“I can’t believe that I have nostalgia for these previous eras of crises,” says journalist Sarah Kendzior.
The public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed,” says journalist Sarah Kendzior. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kendzior and host Kelly Hayes discuss the decline of journalism in the U.S. and how we can resist the erosion of our shared history, our values and our shared reality.
Music by Son Monarcas & Pulsed
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a
Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the collapsing state of journalism in the U.S. and resisting the erosion of our shared history, our values, and our shared reality. I will be navigating these topics with my friend Sarah Kendzior, author of
The View From Flyover Country,
Hiding in Plain Sight, and
They Knew. Sarah has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she researched politics and digital media in authoritarian states. Sarah is also the author of one of my favorite newsletters, which is aptly titled
Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter.
Sarah and I became friends when I was visiting St. Louis, during the protests in Ferguson, about a decade ago. Over the years, we have both been derided and dismissed by fans of the status quo and the establishment — people who ridiculed our analysis until it became undeniable, at which point, they attempted to co-opt it, and reduce it to Democratic talking points. Those people probably don’t want to hear anything Sarah or I have to say about the political terrain in 2024, because if you don’t have anything nice to say about Joe Biden, they would rather you didn’t say anything at all. Well, we are going to say a lot over the next hour, and my hope is that we can leave you with some meaningful ideas and questions to engage. Because, while I believe elections matter, I think it’s incredibly dangerous to reduce our political work to electoral questions and to oversimplify our political analysis into electoral talking points.
One of the topics we will touch on today is the importance of independent media. I have talked a lot, over the years, about how thoroughly corporatized the U.S. media landscape has become. With so many publications going under, and so many media workers being laid off, I believe the award-winning work we do at
Truthout is more crucial than ever. So, if you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to
Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.
[musical interlude]
KH: Sarah Kendzior, welcome back to the show.
SK: Oh, thank you for having me.
KH: I want to begin today by talking about the current media landscape. The layoffs just keep coming. Being a writer or journalist has never been an easy way to make a living, but the situation has gotten increasingly bleak. You and I both have newsletters, which is a route a lot of writers are taking these days to make ends meet. As publications collapse or simply lay off workers en masse, more and more writers are vying for subscriptions to their newsletters. Most newsletter writers do not have editors, fact-checkers, or legal support, all of which places a greater strain on folks like us — and, of course, the average reader can only afford so many subscriptions. Can you talk about what’s happened to journalism in the US in recent years and over the course of the last few decades and how it intersects with the troubling political situation we’re experiencing?
SK: This is the worst that I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve worked in journalism now for 25 years. And I can’t believe that I have nostalgia for these previous eras of crises. For example, in the early 2010s where people were expected to write for free or to intern at large corporations that could certainly afford to pay them. And journalism became a way only for people with inherited wealth to make a living while the rest of us basically tried to survive.
My first job ever was at the
New York Daily News from 2000 to 2003, so I watched digital media destroy print and I watched people have no backup plan when that occurred. And the fact that 25 years later we’re still in this position where there’s no sustainable model, it’s not just bad in terms of how it affects journalists, it’s much more dangerous in how it affects democracy and how it affects society.
And with this many decades having gone by, my biggest concern is how it affects memory. We have digital memory, we have investigative pieces, exposes, day-to-day coverage of all of these momentous political events from the last few decades housed online. But they can be deleted or altered at the whims of the plutocrats and oligarchs that buy them. And we saw this with
Gawker back in, I believe it was 2016, and we’re seeing it now with
Vice. And we’ve seen it with a lot of smaller outlets and a lot of individual websites. And this is disastrous because it’s our history that is being erased. And it’s also coming, of course, when there’s an attack on libraries, there’s an attack on free speech, there’s a rise in book banning. It’s all part of a greater project. I’m very concerned about that. I’m concerned about the information that was lost.
I used to have this mantra about Trump back in 2016 when I said, “This is not actually a laughing matter. This is a very dangerous candidate with lifelong ties to organized crime and lifelong financial misdeeds and just other abhorrent behavior.” And it’s all been publicly recorded through writers like Wayne Barrett or David Cay Johnston or publications like
The Village Voice in New York and
Vanity Fair. They were all covering him throughout the ’80s and ’90s. And so my knowledge of Trump never relied on any kind of inside information, it relied on works that were in the public domain. And now the public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed.
If I were to right now attempt to find the exact same information on Trump and his cohort that I found in 2016, I would not be able to do it. A lot of those articles have been deleted. A lot of them are paywalled. This is a problem that plagued academia for a long time and now plagues journalism where most people just cannot get basic access to factual information relevant to a candidate in an election. For that matter, they can’t get it on other essential matters like public health issues like what’s happening with COVID. You have to pay for that knowledge while propaganda and lies and memes and all of these other things just roam around free. There’s a real struggle. I’ve been talking for a while, so I’m just going to end it there and see what your thoughts are on this too.
Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate your thoughts on this. I was really lucky to come into journalism through the blogosphere, and to get hired as an intern, then as a fellow, and ultimately as a staff member at
Truthout, where we have not had any layoffs in recent years. And I do want to emphasize the importance of supporting the kind of journalism that we believe should exist, and supporting ethically produced publications, because those outlets are an endangered species in these times. The corporate landscape is configured against us, on a number of levels, as are social media algorithms, which is why it’s important to sign up for newsletters, to directly connect with the material we want to read, from trusted sources, because algorithms are not designed to maintain a healthy media ecosystem. In fact, they’ve gone a long way toward destroying a lot of publications. It’s like we have a dying media ecosystem, on a toxic landscape, and now we have so-called AI, further corrupting the information sphere with mass-produced misinformation. The fact that social media platforms are incorporating AI tools is only going to accelerate this enshittification.
Read more