the past half century. This quote illuminates one of the key disadvantages this poses for a democracy. Conglomeration means the political discourse is in the hands of the few. The mainstream media has become increasingly the bulletin board for a "narrowing range of ideas." 

I write because this is not the case for the entirety of America's media. In fact, independent media has done nothing if not diversify over the same time period.  If a range of ideas, diversity, dialogue, and honest/unabridged debate are what one is looking for – the place to go is the internet. The FCC does not regulate the internet like the radio waves. The web isn't as heavily regulated as CNN, MSNBC, or FOX. 

The question is or how much longer. Of course, there are those fighting for net neutrality, internet freedom, and media diversity, but will they succeed? It is difficult to say given such starkly different trends. On the one hand, independent media is growing stronger.  On the other, media consolidation is becoming ever more apparent and overwhelming.