By Glynn Wilson –

Let’s review. There is much hand-wringing in the news of late about how Facebook lost control of all the data it collects on users, how that data was used by Cambridge Analytica to potentially swing the 2016 presidential election away from Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump, and how Facebook and Google have nearly destroyed American journalism by sucking up all the ad money that used to go to newspapers to help pay for covering news and undermined democracy by tilting to the alt-right.

The Washington Post, for example, just ran a story based on a new study suggesting that fake news might have won Donald Trump the 2016 election.

Of course the study does not prove causation — and I still think Trump was going to win anyway for reasons I have already explained ad nauseam – but clearly researchers are hard at work trying to figure this out.

Right after the election, because of the charges about the potential involvement of “fake news” maybe changing the outcome, some news organizations formed a partnership of sorts with Facebook to try to figure this out. Some preliminary findings were just published by the Tow Center for Digital Journalism and written about by the Columbia Journalism Review. Without going into all the details, let’s just say the outcome of this effort was anything but conclusive. In fact, it is pretty damning of Facebook, although the news outfits seemed naive to think they could actually influence a bunch of hacker/programmers who have no respect for what they do.

ABC News, the Associated Press, FactCheck.org, PolitiFact, and Snopes created a “partnership” to supposedly “combat misinformation” shortly after the 2016 US presidential election. According to this writer, “it was variously seen as a public relations stunt, a new type of collaboration, or …”

“…while the fact-checkers largely define their motivations in terms of public service and journalistic ethics, Facebook is looking to adhere to its official community standards (which the news workers never understood). There is an ongoing struggle within the partnership to define ‘fake news'” (although most of the classification power remained with Facebook, not news people) and there was “a general unease among partners about how opaque and unaccountable much of the arrangement (was) both within the partnership and to outsiders.”

Saving you the trouble of reading the whole thing, let’s just say Facebook basically toyed with the news people by setting up an internal dashboard to let them play with a few stories and pretend they were involved in fact-checking stories, although they had no impact on any stories that were already posted and being shared all over Facebook.

“We don’t see mainstream media appearing [in the dashboard] — is it being filtered out?” one news participant said. “Is it not happening?” Another said, “We aren’t seeing major conspiracy theories or conservative media — no InfoWars on the list. That’s a surprise.”

Clearly this was a game to the programmers who were simply using the news workers for public relations purposes to keep the social media giant’s stock from totally crashing and millions of users from leaving, maybe experimenting with developing the news feed algorithm a little.

The full report is too full of inside baseball to interest average news junkies now nearly exclusively dependent on Facebook for news, so we won’t go into all the nitty gritty details. But it is worth pointing out that there is a section on the “History and definitions of ‘fake news’” and findings that show that “Fake news is nothing new.”

Writing in Harper’s Magazine in 1925, in an era when modern rituals of journalistic professionalism were just emerging, journalism schools were still new, and the press was struggling to distinguish itself from public relations agents, Associated Press editor Edward McKernon worried that what “makes the problem of distributing accurate news all the more difficult is the number of people — a number far greater than most readers realize — who are intent on misinforming the public for their own ends. The news editor has to contend not only with rumor, but with the market rigger, the news faker, the promoter of questionable projects, and some of our best citizens obsessed with a single idea.”

These journalism historians have not yet discovered a key piece of research I found while working on my new book on objective journalism. The term “fake news” actually appears in the archives of the New York Times in 1896, along with the term “freak news,” which I will explain in more depth when the time is right.

How Newspapers Killed Themselves

For now I want to turn the clock back a few years to talk about how newspapers basically killed themselves. Perhaps Facebook news readers are interested enough in this information now that they are so concerned with how Trump got elected.

Fat with the profits from their big mass circulation newspaper chains in the 20th century, newspaper editors and their financial managers scoffed at the idea that the internet would put them out of business. The newspaper was actually having a major heyday in the early 1990s after desktop publishing programs had made it possible to create a much better looking product. Newspapers were ugly things up until the 1980s and early ’90s, when color photography and better layout made them more interesting to look at.

So when the first news websites came along, like the Drudge Report, newspaper publishers just laughed and did nothing to adapt for the future. By the year 2000, when I spoke about web publishing at Birmingham Southern, newspapers and magazines were mostly using the web for public relations purposes to try to sell print subscriptions.

Most of the news being read on the radio and television news was still being gathered and written by newspaper reporters, so the entire news industry was complacent and slow to adapt. Craigslist came along and destroyed the economy for newspaper classified ads. Did the big news publishers get together and create an alternative to compete? No, they just complained about it at regional and national conferences.

Some newspapers did adapt. The New York Times saw the writing on the web wall and started forming partnerships with the likes of AOL.com and developing its online product.

The Washington Post saw the opportunity to expand its audience well beyond the D.C. metro area.

The poor Christian Science Monitor, which I wrote for as a correspondent back in 2002-2004, finally stopped publishing its print edition and barely survives on the web.

What about local newspapers in Alabama, Louisiana, Ohio and other states? The Newhouse chain, which owned the Birmingham News, Mobile Press-Register and Huntsville Times in Alabama, the Times-Picayune in New Orleans and the Plain Dealer in Cleveland (and other places), tried to keep it’s news monopoly going on the web. But when the Bush Great Recession crashed the economy in 2007-2008, the downturn was too much for them. They lost hundreds of ad pages and fired or retired most of the staffs, including the highly paid editors and publishers, and shuttered new buildings that had been financed on cooked books showing another 20 years of growth for print advertising.

So what have they done since? They’ve become little more than blogs pushing out sensational clickbait and crazy anonymous comments. And they expect the public to take them seriously as news operations when people can easily find better produced news online, even through social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter?

Good Things About Facebook

Nobody uses Craigslist anymore. It is riddled with scammers and thieves. By 2009-2014, Facebook had replaced that as well.

For example, when I went to sell a house and all its contents in Birmingham in 2013, we did not use newspaper classifieds or Craigslist. We used the new garage sale, yard sale, estate sale Facebook groups and not only sold everything we wanted to sell. We sold stuff that was not even for sale. People started showing up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday with cash in hand ready to buy everything not attached to the walls, including a 100-year-old broken down pump organ I thought we were going to have to pay to have hauled to a landfill.

Before that, in the so-called Arab Spring of 2010, activists had begun using Facebook for good as a way to get organized. There are still some good uses of Facebook. While it was abused in 2016 to help get Trump elected, we used it in 2017 to help get Doug Jones elected in 2017 over the corrupt teen sexual predator Roy Moore.

But as the print news people keep pressuring Facebook to regulate itself to stop the bad actors from using it for evil, the changes are just making things harder to use for the white hats who want to use it for good now. This is a problem. As I write this, Facebook is deleting my original news links posts as “spam,” and if people try to enlighten a discussion in a string of comments in a group by adding news links, the Facebook algorithm deletes them as spam. It is obvious Facebook is using the controversy to try to keep people glued to Facebook and not clicking on any news links to take them somewhere else where they might read actual news instead of a summary of the news in an FB post or a meme.

This is a problem, and the print news folks don’t seem to get this. So let’s say the Associated Press is successful at getting Facebook to allow people to read it’s two-sided news stories, but people are not allowed to see our straight news or insightful commentary that explains the world more in line with a scientific view of objectivity. Fox News viewers clearly see that infotainment that passes for news as “fair and balanced.” This model of news that every story has two sides to it is clearly not the answer to informing at least the opinion leaders out there on Facebook about what they need to know to defend democracy from dictators and tyrants.

Fake News on TV

Totally lost in all this news about the problems of newspapers and Facebook is the widespread use of fake news on local television.

The ‘Fake News’ Controversy is Not Over and Not Just on Facebook: Check Your Local TV News Listings for Sinclair Propaganda

Sinclair Broadcasting is not only putting out pro-Trump propaganda on TV. It is also about to own the LA Times, the Baltimore Sun and the Chicago Tribune. Why anyone would still want to read these newspapers is a mystery to me. I mean look at what they put on their front pages these days?

No wonder people are looking around on Facebook trying to find someone producing news they can relate to that actually deals with the news which has an impact on their world, not just the sensational clickbait that makes money from web advertising.

A Better Way

Let me humbly suggest that going forward, there is a better way. Without all the outdated baggage of print, from ink and paper to delivery trucks, we can do better on the web. But only if people are willing to leave Facebook for a few minutes by clicking on some links and reading some important stuff.

While there are a number of other journalists out there working their fingers to the bone for very little compensation to figure this out, we believe we are onto something here that no-one else has considered. I have been thinking about this and experimenting with the web for many years. If you want to see my latest thinking about this, read what we are now saying in an attempt to explain it here.

The future is too important to leave up to a few billionaire hackers and programmers, or print journalists. They will never replace what we do here. They may put us all out of business, but they can’t do what we do. If the American people care enough to help support this, we might have a future. If not, we’ll say “sayonara,” I guess, Japanese for goodbye. Goodbye news. Goodbye democracy. Welcome fascist dictatorship. Thank you Russia and Trump.

#Resist