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BUZZMACHINE

The media pundit's pundit. Written by NYC insider Jeff Jarvis, BuzzMachine
covers news, media, journalism, and politics.

September 9, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
broadcast, mass culture, mass media, streaming, television
No Comments »

WHAT IS HAPPENING TO TV?

If AI made TV: I asked Dreamstudio for an old TV set with Shakespeare in a
sitcom

TV has had more supposed golden ages than the Queen had bling: Sid Cesar’s brief
blip during TV’s infancy was hailed as one such shimmering age only because what
followed — America stranded on Gilligan’s Island — was so unbearable as to make
his Show of Shows’ Vaudeville shtick seem worthy of nostalgia. On
broadcast, Cosby — yes, that Cosby, but only at the beginning — and Hill Street
Blues marked a prime-time pop-cultural high. Then with cable’s freedoms came
what I think of as TV’s real golden age, spanning The Sopranos to Succession.

TV today is certainly in no golden age. Prime-time, broadcast TV is profoundly
self-parodic, populated with sitcoms that look as if they ran out of Viagra,
cop- and doc-shows exhibiting the production and thespian quality of
telenovelas, and “reality” shows that have lost any hold on reality. On premium
cable, I pay for HBO and Showtime every damned month, watching none of it,
waiting for Billions and Succession. On regular cable, I let MSNBC doomscroll
the news for me — in between commercials for butt-cheek cream and dancing poop
emojis (have they no standards?) — and then gratefully fall asleep to Guy
Fieri’s comfort food. Netflix is so dark it has become Black Mirror. I dread
subscribing to Apple TV+, Disney+, Discovery+, ESPN+, and all the other
pluses for fear of what it will take to cancel them. Just yesterday, I received
an actual letter delivered by the Post Office from Amazon saying, “We’re sending
you this letter because you are an Amazon prime member who has not recently used
any of the video benefits available to you.”

I was, for many years, a TV critic: the Couch Critic at TV Guide, the first TV
critic at People, and founder of Entertainment Weekly. I was born with and grew
up with TV. In the day, I defended television, which was almost as difficult as
defending the internet is now. Of course, there are still good things to watch
on TV. But given the medium’s current state, I am concerned about its health.
Consider recent developments:

The Times reported that NBC is considering handing over its 10 p.m., prime-time
hour to local stations — which is even more of a surrender than giving it to Jay
Leno. This week, The Times valiantly tried to find 41 shows to recommend this
fall — only five from network prime time, the rest mainly found in the bottoms
of barrels — while the newspaper’s own critics mourn the death of fall TV. (I,
too, am old enough to remember when fall brought new TV series and car models
instead of just new phones.)

If network prime time has lost its value, so have networks, so has television,
so has broadcast.

Cord-cutting continues apace, so cable is ailing, too. Thus all Hollywood is
rushing to stream. Nielsen just reported that, for the first time, streaming
surpassed both broadcast and cable in time spent watching in the U.S.:

But hold off writing that hot take about streaming taking over the world. Even
as it triumphs in viewing time, The Washington Post declares that streaming “is
having an existential crisis, and viewers can tell.” Take HBO, lately acquired
by Discovery, which is merging the former’s streaming network, HBO Max, with the
latter’s, Discovery+. To streamline — to cut costs — both are not just canceling
shows but erasing them from the archives and even from social-media mentions.
Netflix, which last year spent $13.6 billion on programming, is panicking,
cutting back, and adding ads. Writers, producers, and actors are panicking, too,
as they are finding fewer buyers for their output in Hollywood’s new monopsony —
that is, a market with fewer and fewer buyers. There are
only five corporate-conglomerate major studios now: Universal (NBC), Paramount
(née Viacom), Warner (ex Time Warner, ex AT&T, now Discovery), Disney, and
Columbia (Sony). And don’t forget that Amazon bought MGM.

Why is this happening now? In a fascinating Twitter thread, University College
London researcher G. Vaughn Joy said we are rapidly reverting to the bad old
days of Hollywood’s studio system. Recall that in those days, five all-powerful
studios controlled entertainment from end to end, from production to
distribution to exhibition. A 1948 Supreme Court anti-trust decision led to the
Paramount Decree, forcing studios to divest their movie theaters. In the happy
heyday since, independent theaters and production companies flourished.

Unbeknownst to me and maybe to you, in 2020 Trump’s anti-anti-trust Justice
Department asked the court to sunset the Paramount Decree because, well, times
have changed. That took effect just last month.

So now big studios can once again lock up vertical integration in entertainment,
from production to distribution to exhibition, not in movie theaters — they are
rapidly going bankrupt — but on your small screen via their streaming services.
There is no longer a bright line between movies and TV shows, between broadcast
and cable, between production and distribution; it’s all a stew of stuff flowing
by your house in streams, each with a toll booth.

We tend to think of media as immutable institutions. But nothing in media is
forever. In addition to my big book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, coming out next
year from Bloomsbury (more plugs coming soon), I’ve been writing a short book on
the magazine as object (also for Bloomsbury). In my research and reminiscences,
I come to see that all media artifacts — a magazine, a show, a series, a
newspaper, a channel — are evanescent, like a bubble in the champagne glass of
time; ultimately, so is any medium: television, radio, magazine, movie. I’ll get
to the book in a minute.

Is this the internet’s fault? Yes, for once it is. What the net destroys is
scarcity and scale. It kills the blockbuster. It massacres mass media. But isn’t
the internet all about scale, you ask? Yes, but in a network ecology, it is that
unprecedented scale that permits anyone connected to it to speak, to create, to
collaborate, to share. We didn’t end up in a 500-channel world but in a
five-billion-network world, each unique. So now there is an abundance of voice
and creativity and every old medium — each of which trafficked in scarcity of
space, time, talent, or attention — must now compete in a marketplace of
abundance. The first reflex of old media is invariably wrong: to seek protection
against new competitors by lobbying in Congress and courts, to buy up
competitors to become bigger yet (see: Discovery + Warner), to reduce costs and
thus quality, to raise prices.

All media are affected. The newspaper industry is consolidating into the hands
of hedge funds and is engaging in profound journalistic conflict of interest by
lobbying for protectionist legislation (one attempt just failed). The magazine
industry is consolidating (see once-mighty Time Inc., sold into homemaker heaven
Meredith, and sold in turn to content sweatshop Dotdash, with various of their
magazines — including my own Entertainment Weekly — folded along the way). The
book industry is trying to hold onto its old ways; see this saga about the
resource and risk poured into making just one book a best-seller; how can this
be sustained and how often can it succeed? The music industry did all this and
more until it finally saw the light, clawed back, and found growth in a new
abundance of talent, genres, and fans.

What comes next? At first, what comes next is inevitably derivative of what was.
Marshall McLuhan said “the ‘content’ of any medium is always another medium,”
that is, the medium that came before. See how, a few years ago at Vidcon,
YouTube was pushing shows that looked a lot like old TV series.

YouTube has since killed much of this effort because it was expensive and didn’t
work. Of course, it wouldn’t. YouTube should not aspire to be TV. It still must
figure out what it means to be YouTube.

What we are left with today is a mess. TV and movies are still hoping for
blockbusters and so they invest only in what they believe are sure things — Game
of Thrones the Presequel House of Dragons — and otherwise, they fill their
channels with cheap pap. Producers, writers, and actors will no longer find
studios willing to back the endless credits of their big-budget productions.
Streaming services will fold as viewers get frustrated paying for crap.

In each medium before, it took time to invent new, native genres. In The
Gutenberg Parenthesis, I recount a rush of innovation that came a century and a
half after movable type with the creation of the essay, the novel, and the
newspaper. In my magazine research, I saw how new forms met new opportunities
and needs: how Harper’s started in 1850 with a mission to curate a new abundance
of content; how Godey’s found value in women as a new market;
how Ebony outlasted Life and Look as white people abandoned their picture
magazines when they saw themselves on TV but Black people did not; how Henry
Luce and Briton Hadden invented not only the newsmagazine but the media
corporation. As a TV critic, I came to appreciate the sitcom as well as the
series, the miniseries, and the soap opera as genres native to the medium.

What will the new, native genres for the post-mass, post-theater,
post-broadcast, post-blockbuster internet ecosystem look like? I cannot know.
They are only now being germinated, mostly by people who could not have survived
the gauntlet of old media. I think we see hints of that future in TikTok, which
to my mind is the first truly collaborative creative platform original to the
net (thus: Ratatouille the TikTok Musical and the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical,
which is being sued by big, bad Netflix). We see hints, too, in Wattpad, a
receptacle for the energy and affection of fan fiction. No, I am not saying this
is the future of culture, only that that future can come from unexpected places.
While the big, old companies try desperately to hold onto their control,
cultural insurgents will undermine them.

I’ve been thinking about the institutions of culture and media — editing,
publishing, networks, and so on — and what we may lose if or when they
disappear. I celebrate the fall of the gatekeepers who restricted media to the
privileged and powerful, the elite and highbrow. I am glad for the end of the
Cronkitization of journalism and civic life: the hubris that one old, white man
could speak to and for all. I am happy to see our sitcom addiction to happy
endings fall to the messy realism of, say, Breaking Bad. I do not miss the
paternalistic nature of mass media, but I do regret that media today have not
maintained its sense of mission; see how network TV entered into public
discourse about bigotry (Roots, All in the Family, Will & Grace) but is all but
silent today on evangelical white supremacy and authoritarianism.

We may miss past institutions’ contributions to the culture — finding,
nurturing, goading talent — until these institutions are eventually replaced as
needs demand.

I believe culture will come out the other end better for the turmoil: more
representative, less exploitative, less expensive, more collaborative, more
inventive. In the meantime? It’ll be a mess.

THE STORY MEDIA MISS: THEMSELVES

August 18, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
brian stelter, cnn, journalism, Media
1 Comment »

Media are not merely observers in the story of democracy’s demise; they are
players. Media require coverage. Who will cover media? Not media. Then no one.

The New York Times and The Washington Post eliminated their ombudsmen long
since. With the death of David Carr and the departure of his short-lived and
inconsequential successors, with the retirement of Margaret Sullivan, and now
with the cancellation of Brian Stelter’s Reliable Sources on CNN, there is no
one covering media as a story for the public. Yes, there are pontificators
aplenty — present company included — and there is inside-baseball coverage for
media people from the likes of the Columbia Journalism Review. But who is
holding media to account for its impact on the political process for the public?
No one.

This is a shameful abrogation of responsibility by our field, journalism.

I have been shouting — even on MSNBC’s air — that we must cover the impact of
Murdoch’s Fox News on public discourse. I begged MSNBC to create a feature: We
watch Fox News so you don’t have to. I wrote an executive there a proposal,
never answered. So I arranged funding of an alum of the Newmark J-School, Juliet
Jeske, to start Decoding Fox News on Twitter and Substack. (Someone in media
should hire her to continue this important work.)

Fox News is only part of the story. The impact The Times and The Post have on
political discourse — hell, on political outcomes — deserves coverage,
criticism, and accountability. The impact of polling, bisecting America into
simplistic and combative binaries, requires research. The slow death of local
news must be studied. The entrance of pink-slime and evangelical news needs to
be watched.

Now more than ever, media are a story media should cover. But media — so eager
to criticize everyone else — are frightened of criticism themselves.

Were I to summon the spirit of David Carr, I wonder whether he would nominate
Stelter as his legitimate successor as media columnist of The Times. I wonder
whether anyone would have the freedom Carr and Sullivan had there to question
the ways of journalism. I wonder whether any editor or producer or network
executive will ever again display the cajones to critique their own.

Media are not objective, impartial, neutral, distant observers on society. Media
— as in any other circumstance, media otherwise would love to convince you —
have impact. If only media gave themselves a fraction of the attention that they
give to so-called social media these days. If only media listened to media
scholars and their research. If only media were open to criticism.

But no, media use their power and privilege to to turn spotlight on others, no
longer themselves. That is wrong.

HOW HARMFUL IS IT?

June 27, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
Internet, ofcom, regulation
No Comments »

As the UK gets ready to regulate harmful (including legal but harmful) speech
online, the appointed regulator, Ofcom, released its annual survey of users.
It’s informative to see just how concerned UK citizens seem to be about the
internet. Not terribly.

First, a list of potential “harms” encountered.

Let’s look at these. Scams (27%). Yes, We get those through every possible
medium: phone, mail, and net. Misinformation (22%). Well, that requires
definition. “Generally offensive or ‘bad’ language” (21%). Oh, that is so broad;
it is in the ear of the beholder; and — even without a First Amendment — does
government want to be in the position of policing “bad” language? Unwelcome
friend requests (20%). Sounds like a bad cocktail party; one may easily walk
away. Content encouraging gambling (16%). Gambling is legal in the UK and
promoted by many newspapers, which profit from it.

The sixth and seventh complaints are ones worthy of attention and are mostly
native to online: trolling (15%) and discriminatory content (11%). Other
categories worthy of attention include objectification of women, bullying,
unwanted sexual messages, and content about body image (each 8%).

Now how concerned are these users about their complaints? 15% are “really
bothered.”

What did the complainers do about it? 30% scrolled past, 20% reported it, 20%
unfollowed whoever posted the offending content, 18% did nothing, 11% closed the
app or site…

That’s the complaint side of the report. It does not alarm me about the extent
of online harm users are reporting to their regulator.

To its credit, Ofcom also asked about the benefits of the net for its citizens.
These results are striking.

“Being online has an overall positive effect on my mental health.” Only 14%
disagreed; two and a half times more users agreed that the net is good for their
mental health.

Oh, but isn’t the net addictive and taking over our lives? To this statement —
“I feel I have a good balance between my online and offline life — a solid
majority of 74% agree; only 9% do not.

“I can share my opinions and have a voice.” I consider this a critical
difference between the net and mass media. 44% agree; only 17% disagree; a third
don’t share an opinion about sharing their opinions.

“I feel more free to be myself online.” A third agree; almost a fifth disagree;
half, being British, shrug.

Many people see the net less as a means of self-expression and more as a useful
helpmate. “Accessing goods and services online is more convenient for me.” A
whopping 83% agree; a mere 3% disagree.

Rather than being imprisoned by the desires of algorithms, it seems people see
themselves as individuals following their own desires. “It gives me space to
pursue my hobbies and interests.” Almost two-thirds — 63% agree — while 11% do
not.

So far, as I read the survey, people feel predominantly positive about their use
of the net and they do not seem terribly concerned about their complaints. The
reason for a regulator to step in would be if users thought themselves incapable
of handling problems there. Ah, but UK internet users do not paint themselves as
desperate. To the contrary, they are confident: 79% call themselves very or
fairly confident as internet users; not so much, 8%.

Well, what about attempts to pull the wool over their eyes by unscrupulous
marketers? How confident are they that they can recognize online advertising?
78% are; 7% are not.

But data is/are a problem, everyone agrees, yes? Sure people feel they have lost
the ability to manage their personal data online? Not so. A majority — 58% — are
confident managing their data; 18% not.

OK, then fake news must be terrorizing citizens. News media say so. How many
feel confident judging the truthfulness of online information? 69%; 9% feel
otherwise.

But young people are the most vulnerable to online disinformation — that’s why
there are so many interventions to teach them news literacy, right? How do young
people compare with their elders? 29% of users aged 16–34 are very confident,
and it goes downhill from there.

Most people feel pretty strongly about their own abilities online. But when
asked about others, well, they need help. Two thirds of users agree with the
statement, “Internet users must be protected from seeing inappropriate or
offensive content.”

There we see the third-person effect at work. Coined by sociologist W. Phillips
Davison in 1983, the third-person effect “predicts that people will tend to
overestimate the influence that mass communications have on the attitudes and
behavior of others…. Its greatest impact will not be on ‘me’ or ‘you,’ but on
‘them’ — the third persons.” The third-person effect, I argue in my upcoming
book, is the basis of so much regulation and censorship of media since
Gutenberg. Ofcom and fellow citizens want to protect them from the internet
whether they think they need it or not.

All of this would seem to me to auger against the urgent need for Ofcom and the
UK government to guard its citizens from the net.

But perhaps, as we hear in a constant media drumbeat, internet companies are
negligent of doing anything to address the problems — problems that humans cause
— on their platforms. Ofcom reports the moderation activity of the three big
companies:

Facebook took down 153 million pieces of content in the third quarter of 2021
alone, 96% found by its algorithms. Is Facebook censoring too much, as America’s
right-wing would claim? Only 2% of its decisions are challenged.

I know I’m being sassy here. I am not arguing against all regulation. The net is
already regulated. Neither am I defending its current proprietors. I wish for a
more distributed web (a la Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky). But keep in mind that a more
distributed web will be much harder for regulators to regulate. And a more
distributed web will make it more difficult for moral-panicking media to find
folk-devil moguls to blame for all our ills.

Interventions in the internet and our newfound freedom of speech online need to
be based on empirical evidence of actual harm, clearly defined. This, it would
appear, is not that.

TOWARD A JOURNALISTIC ETHIC OF CITATION

May 24, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
citation, journalism, nytimes
No Comments »

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After The New York Times published its extensive report on the history of
Haiti’s impoverishment at the hands of its overthrown colonial overlords, a
robust debate broke out between academic and journalistic Twitter about
inadequate citation and sourcing. Journalism must do better.

The gist of it: The Times did include a narrative bibliography in the project,
which is unusual. But some academics — including Harvard’s Mary Lewis — said
they had helped reporters but were neither quoted nor credited. This thread by
Pittsburgh Prof. Keisha Blain brings together other threads; read them all. Many
said The Times was derelict in not quoting and citing current research but also
in ignoring the seminal work of Eric Williams in his 1944 book, Capitalism and
Slavery — columbusing in, of all subjects, Haiti. Joseph Rezek, a BU professor,
said the real problem was that The Times acted as if it had discovered something
new when much research on the topic came before:

After three days, The Times reported on the citation controversy but some said
it still didn’t give credit where it is due. Some journalists — notably Adam
Davidson — pleaded for citational slack in telling stories for general
audiences, sparking more controversy. I entered in more than once to argue that
journalists must practice better discipline of citation, sourcing, and
transparency: showing our work.

There are so many lessons here for journalists and journalism students that I
think it is important to try to catalog them, to examine the journalistic
presumptions and problems at work, and to propose standards.

Don’t blame your tools. First, let me call bullshit on the usual excuses that
journalists do not have the space, time, or appropriate CMS frippery to cite
sources. We now have the internet, with unlimited space and time. And we have
the best possible tool for citation — the link. If any news organization cared,
it would take next to no effort to also update tools to accommodate footnotes,
endnotes, or notes that are revealed at a user’s option; to compile
bibliographies of sources; and to create open repositories for source material.
What is standing in the way of responsible citation is not tools but ethical
will.

Journalists must always cite their sources. I don’t just mean attributing
quotes. Let’s be honest that too often, quotes in stories are a form of
extraction: I (the reporter) got you (the expert) to fill in our (the news
organization’s) preconceived narrative. Anyone who has ever been interviewed
knows the experience of seeing a long conversation reduced to one out-of-context
line included to exploit the expert’s reputation and to make the reporter’s
point, not the speaker’s.

What’s more troubling in the case of the Haiti story is what Yasmin Nair calls
soft plagiarism: not a direct quote lifted but instead the coopting of ideas,
background, context, perspective, and most of all an academic’s research and
expertise.

I have sometimes spent an hour or two on the phone with a reporter explaining
concepts, context, or history: educating them, with nothing to show for it. Far
worse is Siva Vaidhyanathan’s tale of being used and discarded by a PBS series.
There are a million such tales.

So, journalists, in your story or in a supplemental bibliography — try it — find
a way to cite your sources, all those who, through interviews or literature,
gave you the gift of education. To do anything less is intellectual and
reportorial theft.

Screw the scoop. The Haiti episode exposes a grave journalistic weakness: the
addiction to the scoop, to the idea that everything we report must be new, thus
news. That is presumed to be one reason The Times’ Haiti story did not
acknowledge much prior research. Nikole Hannah-Jones tweeted an explanation:
“Simply pitching the story as ‘this happened but many people don’t know about
it[’] would likely have meant the piece didn’t get done & certainly that it
wouldn’t have gotten all the resources.” She is, as ever, correct. But that
indicates something seriously wrong with news organizations’ priorities.
Shouldn’t serving what “many people don’t know” be more important than bragging
about being the first to know it?

Look, too, at how journalists treat each other, not just academics. Here, NBC
reporter Mike Hixenbaugh laments that neither The Times nor The Washington Post
credited local Texas reporters with the reporting that led to the devastating
report on Southern Baptist evangelical sex abuse.

There is no shame in acknowledging that others came before and in giving
them — academics or journalists — recognition for their contributions. The shame
is in not doing so.

The story corrupts. The story is not everything. The story is merely one form,
one tool to inform the public. Failing to credit sources and experts because
doing so would get in the way of the flow of one’s persuasive narrative is no
excuse. I have long warned of the seduction of the story, as it grants too much
power to the storyteller over the story’s subject. Keeping a narrative going
while imparting information and crediting sources is simply our job.

It’s the business model, stupid. So much of this current kerfuffle revolves
around the media economy requiring that news organizations to be destinations,
to sell subscriptions, or (less and less) to sell attention to advertisers. As
Jordan Taylor put it:

In the end, this is not about ethics or credibility but about the fight we’ve
been having since the internet entered newsrooms: Journalists and publishers
don’t want to link out; they don’t want to give credit; they want to convince
themselves and the people they still consider an audience that they are selling
a unique, exclusive, valuable commodity called content.

Wrong. Journalism is a service. When we credit our sources and show our work, we
enhance our credibility and value. When we exploit and extract the work of
academics — particularly academics of color — we extend inequity and injustice.
When we value our own journalistic egos over the reputations of our sources and
the education of the public, we do harm.

So stop. Find every way you can to cite and credit the sources who make your
stories — your articles, your reporting, your informational service — possible.
If you do not, you are thieves.

Another thing. I hate it when journalists say academics cannot write well. Yes,
it is easy to find academic papers intended for small audiences inside a
discipline that use baffling jargon. This writing is not intended for a broad
audience. But behind me I have bookshelves filled with wonderfully written books
by academics filled with not only engaging narrative but also responsible
citation of rich sets of sources. So let’s cut out our intramural sniping about
who’s a better writer.

To the contrary, it is vital — urgent — that we bring academics and journalists
closer together so that news organizations are exposed to, use, and cite
academic research relevant to their reporting. This is one of the reasons why I
started an Initiative in Internet Studies at CUNY’s Newmark Journalism
School — in full disclosure, funded by Google — to highlight research on
internet impact for journalists and policymakers. (The Initiative is also
bringing researchers together to discuss their agendas and I’m working to
develop an educational program; my colleague Douglas Rushkoff and I just
completed teaching a course in (re)Designing the Internet).

Diara J. Townes, who has worked with First Draft and the Aspen Institute and is
a graduate of our school, is leading the effort to find, highlight, summarize,
and share relevant research on internet impact. Here is the Twitter account
where she is sharing research — and please send her more. Here is her Medium
site and here you can sign up for her newsletter.

We in journalism mustn’t build walls to exclude academics by ignoring their
prior research, by extracting their work without credit, and by mocking their
writing (there is plenty to mock in news writing, folks). Instead, in a time
when debate is devoid of fact and data, we must come closer together.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Just as I hit “publish” on this post, a colleague sent me a very good piece by
Jonathan Katz, a “Haiti-head” — alongside his wife, Claire Payton, who holds a
Ph.D. in Haitian history. Katz examines what is new in The Times project. He
concludes:

> My journalism-school superego says that a more honest thing for them to do
> would have been to package the story as what it was — a significant but
> incremental advance in the understanding of a historical event that scholars
> and Haitians know about and that much of the rest of the world does not.

> But would a single front-page story with a headline like France Stole Over
> $500 Million from Haiti In 19th Century, Times Analysis Shows — or maybe In an
> Impoverished County, a Legacy of Theft — have gotten the magnitude of
> attention that this reporting has so far? Probably not.

Attention from The Times’ editors? I agree; probably not. But attention from the
audience? That’s up to The Times’ editors. Nothing would have stopped The Times
from doing just what Katz does here, saying: Here’s a story you probably don’t
know; let us tell it to you and then let us tell you some new facts we uncovered
in our research. Journalism is never the first-draft of history; that is our
worst and most inexcusable hubris. Journalism is always another chapter in
history.

CONCEDE DEFEAT TO BAD SPEECH

April 27, 2022 by Jeff Jarvis
free speech, Internet, journalism, speech, twitter
1 Comment »

What if we concede that the battle against “bad speech” is lost? Disinformation
and lies will exist no matter what we do. Those who want such speech will always
be able to say it and find it. Murdoch and Musk win. That is just realism.

Then what? Then we turn our attention to finding, amplifying, and supporting
quality speech.

A big problem with concentrating so much attention and resource on “bad speech,”
especially these last five years, is that it allows — no, encourages — the bad
speakers to set the public agenda, which is precisely what they want. They feed
on attention. They win. Even when they lose — when they get moderated, or in
their terms “censored” and “canceled,” allowing them to play victim — they win.
Haven’t we yet learned that?

Another problem is that all speech becomes tarred with the bad speakers’ brush.
The internet and its freedoms for all are being tainted, regulated, and rejected
in a grandly futile game of Whac-A-Mole against the few, the loud, the stupid.
Media’s moral panic against its new competitor, the net, is blaming all our ills
on technology (so media accept none of the responsibility for where we are). I
hear journalists, regulators, and even academics begin to ask whether there is
“too much speech.” What an abhorrent question in an enlightened society.

But the real problem with concentrating on “bad speech” is that no resource is
going to good speech: supporting speech that is informed, authoritative, expert,
constructive, relevant, useful, creative, artful. Good speech is being ignored,
even starved. Then the bad speakers win once more.

What does it mean to concentrate on good speech? At the dawn of print and its
new abundance of speech, new institutions were needed to nurture it. In my
upcoming book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis (out early next year from Bloomsbury
Academic), I tell the story of the first recorded attempt to impose censorship
on print, coming only 15 years after Gutenberg’s Bible.

In 1470, Latin grammarian Niccolò Perotti begged Pope Paul II to impose Vatican
control on the printing of books. It was a new translation of Pliny that set him
off. In his litany of complaint to the pope, he pointed to 22 grammatical
errors, which much offended him. Mind you, Perotti had been an optimist about
printing. He “hoped that there would soon be such an abundance of books that
everyone, however poor and wretched, would have whatever was desired,” wrote
John Monfasani. But the first tech backlash was not long in coming, for
Perotti’s “hopes have been thoroughly dashed. The printers are turning out so
much dross.”

Perotti had a solution. He called upon Pope Paul to appoint a censor. “The
easiest arrangement is to have someone or other charged by papal authority to
oversee the work, who would both prescribe to the printers regulations governing
the printing of books and would appoint some moderately learned man to examine
and emend individual formes before printing,” Perotti wrote. “The task calls for
intelligence, singular erudition, incredible zeal, and the highest vigilance.”

Note well that what Perotti was asking for was not a censor at all. Instead, he
was envisioning the roles of the editor and the publishing house as means to
assure and support quality in print. Indeed, the institutions of editor,
publisher, critic, and journal were born to do just that. It worked pretty well
for a half a millennium.

Come the mechanization and industrialization of print with steam-powered pressed
and typesetting machines — the subject of future books I’m working on — the
problem arose again. There was plenty of proper complaint about the penny press
and yellow press and just crappy press. But at that same time, early in this
transformation in 1850, a new institution was born: Harper’s New Monthly
Magazine. See its mission in the first page of its first issue:

Rather than trying to eradicate all the new and bad speech suddenly appearing,
Harper’s saw the need to support the good, “to place within the reach of the
great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical
Literature of the present day.”

Magazines — which Ben Franklin and Noah Webster had tried and failed to
publish — flourished with new technology, new audiences, and new economics as
good speech begat more good speech.

I am not suggesting for a second that we stop moderating content on platforms.
Platforms have the right and responsibility to create positive, safe, pleasing,
productive — and, yes, profitable — environments for their users.

But it is futile to stay up at night because — in the example of the legendary
XKCD cartoon — someone is wrong, stupid, or mean on the internet. People who
want to say stupid shit will find their place to do it. Acknowledge that. Stop
paying heed to them. Attention is their feed, their fuel, their currency. Starve
them of it.

I also am not suggesting that supporting good speech means supporting the
incumbent institutions that have failed us. Most are simply not built to purpose
for the new abundance of speech; there aren’t enough editors, publishers, and
printing presses to cope.

Some of these legacy institutions are outright abrogating their responsibility:
See The New York Times believing that the defense of democracy is partisan
advocacy. Says the new editor of The Times: “I honestly think that if we become
a partisan organization exclusively focused on threats to democracy, and we give
up our coverage of the issues, the social, political, and cultural divides that
are animating participation in politics in America, we will lose the battle to
be independent.” No one is suggesting this as either/or. I give up.

Instead, supporting good speech means finding the speech that has always been
there but unheard and unrepresented in the incumbent institutions of mass media.
Until and unless Musk actually buys and ruins Twitter, it is a wealth of
communities and creativity, of lived perspectives, of expertise, of deliberative
dialogue — you just have to be willing to see it. Read André Brock, Jr.’s
Distributed Blackness to see what is possible and worth fighting for.

Supporting good speech means helping speakers with education, not to aspire to
what came before but to use the tools of language, technology, collaboration,
and art to express themselves and create in new ways, to invent new forms and
genres.

Supporting good speech means bringing attention to their work. This is why I
keep pointing to Jack Dorsey’s Blue Sky as a framework to acknowledge that the
speech layer of the net is already commodified and that the opportunity lies in
building services to discover and share good speech: a new Harper’s for a new
age built to scale and purpose. I hope for editors and entrepreneurs who will
build services to find for me the people worth hearing.

Supporting good speech means investing in it. Millions have been poured into
tamping down disinformation and good. I helped redirect some of those funds. We
needed to learn. I don’t regret or criticize those efforts. But now we need to
shift resources to nurturing quality and invention. As one small example, see
how Reddit is going to fund experiments by its users.

We need to understand “bad speech” as the new spam and treat it with similar
disdain, tools, and dismissal. There’ll always be spam and I’m grateful that
Google, et al, invest in trying to stay no more than one foot behind them. We
need to do likewise with those who would manipulate the public conversation for
more than greedy ends: to spread their hate and bile and authoritarian racism
and bigotry. Yes, stay vigilant. Yes, moderate their shit. Yes, thwart them at
every turn. But also take them off the stage. Turn off the spotlight on them.

Turn the spotlight onto the countless smart, informed, creative people dying to
be seen and heard. Support good speech.

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