Free Advice For Rich Idiots Who Have Some Bright Ideas About Media Ventures

The unsatisfying truth.

A journalist. (Image: Getty)

Like milling elephants mourning a deceased member of the herd, each unsuccessful election season will produce a scrum of wealthy donors wringing their hands over how to turn things around. Some portion of these people will, inevitably, fixate on the media. The other side has it! And people are listening to it! We must do that, for us! Having witnessed this process over and over again as a working wretch in this miserable industry, allow me to offer these concerned people of means a bit of insight—at no charge.

There is a thing called journalism. It is the practice of telling the public about stuff that is happening. There used to be a lot of it. Now, because of capitalism, there is less. So people don’t know as much about what is happening. So people are more susceptible to bullshit. It would be good if there was more journalism.

Here is how journalism works its influence on society: You start a publication. You do journalism. You build an audience, painstakingly, over years. The audience consists of people who believe in you because you have demonstrated with your work that you are honest, that you are insightful, that you are worth believing. Over the course of years, bit by bit, as your audience grows, so too does the influence of your stories. Slowly, your readership becomes better informed. Thanks to your journalism, and the journalism of others like you, readers know more stuff. They are better equipped to make informed judgments about public matters. They are less susceptible to bullshit. These readers may or may not agree with you. Either way, they will have higher quality information with which to make their decisions.

---

---

There is another thing, called propaganda. That is the thing that most wealthy political donors want. It is a different thing. Journalism seeks to tell the truth; propaganda seeks to produce a specific outcome. See the difference?

Here is how propaganda works its influence on society: You start a publication. Your publication consciously crafts its editorial product with the goal of producing, for example, political support for a specific party. This consciously curated framing of stuff that happens in the world is adopted by your publication’s consumers, and over time, the desired outcome is produced. Does the fact that a publication’s overriding purpose is propaganda mean that its individual stories are lies? No. Rather, it means that decisions about the stories and the framing and the writing and the presentation and the relative prominence given to various items are made not with an eye towards best telling the truth, but rather with an eye towards the outcome you want to produce.

There are many reasons why journalism is not attractive to wealthy donors. The pitch for funding real journalism is, essentially, “Give us money. You can’t tell us anything about what to do with it. Then we will write stories inimical to your interests. Over the course of years, civic society will be strengthened.” This tends to strike rich people as unattractive. They are generally looking for something more along the lines of, “Our publication will be the equivalent of injecting an undecided voter with a powerful drug that will indoctrinate them into our way of thinking, like an acid-crazed Manson acolyte.” Journalism cannot promise this sort of ROI. Propaganda can. The confident pitches of propagandists often turn out to be little more than attempts to soak well-intentioned rich people for as much money as possible, using oversimplified promises of grand influence in record time. Oh well. That’s what you get for believing propagandists.

Fox News is America’s most successful propaganda outlet. It has shaped our political environment in powerful ways. Some people—journalists, for example—look at Fox News and say, “That is a disgrace that should be smashed.” Other people—rich Democratic donors, for example—look at Fox News and say, “We need one of those.” Every propagandist considers their own shadings of the truth to be justified by a greater political good. Journalists, on the other hand, are obligated to point out everything that sucks, no matter what. This is why journalists are unpopular. Along with their personalities.

Even those farsighted donors who are willing to invest in actual journalism with an eye towards the long-term civic good often find its reality unappealing. If you want to design a building, you should turn to an architect. If you want to design a publication, you should turn to a journalist. But most donors have another idea about who should design a publication: Themselves. They consume media, so they have some great thoughts on what the media needs to do to be wildly successful. Usually these thoughts consist of “Write about what I am interested in.” Every idea that a rich funder has ever had about how to do journalism more successfully is an idea that has been had a thousand times before by journalists themselves, who—because they exist in a constant state of economic precarity and public scorn—spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about how to do journalism more successfully. They have tried everything. If an idea works, someone will already be doing it somewhere.

---

---

Anyone who has worked in journalism has had the experience of someone who is paid more than them for doing less work coming to them and saying, “Hey, we’re going to do this thing now, to become more popular.” There is only one idea in the media industry for becoming more popular. That idea is: “Do more of the last thing that was popular.” Any viral story will produce a hundred very similar ones chasing its traffic. Any popular redesign will be copied until it becomes standard. Any story subject who perks the public’s interest will find themselves inundated by reporters responding to what the audience wants. Media outlets know damn well what is popular, and they do more of that, until it changes. The typical news consumer is a person who cries “Why doesn’t the media write about really important things?” while never, ever reading those stories when they come out.

Unsatisfying, isn’t it? Welcome to the life of a journalist. I am sorry to tell you, wealthy donors, that there is no shortcut for building a more robust and healthy media environment that will make the public better-informed and less susceptible to bullshit. Propaganda—yes, even propaganda that you make for your own side to balance out the outrageous propaganda of the other side—makes the public more susceptible to bullshit. Competing streams of propaganda are not the same thing as news. News, like all forms of education, produces a smarter and healthier society. But it does not produce a society that can be more easily controlled, which is what most rich donors, deep in their hearts, desire.

You can have opinionated journalism. Hell, that is what I and most of my favorite writers do. Yet the opinion part must always be a result of the truth part. You cannot start with a political goal in mind and work backwards from there, to journalism. You can only start with trying to tell the truth and then see what comes out.

I don’t want to give away secrets, but I must note to you, my rich donor friends, that most of the advice that you hear from media people about how to invest in media will be some form of “Here is why you should give money to me.” Don’t blame us too much. Most of the good journalists really need the money. The handful of spectacularly successful media people who make a lot of money are mostly successful because they are either very lucky or because they have figured out how to game rich donors like you. Either way, investing in their success will make them richer, but will not achieve the deeper good of producing a well-informed public. The only way to do that is to grind out story after story, year after year, reaching one person at a time, and do this with many publications in many places, until it adds up to a changed society. There is no magic wand for media investment that suddenly enlightens the public to the profound truth of your own political beliefs and saves America. Sucks, right? Brother, don’t I know it!

---

More

• Related reading: It’s Not Looking Great; Public Funding of Journalism Is the Only Way; Incuriosity, Inc; The Problem With Journalism Is You Need an Audience.

• Rich people always find the idea of starting a new publication appealing because they imagine that it will flourish thanks to their brilliant influence. In reality, a far more useful idea is “give money to publications that already exist that are doing the things that need to be done.” If you are frustrated that the media doesn’t tell the untold stories that are really important blah blah blah, go invest in In These Times and The Real News and The American Prospect and other places that are doing exactly what you think the media is not doing. Ask yourself: Is the media not doing it, or do I actually not read the stories I say that I want more of? Now you can see why it’s a hard business.

• PLEASE GIVE ME MONEY ALSO. PLEASE BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER TO HOW THINGS WORK. I WILL TRY TO SAVE AMERICA. I PROMISE I WILL DO MY BEST. OH, GOD! I AM ON MY KNEES! PLEASE!