The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

To be brutally honest? Or to project an image of success at all times?

Are you interested in pretense? Or the unabashed truth?

Shakespeare never had any of his characters ask these questions. At least not to the best of my recollection.

Of course the very idea of the best art and poetry is not to make explicit points. The highest art seems to be purposely vague, intentionally vague or maybe even deliberately vague, sometimes to allow readers or viewers to use their own imaginations to fill in the blanks and imagine meanings and endings for themselves. Nothing wrong with that in art and literature.

Even in journalism, however, sometimes ambiguity abounds in the name of objectivity. In public affairs and politics, equivocation passes for answers to direct questions.

This sometimes seems to go against what we are all taught as kids, that is: “Honesty is the best policy.”

Why do I sit around in beautiful mountain campgrounds online thinking and writing about such things, when I should be out there somewhere in the economy trying to make more money somehow? Selling hamburgers or widgets?

Good questions. I don’t know. It’s just what I do. I read, think and write. Some people seem to appreciate it.

So on this beautiful August morning in the Catoctin Mountains in Maryland, in one of the few places in the United States where you can literally escape the most dire affects of global warming and climate change at 1,700 feet above sea level in the middle of a protected forest, the image that pops into my head is a movie scene from “American Beauty,” released in 1999.

You may recall the aspiring realtor Carolyn Burnham (Annette Bening) sucking up to real estate king Buddy Kane (Peter Gallagher), who repeats the famous line, “In order to be successful, one must project an image of success at all times.” Of course you may recall how it all ended badly.

Should I aim the camera at myself and produce a reality show on video or a podcast and charge people for learning about how to better understand what’s going on in the world? Maybe. But I think not. There are lots of people advertising that sort of thing these days, even all over Facebook, not to mention Instagram and TikTok.

Don’t you get the feeling that most people who fall for these sales pitches usually come away disappointed? That’s what I think anyway. Isn’t this how new religions and cults get started? Tell me if you think I’m wrong. Have you ever paid for one of these seminars promoting the secret to success and how to change your life? Did you come away changed and saved? Or did you just feel ripped off?

Me, I’m not interested in such things. Should I be?

Here’s what I am interested in, however, and I believe other people are too.

If you follow news about the press and media itself, in the Columbia Journalism Review, the Nieman Reports newsletter at Harvard, or any of the various outlets for media criticism online, one theme in recent years rings out: There is a crisis in American journalism in the Internet Age as most newspapers went out of business. Many stories are falling through the cracks, not being covered. This is bad for democracy, they say. What to do about it?

I saw this coming 25 years ago and set out to do my part. We started one of the first online magazines in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1998. I delivered a speech about the inevitable death of the newspaper economy in the year 2000 at the annual writers conference at Birmingham Southern College. My projections turned out to be right on target, and now even Birmingham Southern itself is closing its doors in a financial mis-management crisis.

After a brief return to the mainstream press for a few years, I went independent online in 2005 and have been filling in some of those coverage gaps ever since.

I am not alone. Here in Maryland, some of the news workers in Annapolis who saw the Capitol Gazette and the Baltimore Sun go down to a hedge fund started their own non profit news outlet, Maryland Matters. We sometimes run their stories in the New American Journal under a Creative Commons license to help get the word out. There’s also one in Montgomery, Alabama, but the owner is such a dick I will not promote his effort.

The problem with some of these online publications is that the journalism being produced is the same fifth grade level AP style news stories that bored people to tears back when newspapers were already starting to have financial troubles before the Bush Great Recession in 2007-2009. In the blogging era, the Daily Kos and Huffington Post and others like “Buzzfeed” came along and built an audience in the early days of social media, by and large by running sensational clickbait, the modern equivalent of tabloid news.

Of course I don’t know if anyone pays much attention to the Daily Kos much anymore. Arriana Huffington sold her Post to AOL dot com for more than the Graham family got for selling The Washington Post to Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and it seemed to disappear. Then Buzzfeed came along and then went bankrupt, after thinking the solution to making money on sensational news on the web was Google advertising, which of course never paid enough. They tried sponsored content and popup ads, which readers hated. They tried using social media marketing, which drove some traffic but very little revenue to go along with it.

Maryland Matters

Let’s take a look at a recent story from Maryland Matters to see some of the good that is being done, and the problem with the approach.

People power vs. electric power in feud over proposed transmission project: Opposition to the so-called Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project has spread like wildfire this summer

This is great on-the-ground reporting from editor Josh Kurtz. He covers town hall meetings and quotes people on all sides. He answers the question: What is the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project and why has it sparked such an outcry? Who, what, when, where and even why.

He covers all the angles, from the environment to the growing demands for power, including from Artificial Intelligence data centers coming to Maryland like they’ve taken over parts of Virginia. He even hints at the core problem, without fully fleshing it out and really nailing the obvious solution. This is my problem.

I won a top AP award 30 years ago for a similar story about an economic and environmental controversy on the Gulf Coast. It was “newspaper of record” style coverage, that has mostly been abandoned now since the blogs came along, even by what’s left of the newspapers. It is not what gets shared far and wide on social media. It is only being read by those involved in the system, not the masses. Who is going to tell “the people” not involved in the government and politics what is going on? And who is going to suggest solutions?

If Artificial Intelligence is now a threat not only to the future economy of workers of all kinds, including news workers and tech workers and the programmers who type the code to make it work, and it is on the verge of taking over the existing power grid to the point of causing further environmental damage AI is supposed to help solve, why is NO ONE talking about SLOWING DOWN this development and REGULATING this new technology?

You don’t just have to oppose a new power line in your neighborhood, NIMBY style. Why not oppose the fast tracking of the data centers themselves? Force these tech companies to slow down and justify to the public why they are moving so fast, and explain just how they are going to help us?

If they really have a plan to pay people in this country a living wage to not work, since we won’t be needed anymore, should we not develop that plan first before we are all thrown out of work and out of business?

Google Monopoly

In a related story, the federal government, the Department of Justice, finally did something about the monopoly power of Google. A court ruled against them. No one is talking about this on social media.

In Landmark Antitrust Case, Judge Rules Google Is a ‘Monopolist’

A solution is being worked on to figure out how to break up this evil empire with way too much power over our information system. But this case does nothing to address the massive shortfall in revenue from advertising that used to pay for news workers to cover all these stories that are now falling through the gaps and the cracks.

I have often suggested a simple solution, and offered up myself as a plaintiff in a class action case that could solve the problem. No one else is talking about it, not even The New York Times, The Washington Post and certainly not any of the talking heads on talk radio or cable news talk.

Why not?

Our Useless Congress

Yes, everyone knows the current Congress is totally useless. The MAGA faithful of Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordon and the rest are not interested in fixing the problems. They just want to huff and puff and fight to make sure no one censors their crazy, right-wing, false point of view.

But what are the damn Democrats running against them doing to counter the BS? Sharing funny memes about them does nothing but make them even more famous and popular. There’s plenty of campaign money to be had – which now can be pocketed legally – even if you are hated by half the people.

Fighting back on abortion, immigration and the economy, yes. But where are the technological, environmental and economic solutions?

The KKK

At least the New York Times is also covering another threat to the power grid, the Ku Klux Klan.

Why White Supremacists Are Trying to Attack Energy Grids

President Joe Biden talked about the role of the KKK in his recent interview on CBS, and I quoted him and ran the video.

A Sea Change Coming – CBS Interviews Biden: New Polls Show Harris Leading Big in Battleground States

But when I sent a note to the editor of Maryland Matters about the possibility of investigating the Klan in Thurmont, Maryland, all I got was the sound of silence. The journalism they practice is needed. But more is needed as well. Where is the funding going to come from?

In Europe, Australia, Canada and even California, Google and Meta are being forced to pay news outlets for the content they produce that is shared on social media at least by some readers. As far as I can tell, no one in Washington is pushing for that, except for Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. She wrote a bill that never came up for a vote thanks to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in New York because of a family conflict of interest.

Back in 2023, we wrote about this

Study: Google and Meta Owe News Publishers at Least $12 Billion

Bipartisan Support for Regulation of Big Tech Means It’s Coming in 2023

If I were to find myself in a press conference asking questions of Vice President and Democratic Party candidate for president Kamala Harris and her VP choice Tim Walz, these are the questions I would be asking.

Do you have a plan to either slow down the development of AI before it puts us all out of work and crashes the power grid, or an alternative plan for a guaranteed wage for all of us workers put out of business by this technology?

Will you commit to holding the tech giants like Google and Facebook accountable for monopolizing the advertising business – as well as search and social media – and force them to pay us news workers SOMETHING to cover the stories and produce the content they all depend on, including the AI bots? There would be no artificial intelligence without all the news stories published on the web since 1998. That’s what they use to teach the bots how to communicate.

This is not just a mere copyright violation issue. It’s bigger than that.

Yes, first we must stop Donald Trump from getting elected again. But then we better have a plan for what to do about the Silicon Valley tech monopolies and the control they have over all of our lives.

Yes, the only chance we have for even thinking about addressing these problems is to all show up and vote to stop the chrypto-fascists from controlling both houses of Congress as well as the White House and the Supreme Court. But we better be developing plans to stop the bots from taking over too.

That’s my two cents worth anyway. Is it worth two-cents a page view? Or do we have to beg little old ladies to send us their Social Security money so we can tell them what’s really going on?

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