The Correspondent Is Dead: Long Live The Dissident

You probably have heard it somewhere along the grapevine: the traditional news media are having a hard time. Subscriptions have been declining, and the circulation of papers continues to decrease. Who is going to pay for news nowadays anyway? You can pluck it right from the internet, for free!

Well, apparently a lot of people still do want to pay for their news, in The Netherland, at least. It is said to be the soil of a news media revolution, and its vanguard is called The Correspondent, an online journalism platform, started in 2013, by setting a world record in crowdfunding.

In recent years, The Correspondent has experienced spectacular growth. As of November, it claims to have 60.000 members who pay for its articles on a monthly or yearly basis. The Correspondent is one of the world’s largest media companies that exist almost entirely by membership fees. It is unique in that it consciously refrains from advertising revenue that can be obtained from other companies. It is ‘ad-free.’ Also, the organization is also equipped with a profit limitation of 5%, which means that management can pursue other goals than profit maximization. By keeping the voracious business world at a distance, The Correspondent is in a remarkable position to place society above an economic interest through its articles and to claim values such as independence and transparency.

The success behind The Correspondent is based mainly on its progressive philosophy. Journalism should be all about consistent self-reflection and self-improvement — that’s the central message of its manifesto. However, self-reflection does not merely mean not taking a side. In stark contrast to standard news media, The Correspondent simply takes for granted that there is no neutrality or objectivity in journalism. Instead, it encourages its journalists to let their own idealism guide their work. Furthermore, the news medium itself is seen to have a social responsibility as well. As an essential organization of civil society, it must set an example for other organizations. To do so, The Correspondent has started several campaigns to promote more diversity within the organization, to a create better sustainability policy within the organization and to provide better privacy protection for its audience. It is, therefore, no surprise that The Correspondent was rewarded the prize for the ‘Dutch social enterprise of the year’ in 2016.

And it’s not just a Dutch success story, its accomplishments have been noted all over the world, which led The Correspondent to try to conquer other countries as well. Starting with the United States. This month the organization has launched the U.S. version of The Correspondent, with the help of a famous professor of journalism, Jay Rosen, as well as other notable figures. It should be clear by now, both in and outside The Netherlands there almost unanimous praise for the accomplishments of The Correspondent.

However, not all that glitters is gold.

The Correspondent has been criticized before. Several Dutch authors have pointed to their elitism, their cultural homogeneity, the similarity between the ideals of all journalists, and so on. But all this criticism was from people outside of the organization.

As a former employee of The Correspondent in The Netherlands, I found that if there is one thing that is characteristic of The Correspondent, it is hypocrisy, it is the stark contrast between image and reality. While it has found a smart way to present itself as progressive to the outside world, it continually fails to practice what it is preaching the rest of the world about. To point out this contrast, I’ll deal with several of the proclaimed values of The Correspondent, among them: inclusivity, democracy, transparency, diversity and the lack of an ideology.

Progressive shell, conservative core

According to the spiritual father of The Correspondent, the self-proclaimed ‘philosopher-turned-entrepreneur,’ Rob Wijnberg, one of the main problem with journalists is that they often fail to take a critical view towards their own immediate surroundings. What is needed, according to Wijnberg, is journalists who approach news media themselves as power structures.

Well, that’s precisely what I started to do while working at The Correspondent. And I was in for a pleasant surprise.

Because when you start to dissect the internal power structure of The Correspondent, you’ll soon find out that, since its foundation, there has been remarkably little development in its division of power. And the power structure was not innovative at all to begin with. Although The Correspondent invariably presents itself as a progressive organization, both the legal form and the corporate structure are merely the traditional political construction that has dominated the business world for centuries. Both ownership and control are concentrated with a minority of already privileged people. In short, The Correspondent is a corporate oligarchy. It’s business, as usual.

All political power is in the hands of the four founders, who have also elected themselves as the sole members of the board of directors. Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth both own and direct the Dutch Correspondent as well as its U.S. version. The other two members of management, creative director Harald Dunnink, and technical director Sebastian Kersten, also own and control Momkai Media B.V., the digital design agency that develops and maintains the websites of The Correspondent.

So clearly, there is not anything progressive to say about the political organization of The Correspondent. What is interesting, however, that this type of organization runs counter to their own ideals. Because this form of political organization is diametrically opposed to the one that runs through all of their articles.

Unbreaking democracy?

You don’t have to read a lot of articles on the website of The Correspondent to find out the following: if there is one thing that defines their progressive politics, it is their constant cry for the need of further democratization. Their journalists want further democratization of every organization in the state and civil society. From parliament to municipality, from the neighborhood to the workfloor.

That is, except the workfloor of The Correspondent itself.

Because as I pointed out, The Correspondent is not democratically organized. It’s your friendly neighborhood corporate oligarchy that rules the organization. Management is in full control. It has a monopoly on all final decision-making while all employees are legally excluded from any decision regarding ownership and management. So there goes the claim of ‘inclusivity’.

Now tell me, do you really think that those guys within management will voluntarily strip themselves from their powers and try to organize ownership and control in some horizontal, democratic manner? Of course not.

Fortunately, this is The Correspondent. The only place where journalism is genuinely independent. Where journalists are free to follow their democratic ideals and where they are encouraged to criticize power structures by their leaders.

Or so it is.

To be honest, I have never experienced an organization in which employees were so docile to their management and so uncritical of the internal power structure. In my years at The Correspondent, I never met a single journalist who dared to bring up the odd contrast between the democratic ideals as espoused in their publications and their own oligarchic workplace. And that’s including the most passionate democrats among them (yes, talking to you, Rutger Bregman).

You would think it would cause them, mainly them, those investigative journalists, a lot of cognitive dissonance. But none of that. These journalists willingly side with ‘their’ management, through thick and thin, despite the obvious democratic deficit. It means that The Correspondent has enough ‘correspondents,’ but almost entirely lacks dissidents. Anyone who falls out of line due to political ideology, ideals or simply points to the contrast between ideals and practice, will find himself isolated, with no support of ‘critical’ journalists whatsoever.

Hence, though journalists of The Correspondent are said to be much freer than their peers, they somehow still seem to choose to conform to the existing power structure collectively. Democracy is deemed awesome, as long as it’s implemented somewhere else. A classic case of ‘NIMBY,’ as the late George Carlin used to tell us. Democracy, yeah, but ‘Not In My Backyard’! So down the drain goes the claim of ‘democracy’ too.

Dependent journalism

What about another thing The Correspondent prides itself with; the ‘independence’ of its journalism? This claim of ‘complete independence’ is quite striking when compared with another declaration of The Correspondent, namely that journalism can never be truly objective.

As if there was not already enough confusion between ideals and practice, there seems to be a lack of consistency in social philosophy within The Correspondent as well. Because if you say that journalism can never be truly objective, you have to acknowledge that it cannot be ‘completely independent’ either. It is always influenced by a variety of social factors. Furthermore, journalism is still situated within a context of power, as Wijnberg himself rightly pointed out.

This means that news, that is constructed, selected, edited and published in a corporation like The Correspondent, is influenced by the relations of power within this institution. For one, there is the relationship between employer and employee, for example, between management and journalists. I am sure you can think of other unequal relationships as well.

Let’s not ever forget, that management of news media have the right to reward, discipline and dismiss their journalists. It’s not any different at The Correspondent, certainly with its current power structure.

Furthermore, for years Rob Wijnberg was both owner, general director and editor-in-chief of The Correspondent, which put him in the perfect position to recruit the ‘right’ journalists and select the ‘right’ articles, according to his own political ideology, and that of management in general. So there goes the claim of ‘independence’, and perhaps The Correspondent’s claim of having ‘no ideology’ as well.

It does not stop here, because The Correspondent is not, as it claims, independent of corporate influence from outside the organization as well. There is, after all, the so-called ‘partnership’ with Momkai. Let me remind you again, that half of the management of The Correspondent consists of the management of Momkai, which is a for-profit corporation and has invested hundreds of thousands of euros in The Correspondent.

Yes, I am sure that the bosses of Momkai are eager to flush their money and power down the toilet for, say, something like the democratization of the organization. Besides, the management of The Correspondent has also set up other companies such as one for the creation of their own editorial software. To remind you again, this is a daughter company that has created and patented a software code that will be sold, for profit that is. If The Correspondent was really ‘transparent’, they would have laid out the exact power relationships between all these companies, both formally and in daily practice. But they haven’t done that, so out of the window goes the claim of ‘transparency’ too.

The dawn of a new capitalist media

Alas, the show must go on, and The Correspondent is going on tour. Now this organization is presenting itself across international borders as the last hope of the world’s news media. And perhaps they are.

I do think they are an upgrade to the established news media. But I’m also tired of typically highly-educated or otherwise privileged people telling me that we should not criticize The Correspondent, because it’s ‘the best we have when it comes to news media’.

No, I think we can do better. We can learn from the mistakes of The Correspondent and do better than a new form of ‘capitalism with a human face,’ a ‘soulful corporation’ (as it was called after the Crash of 1929), a ‘social enterprise’ (as it is called after the Crash of 2007), or whatever self-congratulatory name the business community wants to give themselves nowadays.

If The Correspondent really wants to improve on those things mentioned, they’ll have my support. But if they ignore or downplay it, we should think about setting up alternative media organizations.

I think, at the very least, a 21st-century news medium that upholds progressive values should practice what they preach. The Correspondent, if they are genuinely as free and independent as they say they are, could have easily, for example, experimented with several forms of democracy within their organization. They could have kept their audience updated about it, like they always say they do, for the sake of transparency.

But the cold fact of the matter is this: The Correspondent only likes political progress, as long as it does not threaten the power of their four well-to-do, white, male owners. (And so much for ‘diversity’ too).

The Correspondent is not the new watchdog of the 21st-century democratic news media, it is the lapdog of a recycled, corporate oligarchy.