Why platforms should pay for polluting our civic discourse
They should take responsibility for the mess they’ve made
Three days before the 2016 election, a shocking story from “Denver’s oldest news source” went viral.
“FBI Agent Suspected In Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead In Apparent Murder-Suicide,” blared the headline rocketing around Facebook from the Denver Guardian.
There was a problem: It was all fake. There’s no such newspaper as the Denver Guardian. The story was complete fiction — and an estimated 15 million people saw it in their feeds 72 hours before they headed to the polls.
The Denver Guardian hoax account might be one of the most-egregious examples of how social-media networks distort the news and sow mistrust, but it’s just the tip of a much larger iceberg threatening to sink local journalism.
The business model of online platforms is structured to reward clickbait, sensationalism and hyper-partisan hot takes — anything that keeps our eyeballs glued to the screen. Social-network algorithms gather people into like-minded groups and promote the content that will generate the strongest reactions. This is a revenue-generating recipe for spreading misinformation and hate.
Targeted online ads and data harvesting are incredibly lucrative for the platforms but harmful for local newsrooms and the communities they’re supposed to serve. The shift in eyeballs and ad dollars to the platforms has hastened the collapse of the traditional advertising marketplace that once helped sustain quality local journalism. This collapse has led to widespread layoffs, which has meant less of the content that readers are willing to pay for, which has resulted in more cutbacks and the continuation of a vicious cycle.
Not all of the problems facing local news should be blamed on Facebook. As Colorado knows all too well from watching the closure of The Rocky Mountain News and the gutting of The Denver Post, many of the media industry’s worst wounds have been self-inflicted. After years of fat profits, news organizations were glacially slow to adapt to the changing media landscape. Runaway consolidation shuttered newspapers and led to thousands of journalists losing their jobs. Diminished newsrooms got disconnected from their communities, and hedge-fund vultures swooped in to pick at the scraps.
What’s been left in the wake of this perfect storm is a struggling media ecosystem that isn’t providing the news and information necessary to sustain a healthy democracy. Studies show that a decline in local journalism leads to less civic and political participation, less government responsiveness and more local corruption.
Quality journalism, in-depth investigative reporting and watchdogs on the beat are antidotes to mistrust and misinformation. So when the market is failing to provide the news we need, we can’t just shrug and hope that someone somewhere will come up with a new business model someday. We need to do something about it.
We need new policies to actually meet the needs of the public. The Colorado Media Projects’s new report, Local News is a Public Good: Public Pathways for Supporting Coloradans’ Civic News and Information Needs in the 21st Century, lifts up a number of novel approaches that promise a path out of the current downward spiral.
One of them is an idea my organization Free Press has proposed: taxing targeted online advertising to fund local journalism. In our report Beyond Fixing Facebook, we estimate that a 2 percent tax on targeted ads in the United States could generate $2 billion a year.
Our plan calls for investing this money in a public trust — perhaps modeled on New Jersey’s Civic Information Consortium — and using it to fund local-news startups, sustain investigative projects, seed civic-engagement initiatives, and lift up diverse voices that have been excluded from traditional media coverage.
Think of it like a carbon tax, which many countries impose on the oil industry. Only in this case, the United States or states like Colorado would tax targeted ads to counteract how the platforms are polluting our civic discourse.
Numerous countries around the world are eyeing digital taxes, and Nobel Prize-winning economists have endorsed the concept. We argue that this is one of the best ways for federal and state governments to address the crisis in journalism without doing anything to infringe on editorial independence.
While a tax on targeted ads won’t solve all the problems facing journalism, it could go a long way toward ensuring there are fewer Denver Guardians — and more guardians of democracy keeping an eye on local officials, talking to local residents, and finding out what’s happening in our communities.
Craig Aaron is the president and CEO of Free Press and Free Press Action.
Read and offer comments on “Local News is a Public Good: Public Pathways for Supporting Coloradans’ Civic News and Information Needs in the 21st Century.”
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Learn more at Colorado Media Project’s website: https://coloradomediaproject.com/public-good
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