The Rise of Populism and the Damages to Journalism
In the past two years, the global rise of populism has inflicted severe wounds to journalism. But inadequate responses from the news media has compounded the damages.
The United States, Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, France (with the Yellow Vests movement), Italy… they all have one thing in common: working as a journalist in one of these countries has become increasingly difficult while operating a news outlet has become more uncertain. There are multiple causes behind this shift. In some instances, the fault lies in the media themselves. Let’s look into it.
The Internet’s Social Sewage
Just subscribe to some Facebook groups supporting various populist factions and you’ll be appalled by the mixture of fake news and putrid ideologies, in which the claim for a more equitable society is practically anecdotal. Facebook has become the dumpster of free expression with a significant casualty: facts.
The dramatic rise of fake news and the demise of facts can be rooted at the beginning of the Trump presidency. The day Trump took office could be called the “ground zero” of the new wave of global populism. But the populism trend actually started nearly twenty years ago: since 1990 the number of political movements labeled as populism has increased fivefold. Trump’s era has initiated two, accelerating factors: the generalization of misinformation — 7646 blatant lies or misleading claims for Trump’s first 710 days in office, according to the Washington Post counting — and the subsequent public defiance of the mainstream media.
The Cult of Total Transparency
The whole mystique of modern populism is buttressed by the concept of total transparency. In America, this transparency is epitomized by Trump and his tweets. Right now in France, the most popular media outlets among the Yellow Vests are Russia Today and its widely followed “lives” on Facebook. No one seems to mind that Russia Today is a Kremlin-driven propaganda machine because it has an unfiltered stream of content that gives an open-mic to the protesters. The incessant publication of content that gives a voice to the protestors conveys the enviable attributes of trust and objectivity.
Last week, the Jean-Jaures Foundation in France published a remarkable analysis by the journalist Roman Borstein. The results of his work can be applied to all the populist movements across the world (the original text is in French):
“It is one of the typical features of these groups: with the exception of the production of Russia Today and Brut [meaning “raw”, a social media-only TV channel which fan the flames of the Yellow Vests], and unless it is a report about police violence or a political scandal, there is never a link directing to any mainstream media. The information is built in a participatory way and circulates horizontally. A 30-second clip shot on a smartphone is more credible than a TV newscast, a set of photographs posted anonymously is seen as a better assessment of the size of a gathering than a counting mentioned in Le Monde’s “Decodeurs” [the fact-checking outlet of the French daily], an unsourced chart exposing “real data” of an alleged economic indicator will be deemed as more trustful than a specialized website.”
In addition to this defiance of mainstream media, the Yellow Vests movement is openly condoning physical attacks of anyone carrying a camera that is not affiliated with the movement.
Repeated Failures of The Media
In a desperate attempt to catch the social media wave, most news outlets reacted blindly to populists movements and rarely made distinctions. For example, BFMTV, the dominant all-news TV network in France, obligingly gave hours of airtime to “representatives” (an elusive concept) of the Yellow Vests. A protester was even offered to become a “columnist” for the network (the idea was shelved). When the network decided to distance itself from the movement by providing less complacent coverage, it quickly fell from grace and irredeemably lost legitimacy among the Yellow Vests.
In the United States, the center-left wing mainstream media failed to adapt properly to Trump, but in a different way.
The failures began before the election when most news outlets fell into the trap of over-covering a candidate whose strategy consisted precisely in saturating the airwaves with the most outrageous statements. As the Oxford communication professor Gilbert Picard noted in a keynote speech — delivered just a week before the election — the usual standards of journalism no longer apply to cover a populist electoral campaign; it could even backfire:
“In covering populism, journalists who provide neutral reporting of slander, hate speech and lies become complicit in attacks on democratic values and human rights. When journalists remain unreasonably neutral, they help spread falsehoods and lies and promote the causes of hatred and racism. When journalists stand above it all and don’t respond, they become partly responsible for the results.”
Picard also mentioned the benefit that Trump drew for the imbalance in the coverage of the 2016 campaign (emphasis mine):
“Between January and September of this year [2016], Trump received 822 minutes on the network television nightly news broadcasts, whereas Clinton received only 386 minutes. If valued as television advertising time, the free media attention on television news, cable news, and public affairs programs given Donald Trump during the primary elections was worth more than one billion dollars, compared to $300 million for his nearest competitor. This disparity catapulted Trump from being a sideshow performer into the Republican Party nominee.”
Once Donald Trump entered the White House things didn’t improve. Reporters and newsrooms who had been shaped by decades of civilized relationships with the president were not ready to handle the vicious communication tactics of the new head of state. They remained fixated on the typical method of reporting on a “normal” presidency and found themselves relaying every statement or tweet made by the arrogant and flustered leader. In doing so, they fell into the trap of amplifying every move and responding to every controversy that was deviously and gleefully triggered by a president only willing to flatter (and expand) his supporters. Trump is by no means a “normal” political leader. He should have been treated differently.
Right now, the main threat to the Trump presidency is not what has been unearthed by the news media, but the Robert Mueller investigation. However, the special counsel acts stealthily, like a submarine, surfacing from time to time, only to fire a volley of Tomahawks before diving again.
Up to a certain point, Mueller’s tactic — shooting with live ammo once the target is unmistakably identified — should have been the blueprint for an editorial treatment for this unprecedented presidency.
Instead, mainstream media gave up most of the editorial discipline that is supposed to be the trademark of American journalism.
CNN or MSNBC are no longer worth watching if you are interested in facts and discernment. Both are an endless stream of editorial segments and suppositions while a factual coverage would be the most potent anti-Trump stance.
The Washington Post has become a bombardment of anti-Trump news displayed without any hierarchy between what is really important and what is anecdotal. One day last summer, on my mobile app, I counted 11 stories about Omarosa Manigault Newman (a former White House aide who was brutally fired by Trump), 8 international articles stories, and 7 business pieces. I since canceled my subscription (and learned later that several of my friends had done the same). I decided to pay for The Guardian instead. As opinionated as The Guardian may be, the publication gives me a much broader perspective, including on news coverage from the United States.
As for The New York Times, I couldn’t agree more with its former editor Jill Abramson who said in her upcoming book “Merchant of Truth”: “Though [Executive editor Dean] Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump. Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.” (Read Abramson’s interview in the New Yorker).
The Trump presidency has inflicted great damages to American journalism caught between pleasing its liberal audience and chasing clicks. Too often, for the sake of a juicy story, basics precautions or skepticism have been disregarded. On Sunday, in the wake of a too-good-to-be-true story published by BuzzFeed News about Trump’s former lawyer being instructed to lie under oath by the president, The Intercept published a cruel list of “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump/Russia Story”. No one is spared.
By allowing raw opinion to be labeled as news analysis or even reporting, American media “fed the beast”; they played into the hands of a populist leader eager to single out the collusion between political and media “elites” — exactly like his peers do in Europe.
The impact of populism on the business models of news
In Italy, a publisher friend of mine told me recently that advertisers are quietly and steadily retreating from news outlets. Whether it is a foreign car manufacturer concerned with tariffs or an energy conglomerate worried about regulation, no one wants to cross a newly elected and aggressive administration. We see an identical trend of fear for populist leaders in the Philippines and Brazil.
In a more pernicious way, the rise of populism fostered the idea that developing paying customers was the only way to preserve the sustainability of the sector. Following the growth of this idea was a spectacular acceleration of the deployment of paywalls.
Two negative effects accompany this trend: one, paywalls will benefit only news outlets able to provide a tangible differentiation in the news coverage. This means that the newsrooms who are able to maintain sizable newsrooms will survive, while smaller (more local) newsrooms will fail. Two, the paid-for principle will benefit fewer readers: expect the vast majority of them to only pay for two or three news outlets (in the best case: one general news, one local –preferably inexpensive — and maybe another source of specialized content). The “Trump bump” won’t last forever. The subscription fatigue is looming. Readers will drop credible news outlets unless publishers agree to spend significant amounts on sophisticated systems to acquire and retain their customers while creating a wide array of revenue stream. We are not there yet.
— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com
