[Fortunately, there are some ideas for challenging the
control the rich have over the media. We are not going to be able to
prevent the rich from buying media outlets. Instead, we will have to
go the other way and allow the non-rich to have a voice.]
[[link removed]]

OMG, A RIGHT-WING JERK CAN BUY TWITTER! MEDIA CONCENTRATION MATTERS
 
[[link removed]]


 

Dean Baker
October 30, 2022
Center for Economic and Policy Research
[[link removed]]


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_ Fortunately, there are some ideas for challenging the control
the rich have over the media. We are not going to be able to prevent
the rich from buying media outlets. Instead, we will have to go the
other way and allow the non-rich to have a voice. _

,

 

It’s more than a bit bizarre that until Elon Musk bought Twitter,
most policy types apparently did not see a risk that huge platforms
like Facebook and Twitter could be controlled by people with a clear
political agenda. While just about everyone had some complaints about
the moderation of these and other commonly used platforms, they
clearly were not pushing Fox News-style nonsense.

With Elon Musk in charge, that may no longer be true. Musk has
indicated his fondness for racists and anti-Semites
[[link removed]], and
made it clear that they are welcome on his new toy. He also is
apparently good with right-wing kooks making up stories about
everything from Paul Pelosi to Covid vaccines. (Remember, with Section
230 protection, Musk cannot be sued for defaming individuals and
companies by mass-marketing lies, only the originators face any legal
liability.)

If the hate and lies aren’t enough to make Twitter unattractive to
the reality-based community, the right-wing crazies are putting
together their lists of people to be purged. We don’t know who they
will come up with, and what qualifies in their mind for banishment. We
also don’t know whether the self-proclaimed free-speech absolutist
Elon Musk will go along, but there certainly is a risk that Musk will
want to keep his friends happy.

In that case, Twitter may go the way of Truth Social and Parlor, which
would be unfortunate, but probably better than having a massive social
media platform subject to Elon Musk’s whims. But we should still be
asking how we can get in a situation where one right-wing jerk can
have so much power?

THE PROBLEM OF MEDIA CONCENTRATION IS NOT NEW

The Musk problem is hardly new. After all, Rupert Murdoch has been
broadcasting his imaginary world to the country for decades,
highlighting pressing national issues like the War on Christmas and
President Obama’s tan suit.  

But the problem goes well beyond Murdoch. Media outlets are owned and
controlled by rich people and/or large corporations. They exist first
and foremost to make money. While there are some cases where owners
may genuinely have a commitment to using their news outlet to serve
the public, for example, the Sulzberger family, which has controlled
the New York Times for more than a century, these are the exceptions.

And, even with the exceptions, their perception of the public good is
an extremely wealthy person’s perception of the public good. That
may not be the same as the perception of an average working person
struggling to get by.   

As far as for-profit enterprises, news outlets have to be concerned
about getting advertising. That may make them less likely to report
news that will reflect poorly on major advertisers. That means things
like both siding the role of the fossil fuel industry in global
warming, or downplaying the windfall that corporations got from
Trump’s 2017 tax cut.

This ownership structure could reasonably cause us to question the
neutrality of news from outlets like CNN (owned by AT&T), ABC (owned
by Disney), or NBC (owned by GE). But Musk’s takeover of Twitter
takes the problem a step further. The viewership of each of the
networks’ news shows numbers in the single digit millions. Twitter
has almost 80 million active users in the United States. This means it
matters much more if Twitter is taken over by a right-wing jerk than
your average television network.

ALTERNATIVES TO CORPORATE CONTROL

Even though the media are incredibly important in shaping people’s
view of the world, there has been remarkably little attention to the
issue from most liberals or progressives. There are some small, and
poorly funded, organizations, like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
[[link removed]] and Media Matters [[link removed]],
which do focus on the issue. And there are a few prominent
intellectuals who have written on the topic, like Rick McChesney
[[link removed]], Dan Froomkin
[[link removed]], and Jay Rosen
[[link removed]], but for the most part, the
issue of media control gets little attention from the left of center.

Ironically, campaign finance reform, which is almost certainly an
exercise in futility given recent Supreme Court rulings, gets far more
attention. The absurdity of the focus on campaign finance reform
should be apparent to anyone who gives the issue a moment’s thought.

Suppose through some miracle Congress passed, and the Supreme Court
upheld, a bill that limited billionaires’ abilities to buy political
ads for their favorite candidate. Is anything going to stop these
billionaires from buying up newspapers and television stations and
running the ads supporting their favored candidates as news stories?

There is no remotely satisfying answer to that question, and it is
ridiculous that campaign finance reformers haven’t recognized this
fact. Limiting campaign spending by rich people will do nothing if we
don’t do something to limit their ability to influence public
opinion through the media.

Fortunately, there are some
[[link removed]] ideas
[[link removed]] for challenging
[[link removed]] the
control the rich have over the media. The basic story is that we are
not going to be able to prevent the rich from buying and owning media
outlets. Instead, we will have to go the other way and allow the
non-rich to have a voice.[1]
[[link removed]]

The idea is that we can give every person some amount of money (e.g.
$100 to $200) to support the media outlet(s), or possibly a broader
category of creative workers, of their choice. This system could be
modeled along the lines of the charitable contribution tax deduction,
where the government draws out general conditions for being eligible
to receive the funds.

This means that the government specifies the types of organizations
that can qualify to receive the funds. In the case of the charitable
deduction, an organization has to indicate that it’s a church, it
provides food for the poor, or does something else that qualifies it
to be a charitable organization.

The government doesn’t try to determine whether it’s a good church
or whether the food it provides is high quality, the only question is
whether the organization does what it claims. A similar policy could
be applied to the recipients of funds allocated through this system.
(In my view, I would make not getting copyright protection a condition
of getting funding – the government gives you one subsidy, not two
– but that is the sort of issue that could be resolved down the
road.)   

This sort of system could provide a large amount of money to sustain
media organizations that are not owned by rich people. For example, if
the credit were $200, and 10 million people chose to support a
specific television network with their full credit, the organization
would have $2 billion a year to cover its operating expenses. That is
roughly equal [[link removed]] to
CNN’s annual operating revenue.    

This credit could create enormous opportunities for the non-rich to
finance newspapers/websites, television stations, and other outlets
that could compete with the current ones owned and controlled by
billionaires. This path also has the great benefit that it could put
adopted piecemeal, with states and even local governments, giving
their residents the opportunity to support new types of news outlets.

If enough people could gain support for this type of program, they
could get a more progressive state, like California or Massachusetts
to pave the way, or a city like San Francisco or Seattle. Just as the
movement for a higher minimum wage has spread from successes in these
places, the same could happen with a tax credit system to support
alternative media.

FUN WITH ELON MUSK AND TWITTER

Even if it proves to be possible to advance a tax credit system to
support alternatives to the billionaires’ media, we still have the
problem of massive platforms like Facebook and Twitter being owned by
rich people, who can essentially do what they want in accordance with
their whims. The big problem here is the issue of network effect
[[link removed]]s.

The idea of network effects is that people benefit from being part of
a massive network since they want to be able to see what a large
number of other people are posting, and they may hope that a large
number of people will see what they post. These effects can be
exaggerated. For example, the overwhelming majority of users will
never have their Facebook pages or Twitter posts viewed by more than a
small number of people. Nonetheless, they are real. This makes it hard
to dislodge a Facebook or Twitter, once it has become dominant.  

One route to go is to make the playing field less hospitable to large
platforms. This can be done by removing Section 230 protections
[[link removed]] for
websites that either sell advertising or personal information. This
means that the big platforms could be held liable for defamatory
material that they circulated over their platform.

In this scenario, if election deniers wrote posts on Twitter saying
that Dominion voting machines had switched votes from Trump to Biden,
Elon Musk could be sued by Dominion for defamation, just as Fox News
is now being sued. The same would apply to the vaccine deniers
claiming that Pfizer and Moderna vaccines have killed huge numbers of
people.

Taking away Section 230 protection from these platforms would not just
help large actors. As it stands now, if some racist asshole started
posting on their Facebook page that a restaurant owned by Blacks or
Asians had poisoned their family and sent them to the hospital, the
restaurant owner would have no legal recourse against Facebook. They
could sue the racist, who may not have much money, but they could not
even force Facebook to take down the post.

By contrast, if a television station or newspaper had allowed the
person to speak or printed a letter to the editor along the same
lines, they would face liability. They could be forced to issue a
correction to avoid being named in a defamation suit.

There are clearly complications with going this route. A platform with
billions of posts daily could not be expected to monitor posts in
advance for potentially defamatory material. This problem has been
solved (imperfectly) with copyright, under the Digital Millennium
Copyright Act (DMCA), by requiring platforms to remove violating
material in a timely manner after being notified by the copyright
holder.

There could be a similar requirement for Internet sites. The evidence
from the DMCA is that websites are overly cautious and err on the side
of removing material even when the claim of violation is extremely
weak. That may also prove to be the case with Internet platforms like
Facebook and Twitter when it comes to allegedly defamatory material,
but that is in part the point.

Part of the point of removing Section 230 protection from sites that
rely on advertising or selling personal information is to put them at
a disadvantage relative to sites that rely on subscriptions or
donations to stay in business. In that case, people could count on
posting material on a smaller site that might be removed by Facebook
or Twitter. This would give sites operating on an alternative model a
large advantage relative to the current Internet giants.

In any case, taking away Section 230 protection would clearly raise
costs for the major Internet platforms. Given that Twitter was already
struggling even before Elon Musk took it over, this sort of increase
in costs would clearly be a serious blow.

Undoubtedly, changing the law on Section 230 protection would hurt
some other sites as well. While some could probably switch over to a
subscription model relatively easily, others may find it difficult.
Sites will of course develop new modes of operation. For example, a
site like Airbnb could require users to sign away their right to sue
for defamation as a condition of usage.

As a practical matter, it is impossible to guarantee that there will
be no negative outcomes from this change, just as is true of every
policy that actually does anything in the world. The question is
whether some number of sites either being seriously downsized, or
going out of business altogether, is a price worth paying to prevent
rich jerks from being able to operate huge platforms according to
their whims.

To my view, it would be worth the price, but your mileage may vary. In
any case, it is distressing to see we are now in a situation where
this is the reality, not just a hypothetical one. It speaks volumes
about the quality of intellectual debate in this country, that this
possibility apparently caught so many of our leading policy types by
surprise.       

[1]
[[link removed]] I
also discuss this in chapter 5 of _Rigged
[[link removed]]_ (it’s free).

_Dean Baker is Senior Economist at Center for Economic and Policy
Research. He co-founded CEPR in 1999. His areas of research include
housing and macroeconomics, intellectual property, Social Security,
Medicare and European labor markets. He is the author of several
books, including Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the
Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Rich Richer
[[link removed]]._ His blog, “Beat the
Press [[link removed]],” provides
commentary on economic reporting. He received his B.A. from Swarthmore
College and his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan.

_His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including
the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, the London Financial
Times, and the New York Daily News._

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