Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.

Part I: Death of an Empire – Did Trump’s Reality Show Presidency Finally Kill the American Dream?

Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined

“We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

By Glynn Wilson –

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — There’s still a threat of snow in the air, but the tree tops are just full of frozen fog this morning as we return to the scene of the crime. To understand this story, it’s necessary to go back in time to 1998, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford invented the Google search engine. I was also a grad student then, teaching journalism, free-lancing, and working on a Ph.D. in Science Communications and Environmental Sociology at the University of Tennessee.

Faced with this amazing new technology called the internet and World Wide Web, we got together with a group of students to figure out what we could do with it. We had meetings in an old mansion up on a hill looking out over the university in the Fort Sanders neighborhood, and came up with the idea to recreate a magazine that the corporate media had put out of business back in the late 1980s called Southern Magazine.

It was progressive and smart, not like the Old South’s Southern Living, published long journalism even about the environment, and was not afraid to tackle politics

In retrospect, we should have just invented our own search engine or had the foresight to invent a social media app like Facebook. But it’s amazing we were able to do anything at all, considering that most of the faculty at the time thought the internet was a silly fad and a toy like the slinky and the hoola hoop.

Our idea was that you could publish great journalism on the web without the hassle and expense of laying out a newspaper or magazine for the printing press, which had to be delivered by truck or bicycle. Without going into much more detail than that, what we came up with was The Southerner magazine, at Southerner.net. The idea was to create The New Yorker of the South, so we also published poetry, fiction and original art.

From the Penny Press to a Penny a Click

The first step in solving a problem is recognizing you have one. The second step is defining the problem. Then like any scientific study, you use a theoretical base of knowledge and develop a methodology for studying the problem. Then you run some experiments and compile and report the results. Then and only then can you draw logical conclusions and make recommendations.

Since I first started studying journalism and communications and practicing it 40 years ago, I have been engaged in a long-term sociological study of the press and public opinion in America and taking note of what the problems are. From one crisis to another, I have seen what works and what can go wrong.

This world is like Murphy’s Law: What can go wrong probably will.

In the heat of the moment, under deadline pressure, the daily press and broadcast media tend to get things wrong, and then continue to follow the bad framing of the problem until the immediate crisis becomes a systemic one. It’s hard to go back and get the story right after the initial story has embedded itself in the search engines and the individual and collective human mind, the body politic if you will.

I learned this a long time ago when a newspaper I worked for ran a series of photographs of the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up, upside down, with the plume of smoke defying gravity by going up, not down. On the anniversaries of that tragedy, I’m sure they still run them upside down. I tell that story in my book. It’s a symbol of how the press gets things wrong and rarely goes back to fix the story.

Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again

That’s one of the reasons people who basically agree on most things political tend to get into arguments on social media about the most mundane aspects of a story. The reporting is often conflicting, and there’s no time for reflection in the moment.

There are several related problems we are dealing with in our communications system now. The one I want to deal with first involves how the press is funded in this country and how the search engines and web advertising works. Don’t worry I’m not going to bore you with all the technical details here. This is just an outline.

First, for years now I have been trying to find a law firm to file a legal complaint against Google. Back in the early days of computer programming and the development of the internet, there were lots of companies writing code, creating search engines to scour the web. Google basically won that competitive war and became the dominant player. Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate headquartered in Mountain View, California with net revenue of more than $40 billion and total assets of over $319 billion.

Imagine how much news you could produce with a budget like that? Do you think with all our knowledge of marketing we might be able to figure out how to change public opinion? If Trump’s propagandists can motivate people to storm the Capitol because they think a legitimate election was stolen, I think we could change this narrative if we had the budget.

The programmers at Google came up with some of the first ads for the web, called Adsense ads. Whether you know it or not, you see them everywhere you look online. They are now dominant on web pages across the globe, especially on news websites.

In the early days they came up with a complicated interface and a scheme for charging companies to buy advertising on the search page itself and on external websites, like The New York Times or the New American Journal. A web master for any news outlet with a web page can copy and paste some code and Google ads will run on the pages containing news stories, like this.

If you don’t like the content of the ad, Google gives you the option to click on the X in the top right hand corner to make it disappear, and you can even report it.

The scheme they came up with basically paid those news website owners a penny a click when a reader accidentally or on purpose hit the ad while reading a story (a majority of clicks are probably accidental anyway, especially on pages that move around because of popup ads. That should be an indication of what a scam this is, but no one seems to notice or comment on it). The company sold this bill of goods by saying the ads were more efficient than print ads in newspapers, and they have made billions of dollars — while newspapers and online news sites starved.

Think about it. Back in the 20th century, when a reader opened the paper and read news stories, they were exposed to the messages and products of advertisers as they turned the page. They viewed the advertisements. Even if they didn’t run right out and buy the product, they were exposed to its existence. Then one day when they found they needed the product, they knew where to find it. In many instances, they learned of its very existence from advertising.

Google proposed that advertisers would get more bang for their bucks if they could know that a reader actually clicked on the ad. That was still no guarantee they they would buy the product, for example, or send the politician money in the case of political advertising. But it was a better measure than how many people paid for a subscription to the newspaper.

The big corporate chain newspaper managers were arrogant in their power and wealth and didn’t pay Google much mind. For much of the 20th century, newspapers made on average a 20 percent profit or return on investment, so they didn’t take the internet seriously. Critics had told them for years that the advent of radio would put them out of business, then that television news would be the end of them. It didn’t happen. So they didn’t give the web publishing platform much of a thought.

The exceptions were notably The New York Times and The Washington Post. Some smart people running The Times saw the internet’s potential early on, and the web version of The Times today is downright amazing, far superior to any newspaper ever. Since The Washington Post was basically a regional newspaper only distributed in print in D.C., Maryland and Virginia, and never invested in regional printing like The Times, USA Today and The Wall Street Journal, the management at The Post saw a chance to become a national newspaper that could be read online by people all over the country and the world.

But it took years before some of the mass circulation daily newspaper chains took the net seriously, most notably the Newhouse chain papers in Alabama, New Orleans, Ohio and other places. When they did finally come around to realizing that they needed a web page for the content of the newspaper, they never challenged the system Google came up with for advertising. So now they are stuck making very little money on web ads at the rate of a penny a click.

Pay for Page Views

What I propose is this. Knowing what we know about how readers view advertising on the web, it is clear that readers are exposed to the messages of advertising even if they don’t click on the ad. So Google should have and now much be forced if necessary to pay for page views, not just clicks.

Google has paid out upwards of $9 billion in lawsuit settlements in the United Kingdom alone, but so far, no one has sued them successfully in the U.S. In Australia, where Report Murdoch is the tabloid newspaper king, he got the national legislature to pass a law requiring that Google and Facebook pay news outlets for running their copyrighted content on the Google and Facebook interface. Rather than comply, Google and Facebook just gave up on Australia, leaving an entire continent to other companies.

Never mind what’s happening in Communist China, where Chinese companies control the web there. They do everything on WeChat kind of like “The Circle” depicted in the film now available on Amazon Prime Video.

I’ve put together a formula for how this could work in the U.S. based on the traffic of my news pages over the past 15 years. I’m confident that if a judge and/or jury were to be exposed to this argument in a court of law, they would find this logic compelling and Google would owe us and other news publishers lots of money in back pay for all the exposure we have provided for Google’s advertisers. The way I have it figured, Google owes us about $200,000, which if we got it in one lump sum, minus attorneys fees of course, we would have the resources to build a viable web news service that could challenge all the fifth grade level sensational clickbait out there and report the truly important news, leaving all the fish wrapper filler behind.

I also suspect this lawsuit would generate lots of news coverage, and maybe other news outlets would join us in a class action case. That alone would increase our traffic and revenue, providing more of a budget for producing news.

The Digital Divide and News Deserts

Google could voluntarily change this policy and free up all those billions sitting in the bank doing nothing and pay news publishers enough to pay enough reporters to cover all the news that is going uncovered. The digital divide is real. Poor people can’t afford to pay for cable television or The New York Times and Washington Post or other newspaper digital subscriptions. So too is the growing problem of news deserts in this country, places where important local news is not being covered at all.

My proposal would solve these problems, and at the same time, give us a chance to go back and create a shared narrative about the world. It’s a long-shot now that 74 million people in this country seem quite wiling to listen to a demagogue on YouTube than news reporters. But hey, we’ve got to try something. If we continue down the path we’re on, we are doomed for sure.

With news organizations weakened economically by the web and social media, Trump was able to come along and exploit the situation, even convincing millions of people that news reporters were their enemy. He became the center of attention, the arbiter of truth about the world, at least for the 74 million people who voted for him.

News reporters are not the “enemy of the people,” as Trump claimed over and over again, and anyone who calls themself a journalist who goes around under a banner of “Murder the Media” is the devil’s own spawn. They are not serving their country or the people. They are purposely misleading them. If they attempt to kill reporters, they should be tried and convicted and jailed for attempted murder.

Nature Abhors A Vacuum

As we know, nature abhors a vacuum. Trump waltzed into the vacuum of the news deserts, especially in rural America, and took control of the narrative.

If we are going to have a chance as professionals to seize it back, real news has to be funded. That’s only part of the problem. But it is a significant one.

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Editor’s Note: This is the second in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.

Part I: Death of an Empire – Did Trump’s Reality Show Presidency Finally Kill the American Dream?

Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined