What a scam upon donors, what a disservice to advertisers, and what an attack on a free and open press.
Holy hell.
The Washington Examiner has a piece out that should boil the blood of anyone who believes in a free and adversarial (we’ll get to that word in a minute) press.
The report flagged the work of “disinformation”-tracking groups, and how their net effect is to essentially sideline and defund conservative-leaning media:
Major ad companies are increasingly seeking guidance from purportedly “nonpartisan” groups claiming to be detecting and fighting online “disinformation.” These same “disinformation” monitors are compiling secret website blacklists and feeding them to ad companies, with the aim of defunding and shutting down disfavored speech, according to sources familiar with the situation, public memos, and emails obtained by the Washington Examiner.
The work of a British outfit called the Global Disinformation Index deserves particular mention, and scorn. Its latest “risk assessment” of American online media is its own Steele dossier of disinformation and a radiating example of why one must always read the methodology.
Starting with the obvious problem: Its list of the “ten riskiest online news outlets” is, you might have guessed, entirely composed of conservative or libertarian-leaning websites. It includes a few I wouldn’t recommend to my friends (what with their #StoptheSteal) but also several others — such as RealClearPolitics, the New York Post, and Reason — that are generally reliable and no more sensational than a couple of those on the report’s “lowest-risk” list. (National Review was among dozens of sites representing a range of viewpoints that were assessed by GDI; it’s unclear whether NRO is on the group’s nonpublic “exclusion list,” which flags what it considers to be the “worst offending websites.”)
Did nobody at GDI wonder why their methodology generated a watchlist of exclusively right-leaning sites? As I write this, the top story on the homepage for one of those outlets on the risk list, the American Spectator, bears this headline: “Roger Waters’ UN Speech, Like Meddle, Best Experienced on Acid,” and I challenge anybody to identify a single part of that statement that isn’t true.
Joking aside, it’s safe to assume that GDI convinced itself that its assessment has simply proven what respectable people know to be true: Conservative websites get it wrong, and everyone else gets it right, every time.
But the problems with the report are evident from the get-go. The opening paragraph:
News websites have financial incentives to spread disinformation in order to increase their online traffic and, ultimately, their advertising revenue.
News flash, in the parlance of our industry: The disincentives against spreading actual disinformation far outweigh the incentives. The threat of devastating lawsuits, advertiser boycotts, subscriber and reader backlash, and fact-checks by competitors weigh heavily on all but the fringiest places (even Alex Jones had to answer for his nonsense eventually). Not once, in two decades in news and commentary, have I been in a meeting in which a colleague discussed the financial upside of deliberately telling a lie. Misleading and factually wrong stories still make their way out there, more often than they should — but it’s not good for business.
So this raises the question of how the authors define disinformation. And this is where things get really interesting:
GDI defines disinformation as “adversarial narratives, which are intentionally misleading; financially or ideologically motivated; and/or, aimed at fostering long-term social, political or economic conflict; and which create a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting institutions or at-risk individuals.”
Okay, “intentionally misleading” — we can all agree that’s bad. But “financially or ideologically motivated”? That rules out all content produced by ideologically aligned websites (including this one). What about creating “a risk of harm by undermining trust in science or targeting institutions or at-risk individuals”? This sure seems like a warning not to write critically about government institutions, no? And clearly, writing critically about coronavirus mask mandates and lockdowns is out.
But when one considers the basic term they use for this verboten journalism — “adversarial narratives” — it becomes all the more outrageous. The adversarial press is a cornerstone of a free and democratic society. The late senator John McCain, while informing Chuck Todd (facetiously, I guess) that he hates him on a personal level, acknowledged in a 2017 interview that “if you want to preserve democracy as we know it, you have to have a free and many times adversarial press.” That word, again, is “adversarial.”
Yet “adversariality” is one of the indicators considered to score each publication. This is a bad thing in media? The Abu Ghraib exposé sure seemed adversarial. Watergate was adversarial. The Pentagon Papers were adversarial. All those examples of reporting undermined trust in institutions. But . . . the institutions kind of deserved it.
What a scam upon donors, what a disservice to advertisers, and what an attack on a free and open press.