Bigmouth Strikes Again: Carrie Marshall's blog

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Category: Media

Journalism, radio and stuff like that

  • Money for nothing

    There’s a fascinating article in 404 Media about the shameful shuttering of Jezebel, one of the most important feminist publications online. According to the CEO of parent firm G/O Media, which acquired the site from its previous publisher, “our business model and the audiences we serve across our network did not align with Jezebel’s.”

    The audience here isn’t you or I. It’s advertisers. And those advertisers are worried about “brand safety”, which means in effect there’s no money to pay for anything potentially controversial.

    the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.

    Let’s see what sort of content is considered too risky for brand safety, shall we?

    words like “abortion,” “pro-choice,” “pro-life,” “wade,” “gay,” “transgender,” “sexual,” regularly show up on brand safety keyword blocklists, which four different industry experts told 404 Media are extensive, ever growing, and rarely updated.

    The goal, mostly, is to ensure that adverts are not placed next to abusive content – such as bigotry or conspiracy nonsense. But this broad brushstroke blocking means that adverts will not be placed next to legitimate content either, such as magazines for gay and trans people, or information about safe abortion. And it seems rather hypocritical when you see many of the brands who have brand safety divisions continuing to advertise on Twitter next to blatant homophobic, transphobic, racist and anti-semitic abuse and increasingly, illegal content.

    Blocklists are a fairly low-tech tool, and many advertisers are moving away from them to more sophisticated “sentiment analysis”. But that too can have a chilling effect:

    [one ad system giant says] advertisers can choose to block all sorts of potential topics, especially those that may elicit negative emotions as detected by its artificial intelligence: “Exclude content relating to negative news or sentiment around sensitive social issues such as immigration, abortion, euthanasia, vaccines

    As the advertising giant quoted above admits, that exclusion will also apply to:

    educational, informative, and scientific content related to the topic.

    In effect, then, online yahoos effectively get to censor what journalism is and isn’t funded: if it’ll get a bunch of far-right goons, Qanon reality deniers or other vocal minorities outraged, it won’t get funded. And if it won’t get funded, editors aren’t going to commission any more of it.

    This is the fundamental problem with an advertising funded economy. For decades, there was a wall between editorial and advertising, with the latter unable to influence the former. That’s because it was widely understood that the interests of advertisers and the interests of editorial often diverged and could even be in opposition. Now, though, advertising and editorial are linked – and because of this, many publishers are no longer in the business of telling, but of selling.

    The problem with that is by and large, it’s not a problem for right-wing media. The most rabid right-wing publications have generous funders with very deep pockets. It’s the publications on the left, which don’t tend to have billionaires backing them, that have the problem. If advertisers don’t want to be associated with potentially troll-attracting content – content such as information on climate change, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, vaccines and so on – then the only way to pay for it is to put it behind a paywall. And that creates an uneven playing field where the hate speech, misinformation and disinformation is free to read; the accurate stuff is locked away.

    As 404 Media puts it succinctly:

    there’s an entire advertising industry that has fucked the internet, and fucked society. 

    It’s hard to disagree.

  • Everyone isn’t everyone

    There’s an accidentally enlightening headline on the BBC report about blatantly obvious crypto fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried, who has been convicted of stealing billions of dollars by defrauding would-be crypto millionaires. The headline: “Everyone got duped by Sam Bankman-Fried’s big gamble.”

    But that isn’t true. There were lots of people pointing out that this emperor didn’t have any clothes for a very long time, but mainstream media chose not to listen to them in much the same way that most mainstream media was embarrassingly credulous about NFTs, most of which are now worthless. Long before the authorities moved in it was very clear to anybody with eyes to read or ears to hear that Bankman-Fried was as trustworthy as a three-dollar bill in an industry that’s an absolute paradise for fraudsters.

    Everybody got duped? No, a small section of people got duped because journalists didn’t do their jobs. As John Naughton wrote last year, “so many apparently serious media outfits let him get away with it… Some interviewers confessed apologetically that they knew nothing about the complex businesses he had run and allowed themselves to be bemused by the incomprehensible bullshit he was emitting.” All the signs were there, but supposedly reputable, authoritative news outlets didn’t want to tell that story because “the mainstream media were so invested in the founder-worship that is the curse of the tech industry, not to mention some of those who cover it.”

    All too often, journalists aren’t doing journalism: they’re doing PR. It may be PR for charismatic tech CEOs, or for the think tanks they and their cronies fund, or for more dubious attempts at controlling particular narratives. But it’s still PR. When “everyone” means “everyone who feeds me stories or makes me feel interesting and special”, many more people suffer the consequences.

  • AI won’t save publishing

    A wise post by Ian Betteridge on AI as a “burning platform moment” for publishing: publishers who see AI in editorial solely as a way of reducing costs aren’t seeing the big picture. AI reduces barriers to entry too: if you’re publishing “good enough” AI-written content, your rivals are everybody else with access to AI. And that access is cheap.

    You cannot gain competitive advantage at the cheap, low-cost end of the market. Trying to do so will not only make you vulnerable to anyone else with the same tools (at $20 a month) but also devalue your brand over the long term.

    As tech writers of some vintage, Ian and I have both seen many technological waves disrupt publishing: the move to digital, the pivot to video, the rise of search engine optimisation, the rise of reviews that aren’t reviews and many more. Each time, some publishers – including very big and successful ones – have sacrificed long-term credibility and ultimately viability for short-term returns, only to see those returns disappear as a new disruptor comes to town. There are countless formerly great publications that have lost significant readerships, or disappeared completely, because of that short-termism.

    And AI isn’t the only disruption that’s here right now: the current obsession with Google traffic and affiliate revenues that means everybody covers the same product stories and deals is running out of time too.

    As Betteridge rightly points out, publishers have assets that AI and cheapskate rivals don’t: “decades worth of experience, context, contacts and knowledge of audiences in your editorial teams.” Wise publishers will be thinking of how to empower and amplify them, not replace them.

  • Donating to hate

    The Huffington Post has a new article about another very rich American donating money to fund anti-trans groups. This one is Joseph Edelman, a billionaire hedge funder. He’s not alone: rich men’s money has been funding huge swathes of the anti-trans movement for some years now, and not just in the US and its UK affiliates: there’s a lot of Russian oligarch money in there too, especially in mainland Europe. You might argue that Paul Marshall, a significant funder of right-wing media in the UK including UnHerd and GB News, is part of the same pattern – the super-rich funding outlets that push division and portray the world’s most privileged people as victims of sinister, shadowy “elites”.

  • Now that’s funny

    From Popbitch:

    The intensity of internet discourse can sometimes create an overinflated sense of just how interested the general public is in certain stories.

    For instance, Graham Linehan’s new memoir Tough Crowd: How I Made And Lost A Career In Comedy sold 390 copies in its first week – including pre-sales. A figure that fails to place it in the Top 1000.

    To put that into context, titles that did crack the Top Thou include: a large print wordsearch book in at No.551, which sold more than twice that; and a colouring book called Dinosaurs Around The World, which sold over 2,000.

    He’s currently claiming to have sold tens of thousands of copies, apparently unaware that “ordered by bookshops who thought serialisation in two national newspapers would mean a lot of sales” and “actually bought by people” are not the same thing. Books not sold are returned to the publisher after a set period.

    Hilarious hubris aside, the opening paragraph of the Popbitch piece is key here: that story, and the trouncing of the Tories in last night’s by-election, are yet more evidence that the anti-trans culture war is an obsession of a very small group of people: newspaper proprietors, right-wing politicians and obsessive internet trolls.

    Update: in fairness, it’s worth pointing out that the figures won’t include pre-sales sold directly via the publisher, which is where the author’s biggest fans will have been getting their copies from. But that just further proves the point that the general public just isn’t interested.

  • “I no longer feel safe”

    Jane Fae writes in Metro about the UK government’s demonisation of trans women:

    “I no longer feel safe as a transgender woman. I no longer feel included.

    …Did I mention I was angry? Well, yes, that. But also scared; fearful for my future in a country that can contemplate this; and – having seen how vicious, how violent the anti-trans backlash has been in some parts of the world – wondering just where this one stops.”

  • Evil with smiles and suits

    One of the major drivers in anti-trans media and legislation on both sides of the Atlantic is the Alliance Defending Freedom, ADF for short. When there’s a Christian bully taking legal action claiming oppression, the ADF is there. When there’s an anti-trans test case trying to remove healthcare, the ADF provides “expert” witnesses. And for at least six years, trans and other LGBTQ+ people in the UK have been trying to raise the alarm that their ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    This week, The New Yorker reports on how the ADF’s ultimate goal is the removal of LGBTQ+ rights and women’s reproductive freedom.

    There’s more to it than that, of course. As the article points out, the ADF is effectively trying to remove any and all restrictions on what religious extremists can do and say, even if that means opening the door to even more vile people such as violent racists. That may even be a feature rather than a bug, as bigotries tend to apply to multiple groups, even if the bigots are usually careful not to admit it.

    As ever with reporting like this, it’s both valuable and worthless: valuable because it’s well researched, accurate and clearly sets out the danger; worthless because the people who need to read it won’t read it. And here in the UK, both print and broadcast media will continue to platform the ADF without explaining to readers and listeners what it is and what its goals are. I’m long past the point of caring whether that’s incompetence or malevolence because the result is the same.

  • These things speak to me

    There’s an arresting quote in Jude Doyle’s superb profile of the late author Rachel Pollack that to me, sums up the experience of being trans when you haven’t come out:

    all of these things speak to me, but I am not welcome in the places where they are being spoken.

    The piece also links to an important slice of trans history, the manifesto Don’t Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast. The language around transness has changed a lot since it was written in 1972, the same year I was born, but it remains timely.

    When we’re alone we tend to accept the stereotypes. By getting together we’ve discovered how ridiculous they really are. No one in the group has ever said, ‘What horrible trick of nature has made me a woman trapped in a man’s body?’ We just don’t think that way.

    …The important thing is, no one should tell you, as a man or a woman, this is the role you have to play, and you have to play it all the time. 

  • A loaded question

    Someone made the rookie mistake of asking writer and academic Julia Serano to come on air and discuss the bigot dog-whistle “what is a woman?” Serano declined, and explained why.

    “What is a woman?” is not intended to be a question. It’s a slogan created and championed by UK “gender critical” activists who strongly oppose the social and legal recognition of trans people, with some even calling for eliminationist measures that would morally mandate us out of existence. Whenever gender-critical activists pose the “what is a woman?” question to politicians, organizations, celebrities, etc. (as they are wont to do), they are not looking to start a nuanced discussion or debate. Rather, they want a yes-or-no answer to their real question, the only question that counts in their minds: Will you support our anti-trans beliefs, policies, and legislation?

    Serano’s right, of course. “What is a woman?” is a loaded, rhetorical question asked by the kind of people who praise the Taliban or Russell Brand for “knowing what a woman is”, and it’s asked in much the same way as “when did you stop beating your wife?”

    It is a question with an agenda, and it is based on an underlying assumption, a belief, that there is a single, immutable definition of what a woman is. And of course, that isn’t true.

    The term “woman” is a classification and as Serano says, it has different criteria and meanings in different contexts. So for example in genetics, the criteria might be chromosomes; in reproductive health, reproductive anatomy; and in everyday conversation, social class: “people who move through the world as women and are interpreted and treated (and sometimes mistreated) as such.”

    …if I mentioned having a conversation with a woman that I know from work or ran into at the store, you wouldn’t think at all about her chromosomes or reproductive organs (unless, of course, you were some kind of creep). 

    Serano writes:

    …we all understand that “woman” is a broad category that comprises roughly half the human population. By necessity, it includes all sorts of diversity and seeming exceptions to the rule.

    This is why, in everyday life, nobody ever asks the question “what is a woman?” In fact, the only people who bother to raise the issue these days are anti-trans activists.

    And the reason they raise it, and the reason so many cisgender men parrot it, is because it’s a distraction from the very real issues all women experience, cis and trans. Because if we were to focus on any significant danger to women, we wouldn’t be looking at trans women. We’d be looking at cisgender men and some cisgender women too.

  • Now they’re closing clinics

    A US health clinic for trans people has closed its doors permanently after the introduction of a state-wide ban on healthcare for trans teens. As Xtra magazine reports, the ban was largely based on wild allegations by a single person, allegations that appear to be largely or completely baseless. But the national press, and the New York Times in particular, doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a good scare story – and those scare stories often end up being used as evidence by the bigots in support of their bans.

    From the article:

    While the bulk of the blame for the clinic’s shuttering lies with the state’s conservative legislature, its closure was also accelerated by a group of anti-trans journalists who presented Reed’s unsubstantiated allegations to a wide audience.

    …[despite the claims being debunked] Reed got a rosy portrayal from New York Times journalist Azeen Ghorayshi. Ghorayshi reported that she couldn’t substantiate most of Reed’s claims, and yet still went on to paint Reed as a brave truth teller in the pages of the paper of record.

    Evan Urquhart in Assigned Media has more, including interviews with the parents of trans teens.

    “We care about the clinic we take our children to. We care that it is providing ethical care. We care that it is following the standards of care. But using the words of this person [Reed] who has been shown to be unethical, to deny healthcare to all these people, just isn’t right. In Missouri, politicians are making health care decisions right now, none of whom are qualified to do so.”

    For too many journalists, this is a game. But for the people losing their healthcare – and the right-wingers have adults in their sights as well as teens – it’s a matter of life and death.