In the shadow of the infodemic
The crisis in media comes at a terrible time
On April 5th I took a flight to Queenstown, I was on my way to Wānaka to speak at a panel titled ‘Truth and Lies’ at the Wānaka Festival of Colour, alongside microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles, one of New Zealand’s most prominent science communicators during the COVID pandemic, and RNZ host Susie Ferguson, presenter of the Undercurrent podcast on disinformation in Aotearoa New Zealand. Kathryn Ryan from RNZ hosted the panel, as well as several others at the festival. (Kate Hannah from the Disinformation Project was also going to appear, but had to cancel).
I’ve done a few events like this since my book came out, this was the first one that had protesters outside (and a handful of hecklers inside). I should probably be surprised it took this long, any speaking appearances I do generate a backlash online, but rarely to the keyboard warriors show up. Primarily though I think the protesters were there for the others on the panel; women in the counter-disinformation space attract far more vitriol than men. While a dozen or so people stood outside with larger-than-life pictures of supposed vaccine injuries, myself and the others got the opportunity to meet Central Otago local Sam Neil, who had been in the audience. He told us we were doing great work, I told him I’d been a fan since Jurassic Park.
On the panel I spoke about the spread of disinformation online, how social media algorithms developed to keep eyes on screens as long as possible inadvertently led to people being served up more divisive content, how Facebook’s internal research showed their algorithm was suggesting extreme groups to people, and how while we were confined to our homes during the lockdowns, this all became a lot worse. I acknowledged that social media had improved somewhat in recent years, but that I was still concerned about things I read about, like the number of teenage boys getting into masculinity influencer Andrew Tait.
“What can we do? '' is always a tricky question. I told the audience to be sceptical of everything they see online, I gave the example photographs circulating on Twitter (X) purporting to be from bombing in Gaza, that are actually from earthquakes in Syria last year. (An aside, if you’re on that platform, the BBC journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh is a useful follow as he shows which images and videos circulating are disingenuous). Time was running out by this part of the discussion and I felt like I perhaps should have picked a different example. There is false information spreading about the situation on the ground, undoubtedly. Alongside that though, people in Gaza are documenting their own genocide thorough tweets and Tiktoks. You can see how treating all of those with suspicion until an English speaking journalist corroborates a story is problematic. The information situation will get worse if Israel succeeds in banning Al Jazeera and other media.
I also suggested to the audience that they get their news from organisations that come under the Media Council or Broadcasting Standards Authority, noting that many online-only platforms are online-only specifically to avoid having to adhere to standards on accuracy, and if they’re in a position to do so, take out subscriptions to reputable media sources. Because social media companies, the ones whose algorithms have pushed people to Qanon influencers and more, are now getting the advertising revenue that once went to news outlets. I now know just how much of that revenue they’re getting- 90 cents in every dollar spent on online advertising.
This has been devastating for the news media. TV3’s Newshub, one of the country’s two evening news bulletins is ending, along with The AM Show. TVNZ, which is state owned but run commercially, is ending their midday bulletin, the investigative Sunday programme, and long running consumer affairs show Fair Go. As I write, it has just been announced that Stuff, the country’s largest news website, will produce a daily news bulletin to replace Newshub on TV3. Having a competing nightly news broadcasts is needed, as despite many of us thinking of everything as being online now, 50% of the population still watches linear television- including 75% of the over 60s.
Even for those who aren’t watching the broadcasts, the news will likely reach them. Most news still originates with journalists in newsrooms. With that in mind, not every job from Newshub will be saved, it looks to be the case that the new TV bulletins will be produced in large part by Stuff’s existing teams, though they are hiring some of the redundant Newshub staff. There will be less journalists working. At the 2006 census there were 4071 professional journalists in New Zealand, the figure is estimated to be less than 1500 today once the TV redundancies are taken into account. Less than half the number of journalists, despite the population growing by another million people during that time.
For journalism to survive many articles are going behind paywalls, I told the audience in Wānaka that I worry about this (even though I need to do it myself) because while good information is becoming a premium service, the fake news- the likes of Counterspin Media, Reality Check Radio and Alex Jones’ Infowars will always be free. It was at this point a heckler yelled out “they’re not fake!” a disappointing reminder that there are people out there who believe the outlets telling people the COVID vaccine is unsafe or denying the reality of mass shootings, including the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, are actually the trustworthy ones.
Trust in news media has been steadily declining. Last year, a minority of people, 42%, trusted the news “most of the time” . This year that’s declined even further, now just 33% of us trust the news most of the time. This doesn't mean two thirds of us are in agreement with the heckler or his cohort protesting outside with anti-vaccine placards; many marginalised people have reason to distrust media who have in the interest of balance framed their rights as a topic to be debated, or framed coverage of events in a way that aligns with the powerful. Back in Christchurch last weekend I attended the weekly rally calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. A Palestinian speaker berated the coverage of ongoing genocide in The New Zealand Herald and Newshub, the crowd booed these outlets. This is not necessarily an unfair response, though I can easily find good journalism on Gaza in New Zealand media, such as the recent Q&A interview with Auckland University senior lecturer Dr Ritesh Shah, or the item on the soon-to-be-gone Sunday that included this frank interview with former IDF commander Yehuda Shaul.
I do worry that some in the Palestine solidarity movement could end up sharing those fake tweets that claim photos from earthquakes and other conflicts are actually scenes from Gaza, a well meaning attempt to share information directly from people on the ground that could instead end up discrediting them, or worse, I worry about people sharing content from the far-right activists who have rebranded themselves as “pro-Palestine” in order to launder antisemitic conspiracy theories. For someone like myself, whose every statement on Palestine is picked apart (and often shared screenshotted with context cropped out) I’m extra careful what I share, which means I share very little. This chilling effect could be the goal of some of the disinformation spreaders, or it just could be a side effect of the polluted information environment.
The information environment does feel a little cleaner this week with Reality Check Radio going off air. The website for the online station which was previously producing nine hours of content a day now shows a single video soliciting donations, with text asking “are you willing to face the following challenges alone?” The “challenges” listed include “medical tyranny”, “gender ideology” and “mass migration” in a potpourri of conspiracist talking points. The same episode of Q&A that gave us an insightful interview with Ritesh Shah had a piece on RCR’s hiatus that was woefully inadequate. The platform's more respectable hosts, such as former TVNZ newsreader Peter Williams, were interviewed, with no mention of- to pick just one example- another host recently platforming Peter Brimelow, a man the SPLC describes as a white nationalist. While I wouldn’t consider this newsworthy for Q&A, it’s perhaps also notable that Williams recently interviewed Randal Richards, about how Richards and his associates disrupted the Wānaka event I spoke at.
While they deny that this whole thing is a publicity stunt, RCR will probably come back once they’ve raised enough money from their listeners to do so. But globally, the audience for right-wing media is falling, due to Facebook deemphasising news in people's feeds. Left-wing and non-partisan media has also been affected, but less so as right-wing media sites have more commonly produced content designed to go viral or gain clicks from outrage, and have relied more heavily on Facebook for traffic. As Paul Farhi in The Atlantic points out though, the decline in web traffic doesn’t necessarily put the future of these platforms at risk, as many have wealthy patrons backing them rather than relying on advertising revenue. (In New Zealand, this is the case with Sean Plunkett’s The Platform which is funded by the Wright Family.) Less readers does likely mean less influence however.
The future is not looking bright, but I hold out hope. Video production is expensive and resource heavy, but podcasts have taken off and many of them are able to sustain themselves financially. New Zealand is a small market for media but perhaps not dissimilar in size to the “niche” audience a podcast is targeted to, perhaps podcasts will soon fill the space vacated by The AM Show, Sunday and Fair Go. We should be concerned that we’ve reached a situation where a single company like Facebook can have such an outsize impact on the traffic to news websites by tweaking their algorithms, but we can get apps directly from those sites themselves, and share links to articles in smaller group chats. We can subscribe to newsletters and fund the media we want to read. RCR hiatus notwithstanding, the fake news isn’t going away, but there will always be an appetite for real news, and we’ll find a way to ensure it keeps being produced.