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My reservations about the sincerity of the question were largely due to it being an attempt to promote a new commercial service by Lobster Media in collaboration with Journalism.co.uk. The commercial relationship that underpinned the publication is perhaps is the vindication of what follows.

I wrote about UCG many years ago in Digital Journalism, which I co-authored with Janet Jones. I wrote then that UGC,

can contribute to richer journalism, but it is also true that such material is usually exploited by corporate media in the context of economic calculations – it is often seen as cheap or free content for which the contributors need not be remunerated (p.30)

The scramble to incorporate UGC into news reports in the late 2000s under the guise of “democratisation” was cynical, and based on a notion of “democracy” that was conceptually unrecognisable.

In the very first instance, whose voices are heard? Many years ago I tried to explain to a then BBC News editor that their UGC “Have Your Say” on Venezuela may not reflect the voice of “the people”. On one hand we know those contributing from the UK have been subject to a rather significant propaganda campaign, which may skew understanding if one understands that news media may not be the arbiter of all truth.

On the other hand, the plentiful voices from Venezuela may not reflect Venezuelan society. Largely English speaking, articulate and with access to computers and the internet, those voices probably weren’t coming from Barrio 23 Enero. This is to say, there is a class and status relation in UGC and social media more generally. Heavy users are young, wealthy and educated. It is their voices that come through UGC.

So UGC is hardly democratic. Moreover, as the passage above suggests, UCG was akin to any other innovation in media technologies – it can be reduced in the final analysis to a commercial relation: UGC was simply free raw material.

Lobster Media’s initiative to remunerate UGC providers is admirable in a sense. News Flair does something similar with video work. So yes, it’s about time “citizen journalists” were paid by the companies making vast profits from their unpaid labour.

What does UGC really contribute?

In explaining its business model, Lobster Media relates UGC to exciting times in the media world, especially

the immediacy of social media. However, that’s not the only factor. At the very heart of this is a craving for authenticity – the genuine, gritty and unfiltered nature of UGC, which is bursting out from every corner of the globe. It’s legit and it’s as live as it gets

I’ve long held that immediacy is not a good in itself. Sometimes it can be useful, if for example there’s a flooded area to be avoided or an incident that may affect people’s movements in the immediate future.

However, the concept of immediacy in news is again an economic relation. The notion of the “scoop” was one in which journalists got the story out first, and therefore sales to the newspaper with the scoop would rise. Immediacy is an attention-grabber and little more.

Additionally the belief that it is more authentic than traditional content is questionable.

Even a tin pot philosopher is rather well aware that appearance and reality are not the same thing. There is little “authentic” about surface reality. News editors aren’t really very interested in long accounts that present a complex and deep reality. Indeed the first thing journalists are taught is how to make a complex world simplistic. As such they are taught to infantilise the public.

Take any recent incident and look at the UGC – immediate footage of people running, some screams, a siren, police cars. It tells us precisely nothing beyond the initial statement that “something has happened”. It offers no depth, no insight, no authenticity. It’s just filler. It’s candy for the childish mind.

But there’s a deeper problem with the account here. Immediacy has become the business model in journalism. Unreflective response is nurtured encouraged though UCG and social media platforms. The hyperreal is now the authentic.

Behind all this are scandal merchants whipping people up into hysteria over the latest scandal or tragedy. “Here something awfully terrible and very sad has happened….isn’t it terrible and sad?” Even the soundest minds are guided to rage so often articulated online.

Rage Markets in the UGC-Media Complex

UGC isn’t independent of mainstream media – a term itself less and less useful as they have adopted the forms of radical media as radical media had adopted the forms of mainstream. From the camera angles and POV to the topics, intonation and emphasis much of UGC copies the form of traditional reporting.

The Age of Moronism that Herbert Marcuse identified in the 1960s can be discerned in any shooting, protest, terrorist attack, and nowadays car crash.

If there’s an Islamist terrorist attack, right wing social media pounces upon it as evidence of the incompatibility of Islam with Western culture. At the same time the left will jump in to deny any causal relation and denounce those entertaining such a link as “Islamophobic”.

When there’s a white terrorist attack, the right is as likely to call it the action of a lone madman as the left is to call it evidence of organised white supremacism.

Rage Markets and the Crisis of Political Rationality

Social media encourages and almost demands ignorant speculation framed by the concerns or this or that political lifestyle. The echo chambers are getting bigger and louder to the extent that we have certainly reached a crisis of political rationality.

The echo chambers reinforce narratives with their mainstream counterparts egging them on – the Daily Mail on one side and its liberal-left analogue, the Independent, on the other.

The papers listen to their readers, tell them what they want to hear, which is then amplified through sharing on social media, and then integrated into news copy, and so the cycle continues.

Fuelling the respective rage market becomes the function of the press. And so news stories come to be written as click bait, tailor made for their respective markets to froth over.

The paradox is this. Social media and UGC don’t change things for the better. Flat earthers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, racists, paranoid leftists, conservatives, xenophobes, internationalists, Corbynites, Brexiters, antifa, and each and every other grouping is encouraged to further fragment into what are effectively consumer groupings.

Links form networks, Facebook and Twitter accounts provide walls to keep out undesirables, so unchallenged adherence to unreflexive beliefs is untouched.

Safe spaces, bans, no platforming, Doxing, trigger warnings, unfriending, blocking are the tools of the new politics. Purity is key. Disagreement is the new taboo.

The unending cycles of confirmation bias within bubbles reinforces the walls, ensuring no dissenting idea can get in while Spanish Inquisitors roll in their graves.

“Tell them more of what they want to hear” is the mantra of the news editor. Abidingly the Daily Mail tells its readers of a new group seeking to impose Sharia in a genteel English village as The Independent tells its customers of the cognitive disabilities and racism of every white working class Brexit voter. Neither the Muslim nor the Brexiter can be reasoned with – they have no words, no reasons and can only be destroyed as the virtual pitchforks are brought out to do their bidding.

The problem of course is precisely what passes for “authenticity” and the supposed need for immediacy. The time compression that news media and particularly social media structure remove the space for reflection, consideration and thought. The commercial imperatives of the news media, and its basis in cost-benefit analysis are structurally positioned to remove the necessary conditions for democratised media.

The post The cynical trap of User Generated Content – it does not democratise media appeared first on The Fourth Estate.

It’s been 40 years since Stuart Hall announced the Great Moving Right Show, where the centre of political gravity shifted far to the right. In the UK it was startling to see Corbyn’s Labour manifesto derided by 80% of the press as radical. Indeed, it would have looked more or less at home as a 1970s Conservative Party manifesto. That’s how far to the right the centre has moved.

France is no different: policies passed since 2015 by Hollande’s social government were increasingly towards the right of the spectrum. The state of emergency adopted following the Paris terrorist attacks in November was then renewed five times, and Macron is planning to extend it further. International Socialism explains the shift in its last edition, highlighting in particular the crisis political parties are facing in France.

This shift has been supported by a largely right-wing mediascape; where “the left” is really just the centre. Television news and newspapers are staffed by middle-class liberals who are said to represent “the left,” but as Deirdre O’Neill argues, the majority of the commentariat are privately educated Oxbridge graduates.

At best journalists reflect what Marx Deuze calls an “occupational ideology”, wherein their concepts of “balance” and “objectivity” tend merely to reflect hegemonic shifts – they obey and amplify institutionalised politics and its reconfigurations over time.

No clean politics

The challenge to the political “centre” by UKIP, the Front National and other far right groups has been met with contradictory consternation by the media that facilitated it. The narrative of the likes of UKIP and FN feeds off the media narrative that the political class is dirty and its institutions corrupt. It is not just the promise of national self-determination that animates the right, but also the cleaning up of dirty politics.

In response the political class and broadly supportive, if contradictory media, will seek a “clean” candidate.

It was on this basis that Macron was elected on a clean politics pledge and promised to do away with embezzlement scandals and bad habits – but bad habits die hard. What France faces now is pretty much to the T a copy of the Fillon affair, or “Penelope gate” for the media, which shook the presidential campaign between January and May. The smear campaign saw the leading right-wing candidate and former Prime Minister François Fillon go from polls favourite to disgrace through a series of scandals including reports that he paid his wife for work as a parliamentary aid that she allegedly did not perform.

Fillon and Le Pen, who was accused of using legislative aids on the EU payroll for her own party’s political activity but rejected a formal summons from French investigators, quickly became the plagues of the 2017 presidential election. This paved the way for fresh blood, novelty and dynamism, incarnated by the young and smiley Macron. He played his cards well and benefited from the crisis of the traditional parties and a media seeking hope.

Having left Hollande’s government, he distanced himself from the much disliked president (who gathered 4% of approval at the end of last year) while never taking positions (“I’m neither right nor left”) and using appealing timely statements (“Make our planet great again.”)

Such rhetoric sits well with the media. It is the rhetoric of Blair, Jospin, Schroeder and Hollande –  it says enough to appeal yet not enough to threaten the establishment. The media’s position towards Benoit Hamon – who was democratically chosen to represent the left in a primary election Macron refused to participate in – is unequivocal. Although hardly a revolutionary, the Guardian presented him as a “rebel” from the outset, drawing obvious comparisons with Corbyn. Hamon’s programme, had he been elected president, was very daring compared to previous and other leftist candidates, promising a Universal Basic Income and strongly criticising Hollande’s bad record on immigration, refugees, and the treatment of undocumented migrant.

The broadly liberal policies of the “radical” candidates are portrayed at the left boundary of possible politics. Such limitation constitutes what Chomsky calls the boundaries of legitimate dissent. Left-liberalism is the only left alternative to liberal liberalism. Anything beyond that is cloud-cuckoo land. Therefore, personalities like Macron are championed by the media because it’s better to have them than the real left.

Of course, in reality, Macron brings nothing new, but in the lead-up to the election, he was the perfect answer to old-style politics which, as the Fillon and Le Pen affairs demonstrated, are filled with abuse, treason and unworthy of public trust.

Before long, rumours were circulating about Macron’s entourage, and investigations are now ongoing into four of his former ministers, who resigned shortly after being nominated.

But the distinction ought to be clear between what is legal – and indeed all these ministers, members of parliament or other public figures should be treated as innocent until proven guilty – and what is right in the ethical and moral sense. As elected representatives of the French people, they should lead by example.

Fillon’s many lines of defense, including the always-handy “everyone else’s doing it” has only contributed to making these practices commonplace – to the point where Fillon still gathered 19.5% of the vote in the first round; and so it’s hard to imagine Macron, with his choir-boy image will lose much voters confidence in the current affairs. The parallels with the UK’s own deified liberal Tony Blair are stark.

So Macron’s leadership, instead of bringing fresh air, has so far been more of the same.

Four of his ministers could be heard in current investigations and have already resigned.

Richard Ferrand, formerly from the Socialist Party, is under investigation for his past business and financial dealings, and was asked by the president to resign in order to lead the party’s deputies in the national assembly. Not completely sidelined then, but moved enough to show the government is tough on ethics, Ferrand now benefits from parliamentary immunity.

Most significantly perhaps was the resignation of Justice Minister and Garde des Sceaux (garant of the justice) François Bayrou, who was carrying the moralisation law.

The law, a true symbol of the moral ideals publicly defended by Bayrou through years of political campaigns, is meant to “restore confidence” and is mainly targeted at ministers and members of parliament.

Speaking in a press conference early June, Bayrou said “For years we have seen practices develop that have damaged people’s confidence in their elected representatives and provoked a profound exasperation among the French.” This is what the fresh blood is supposedly fighting against, then?

Macron: a breath of fresh air?

Macron’s election promised renewal, and of the 350 LREM deputies, 315 have never been elected before. LREM being less than two years old and self-defined as a “neither right nor left” party, calling it directionless is probably just an understatement. So what do these new wannabe politicians believe in, defend, and most importantly what did they agree to in order to represent the party at the assembly?

In order to be invested, all candidates had to sign a contract – which Macron explained would discourage “disagreement with the heart of our project” and prove commitment to “voting with (him) the big projects”. He wants no dissenting voices.

The contract itself is rather vague and organised around six projects – the clearest one of all being the labour law – the one Macron failed to pass originally in 2016 and which was pushed with force through parliament edited and revised under its new name: El Khomri law.

Now that he has a majority in the national assembly, Macron will push for a vote of confidence in early July which will enable him to rule by decree – bypassing Parliament to push through new reforms. And what better time to do that than during the quiet summer months?

The muted response to such a proposal in France and abroad is telling, just as when Mario Monti was appointed to lead a “technocratic government” in Italy. In that instance there was no chorus of protest in the Western press about a new dictatorship in Europe. It is in the Western media mindset justifiable to impose martial law, rule by decree or unelected government if “necessary”. But of course that necessity cannot be found in places like Venezuela for instance.

Contradictory positions: who can we trust?

In a post-political era it is not the substance of rhetoric that counts. Much as newspaper headlines are designed to attract attention and feed bias in the left and right, so the vacant utterances of politicians are there to titillate empty-minded voters who demand their prejudices are spoken to.

While in Brussels for a EU leaders summit, Macron declared it was France’s honour and duty to welcome refugees. Visiting Calais on Friday, Home Secretary Gerard Collomb defended more heavy-handed security measures in the handling of the migrant crisis in Calais and announced the deployment of 200 more police staff, bringing to almost 700 the total of forces on the ground. As for the charities trying to help migrants access food and water on the ground, Collomb invited them to “spread out their know-how” away from Calais.

The government’s position was recently criticised by Jacques Toubon, head of France’s public human rights watchdog, who advocated for migrants to have access to clean water and for charities to distribute food.

So while his ministers defend tougher security measures, raising Macron’s popularity with Fillon, Le Pen, and “centrist” voters, Macron seduces foreign leaders – and the media ensures this is what everyone sees.

Devoid of substance he plays the game with a compliant media. There is no substance, we are left with gushing adoration of his personality and character: He’s a good person, has a nice smile, he’s stylish, witty, young, has a wife. There is no political evaluation whatsoever, purely personality evaluation.

UK media coverage has shown even more support to Macron than the French; with the Guardian describing him in November 2016 as “a product of the times,” and “a rebel,”.

Since his election, his victory has been portrayed as “an example for Britain,” a “revolutionary political moment,” “a breath of fresh air in French politics” simply for being young, good looking and energetic – which earned him comparisons with Canada’s Trudeau.

And it’s not just the “left” newspapers that are happy to support Macron: so are the markets.

Rare are the opinion pieces that present his anti-system stances as a “sham”; and indeed, he is nothing but a product of the system. One that knows that nowadays the old distinctions between left and right are gone, and to appeal to the masses and please a broad audience, he should avoid taking a strong stance for as long as possible. As with compartmentalised liberal newspapers the strategy is clear – tell people what they like to hear and hope nobody notices the contradictions.

Politics have shifted, and so has our perception of politicians: their roles, their responsibilities, and what we should them hold accountable to. But indeed, we know deep corruption persists, with the wealthy seeking always more power and more money. Tax evasion, embezzlement, fictitious jobs – corruption at this level could easily be solved if there was real counterbalance. But the media defends and perpetuates the status quo, sacrificing a couple of figures here and there to seem balanced. So when there’s a need for fresh blood, the media presents fresh blood. But Macron, former economy minister, former investment banker, graduated from the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) and Sciences Po, is not only no different, he’s probably more dangerous than what France has just left behind.

Written by Charlotte Sexauer

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Each interview opens the question of the political present and investigates the configurations of political reasoning through which it is understood. The victory of Trump, Brext in the UK, the rise of Cineque Stelle in Italy are understood as responses to the modern political and economic crisis, and in particular the economic crisis that began in 2007. We hear in these interviews how the contradictory responses of sections of the left that grew from the 1960s might be seen to exasperate the crisis of political rationality.

We the interviews dig deep we find that identity politics of course has routes beyond the 1960s into the imperialistic white supremacism articulated in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, the postmodern fragmentation of people into ever more niche segmentations can be seen to serve the age old method of divide and rule, at a great cost to concepts such as public good or well-being.

Here we hear Prof. Olivia Guaraldo reflect on the political present and how we arrived here. She interrogates the trajectory of identity politics from the early twentieth century, considering its virtues as well as its problems.

In the second interview, Dr Deidre O’Neill explain how class has become marginalised as an analytical category, thereby restricting adequate diagnosis of social problems. For Dr O’Neill, the problem lies not just in analytical shortcomings but also in the class dynamics of public engagement.

The post Identity Politics series appeared first on The Fourth Estate.

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The New York Times, apparently Trump’s most significant media adversary, expressed concerns about fakery well before Trump was elected. In a statement reminiscent of C. P. Scott, it held that ‘facts hold a sacred place in Western liberal democracies’. He points out that 70% of Trump’s statements fall into the categories of false, and then cites the claims of Brexiters to suggest ‘the sense is widespread: We have entered an age of post-truth politics’.

In the UK, former editor of The Times, Harold Evans, told us in February, ‘In terms of truth of journalism it is a very perilous time…We have those people who don’t have the brains to distinguish facts [from fiction]. Then we have the bad performers in the press, particularly numerous in the UK … Then you have got the assault [on the media]’

There we have it. Two newspapers telling us they are concerned about truth and fakery. While they’re at it, Trump tells us that the same newspapers deal in fake news and sustain a post-truth politics.

Lined up in ironic formation on either side are the foot soldiers. Postmodern left and right wing “activists” face off to condemn anything that grates with their prejudices as fake and post-truth. Egging them on are their favoured media – the likes of The Guardian and Independent on one side and the Sun and the Mail on the other.

I’m minded of the Rabbi who on adjudicating two counter-posed views tells the first “you’re right”, and tells the second “you’re right”. They query him: “but we can’t both be right”, and he replies “you’re right”.

To untangle this a little, let’s start with some logical points. Might it not be the case that news is all fake? Might there be a possibility that what is considered fake or untruthful is merely that with which people disagree? This is, after all, the consumer society, wherein lifestyle starts and ends at individual preference. Does not the dominance of subjectivity in our hyper-real world render the concept of “fake” anathema? If the position is maintained, then it necessitates the acceptance of antonymic concepts.

To maintain that we have entered a period of “post-truth” politics or one of “fake news”, two logical relations must be demonstrated.

1. “post-truth” indicates a prior period in which politics was “truthful”
2. “fake news” indicates a form of news that is “real”

So the first thing anyone throwing around such terms needs to do is to explain when the “truth politics” period was and where the “real” news can be found.

The problem is perhaps that cultural shifts underpinning political discourse militate against recognising such concepts. Perhaps the meta-explanation for these problem is that we’ve arrived at a crisis of political rationality. The characteristics of this crisis seem to be:

1. A lack of coherence and consistency in the application of principles, which seems to result from
2. A speeding up of communication but not of thought, which we can see in particular in the uses of social media
3. A disregard for or misuse of historical precursors
4. Mediationscapes that create echo chambers of narcissistic self-referentiality
5. The domination of “discursive conformity”

Let’s take an example. Last week Metro reported that ex-UKIP politician Janice Atkinson called for the death penalty for suicide bombers. The story perfectly fitted the liberal left view of UKIP members – so thick they want to kill dead people. People on blogs and social media rushed to ridicule and condemn without considering for a moment that perhaps the newspapers they spend so much time criticising might in this instance too be spreading fake news. The notion that a headline may be embellished with the same click-bait techniques used by the Daily Mail as much as The Canary, seems not to be considered.

But the news media fed tasty junk to a hungry audience who swallowed without chewing and belched their guttural reaction onto the internet. No, you don’t have to like Atkinson to find fault in the story any more than you need to agree with the death penalty. Yet to publicly object to it as post-truth fake news being used to manipulate public opinion against UKIP would be to step out of synch with the discourse of the left against UKIP. The actual statement can be found here.

There’s no move to condemn the Metro’s piece as fake news, because it is reassuringly aligned with prejudice. To even notice it is fake would have entailed stepping out of conformity with discursive alignment. Another recent example, no less embarrassing, was the idiotic speed with which news circulated that the right-wing Tory MP Philip Davies lost his seat in the 2017 election. Within minutes feminist activists spread the glorious news around the world. It seemed not to matter whether it was true – it wasn’t – it was a moment, a dream come true, a simulation of a better world whose veracity did not matter, as long as it provided momentary pleasure. Naturally because people said it on social media, then journalists said it in the newspapers, so then people said it with verification on social media.

Discursive conformity frequently mediates Facebook and Twitter spats. If an utterance fails to intersect with the general thrust of a discourse it is rarely reasoned with. At best responses come from a pre-packaged repertoire of unreflexive and standard phrases and slogans. Rather, given the lack of time and cognitive capacity to engage an alien perspective or counterpose data, the rapid reaction is to remove the dissenting perspective altogether. There’s little interest in truth or reality, as it is overridden by conformity.

Consider the frequency with which you read the words “blocked”, “muted” or “unfriended” on social media. They are as awfully depressing terms, especially when those who block, mute and unfriend accuse those who fail to mediate their politics of being fascist and shutting down free speech. More often than not, those blocked, muted or unfriended are dismissed as “thick”, and therefore unworthy of education and engagement. How mean and uncharitable people have become.

There is something incoherent and illogical about such attitudes. Truncated thought processes, flawed principles, rapid, responses too quick for consequentialism, immediacy and discursive conformity militate against considered analysis and understanding. Who wants to wait two weeks to hear your thoughtful analytical, evidenced-based response to the subject of the latest Twitter storm? The story has moved on, gone, you’ll miss your opportunity. Indeed which news organisations will eschew the time-honoured tradition of being first with the news to facilitate some long-winded complex analysis that fails to lend itself to click-bait?

Who has the inclination to slip outside the comfort zone of discursive conformity and risk being ostracised from the social crutch that activism has become for those on the left as much as those on the right?

So to a degree fakery is reduced to subjective preference expressed in discursive alignments. But to juxtapose it to “real” news would require news to report on things that are themselves real without mediation. Moreover a simple unmediated window on reality. Yet the second claim, that we have entered post-truth politics seems not to present a “real” work on which to report.

The crisis of political rationality that underpins such contradictory relations to media is itself premised on a philosophical problem: Can the concept of post-truth be coherently criticised without a conceptualisation of truth. The postmodernism that underpins so much left discourse does not allow for such a criticism because of the inimitably contradictory assertion that the truth is there is no such thing as truth.

Beyond even more difficult epistemological questions, and eschewing a couple of thousand years of history that demonstrates truths are anathema to the strategic pursuit of political power (which does nothing to discount their existence), let us consider prior considerations of truth in the modern, democratic world.

In the 1970s Hannah Arendt developed the theory of “modern political lies”, which are ‘so big that they require a complete rearrangement of the whole factual texture – the making of another reality into which they will fit without seam, crack or fissure [. . .] modern political lies [. . .] offer a full-fledged substitute for’ reality’. For Arendt, the modern political lie was the cause of the disastrous invasion of Vietnam and was well illustrated in the ‘Pentagon Papers’ otherwise known as the ‘History of the US Decision-Making Process of Vietnam Policy’. Arendt argued that policy in Vietnam was set by ‘self-deceivers’ who manipulated reality to fit their theories of what was wrong and how it could be fixed.

In this sense, “facts” that could be weaved into this “factual texture” became true in virtue of their “fit”. Indeed even Arendt was prone to referring to “North” and “South” Vietnam.

The notion of a factual texture in which claims are weaved together discursively is, however, the tip of the iceberg. It is not just a discursive fabric but a material reality in which truths are constructed. To this end, Christian Aid’s analysis of Israeli actions in the Palestinian Territories is instructive. It’s not just words but a reality – in this case of “settlements” that is constructive to give truth claims their validity. Another study found the same process taking place in the US-UK invasion of Iraq. George W. Bush’s claim that the war was over on 1^st May 2003 seemed absurd, but it had the effect of creating a material and legal reality that provided validity to US-UK actions in Iraq, and made reports of those actions factually correct terms of their alignment to this constructed truth.  “Facts on the ground” were the bases of truth-claims.

Of course admitting that truth is created leads those with short attention spans to give up: there’s no such thing as “real” truth. Therefore “truths” become pragmatic. Something is true because it is useful and aligned to particular discourses, to particular factual textures that make up self-referential echo chambers. Nothing on the outside is true.

So we are left with two considerations. Either there is truth, but truths are historical and politically created, or there is no truth. In either case the concept of post-truth politics is redundant.

The reporting of these “truths” leads us to consider the nature of fakery. In this sense, it is not “fake news” that is the problem, but the very nature of news itself. It is not just news one doesn’t like that is “fake”, but news itself as a discursive style and time- resource- and epistemologically-limited practice is unable to get at truths. News exists on the surface, always. It, like politics, is constructed.

So there was not and is not “real” news before or beside “fake” news. Yet it is one of those curious phenomena that no matter how long one might study the social construction of news, ideology, hegemony or any array of analyses that indicate the news is anything other than an accurate portrayal or reality, people do tend to believe it if it conforms to a discursive preference.

It is therefore reasonable to suggest that The Sun or the Daily Mail provide fake news from the right-wing, just as The Guardian and The Independent provide fake news from the left wing.

It is worth recalling that, whatever the publication, it is at base a business that provides packaged news commodities to a consumer group whose choices are founded in preference, reassurance and prejudice. The intonation and slant given to any given story necessarily coheres with the expectation of the audience or consumer group’s preferred framework of understanding.

To be able single out the contemporary historical moment as somehow special requires understanding of a more innocent and truthful past that simply did not exist. To consider only that with which one disagrees to be “fake news” requires a concept of reality that fails to understand how all news media operate.

The solution is not, as canny newspapers and politicians seem to be encouraging, to reassert the reality of news or truth of politics. Is it to insist on the veracity of one solipsistic politics over another. Nor is it to give up and slip into a relativism that is immune from critique.

As the problems of politics and news are so much deeper than post-truth or fake news, so too are the solutions. Reconfiguring discursive time might help, but this is unlikely in a social media world where immediacy is the major currency.

Media scholars often refer to Jurgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere to suggest how democratic discourse might be arranged, but more often than not its conceptualisation ends with “people communicate”. Such a formulation tends towards an argument for free speech that negates power relations, or in its “radicalised” form, forms of performance in public spheres that resist and challenge power.

The lack of reflexivity in the latter seems to militate against the purpose of the public sphere in the first place. Rather than closed discursive circles hermetically sealed by preferred media it is crucial for people to break out of their comfort zones, and be exposed to the other, however disagreeable. The key value of the public sphere is to encourage intersubjectivity, on the basis of which truth claims can be evaluated. To seek and understand the perspective of the other is a necessary start to finding a way out of this crisis of rationality.

Yet it seems truth and reality have little relevance within fully marketised media and political spheres. Each market segment will continue to feed its consumers with the information that confirms both the form and content of presumptive prejudice while also bolstering those outlets as the chosen and thus agreed reality and truth. There is little likelihood of this changing in the digital media world.

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What the newspapers did

Research by the American Presidency Project shows that of the major US newspapers, 57 endorsed Hilary Clinton, 26 did not endorse, 5 went for “none of the above”, 4 endorsed the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, 3 had a line of “not Trump” and just 2 endorsed Trump.

In rough circulation figures, 17 million Americans read papers that were against Trump, 6.5 million read papers that did not endorse, and only 300,000 read papers that did endorse him.

Despite these stark figures, Trump got elected. It’s amazing, apparently, that Trump trumped the media. Some have gone so far as to claim that Trumps victory spell the end of mainstream media. No longer are they able to sway opinion or voting intention like they once did.

But what about television and radio?

Well in the first instance, they never really did decide elections. But more importantly, newspapers aren’t The Media. “Mainstream” media also encompass television and of course radio. I’ll come to the internet later. Whatever the impact of the internet, the Pew Research Center reports, 57% of Americans often get their news from television (including cable) against 20% who often get their news from print newspapers.

Where the vast majority of newspaper circulation did indeed oppose Trump, the most widely viewed cable television news station was vociferous in its support for the Republican candidate. Fox News registered an audience of 2.48 million in 2016, which is more than the combined viewership of the next two stations, CNN and MSNBC, put together

It is not through just through immediate reporting that media have their influence, but rather through the long-term exposure to particular views and ideas. To the first quarter of 2017 Fox News held the position of most watched Cable TV news station for 61 quarters. It had laid a discursive frame through which Trump would be comprehensible long before he announced his candidacy.

In addition to Trump’s support from Fox, it is worth attending to the audience of radio shows. In 2016 the inimitably right-wing Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity shows drew a combined 29 million listeners each week.

Unorthodox as they might seem, Limbaugh’s and Hannity’s shows are carried by Premier Networks, the largest syndication company in the US, and both play out on major corporate radio stations. They are as mainstream as you might find.

Is digital media any different?

But, we are told, it is social media and the internet that carried the 2016 election.  Breitbart has been singled out as the main non-mainstream news web site, but the Alexa’s list of the “top” news web sites reads like a who’s who or the corporate media – the top 5 are CNN, New York Times, The Guardian, and the Washington Post. Alexa’s ranking does not take account of just visits, but other indicators such as inward links.

Where there is certainly a big audience for “digital native” news web sites, they are hardly cottage industry radical outlets. Huffington Post is owned by the media giant, AOL. Incidentally, Andrew Breitbart, founder of Breitbart news was also one of the founders of The Huff.  Another example of “non-conformist” digital native news outlet, Buzzfeed, whose investors include Comcast, NBCUniversal and venture capital firm Andressen Hotowitz, has annual revenues that surpass $150 million annually.

Of course social media shares account for a huge amount of traffic, but social media firms are among the biggest capitalist corporations, and shares tend to circulate stories from corporate media companies.

In other words, digital news services are mainstream news. As Robert McChesney put it in 2002, the corporate media giants walk on.

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