Journalism, Newspapers and Hate Speech

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And now for something completely different.

Often it is two posts I see on --on the face of it-- unrelated topics that prompt me to blog on something.  But today, it is two somewhat more connected ideas, about which I do not yet have a considered opinion.

The more recent one is an appeal from a British group against Hate Speech.  British tabloid papers --principally the Sun-- have been featuring articles with hate speech, and because this is a relatively recent phenomenon, it is even more noticeable there than it is in the US.  The reasoning goes like this.  (1) Why do papers like the Sun feature hate speech?  Because hate speech sells.  (2) What generates more revenue than circulation?  Advertising.  (3) How can we apply pressure on the Sun?  Get businesses to refuse to pay for ads in the Sun.

Hate speech is rather a blanket concept.  In fact, because I put up so many posts critical of Donald Trump, I could be accused of hate speech too, if the Trump foolishness machine rejects the reasons behind my positions.  The core, mainline hate speech, accepted by the Good Housekeeping Seal, is Racial Hate Speech.  Next comes LGBT hate speech, though at the moment I do not endorse Transgender rights to be included along with LGB folks for equal rights.  Okay.  So we have to be careful in using the phrase hate speech, because it can mean different things to different people, depending on their particular list of categories that should not be vilified in print.  But even if we limit hate speech to speech humiliating racial minorities --the most vicious form of it-- we would be targeting the most politically potent forms of public hate speech.

The other post that caught my attention was also a video, an episode of Last Week Tonight by John Oliver.  In this video, John Oliver brings up the point that the foundation of the News industry are local reporters working for local newspapers.  But, for various reasons, local newspapers have been losing readership steadily since the 1970s, and so they have been laying off reporters (and selling themselves off to Rupert Murdoch) and so (3) a lot of the "news" is just recycled and rehashed, or (4) manufactured.

As independent newspapers continue to fail, a few newspaper chains dominate all the news outlets, which makes it very easy for anyone who wants to do this to spin the news in favor of a particular point of view.  For a while, the news favored Trump, which was not a good thing, and now the news opposes Trump, which is not a good thing either.  There are no good things in News, and it all starts with people not reading newspapers.  (The reason people stopped reading newspapers could easily be that newspapers were more full of advertising than news.  It is hard to tell whether people stopped reading because of ads, or whether ads began to flood newspapers because of people not reading.)

To summarize, we can put pressure on businesses not to advertise on newspapers that indulge in hate speech.  This is a first line of attack, but once the initial strategy of putting pressure on newspapers whose major selling strategy has been hate speech has been accomplished, we have to consider papers that indulge in hate speech only part of the time, and dealing with them will not be easy.

The news industry is now very fragile because thus far the primary news sources have been local reporters from newspapers.  But it really seems as though the process of losing readership is not going to be reversible; reading is really hard, as Barbie will be saying pretty soon.

Oliver features a clip in which the new owner of a certain newspaper calls for a conference with his reporters, and instructs them only to feature news of certain categories that readers like to see.  A reporter gets viciously attacked for criticizing this strategy.  This is not a new thing, going on anecdotal evidence; fiction about the news industry has countless instances of fighting for a better balance between news and crap, and this can't all be without any roots in reality.  Of course, that isn't proof of anything . . .

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