No matter how bad they are. Like me.
Erick Erickson is appalled that Senate Minority Leader McConnell (R-KY) is backing a law that, well, it depends on how you interpret social media links to news sites:
Breitbart News says sources credit McConnell with adding the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The NDAA is a must pass appropriations measure for national security. The JCPA is a federal welfare program for the very media that hates Republicans. It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you. If McConnell is behind this, he needs to reverse it.
You know how you can go on Facebook or Google, find a news headline, and click through to the news site to read it? The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets. It would effectively create a “link tax.” It is nuts.
Nancy Pelosi is a big fan of it. Why any Republican would vote for this is beyond me. It sure as hell is not conservative.
Skipping over the linkage of the JCPA to the NDAA, which sounds to me like two very disparate subjects and thus shouldn’t be in one bill, let’s talk about the definition of buyer/seller, the very heart of capitalism. Sellers come in one of two varieties: an entity that produces a product or service, or an entity that buys, perhaps combines with other product, and then resells it with some sort of added value.
Notice that, in the era of Radio and Television, the tangible product or service, aka the radio or television program, is not the actual product, but was rather the empty space between content scenes or segments, dictated originally by the needs of drama, and this became commercial time, desirable for companies desiring to advertise services and products. In the Internet era, an analogous source of revenue is derived from the sale of commercial space on web sites. And for paper publications, predecessor to the these three, the product for consumers was the paper and its contents, both of which had value, which they bought, while advertisers bought space from the publisher in their publications to place their advertisements; publishers were paid coming and going.
Content commerce in the Internet Era, moreso than Radio and Television, functions to separate consumers from the mostly honest transaction of paying the producer of content for that content, substituting the considerably more questionable commercial model to the transaction.
So, back to the point, your generally capitalist system has consumers paying the original producers for their services and/or product, and resellers paying them as well from their revenue made via reselling.
So, what is Facebook (or Google, or other sites in this category, for which we’ll use the iconic Facebook)?
A producer? No.
Do they pay for the links they provide to other news sites? From context it appears that’s no, as well.
In fact, this exposes a hidden contradiction in Erickson’s screed, although he may not be aware of it himself. Consider the contradiction in these two statements: It is a bailout for dying publications to be funded by Silicon Valley ad dollars generated from you, and The JCPA would make Facebook and Google pay the news outlets for the kindness of displaying their news headlines and generating traffic for those news outlets.
The contradiction is the assertion that Facebook, et al, are keeping those publications alive, and yet they are dying. When a contradiction like this comes popping out of an argument, that usually means there’s a serious problem with the characterization of the situation.
Again, is Facebook producing the news, or is it reselling the news? Well, the fact of the matter is that, in a commercial sense, Facebook is thieving it. Let’s think about Facebook’s motives: they’re not putting those links up out of the kindness of Facebook’s wooden little heart. Their visitor analysis has, without a doubt, revealed they can drive more traffic with links that make them look local than without that characterization. Most, though not all, humans desire a sense of familiarity. Why do many inhabitants of small towns lament the demise of said towns? Because they’re familiar and they know everyone and gives a sense of extended family. So Facebook sprinkles everyone’s feeds with reader-local content. I’m in the Twin Cities of Minnesota, and I see ads from Senator Klobuchar and a number of local businesses, along with an occasional news story from various sources.
Facebook also sprays me and my neighbors with high-revenue links that they hope we’ll click on. (I try not to do so.)
It’s not about the content, per se. It’s about building an ambiance that sharpens the addiction to social media, along with message “likes” and all that well-described social media goal: keep the eyeballs on the screen as long as possible. As a former social media addict of roughly 40 years experience, this is not incredible, but quite credible.
And if you don’t have to pay for the links, it’s another penny in the corporate pocket to invest in the Metaverse. This is irrelevant, but, hca ey, Facebook’s clever in many ways, but so far their future product, Metaverse, appears to be a smoking crater.
I’m not sure what motivated Erickson’s misguided anti-legacy-media rant. Maybe he simply misinterprets the currents of media commerce, itself a confusing subject because the traditional, if misguided, private sector metric of money money money just doesn’t work so well in the free (liberty sense) press sector of society, because money doesn’t measure excellence in that sector. If you want to know about excellence, ask about Pulitzer’s and ask if Fox News has any (none mentioned on their Wikipedia page). If you want to read my laboriously worked out conclusions on sectors of society and the results of metric confusion, Sectors of Society at the top of the page is the starting point for that.
Or maybe he hates legacy media. He certainly uses a lot of negative adjectives, such as sclerotic, to describe them. He has that contemptuous attitude that makes me suspect that, as a confirmed extreme rightist, he’s appalled that a news service doesn’t support this positions, and therefore they must be condemned. That many of them are not surviving this new era of “free information” must be gratifying, and the easy conclusion that they are incompetent causes him to skip reanalysis that would reveal false characterizations. It’s an insidious form of confirmation bias.
He also doesn’t seem to be aware of the degraded journalism product that is being brought on, in part, by the lack of revenue from Facebook, etc, offered by local news providers. In this case, degraded can mean complete disappearance, such as news of strictly geographical interest like changes to city zoning regulations, the police beat, etc. These are serious degradations as they can function as oversight of police and other governmental institutions.
To Erickson, the old media are just sclerotic because he persists in applying improper metrics to legacy media, without realizing that his preferred media, which offers at least some support to his extremist positions, does not and can not offer the journalism product that the old line media does with excellence.
Here is Perry Bacon, Jr.’s proposal to find a way to preserve legacy media.
