Thoroughly predictable consequences trigger performative outrage

THIS is going to be another commentary that will piss people off, but we’re not in the making people comfortable business here at the Bad Manners Gun Club.

In a post to Substack dated January 4, Ann Telnaes, who is well-known, Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist, announced that she was leaving The Washington Post in protest after 16 years, after a cartoon she had submitted was killed by the opinion desk. In the cartoon, several media plutocrats - Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook and Meta founder and CEO; Sam Altman, Open AI CEO; Los Angeles Times publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong; Mickey Mouse, representing the Walt Disney Company, which owns ABC News; and Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post – are depicted kneeling before and offering bags of money to a large statue of Donald Trump.

Telnaes published her rough sketch of the cartoon with her Substack article, and even though the cartoon has been widely shared in social media, I will not reproduce it here; it is her intellectual property, and the lady is now unemployed, so you can support her in a small way by looking at it on her own Substack page.

In her commentary, Telnaes notes that several new articles in the WaPo have detailed the obeisance paid to Trump by the aforementioned tech bros, including large donations to his “inauguration fund,” visits to his stronghold in Florida, and in ABC News’ case, surrendering a $15 million settlement in an otherwise baseless defamation case brought against the network by Trump. Thus, the implication is that killing the cartoon because of the mockery directed at WaPo owner Bezos was out of line, and a suppression of press freedom, because after all, it was simply lampooning actual events that had been reported.

I’m sorry, but what did Telnaes expect to happen? 

To be clear, Jeff Bezos is a toxic monster who deserves to be called out – in fact, I think he ought to be in the first cartload hauled to the guillotine when democratic-minded society finally grows some cojones and launches the revolution – because of his unchecked greed and shameless exploitation of his workforce, suppliers, and the enormous consumer market his businesses serve. My growing skepticism of Bezos’ Amazon finally snapped in 2021, after a deadly tornado ripped through the Amazon warehouse in Edwardsville, Illinois, killing six workers; Bezos’ reaction, which was to go ride in his giant penis rocket and then spend hours making yabang about it on social media before even acknowledging the Edwardsville tragedy, was beyond appalling. It goes without saying that because he owns The Washington Post, I do not subscribe to, read, or cite that publication.

But, the thing is, he does own The Washington Post, and even if he were not a galactic-scale douchebag, he could hardly be expected to countenance being personally criticized by his own paper. Yes, the criticism is certainly valid, but one cannot expect to break the reality of human nature. Particularly when it was already well-established that Bezos does not see the paper as an independent entity at all, but rather as something that should have his personal stamp on it, including his self-serving political orientation. If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly became so when he ordered WaPo not to endorse a candidate for the 2024 election, breaking an almost 50-year-old tradition.

I find it hard to believe that someone of Telnaes’ experience near the top of the mass media food chain would genuinely be surprised at having the cartoon rejected; and if it was intended as a test of WaPo’s editorial independence, that same experience, including recent events, should have already made it clear that the paper would fail that test. Thus, I have to conclude it was done intentionally, knowing what the result would be, as a way to spin up outrage. Perhaps Ann Telnaes had already decided she could not work in the ethically bankrupt atmosphere created by Bezos, but didn’t just want to go away, but go away mad. That’s an understandable feeling, if that is what was happening, but in that case, it makes the controversy over the cartoon a little disingenuous – again, for no other purpose than to spin up outrage.

That would still be okay, except the shot was wasted. Spinning up outrage among the people who are naturally going to be outraged about the broligarchy toadying up to Pervert Hoover is preaching to the choir – if any of us who willingly expose ourselves to the daily news weren’t already aware that it was happening, and that it’s something worthy of scorn, that’s on us for not paying attention. And if the message was intended for MAGAworld, not only are the vast majority of them not WaPo’s natural constituency in the first place, even if some of them are, their minds are not going to be changed by it.

So again, the question is, what is the point? I invite anyone who believes they know to share, because the only point I see at this time is simply to trigger anger for anger’s sake. And that is not going to change anything. The outrage is a given; what the world needs to be having is a conversation about how to remove the influence of money on politics, how to establish and protect the separation of state and media, and how to remedy the gross inequality our economic system has created. We are not powerless, but when we adopt the pretense that simply being outraged is actually doing something, we are making the deliberate choice to be. Stop it.        

Those damnable paywalls

I spend as little time as possible on LinkedIn – my impressions of that particularly odd and toxic form of social media are a subject for another time – but in one of my brief visits during the holiday season, a short commentary posted by a journalist named Sharada Balasubramanian caught my attention. I am connected to Ms. Balasubramanian through circumstances I cannot recall at the moment, and I do not know her personally; according to her bio, she describes herself as an Environmental and Development Journalist and Media Trainer, and based on her list of various jobs going back about 20 years, that seems like an appropriate description.

Since Ms. Balasubramanian’s piece is not very long, and to spare you the discomfort of wading through the LinkedIn bog to find it, I’ll post it here in its entirety, as it was written, save for correcting a few minor typos:

Our stories behind paywalls – the state of journalism

“My journalist friends keep publishing every other day, but then I cannot read any of them – all of them are under paywall.

I come from a legacy newspaper background, starting my career as a sub-editor over two decades back. The thought of journalism was – it will be read by policy makers, government officials, the general public, and perhaps, the story could contribute to change. All of that has changed.

In today’s scenario, when journalists talk about impact or organisations talk about impact, I am clueless as to how this is happening. Do we know that policy makers read those stories and bought those changes? How do we judge the impact of such stories, or how can such claims even be made? Do the change makers watch Instagram reels? The market is flooded with content – how are we sure what they read. It is not like those olden times where Times of India, The Hindu or the Indian Express or The Statesmen was read to know what was happening.

I am baffled by the word impact in today’s media scenario, and I find it unacceptable as journalists keep talking about their story impact. On the other side, I also hear decision makers or NGOs say, we do all the work and fight for years, and some journalist claims impact. I empathise with them.

When some young journalists write to me telling, our pitches have not been accepted – can you offer me guidance and tips? The only advice I had was, please read the articles or stories of the website where you are pitching your stories – understand what they want, and then pitch – it may work. I cannot dispense the same advice today – for them to read any publication, they have to subscribe or pay.

So how do journalists pitch the story is another ballgame altogether? And how do they get their pitches approved? It is hazy, and for now hard to solve.

And with the overflowing freelance journalists, especially in the field of environmental and climate journalism, it is not even jostling for space – there is limited space left for jostling – some of the well-known environmental media sites have shut shops.

The media website owners say they are forced to go behind paywall for revenue generation – the adverts have shrunk, and how do they monetize. I really do not understand the revenue model of today’s media, so I am not authorised to speak on this. What I understand about the paywall, that it is sheer business, and if you pay read, else you cannot.

The statement of press democracy, a change maker, or impactful stories all seems to be disappearing in thin air for now.

And people who talk about it, they may only convince themselves of it. Not the world. Not the people.”

***

Obviously, Ms. Balasubramanian was freestyling a bit with that post, and it took me some time to interpret it to my satisfaction, which was necessary because my first reading of it was triggering. What it boils down to, if I understand it correctly, is the same general complaint about the enshittification of modern media I have heard many times from within our business and from the audience, and it goes something like this: Media has lost its mission to be the objective source of truth in society, and replaced that with commercial objectives; after all, if media is obliged to operate as a business, it has no choice but to be the best business it can be, with all that implies about choices and compromises it has to make.

As a consequence, the change in priorities has degraded the quality of the product itself; because media is now profit-oriented, and the currency by which we ultimately measure success is eyeballs, then “impact” – and therefore validity and credibility – is simply a function of how big the audience for a particular piece of output is, whether or not it’s gone “viral,” which is a term that makes me gag even if I don’t say it out loud, and not whether the story had any real-world effect.

And of course, Exhibit A in this indictment of the media is the contemptible paywall, the most visible example of prioritizing production of revenue-generating content over providing information.

Reality bites

The Manila Times implemented a partial paywall about two years ago, and there was a great deal of uncertainty about whether or not it was the right thing to do; the plan encountered significant resistance from many of our associates, particularly among the opinion writers, who feared it would drive away their audiences. At present, we have a paywall for our opinion section and some of the special sections of the paper for the online edition, but the daily news in the main sections (National, Regional, World, Business, and Sports) is free. We have a digital edition which is a virtual print edition, that of course is by subscription only; and we still print a substantial number of hard copies every day – I’m not sure of the exact number, it’s in the neighborhood of 400,000. Our daily reach, according to our consultants, is about 2 million.

The hard reality is that it costs money to produce the news, and it costs more money to produce a better and more diverse product (such as the multimedia streaming channel we launched a few months ago). There are supplies to buy and bills to pay, and above all, talent costs money. Whatever else journalism is to those of us who engage in it, it is above all a job, because we all like to do things such as live in a building and eat food.

There was a time when advertising and subscriptions to the print edition were sufficient to fund the entire operation, and provide all of our content for free online. But print is dying, so that doesn’t work anymore. We could provide all of our daily content for free online, but in order to support ourselves it would require an unreasonable amount of advertising, which no one likes; we are already at the limit of what is tolerable on the free parts of our website, and there are some papers in town who have more limited or no paywalls whose websites are practically unreadable due to so many advertisements. Take a peek at the Inquirer for an example of that.

And on top of these constraints, our competition has increased enormously; not only are we competing with the other legacy media in town, we are competing with thousands upon thousands of self-appointed social media journalists. Some of them are actually good at it. So, we need to keep up our quality and what competitive advantages we can hold onto, which are in the form of experience, and greater resources and scale. And guess what? That costs money, too.

Unfortunately, the only way we have to measure whether we are spending our money appropriately is by the size of our audience, the so-called “impact” that Ms. Balasubramanian scoffs at, because real impact – catalyzing some change in society or government – is not something that happens every day. It does happen, but it takes a ton of ore to produce a gram of gold.

I do understand Ms. Balasubramanian’s frustration, from the standpoint that we, as paying customers, have a reasonable expectation of receiving value for our subscription money. Too many news outlets, whether of the traditional or social variety, do not adequately provide that, and that is wrong. We, as media practitioners, should embrace the pay-to-read model as a compulsion to constantly improve the quality of what we do. I certainly try to look at it that way, and treat every day as training for better research skills, better critical thinking skills, and better writing skills, with the end view of making my stories the best anyone can read on any given topic. I’ve been doing it with The Manila Times for a dozen years, and if I do it for 100 more, I will still fall very, very far short of perfection.

But not far enough that I’m apprehensive about asking someone to pay for it; and as my craft improves, I’ll just ask you to pay more. It’s my job, after all.