As if we didn’t have enough to feel crappy about on this first Trump Nation Thanksgiving, it now appears that fake news is in and real news is on its way out. Given the populace’s disgust and disdain for the news media, there may not be a lot of tears shed over this development. But there should be. The newspaper industry has been suffering an agonizingly slow death for more than a decade while its chieftains search for an elusive cure, one that would somehow monetize the real news it’s been giving away for next to nothing. So now, insult joins injury, like a bad Monty Python sketch, as a swarm of mischievous entrepreneurs rake in the dough by making stuff up and calling it news.
Let’s sort this out. As the digital world took off 20 years ago, newspaper companies rushed to put their content online. They had a “Field of Dreams” business model: if we build it, the money will come. They’ve been waiting for Godot ever since. The problem is two-fold. First, newspaper online advertising produces a small fraction of what the print product brought in. Secondly, Google and other search engines swooped up the free news content and fed it to readers with lucrative targeted ads. A search on duck hunting will take you to a newspaper story on the sport, along with ads for shotgun shells and decoys. Google gets the ad revenue and the newspaper that produced the story gets zilch.
As a result of all that, both circulation and advertising for the print product has been in freefall. At least 15 newspapers have closed. Many others killed off the print version and publish only online. More than 20,000 journalism jobs have been eliminated. Nineteen newspapers pulled their journalists from covering the federal government. The number of full time newspaper reporters assigned to cover state government fell by 35%. The retrenchment strategy, of course, has had predictable results. With less news and dumbed down content, even more subscribers and advertisers flee.
Meanwhile, teenagers in Macedonia are raking in $3,000 a day by cranking out totally made up stories on old laptops in their parents’ basements. And they are a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to the burgeoning fake news industry. Gone are the days when only the wealthiest of families – the Hearsts, the Sulzbergers, the Bancrofts, the Grahams – could afford to publish a newspaper. It can now be done without money or real news. One of those Macedonian kids, for example, cobbled together a website in less than an hour and published a fake pre-election story about Hillary Clinton endorsing Donald Trump. He then shared it on Facebook. According to BuzzFeed, it generated 480,000 clicks in a one-week period. Those clicks turn into dollar signs thanks to online advertising networks such as Google AdSense.
To throw some perspective on this 480,000-clicks-in-a-week fake news, BuzzFeed also reports that the New York Times real story on Trump declaring a $916 million loss on his 1995 income taxes generated a mere 175,000 Facebook interactions over a one-month period. Making this phenomena even more absurd is the fact that fake news played a very real role in the campaign. The Washington Post reported last week that some of the campaign issues were the invention of Paul Horner, a passionate Trump detractor who makes his living from click bait advertising fed by his totally fabricated news stories. For example, Horner’s fake blurb about a Trump protester being paid $3,500 by the Clinton campaign went viral on social media, bringing in a nice piece of change for him. It also became a talking point for the Trump campaign which retweeted Horner’s post and blasted Clinton for hiring protesters which, of course, never happened. Despite feeling crestfallen to think his antics might have helped elect Trump, Horner has not abandoned his lucrative career. His “breaking news” about President Obama issuing an executive order for the running of a new election gathered 250,000 Facebook shares in one week.
Back in the real news world, major publishers are bracing for yet another massive round of job cuts. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, USA Today and its national string of Gannett-owned dailies will eliminate hundreds of very real journalism jobs. That would be a travesty at any point in time. Right now, it is a national tragedy because we are about to inaugurate a president who has a pathologically adverse relationship with the truth. It will take much more than a bunch of Macedonian kids and their laptops to protect our democracy. We need real journalism. And we need it now.