Can Biden stay in presidential race or will concern about the state of his health force him out of the running?
There are plenty of reporters who say his time is up, but how did the president get to this stage in the campaign without anyone running a health-check on him? Jill Abramson, the first female executive editor of the New York Times, joins Alan and Lionel on this episode. She explains that when she was in charge, she had a physician on the staff who’d be in touch with the candidates’ doctors to ensure the paper knew the health status of a potential president.
But any journalist speaking out about the president’s health risks being attacked by Democrats, who don’t want Biden to be hounded out of the race by the press. But what’s the alternative? A candidate who seems intent on destroying democracy? Alan and Lionel are also joined by Steven Brill, author of The Death of Truth. His latest book is a deep dive into the sludge of fake news and how social media channels have assisted the spread of conspiracy theories. Now the struggle to revive the truth begins in earnest.
This transcript is unedited and may contain mistakes.
Alan: Mark my words, Joe Biden is going to be out of the 2024 presidential race, whether he's ready to admit it or not. Tough talk from James Carville, a veteran of Democratic presidential campaigns writing in the New York Times this week.
Lionel: Carville, also known as the Ragin' Cajun is famous for the line, "It's the economy stupid which helped Bill Clinton win the 1992 election." He's one of several key Democrats calling for President Biden to stand aside in the US election. They also include House Democrat, Adam Smith. We're going to hear a lot more, I suspect, in the next few days.
Alan: Will Kent Joe stay in the fight? If not, what will happen next? Former New York Times editor, Jill Abramson joins us to explore the options for a Democratic Party in turmoil and how the press is handling it.
Lionel: We'll also be joined by journalist and Broadcaster, Steven Brill, for a deep dive into the sludge of fake news online. His new book, The Death of Truth, discusses what went wrong with social media. How did the platforms become awash with conspiracy theories and fake news, and what can be done to fix them?
Alan: First, it was Kellen McKenzie on Twitter who said that he would be leaving Britain the moment the storm up administration came in. Instead of which, Lionel, I noticed you fled Britain. Should we read this as a slighter burn that the new dawn that is breaking in Britain?
Lionel: No, Alan, this is a departure which took place not on political grounds. I'm actually in Sun Valley, Idaho attending the great media tech conference in America organized by Alan and Company in Sun Valley. Everybody's here.
Alan: Is Rupert there?
Lionel: He's supposed to be here. I did not see him last night at the cookout. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is supposed to be here. Masayoshi Son, who I think I've actually written a biography of Masayoshi, which is coming out in October.
Alan: The world is on the edge of their seats.
Lionel: Everybody's here and they're all talking about one thing, is Joe Biden going to stay in the race or not?
Alan: Well, we're coming onto that in a minute. Just give us the feeling of, if you place a bet now, is he going to be in or out?
Lionel: I would not place a bet because I'm not a Tory. I really don't think you can call it, Alan, I know you're going to be disappointed to hear that, but I ask pretty well everybody what they think. Monday, it looked really bad, president was on the ropes. A lot of Democrats speaking up publicly. Since then they've retreated. He really is like a barnacle, he doesn't want to move.
We'll talk a bit more about that, but there's one other story that you'd be very amused to hear. Several people said to me, the person who is most happy about this huge story covering all the front pages regarding Joe Biden is Will Lewis. Because it's not the story about his troubles and the phone hacking campaign. He's surpassed off the front pages.
Alan: Will lives to fight another day.
Lionel: Yes, I think so. Alan, what's caught your eye?
Alan: Two departures. One sad, one depending on your taste. Matthew Paris has written his last column for The Times which I think is a bit sad. He's consistently an interesting voice. More than interesting, they're consistently provocative unpredictable voice, humane voice in British journalism. At the same time, Trevor Kevin who maybe was less benign, the political editor of the Sun at the age of 81 has decided that he's had enough.
On arrival, we were expecting Thangam Debbonaire to be the next secretary of state for Culture, Media, and sport. She lost her seat in Bristol Central to the Greens. Instead, what you've got, Lisa Nandy. In terms of the sudden media aspect of her brief, people would be coming back through her past pronouncements. I would say the omens are good. I think her mother was a producer on what the papers say and...TV. Her stepfather was ...legendary figure in investigative journalism. She's got journalistic heritage. She's often spoken up for a free press.
Lionel: She also on Andrew Neil's Late Night show, I did a couple of sessions with her. A good broadcasting performer, I think.
Alan: Early days. She did write an article which they've dug up on a proposal which I think is interesting and written on, which is that you should neutralize the BBC. That everybody, every child born into this country should be given their share at the BBC. Taking control away from the government and placing it to the hands of the listeners and viewers. Lots of flesh to be put on a burden, but in principle, it sounds like an interesting idea.
Lionel: I noticed that she called for an end to the culture wars which we'll see how that translates in practice. A wider point, Alan, I must say that a lot of people, and these are big investors, they're very wealthy people, last night were asking me who is Keir Starmer. What's the Labor government going to do? If they're not socialists, are they with the capitalists?
He isn't a well-known figure. My wife and I, Victoria and I did reassure the cream of the American media elite that actually Keir Starmer's made some good first moves, and this is a centrist center-left government. I'm not expecting any thanks for that, Alan.
Alan: They should watch out because the other thing that Lisa Nandy has said in the past that she's interesting to me is to tax social media companies to fund local democracy reporters in the UK and more investigative reporting. They may not like us so much when she starts doing that. Now, the other piece of news...I know you could be our criminalologist in deciphering this.
A little paragraph saying that my Lord Morris Saatchi may have entered the race for the Telegraph. In company of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who's a director of The Economist. Does that sound plausible to you? Where do we go to with that? I think closing the bids are in a week's time, July the 19th.
Lionel: I think it's early days on this. I do know, and I've known Morris Saatchi and Lynn Forester de Rothschild for many years. I think the key point here is that Lynn, she obviously inherited a substantial amount of money when Evelyn died. Morris is very wealthy in his own right so I think they could access the money. Lynn is interested in media. She's been a long-time director at The Economist on the board of trustees there.
I should be careful here, whether it's trustees or corporate director, but she's certainly been a member of the board because the Rothschilds had a stake in The Economist Group, long-standing through the family. While she's very interested, I'm not sure whether it translates at this late stage into a full bid, but who knows?
Alan: Popping up it's the same old bidders. It's David Montgomery of the National World, who I don't think should or would be allowed to own it on competition grounds. Paul Marshall, we've discussed him in the past. People are still mentioning Murdoch in terms of The Spectator. I don't think that should be allowed. Then possibly ...themselves if no one else-- if they can get money from a different source.
Lionel: I'm going to pick you up on that, Alan, about why you think Rupert Murdoch is such a poor owner of The Spectator. Would he really interfere?
Alan: First of all, he owns a huge slug of the British Press already on competition grounds. I don't think we need Rupert Murdoch opening anymore because he's a particular kind of owner. We heard from David Yelland himself last week about if you're going to survive as a Murdoch editor you have to read the runes. You don't have to be told what to print. You read the runes, otherwise you don't last long.
Secondly, in sheer corporate governance terms, what Nick Davis has been talking to us about and the court cases that are going through the courts at the moment, reveal an ethically bankrupt company. Those are strong words, but I think they're justified. If this was any other kind of company than a media company and the [unintelligible 00:09:41] that sometimes runs media companies, there would be no question that a person like Murdoch would be allowed to get their hands on a respected national asset like The Spectator. But you may not agree.
Lionel: I think the corporate espionage that has been revealed and what went on, that is something serious and should be weighed. I was making a narrower but quite important point that I think Rupert, Murdoch is interested in The Spectator. He knows it's a quality magazine. It's a trophy asset. I don't think personally that he would interfere or micromanage the editorial line.
Alan: Lionel, it's not just corporate espionage. We just talked about the new culture, media, and sport committee. Here is a company which tried to hack the phones of all the troublesome members of that committee, including the chair. Seriously, this guy should be allowed to own this company? My second question to you is, can you imagine any editor or future editor of The Spectator under Murdoch, making wrong noises about Britain's relationship with Europe. That's not how it works, is it?
Lionel: Well, no, but The Spectator at the moment is mildly Eurosceptic. The fact is, you and I know that ...] has already said that there's no chance of rejoining the EU in our lifetime. That's not the acid test.
Alan: You take over as editor of any Murdoch paper and you have a certain number of red lines in your head that Rupert, your owner is not going to allow you to cross and you edit accordingly.
Lionel: I don't think, certainly the current editor, Fraser Nelson, doesn't operate under any traffic light system. He does what he wants and he has a fairly, fairly broad judge of opinion. That's what makes The Spectator interesting. Well, we'll see. I'd love to see your red list of bidders who are not considered fit for ownership. Would you include The Abu Dhabi?
Alan: I think Zucker himself, if you get money elsewhere would be a very interesting owner as a Democrat because he's not wrapped up in Tory politics that he's used to the American divide between news and comment and he's still a serious journalist. I can see the problem with the Abu Dhabi money.
Lionel: Well, we'll see what happens with The Spectator. All I know is that Fraser Nelson is determined as best he can to extract a very high price. In his own mind, he wants to beat the Financial Times sales price back in 2015 to Nikkei the Japanese. Which by the way, Alan, and I know we're not that competitive together, but we did secure 44 times earnings.
Alan: Well...] has never been for sale and never will be for sale. We'll never know.
Lionel: Just when the real campaigning should be getting underway in the US election, Joe Biden's health and suitability to run is dominating the narrative. Ever since his disastrous debate with Donald Trump, the calls for the president to stand down have become louder and louder.
Alan: Biden's determined that he's perfectly fined to run for office claiming that his health is no issue. Is the Democratic Party heading towards a showdown at their national convention in Chicago that begins on the 19th of August? Or could the president pull out of the race before that?
Lionel: The Democratic Convention in August is coming up fast, so the Democrats will have to decide pretty soon about whether Joe Biden and his vice presidential candidate, Kamala Harris are indeed ratified. Or whether there's some new device like a mini-convention. James Carville has talked about bringing in Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to select a slate of eight candidates, have a mini convention of delegates to decide.
All this is up in the air. We are joined by Jill Abramson, first female executive editor of The New York Times. After watching the first presidential debate, Jill said she didn't think that either candidate was in a fit state to run for office.
[music]
Alan: Welcome Jill Abramson, an extraordinary few days in American politics. How much do you blame the American media for the gasp of surprise that people felt when they watched that calamitous behavior by Biden in that debate?
Jill: Well, I'm not big on the blame game, but I do feel that the fact that news reporters in Washington DC themselves had gasps of surprise while watching the debate tells you a lot about an insufficient amount of deep reporting on President Biden's decline.
Alan: Now, you were a bureau chief in Washington. How easy is it to get that information about the medical condition of a president if the officials around them are desperate to shield him?
Jill: It's tough, and I'm not going to say otherwise. Part of that reality is why for my entire career at The New York Times, we had a very experienced physician named Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, who every presidential cycle, and he'd get going early, would line up cooperation. If he needed the top editors of the paper to help him [unintelligible 00:15:36] to his requests, he wouldn't hesitate to do so. He would start trying to line up cooperation from the nominees, the leading candidates who had become the nominees, and ask for their medical records and access to interview their doctors.
He would do sit down interviews with the nominees themselves about their health. It wasn't a perfect system. Candidates who wanted to cover up illnesses could still attempt to do so and sometimes succeed. It's been reported after the fact that Ronald Reagan in his second term exhibited signs of the Alzheimer's disease that he would later announce he had. By and large, it was a good system, and at least was a good-faith effort on the part of a major news organization to hold candidates accountable for being transparent about the state of their health.
That system in part, I don't want to say it's because Larry Altman went to a very well-deserved retirement, which he did, but that system was not adequately put back in place. I'm not targeting the New York Times here, but anywhere in journalism.
Lionel: Jill, the key point of course, is that having Lawrence Altman covering that story meant that the White House correspondence and you know the game as well as I do. They sometimes might be treading carefully because they didn't want to lose access to their sources.
Jill: Yes. That's a common practice at newspapers. I did that hundreds of times at both The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
Lionel: Is the defense also not that the White House was extremely adept at covering up the president's physical frailty?
Jill: I don't want to describe it as adept because I think it was offensive. I think they all but threatened White House reporters who were making inquiries about the president's health, his obvious decline in recent months and the like. They not only put up a smoke screen, they mounted a fierce counteroffensive that all but threatened to cut off any reporter who was going to publish anything about this.
Alan: This is an extraordinary election in many terms, and there's a sense amongst those on the liberal left that something existential is at stake here. Does that affect reporters? Do they think, I don't want to delve too much into this guy's candidate because the alternative is so much worse?
Jill: Reporters now face something that I did not in my career, and I gather it's painful and horrible, which is the social media onslaught, much of it fueled by ideology and partisans, which greets any story that is perceived as helping the political enemy. In this case, any story about Biden's decline would be met with a big social media attack from Democrats who accused the reporters writing such stories of helping Donald Trump and being out to help elect someone who was bent on destroying democracy.
Social media attack is a factor. Then a more high-minded reason, which is reporters somewhere in their own consciences worrying that doing these stories would indeed help elect someone who was bent on destroying the pillars of democracy.
Lionel: Jill, wearing your old hat, what would you tell the young reporter when he makes those points to you.
Jill: For the social media attack, all I would say is what I always say to reporters, we'll have your back. The New York Times has your back and The New York Times is still a powerful institution in American society, number one. Number two it sounds corny and old-fashioned, but The New York Times has always reported the news without fear or favor, and let that be your guide again in covering the story about President Biden.
Lionel: There are different ways of telling the story. Obviously, there's the text, there's the deeply reported version, the kind of stories that you and I are writing. Then obviously, suddenly you've got a text plus if you like, dimension, where a news organization like the Times, like the Washington Post, could produce a very effective video. If you used snippets, portraits of the president stumbling and put it all into one go, I mean, that would be ...
Jill: Yes. Those videos appeared all over social media and on Fox News for months before the debate. The problem with those is obviously sometimes they were edited speciously, but they provide no context. There were reporters who took a video approach, and I'd point you to a very good journalist named John Ellis, who edits and writes a daily news report called News Items. In 2021, he did just what you're talking about and wrote context and did some reporting. Wrote a quite good piece as early as 2021, mainly by sitting and watching YouTube videos going back to 2016.
Alan: It's fair to say that The Wall Street Journal did do a pretty thorough job of reporting this recently.
Jill: Yes. I publicly praised Annie Linskey and the rest of the team at the Journal, that did a thorough story. I think that could have been done at the point they published it before the debate. They not only faced fierce criticism from the Biden White House, but I have to say it looked to me like journalistic colleagues and other news organizations were very happy to get on the critical bandwagon and say, "Oh, that story was shoddy because it only quoted Republicans by name."
Lionel: I couldn't agree more, Jill. I was in Washington just after that story was published around the dinner table. There was some senior journalists, including a very prominent TV journalist, and they were trying to rip this story apart. It was unbelievable.
Jill: [unintelligible 00:23:12] really hard. It's because they didn't want to have to get assigned to do the story.
Alan: Jill, I think you think something else has happened since the debate, which is the media organizations have gone into overdrive. In some sense, overcompensating for what they didn't do beforehand.
Jill: Yes. With a kind of political reportage I don't like, which is it's the whole will Biden or will he not survive? Taking the political temperature of the moment up on Capitol Hill, it's just the easy stuff. That's the easy stuff to do. It's not terribly enlightening to the public. I don't like that. I think proportionality even in the digital age is important. It's really hard to maintain it on a big running story like the debate aftermath.
If you count up, I don't want to keep harping on The New York Times, but look at The Washington Post and just count up the number of stories every day and the number of opinion columns every day, and it's too much. It looks like the press is trying to hound Biden out of the race, and that is not our role. It is not our role.
Alan: Are there echoes here of 2015 that Hillary Clinton leaked letters where in retrospect, everyone said, oh, we went overboard, but at the time, nobody could resist it?
Jill: Yes. We're talking a lot about The New York Times, and of course that's my primary association.
Alan: It's a difficult balance, isn't it? Because, in a way, it's the only story in town now.
Jill: It's the only story town, but there's also a commercial motive, Alan. You and I, in our books both wrote about this. That the digital revolution and the enormous vacuum that is the internet crying out for new material every night. To say every hour is even an understatement now the news cycle moves so quickly, is that that appetite for new, new, new stories generates that imbalance. It just does.
I don't instantly have a solution to that. It makes it really hard to keep a sense of proportion. Where's the deep coverage of Donald Trump, not just of his health? It's as if radio silence on Trump descended at the very point the huge wave of coverage of Biden's debate performance rose. I'm glad that seems to be recalibrating right now, but just because the Biden story is dominant, you can't let up on the Trump story. I believe in editors. I believe in Lionel Barber and Alan Rusbridger. I truly do. I don't want to just cast the judgment about which news stories are important and yet highlighted to a popularity contest.
Lionel: For what it's worth, I stopped the 10 top stories appearing at the top of the page. I said, "I want to know which stories are being read at what length, not just the clicks." Jill, thank you so much.
Alan: Thank you, Jill.
Lionel: This is Media Confidential from Prospect Magazine. After the break, we'll be talking to Steven Brill, author of The Death of Truth. We'll be right back.
Alan: In the Prospect Podcast this week, after last week's historic election, what can Keir Starmer and David Lammy do to put post-Brexit Britain back on the map? Senior editor Alona Ferber is joined by international affairs expert and prospect contributing editor, Isabel Hilton to discuss.
Alona Ferber: If you start from the position of recognizing that Britain is a medium-sized power with a lot of domestic problems, then automatically your international position changes. You have to count your assets. Britain is still a permanent member of the Security Council of the United Nations. That's increasingly dysfunctional. The whole rule-based order is dysfunctional.
Now, it seems to me that medium powers such as the UK, who are going to be increasingly caught between the rivalries of big powers, US and China, need to make alliances with other medium powers. Because medium and small countries need the rules-based order. That is their protection, otherwise, they simply get trampled. It is not unimaginable that if Britain were to feel that it needed to cling to the United States as it has before, this very close alliance, and we have a Trump presidency, and that becomes very unpredictable. Britain could be dragged into situations which are really not to Britain's advantage.
Alan: Follow Prospect Podcasts wherever you get your podcasts. If you enjoy listening to Media Confidential, perhaps you'd consider sponsoring Media Confidential. As we're about to hear from Steve Brill, there has never been a more important time for trusted media in an age of machines and of domination by the four big tech companies. Prospect is a comparative minnow, but what we do is rigorously check our journalism to fact-check it and to try and maintain an independent path in a world that's increasingly polarized.
If you think that's valuable, we treasure you as listeners, but perhaps you'd like to sponsor an episode because that would enable us to continue our work of explaining. Of lucidly analyzing and contextualizing information and also our work of investigation.
If that appeals, get in touch with Wendy Miller who is our fabulous sponsorship person. You can contact her on mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk. Do it quickly before others beat you to it.
[music]
Lionel: Welcome back to Media Confidential. Steve Brill has written a new book Death of Truth. Its full title is How Social Media and the Internet Gave Snake Oil Salesmen and Demagogues the Weapons They Needed to Destroy Trust and Polarize the World, And What We Can Do.
Alan: What's a state cannot be underestimated. Steve says when the public loses trust in institutions that have traditionally been sources of information, the foundation of a democratic society is at risk.
Host: Well, we're delighted to be joined by Steve, an American lawyer, journalist, and entrepreneur. He founded the monthly magazine, The American Lawyer, and cable channel, Court TV. He's a bestselling author, the latest being The Death of Truth. Steve, that's quite a title. Can you actually justify it?
Steve Brill: Yes, I think I can. I spent about 300 pages justifying it and justifying what may be our mutual frustration that the country, western democracies, the civil societies no longer at least organize or unite around a basic set of shared beliefs. Shared facts, and shared trust that most of the institutions we care about try to work most of the time. The book is based on the notion that nobody believes in any facts, everybody just has an opinion.
The opening scene of the book, the opening page recounts on a meeting that my wife and I went to. It was a parent's day, visiting day for our then third-grade daughter at school. We're all standing in the back of the room and the teacher asks one of the kids, luckily not my daughter, how much is 6X7? The kid answers, it's 41. The teacher says, I disagree. Well, you don't disagree over 6X7, it's a fact.
Well, today we disagree over who got the most votes, over whether Vladimir Zelensky just bought King Charles' Estate at Highgrove with $100 million supplied by the American government. Whether the COVID vaccine will kill you. Whether there was a moon landing. That's the state we're in. I think I can justify the title of the book. Although if I had been more exact, I might have said the comatose state of the truth. On the notion that it can be revived because they spend a fair amount of time talking about how we might get back to where we once were.
Host: We'll get to that, but you do identify the hyperscalers, these huge big data companies, the Googles, the Metas, once Facebook, as having a central role in bringing us to the position, the dire position that we are. Can you talk a bit about that?
Steve Brill: Sure. There have always been conspiracy theories, there have always been hucksters, they've always been demagogues, but they've never had the communications tools at scale that the social media platforms have created for them. A combination of scale and a lack of any accountability. One of the things I say is the great thing about the internet is that anybody can be a publisher. Anybody can instantly reach a billion people with a video or a text message or anything they want, instantly. It doesn't cost anything, there's no barriers to entering. That's the good news about the internet.
The bad news about the internet is that anybody can be a publisher. There is a difference between some anonymous person reaching millions of people with a fake video saying that the COVID vaccine has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and a doctor online saying that the COVID vaccine is completely safe. The difference is that the social media platforms, their business model is to give you more of the guys saying the vaccine will kill you and less of the expert because the expert is boring, the expert is non-inflammatory.
The social media platforms, their business model depends on the most people seeing and staying on the platform so that they can maximize their ad revenue. Co conspiring with that is something called programmatic advertising, which means that advertising that might go to the Economist or the Guardian, to take two examples, instead goes to hoax websites because advertising is placed by algorithm, not by anyone making a rational choice about where they-- not by any brand making a rational choice about where they want their Ads to appear. Which is another great scandal.
Lionel: There are some stunning numbers which you produce about the volume of programmatic advertising.
Steve Brill: Every second, 15 million ad placements are made by the programmatic advertising machine. There isn't anyone alive who could actually be involved with making real choices about where those placements happen. It's all done by algorithm and it results in billions of dollars going to support, to finance all the stuff that we're also worried about. That same billions of dollars does not go to advertising on legitimate journalism websites.
In the United States, we've just passed a really sad milestone, there are now more fake news sites posing as local news sites in the United States, than there are legitimate local news sites in the United States that are published by the proprietors of legitimate daily newspapers in the United States. If you're looking at what you think is a local news site in the United States, the odds are better than 50-50 that you're reading something that's either been financed by a political action committee on the left or on the right. Or now there's a new player in the field, of the Russians who've stood up 167 new fake local news sites in the United States.
Alan: Steve, all this is alarming. I guess we might all agree about the malignant effect of social media. To what extent do you think what we used to call legacy media or mainstream media also has a share of the blame?
Steve Brill: Well, there are lots of different ways they have a share of the blame. One would be not being more aware of the threat early on. As you know, because actually other than the FT, every newspaper we can think of made the initial mistake of saying gee the internet's wonderful. I'm going to put all my stuff online for free so that more people can read it and see it. That had what, in retrospect, was the obvious effect of killing the sales of print publications and killing subscriptions because people did the natural thing. If I can get it for free why should I pay for it?
Lionel: I think we should point out that The Wall Street Journal also had a paid-for model.
Steve Brill: Right, and that model was started by my NewsGuard partner Gordon Crovitz. I should not have neglected that, I will get in trouble. That's one area where legacy media are at fault for not really understanding and anticipating the business dynamics. The other broad area is not understanding how to take advantage of that medium, of the internet, of social media early enough and letting others basically usurp them.
Then there's the age-old content question. In the old days, you could argue that the problem was that there were too few outlets that dominated news coverage. Certainly in the United States, you had a situation where there were three network newscasts that in the 1970s had 92% of all the oddballs. That's not such a great thing because it led to all kinds of conventional wisdom and mainstream thinking, which probably allowed the Vietnam War to go on years longer than it would've if there were people out there really doing the kind of reporting that people ended up doing.
What's replaced that monopoly on thought and news is the chaos that we have today. We have to somewhere get back into the mill. We have to acknowledge and create the economic environment for the idea that journalists actually are people who should be listened to more than someone who is anonymous and is posting something on a platform and saying that 200,000 people died from the COVID vaccine in the United States, which is nonsense.
Alan: Steve, you've got a number of recommendations in your book, including media literacy programs, ban on anonymity of posting make it easier to sue the tech companies. You also suggest a subtle position on Section 230 about the notorious or infamous American Act that really has granted immunity to the tech companies for the content they're publishing. Rather than repealing it or banning it, you suggested a couple of modest tweaks. Can you just tell listeners what they are?
Steve Brill: The major legal underpinning or logical underpinning of the notion of immunity under Section 230, which was a three-paragraph amendment to a multi-hundred-page telecommunications bill passed in 1996 before there were any social media companies. The underpinning of it was that the social media companies are not publishers. That holding them responsible for what is said on their platform is the equivalent of holding the telephone company responsible for what I say to you during the telephone conversation.
There's no editing going on. That's been proven to be false because the editing going on is the algorithm that sends a selected material to me based on my interests and based on the social media's business model. To keep me on by sending me into my corner and giving me stuff that is going to inflame me and keep me reading. The algorithm is an editorial process, I think so.
You could tweak Section 230 by saying, you have that immunity just the way a postman does from carrying a letter that says something harmful. You have that immunity as long as you're not doing anything to interfere with how the content is presented. While I have you guys on, I want to ask you a question. We have Section 230 in the United States, that's our excuse. What's your excuse? You don't have Section 230?
Alan: We don't. The last government grappled for about four years to try and produce something that would make sense of all of this. I think it's fair to say it wasn't a terrific piece of legislation.
Steve Brill: You uncharacteristically are understating it. It is a useless piece of legislation.
Alan: I was being British.
Steve Brill: It brings to mind the things I say in the book, which is America's two greatest exports to the UK and Europe are, A, the social media companies, and B, now, high stakes, high dollar lobbying, which is what happened. The Online Honest Bill was announced with great fanfare. Someone even working for me at NewsGuard was lured away to Ofcom because this was going to be the great revolution. We were finally going to put Facebook and Twitter and YouTube in their place and London was going to show Washington how to do it. Nothing happened.
Alan: I think the truth is that Brussels has done a better job than London. The Digital Services Act in Brussels is a better piece of legislation.
Steve: It is. It is slightly better. The proof is still in how they enforce it, but it's certainly better.
Lionel: Steve, if you were setting up a new media group, how would you go about establishing a brand which was consistent with a degree of trust, but which was also commercially successful. Or is it the case that actually it's almost impossible? You need to have some other form of funding or a sugar daddy if you want to stay in the truth business?
Steve: I don't think that's the case. You ran a newspaper that proves it, to which you're going to say, "Well, that was the FT. Those are people who pay for it as a business expense," but the fact is that what we're seeing today, you can see it with people making voluntary contributions to The Guardian. They've been able to communicate effectively to their audience that journalism costs money.
There are instances of local news startups, which I believe in the United States can and should subsist without being nonprofits by making the case to people that they should pay.
It's not just The New York Times but the Minneapolis Star Tribune has turned a profit by getting people to pay for their online content and getting advertisers to appreciate the fact that an Ad works better on the website of the Star Tribune than it does on Infowars, which is just factually true.
Factually, advertising works better on credible news than it works on garbage. It's just that the programmatic machine doesn't allow for advertisers to make those adjustments, unless they in insist on it. Which is a self-serving thing for me to be saying, because one of the things NewsGuard does is it creates those filters for advertisers so that they can make those decisions.
Lionel: Steve, would you be anxious if Google effectively tried to do what you are doing? Sometimes people say, "Google, why can't you just rank news organizations and make judgements about whether they're worth it or not?"
Steve Brill: I wouldn't be anxious at all because no one would trust them. They would do it by algorithm. In fact, they do it. Actually, they do it. There are four entities in the world that judge the reliability of news sites. Google does it, Facebook does it, YouTube does it, and Twitter does it. Then there's a fifth one called NewsGuard. The first four do it in secret, so that if you, Alan, wanted to know how does The Guardian compare with the Washington Post, you wouldn't know who to call at Facebook to ask.
If you got someone on the phone, they wouldn't tell you. If they did tell you how you scored compared to Washington Post and you said, "How come?" They'd say, "Well, we can't tell you because you'll game our system." No one would trust them, and certainly, no one would trust them because of the judgements that they do make.
One of the scenes I have in the book is the only time that YouTube ever opined on the reliability and legitimacy of news sites was when the head of content at YouTube was on RT, the Russian propaganda site, and he commended them for getting their billionth view on YouTube. Whereupon he said, "The reason you attract that audience is that everybody knows that you're real, that you're legitimate. You're not just a bunch of propaganda." I'm not making that up, that's what he said.
That's the only time any of the tech companies has ever actually openly opined on the reliability. I would love it if Google listed how it ranks things because you'd get a computerized list that would look like a chatbot. It would probably list organizations that don't exist. It would have Infowars rated higher than The Wall Street Journal. God knows what it would look like.
Alan: I couldn't access your rankings, but I know The New York Times recently fell a bit from grace from its 100% ranking to something a little less than 100%. How does the FT score now?
Steve Brill: The FT is still 100%.
Alan: I suppose Prospect is too small to be--
Steve Brill: Actually, I should look. I don't know if we've rated it or not, but we certainly should, and we will. We'll rate anyone who asks us to rate them. We don't ask permission to rate anyone.
Alan: okay. Well, please, rate us. We're begging to be rated. Steve, it's been great to talk and thank you for all your work.
Lionel: Thank you very much.
Lionel: That's all from Media Confidential today. Thank you to Jill Abramson and Steve Brill for joining us. We'll be back next week with more news from behind the headlines and clickbait.
Alan: You can send any questions or comments to mediaonfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk. We'll get in touch on Twitter or as we now call it, X, ....Remember to follow Media Confidential wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. Our producer is Martin Poyntz-Roberts.
