Here’s my interview with ABC News Australia and then my discussion with Mathew Ingram of the Columbia Journalism Review about the fallout from Murdoch’s media law and pressure on the platforms in Australia.The discussion with Mathew occurs on Galley, CJR’s platform for dialog. I’m posting it here because Mathew got me to sum up my views in one place.
Mathew Ingram: Over the past year, Australia has become Ground Zero in the battle over payment for content, since that country is working on a mandatory code that would force Google and Facebook to pay news publishers for using even…
(Here is an opinion piece I wrote in Australia’s Crikey. I had offered it to The Guardian. Here is a related piece from Crikey editor-in-chief Peter Fray.)
I love The Guardian. It has long been my most trusted news source worldwide. I have been honoured to write for and work with this grand institution. So I am sorely disappointed that The Guardian is dancing with the devil, Rupert Murdoch, in backing his legislation, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code, for it would ruin the web for the rest of us.
The Code is built on a series of fallacies. First is…
In its blackmail of Google and Facebook, the Australian news duopoly conveniently forgets its roots
Just as he broke democracy, Rupert Murdoch is trying to break the internet with his protectionist legislation in Australia to force the platforms to “negotiate” and pay news publishers for the privilege of linking to them, giving them free marketing and audience.
Facebook is threatening to pull news out of its News Feed; Google is threatening to pull out of Australia entirely rather than break the net.
In researching the book I’m writing about the Gutenberg age, I’ve come to see just how cynical the Murdoch law is, for it conveniently ignores the roots of all newspapering, made with scissors…
The first decisions of Facebook’s independent Oversight Board make Facebook’s judgment look good by comparison. Who saw that coming?
The Board has in essence said that it is OK to insult Muslim men as a group — yet not Azerbaijanis — and that freedom of expression justifies spreading medical misinformation. How in any logic does that make for a better Facebook, a better internet, and a better world?
The problem is that the Oversight Board is interpreting Facebook’s community standards, which are intended to guide moderators and algorithms in their decisions on what posts to take down. …
Facebook calls in its Oversight Board to rule on the question
Facebook has decided to ask its new, independent Oversight Board to rule on its decision to suspend Donald Trump indefinitely. The Board will be able to make a binding determination regarding Trump, telling Facebook it was right or wrong, and Facebook and Instagram will obey. Trump will be free to submit a statement to the Board within two weeks.
Though the question is specific to Trump, it will undoubtedly have larger impact as other government officials — in Germany, the EU, the UK, and most worryingly Poland — are complaining about platforms being able to take down heads of state…
Words matter
Journalists are tying themselves in knots about what words to use, what to call the actions yesterday, what to call the people who incited and engaged in them. Choosing the words is the ultimate job of the journalist.
Let me propose a historical way to view what is occurring now. I am coming to see #BlackLivesMatter as the recent culmination of the long American Racial Reformation. The Martin Luthers of our time are Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, who made #BLM a movement, and Stacey Abrams and especially the Black women who have finally brought our electoral victories, and…
An allegory for our time
They had warned me about the silence of the City. Living in the woods these last few years, alone with my pod-family, my mind’s ear had grown accustomed to nature’s carols of birds, crickets, and wind. From the City, I expected the cacophonies of my memory. But now, there was not a word.
When researchers agreed that this latest virus, MO’VID-29, was spread most effectively via talking or shouting — not to mention coughing and sneezing or, God forbid, singing — it did not take long for masks and silence to become the norm and then the law. In the…
Here’s to our Social Journalism students
Every year at this time, I am impressed with the imagination, invention, daring, and mission of our Social Journalism graduates at the Newmark J-School as they reimagine and reinvent journalism. I am particularly impressed this year as they were hit with the pandemic, forcing them to take their work of showing up and listening indoors and online. In this, the last week in the term, we watched 2020's graduates and next year’s students present their work with communities.
These students consistently push the old, sealed envelope of journalism. Examples: A few are experimenting with fiction as journalism. One planned a…
Reconstructing journalism to address alienation versus facts
I do not believe most people espousing QAnon’s agitprop believe it. I believe they want us to believe they believe it. It’s performative: owning the libs, the pollsters, the media, the elites. Our old institutions fall for it and that is why the conspirators continue to play us. The primary weakness here is not in their belief system but in ours.
For us to think that journalism, fact-checking, and appeals to rationality will win this war on truth is itself irrational; we now know better. For the Trumpists to say something could be true —even blood libel—is sufficient for them…
What we are witnessing in the Trump times is the last stand of angry, old, white men, who would sooner destroy the institutions of democracy than share them with those who will follow.
Conservatives — whom Robert Nisbet called “prophets of the past” — no longer strive to conserve institutions. Instead they are undermining the presidency, Congress, the courts, the rule of law, the armed forces, the United States Postal Service, standards of human rights, the Census, voting rights, elections, the peaceful transfer of power — in short, democracy itself — not to mention science, medicine, education, and the press.
Jeff Jarvis
Blogger & prof at CUNY’s Newmark J-school; author of Geeks Bearing Gifts, Public Parts, What Would Google Do?, Gutenberg the Geek
