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Netflix and Stan could be forced to spend a share of their revenue on Australian content, under a proposal being considered by the recently installed minister for communications, Paul Fletcher.

On Wednesday Fletcher announced extra funding for regional news media to help it survive the coronavirus crisis emergency-inspired measures which may be too little too late, given that the virus disruption has already pushed teetering businesses over the edge.

But at the same time, Fletcher released an options paper examining the future of the screen industry, and that is a longer-term game.

While the release was given extra piquancy by the fact so many Australians are presently slumped in front of the box, it is a welcome sign that Fletcher, who replaced Mitch Fifield in the portfolio in May last year, is thinking strategically about longer-term media policy.

The options paper forms part of the governments response to the ACCC digital platforms inquiry report released last year and addresses one aspect of the legacy of decades in which Australia has not really had a media policy worthy of the name.

Successive governments have instead focused mostly on internet and telecommunications, while reacting knee-jerk to the shouts of media barons or freezing on the spot when those barons could not agree.

This options paper gives some cause for hope that those days may be over.

In a nutshell, the traditional free-to-air broadcasters are in decline, with revenue, influence and viewer numbers bleeding to new platforms. Streaming services the international behemoth Netflix and the locally owned Stan are increasingly dominating viewing habits.

Yet the traditional television broadcasters are loaded up with obligations, justified in previous times by the fact that they use a public asset, the broadcasting spectrum. These requirements have been out of date for at least a decade.

Specifically, traditional broadcasters must make and screen minimum amounts of Australian content, with additional quotas for local drama, documentary and childrens content. Netflix, Stan and the other streamers have no such obligations.

Its clearly unfair, and as the options paper spells out, is now so burdensome that it threatens the future of Australian stories which reflect who we are as a nation to ourselves and to the world ... The cultural significance of Australian content is not easily quantifiable, but it is highly recognisable. Three-quarters of Australians favour the government providing support to the Australian screen production industry, the paper says.

Australian screen content also contributes $5.34bn to the economy, and has knock-on positive effects on tourism and exports.

On the other side of the ledger, the government has traditionally provided both direct funding for Australian content and tax breaks for production.

Netflix and Stan have invested in Australian productions but not much and not many. Only 1.7% of Netflixs catalogue is Australian content, and even Stans offering is only 9% Australian.

Drama, documentary and childrens programming is cheap to buy overseas old foreign content can be imported for as little as $1,000 an hour, whereas making fresh programs costs between $500,000 to more than $1m an hour.

The options paper makes it clear that if the market was allowed to rip without government-set local content obligations, we would see next to no Australian drama and no Australian childrens content.

The options paper lays out four possible models and invites comment.

The first option is to do nothing.

Option two is to make minimal changes and seek to persuade streaming services to make Australian content on a voluntary basis (good luck with that), with some fine tuning to the existing regulations and some extra pressure on the ABC and SBS.

The third option and the one that seems to me best suited for the times is to put Netflix and Stan on the same footing as the traditional broadcasters.

All providers would be obliged to invest a percentage of their Australian revenue into new Australian content. This could be done either by making their own content or through contributions to an Australian production fund to be overseen by the existing federal government funding agency, Screen Australia.

There might also be extra tax breaks for childrens content and feature films, with a points system weighted to encourage local production and use of Australian talent.

There are some wriggles in here and some unanswered questions. For example, the ABC and SBS would be made to allocate funding specifically for Australian childrens programming. But the options paper doesnt say whether this would be additional funding or whether the ABC would have to find it from its already challenged budget.

So far, Fletcher has not addressed ABC funding a bitterly contested matter given how much some of his colleagues hate the national broadcaster. He has not responded to pleas for cuts to be reversed, reflecting the extra costs the ABC faced during the bushfire emergencies. Instead, he has encouraged the ABC to sell its Ultimo offices.

As it stands, if the ABC was faced with extra obligations for Australian childrens content, it would mean money would be bled from other areas, and would also represent a reduction in ABC independence and control over its own budget not good, at a time when journalism is so desperately challenged, as Fletchers support for regional journalism acknowledges.

The paper also doesnt address the issue of how Netflixs Australian revenue would be determined. As has been reported elsewhere, Netflix likes to pretend that its Australian operations dont really exist, thus avoiding tax.

Finally, the last option in the paper is complete deregulation, which as the paper makes clear would spell the near death of Australian stories on our screen. It seems this is not the favoured path.

Its a long way from an options paper to a media policy, but the evidence of strategic thought is welcome. What remains to be seen is how Fletcher will deal with the inevitable backlash, which this time will come not so much from the old media barons but from the new.

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Real long-term thinking on TV would mean Netflix and Stan are treated the same as free-to-air - The Guardian

With the worlds attention on the Coronavirus pandemic, Indias Government is introducing more draconian measures to advance its nationalist aims.

Its easy to forget in the fog of chaos and confusion around COVID-19 that the threat of a nuclear armed war remains ever present, with tensions continuing to simmer in the worlds hottest flash points a reality brought full-frontal when North Korea fired a test missile into the Sea of Japan on Tuesday.

A cruise missile landing harmlessly in an empty body of water is one thing, but Indian military aggression along Kashmirs Line of Control, which pits two nuclear armed forces within shouting distance of one another, is something entirely different and constitutes an alarming threat.

On 8 April, videos emerged on social media showing Indian forces moving heavy artillery into the village of Panzgam in Kupwara district to use the area as a base from which to target Pakistani military positions on the other side of the border, despite such a move constituting a war crime. But then the Indian military has a long history of using Kashmiri civilians as human shields to blunt retaliatory attacks.

On Sunday, the two armies traded heavy fire, just as the Indian Army had hoped and initiated, leaving three civilians dead, including a woman and a child. A statement given by an Indian military spokesperson in the aftermath of the engagement typifies New Delhis sinister and duplicitous actions in the occupied territory.

Pakistan today at 5:00pm(local time) initiated unprovoked ceasefire violation in Keran sector, said Rajesh Kaila, an Indian Army spokesman in Srinagar,in a statement. Pakistan now targeting civilian population in Kupwara sector near the LoC [Line of Control] resulting in killing three innocent civilians including one woman and a child.

It takes a special kind of bravado to mobilise your military and then move units into a civilian neighborhood before shelling opposition forces, only to later claim that you were the victim of an unprovoked attack while using human shields along the way. But human rights groups have spent more than three decades documenting how India uses terror as an instrument of control in Kashmir.

If we knew they would one day enter this area also and make us all human shields we would not have invested our lives into these houses, a resident of Panzgam told Middle East Eye. We are crying with fear.Our children and elders are panicking.

At the same time as the world is battling the Coronavirus, Indias right-wing Government is seeking to capitalise on the pandemic on multiple fronts.

At home, the Narendra Modi regime is giving life to conspiracies that blame Muslims for spreading the virus as a means to bolster the Governmentsdivide-and-rule strategy. In Kashmir, it seeks to further its aim of subjugating the territorys eight million Muslims to Hindu minority rule.

With little fanfare and next to zero international media attention, Indias Ministry of Home Affairs made a stunning declaration when it announced that Kashmir would now be subjected to a new domicile law, granting any individual who has resided in Indian-Administered Kashmir for 15 years or longer the right to own property. By individual the Government actually means any military or Government official.

When New Delhi scrapped Kashmirs semi-autonomous status on 5 August last year, it marked the Governments first step in transforming the occupied territory into a Hindu nationalist settler colonial project. In granting property rights to Indian Government and military officials, it has now moved onto stage two.

It should be no secret to anyone by now that the Government of the Bharatiya Janata Party wishes to do to Kashmir what Israel has done to the Palestinian territories, Mr Shifat, a school teacher in Srinagar who wished only to be identified by his first name out of fear of Indian military reprisal, told me by phone.Giving land, homes and jobs to Indian soldiers and their families is how India will try to change the demographics here no different to what Israel has done with its settlers in the West Bank.

His sentiments were echoed by Pakistans Prime Minister Imran Khan, who condemned the new domicile law as an illegal action and accused New Delhi of exploiting the international focus on COVID-19 pandemic to push BJPs Hindutva supremacist agenda.

The Indian Government is also using the Coronavirus crisis as a pretext to implement even more draconian measures against Kashmirs eight million Muslims. On 10 March, the Government set up a 247 control room with heat maps and phone trackers to locate people. While such mass surveillance laws are ordinarily deemed unconstitutional and thus unlawful in India, they are being carried out in the name of fighting the pandemic.

Naturally, every resident of Indian-Administered Kashmir worries that these hi-tech surveillance measures will become a permanent feature, invoking fears that Indian security forces will monitor and control every aspect of their daily lives mirroring the way Beijing rules over 13 million Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

All this comes on the back of a lockdown and a communications blackout that has been enforced in the territory by the Indian military to varying degrees since 5 August last year.

If weaponising the COVID-19 pandemic to further repress 200 million Muslims in India and ethnically cleanse eight million more in Kashmir while putting the region on the brink of nuclear war does not make India a rogue or threatening state, what will?

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The Coronavirus Crisis: India is Using COVID-19 to Advance its Hindu Settler Colonial Enterprise in Kashmir - Byline Times

What stage do you think North America is in right now?

Gurnani: North America is in the oh my god is this going to be a Lord of the Flies situation stage. On the verge of the maybe I should have joined that underground bunker cult stage. But things are going to get better. Itll just take some time for society as a whole to get on the same page, accept where we are and settle in until things settle down. The level of uncertainty isnt changing for any of us across the world, but the level of acceptance does change.

Pearce: It was frightening and fascinating at the same time. We were working in China in December so started hearing about it from January, all the way up to now where a number of markets we operate in are within lockdowns. Communicationwas key, both with team members and client partners.

Gurnani: You start to see the patterns, and you start to see where people will go, what people will feel next. Leading creative work for these different markets reminds us that there is a tomorrow.

Pearce: This situation for many people and businesses is pushing them to a place they should have been going to anyway, just much faster than they may have chosen themselves. It has and will force businesses and marketers to stand up and be brave, both through the COVID period and into the new normal. Be more like Ryan Reynolds: bold, quick, calculated and always entertaining.

Gurnani: If there was ever a time to be escapist, silly, hopeful, joyful or purely entertaining, now is it.

Pearce: Full-time doesnt have to be five days a week. You dont have to sit in a major city to be good at your job. Digital make-up and virtual fashion make getting ready to work-from-home much quicker, and better for the environment. Borderless working encourages and creates true diversity of thinking. Creatives are going to want to move west to east, rather than historically east to west.

Gurnani: I believe many more creative leaders will learn to have greater trust in the creatives who work for them. At the end of this, more of us executive creative directors and chief creative officers will be in control of our need for control. Its harder now for us to give clear feedback. Its harder now to help our teams concept. Its harder now for us to jump in and fill the gaps. Were all going to come out of this with a little more let it go in our step.

Thats kind of a nice thing, yeah?

Sir Martin Sorrelljoined Ad Age Senior editor Jeanine Poggi on an episode of Virtual Pages to discuss how S4 Capital is weathering the global crisis. During the conversation, the media mogultells Poggi that he recently discussedwith Cannes Lions organizersthe possibility of the event going virtual. Parentcompany Ascential made the recent decision to cancel outright the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity afterholding companies and agencies cut award show costs and began pulling attendance and submissions for the Lions as financial pressures mounted during the coronavirus pandemic.

Sorrell, who built and formerlyled conglomerate WPP, also offered his opinion of how holding companies are handling the pandemic, namely on their decisions to reduce staff. Sorrell says,"to fire 10 percent of your workforce, or whatever it is, is not the answer." He says holding companies that are cutting staff are"taking out the people on the front line, who interface with clients, are good with clients," and that's only going to cause more problems going forward.

The ANDY Awards, hosted by the AD Club, has decided to keep chugging along, virtually. The Ad Club says it will still be judging standout work from the past year, with jurors doing so remotely. It also introduced a new category, the "Pop Choice" award, which will be decided by the general public via Instagram. Beginning April 24, anyone can vote for their favorite work through Instagram Stories. That voting period will remain open for 24 hours. All ANDYs winners will be announced during a live virtual event on April 27.

Creative agency Arnold and Havas Mediaannounced a new integrated leadership team in Boston. Comprised of talent across both creative and media, the Havas-owned agencies say they will create a unified strategic offering and share resources for clients going forward. As part of this, Scott Stedman, former MDC Media Partners chief marketing officer, will join Arnold + Havas Media Boston as chief growth and product officer. The following executives were promoted under the new agency: Gabrielle Rossetti, executive VP of strategy at Havas Media has become chief strategy officer; Vallerie Bettini, executive VP and marketing director, is now chief client officer; Julianna Akuamoah, senior VP of human resources, was named chief talent officer; and Cass Taylor, executive VP and client lead, has become chief operating officer. Rounding out the leadership team for Arnold + Havas Media Boston (pictured below) are CEO George Sargent, Chief Creative Officer Sean McBride, and Chief Financial Officer Lucia Ferrante.

The core of this Arnold + Havas Media Boston leadership team has been winning with our clients for years. We already know each other well, and our shorthand allows us to be tightly focused on executing on our shared vision of integrated thinking for all clients, Sargent says.

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Agency brief: Vice, Virtue APAC bosses share experiences of leading regional offices through the pandemic - AdAge.com

Coppins: Yeah, exactly. Thats whats actually interesting about this particular playbook, because if you talk to scholars who study propaganda and disinformation, what theyll say is that up until pretty recently, most autocratic regimes or even just kind of illiberal political leaders would try to censor dissenting voices and inconvenient information. They would shut down opposition newspapers and throw journalists and political dissidents in jail. Thats how they kind of maintained control and power.

What youve seen in the last 10 or 20 years is that a lot of the illiberal regimes around the world have realized that in this era of whats called information abundance, where everybody has the internet, everyone has social media, everyone has TV and radio and books, its very hard to fully contain the spread of information. Its much more effective to flood the zone with lots and lots and lots of content and propaganda and disinformation and noise. And what this is called is censorship through noise. Basically, youre drowning out the dissenting voices rather than throwing them in jail.

Wells: I remember one time I had a conversation with someone who grew up in China, and we were talking about the misinformation in Chinese media and state-controlled media and things like that. And I was like, Oh, that seems so disorienting. And I remember she said, Well, in China, we just know not to trust it. But in the U.S., you still actually believe the things you hear.

Coppins: Yeah. Thats such a good insight and an important point. I do think that that is a major problem in our society, and its born out of something good, which is that, compared to a lot of other parts of the world, were actually not used to our own government waging coordinated disinformation campaigns against us.

If you compare us as a people to, for example, people in Eastern Europe or the Baltic countries, who have spent generations dealing with Russian disinformation and Russian propaganda, youll find that they are a lot more savvy about it, and frankly a lot more cynical. We also have this fundamental belief, which I think is generally good, in free speech. We really believe that dissenting voices and opinions shouldnt be censored. And we kind of instinctively push back against any effort to censor speech.

Wells: But that is, like, a sort of ethic that comes from a time when the tool of control was censorship rather than flooding.

Coppins: Exactly. And you read like all the famous novels that are about future dystopiatheyre all very concerned with censorship, like the state coming in and burning books or sticking old newspaper articles down the memory hole. That idea colors so much of the literature about authoritarianism. But in this modern era, thats really not how it works, at least not in most democratic or ostensibly democratic countries.

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Social Distance: Are These Tweets Real? - The Atlantic

Americans dont trust the government, and they dont trust the media. That trend has been evident for years, but the Trump era has accelerated it.

Now we can see the worst-case scenario that trend could create, playing out in front of our eyes: Confronted with a paralyzing coronavirus pandemic, theres deep confusion about the steps the country should be taking to respond.

Dont expect it to get better, says journalism critic Jay Rosen. Thats in large part because the Trump administration uses confusion as one of its primary political tools. Right now, it is employing it to create cover for the president, who wants to argue that he shouldnt be blamed for a litany of missteps as the virus moved from China to the US and exploded across the country.

The fight to keep Americans from understanding what happened from December to March is going to be one of the biggest propaganda battles in American history, he told me recently. The Republican Party and the Trump campaign and the MAGA coalition are going to have to produce confusion and doubt on a scale that is unlike anything youve ever seen before.

That conflict is unfolding in plain sight: The point of that weird campaign video Trump rolled out at a White House press conference this week was to recast himself as bold and decisive in the face of the pandemic as opposed to convincing reports in the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets emerging recently that portray him and his administration as dithering and confused, and slow to make crucial decisions like telling the country to start socially distancing.

Its an extension of the challenge Trump has posed to journalists from the start of his administration, when he ordered his then-press secretary, Sean Spicer, to tell the press that his inauguration had an enormous audience instead of a paltry one. Or, in Trumps words, delivered to a group of veterans in 2018: Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not whats happening.

Rosen, who teaches journalism at New York University, has been meeting up with me once a year to discuss the challenges the Trump administration poses for the media. This year, instead of a podcast, we chatted via Skype, and Im presenting edited excerpts of that conversation below.

If you read the story I wrote earlier this week about the medias struggles to report on the pandemic, youll recognize similar themes in this conversation, which was happening while I was reporting that story; Im grateful to Rosen for the opportunity to shape my thinking.

Theres a giant gap in the way the American public perceives or has perceived the pandemic. That split is both across political divides and across news consumption divides. Are you surprised in any way to see what were seeing today?

No.

We have talked about this sort of gap for several years. But did you imagine that this would manifest in a literal life-and-death crisis like this?

No, I never imagined a crisis like this. I did, like lots of other people, worry about what would happen in a truly serious event, combined with the Trump presidency. But I was thinking a war, a terrorist attack, a natural disaster of epic proportion, something like that.

But something like this, which affects everyone and is invisible and takes both science and imagination to understand which I think is a very interesting point for us to discuss I never conceived of something like this.

There have been many failures. I think one of them, for a lot of people and I include myself here is a failure of imagination, a failure to see this coming, even though people have literally made books and movies about this for years.

This possibility was talked about a lot. And warnings for the virus began early, and so there was plenty of information that it was going to become important.

But what I meant by imagination is something additional to that, which is: In order to understand what is happening now, in order to be informed, you need not only good information, reliable information, but you need imagination to see what it is.

Imagination buttressed with science ...

Yeah. Thats why [Dr. Anthony] Fauci and others say if it sounds like its too much, its just enough.

But its an incredibly difficult thing to tell people about, because unlike a hurricane or even a war, [the virus] is completely abstract. So thats one of the challenges that journalists faced.

Right. You cant see it until you either have it or youre looking at someone who has it. Even now, one of the things that strikes me and you see this manifesting on Twitter is that even now when there are [thousands] of people who have died, because so much of it is happening in a hospital, or in someones house or en route to the hospital, that youre not seeing it.

And while theres plenty of reporting from inside hospitals ... in terms of visuals, youre still not seeing it. And so you end up with scenes like people on Twitter saying theyre going to the Elmhurst Hospital in Queens to see if they can see these lines with people.

Thats a whole meme now go to your hospital and take video of nothing happening so that you can own the libs.

Are you tracking the percentage of people who say they are worried [or] not worried, and how thats evolving over time and what their sources of information are? It seems like it has changed over time, in part because at various times the president has said this is a serious thing, after saying it was not a serious thing.

Yeah. And this coheres with political science findings from long ago, that public opinion does follow what political leaders and party leaders are saying.

The recognition that theres a reality there, that this thing is happening, its real, its not a story, its not a fake I think that has grown. But as that has grown, so has the attempt to escape responsibility for that.

And I think this is a really important point that Ive been trying to make: The fight to keep Americans from understanding what happened from December to March is going to be one of the biggest propaganda battles in American history. Because so much of it is public. We have so many statements from Trump minimizing the danger. So many things are already on the record.

The Republican Party and the Trump campaign and the MAGA coalition are going to have to produce confusion and doubt on a scale that is unlike anything youve ever seen before. And that, of course, is going to be a huge challenge for the press.

But its much more than the press: I think the fight to interpret what happened in those first three months as someone elses fault and to persuade Americans that it wasnt Trumps responsibility when there are so many things on the record, like giving myself a 10 out of 10 or this is going to go away, itll just magically disappear. All those things are going to have to be overridden somehow. And that is going to put a huge strain on the information system.

In the pre-Trump era, any politician, let alone the president, who not only said this once but downplayed the virus multiples times made a whole series of statements that were then not rebutted but actually refuted that would be the end of the story. Right? Its all on tape. We know what it is. Theres no doubt about it. Theres no debate.

In the Trump era, sadly, weve become used to the idea that Trump can say something on live TV in front of everyone and then is actually able to make it go away, magically. And that there is a significant chunk of the population that either will never hear it or refuse to believe it or doesnt care.

So youre describing a fight to come. But it seems like in some ways, this wont be a fight: Both sides will already be resigned to either believe Trump or not believe Trump. Is there any reason to believe its different this time?

I think thats a little oversimplified.

The Trump base will believe anything that he believes, and theres already polling data indicating that his core supporters trust Trump as a source of information far more than they trust the news media or any other institution. So for that group, yes.

Then, of course, theres a large group of Trump doubters, who are also, not coincidentally, more likely to think that the mainstream media can be trusted as a source of information.

But there are people who are in neither of those camps. I wouldnt call them centrist. I wouldnt try to characterize their ideology. But theyre not in either one of those camps. And for those people, the key for the Trump campaign is to create confusion, not belief. And thats what were going to see in the months ahead: the massive effort to create doubt and confusion about things that are overwhelmingly clear from the public record.

One side says this. The other side says that. I cant make up my mind; Im going to either ignore it or shrug my shoulders.

Yeah, its already happening. Like, [New York City Mayor] Bill de Blasio does not have a great record in himself and warning his public. He went to the gym way after it was too dangerous to do that. And so there is some responsibility there, right? Compared to Trumps responsibility, its, you know, small. But its real.

That kind of fact is going to interact with on the one hand/on the other hand journalism. And theyre going to try and, of course, blow that up.

Another thing that has already started happening is people keep sending me this graphic. I dont know who created it, but Ill send it to you. That is all the headlines from various sources that minimized the virus, that said its not going to be that big of a deal some similar things to what Trump said.

The attempt is to say that it was the MSM a term I dont use, but they do it was the mainstream media that misled us.

I did want to ask you about that. Do you think the mainstream media Ill use the term could have done a better job of raising the alarm earlier?

Probably, yes. As with other very big crises, like the 2008 economic crisis, you can go back and you can find reports that gave the appropriate warnings. But the overall tone of the coverage did not accomplish that.

I think the same thing will be true here. There are definitely reports quite a few that said this thing is bigger than the political system seems to be acknowledging. And then even before this particular virus arose, the possibility of a global virus like this, having this kind of effect, was very well known and discussed quite a bit.

So there is some responsibility there from the news media. But the news media of course isnt one organism.

Ive been thinking about this for a while. I think there are probably two different reasons that the media, broadly, was not more alarmist about this. One is a sincere desire not to be alarmist in general, and specifically over a health crisis. If youre telling people this is going to be terrible, and you quote people who are stocking up on food, you can have a run on markets.

I think it would be part of the reason that you didnt see kind of a Time out, nothing else matters. Pay attention to this. That would be one reason.

But another way to look at it would be if the president and the White House [were] hair on fire about this, there is no doubt there would be media coverage of the same type. So thats a factor as well.

Theres a lot of resistance to reporting on something that is a possibility.

But the other thing is that for many journalists, this reporting involved going to health experts often the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] or the WHO [World Health Organization], or people like that and saying, What should we think about this? and then reporting what they say.

Now were seeing that, in some cases, those institutions themselves were behind in sounding the alarm, being more vocal about the alarm, and some of their advice and prognostications have changed.

And it seems like that would pose a real challenge if you are a good reporter, and you go to what is supposedly a nonpartisan institution staffed with experts, and theyre saying this is our view that itd be very hard for you to run against that.

I agree with that. Journalism scholars say that news reporters are dependent on authorized knowers. This would be a very good example of that. When the authorized knowers arent making a big deal of something, its extremely difficult for journalists to do that.

What do you make of the Ben Thompson argument that this is why Twitter was particularly valuable? Because you had all sorts of experts on Twitter sometimes they werent sanctioned by the CDC, sometimes they were smart people in Silicon Valley and theyve had insight and we should have listened to them more than the CDC or the WHO at various points?

Well, if the question is the availability of information that warned us that this was coming yes, that information was available. And you could find it in part by doing your own research. Thats true.

But the problem is not really the availability of good information that turned out to be right and important. Its the combination of good information and public attention.

Which is kind of the job of the media. To contextualize that information and to put it out.

Yes, and to order things. This is one of the problems we have with our news system. The news tends to be, to use a colloquial expression, one damn thing after another. And what its not that good at even though people say that front pages do this its not that good at helping us organize stories in order of priority.

Like telling us whats most important to worry about. And next most important, and maybe third or fourth. And keeping those priorities both stable, in the sense that they dont change day to day, but also be able to evolve as big events evolve. We dont really have anything like that. And so it tends to be one damn thing after another.

If you just think about producing todays news, then a sense of hierarchy, a sense of relative importance, disappears from the flow of content. This is a big problem with our news system. Its not the fault of any one journalist or any one news organization. Its a problem with relying on news for our knowledge.

But there are hierarchies. Theres the top of the newscast. If you know how to interpret the New York Times, you know that the story on the far right is the most important even though it may be under a smaller headline than the rest of the page. That is part of the job of media, right? Packaging that and ordering it?

Yes. But that tends to be a little bit different than what I said. Thats heres the most important new thing that happened today.

But some things are not new, but they are the most important thing. So some things are persistent and still the most important thing today. And when you have things like that, where actually the news of the day doesnt change the fact that you should be worried about X, Y, and Z first thats where the system breaks down.

I want to come back to the original idea here that I had when I was talking to you, which was: Is there anything we can do about a partisan divide and a news source divide that is now literally a life-and-death situation? Is there any practical solution to this problem today in 2020?

Well, as the reality of the virus grows and everyday life is affected and people have extremely practical questions like, What do I do? How do I protect my family? the news at the local level becomes extremely important because people need to know where to go, what to do.

So its possible that local news providers will experience kind of a rebirth of both use and trust from the many questions and crises that arise from this situation.

And a relationship with a local news provider is basic to how people develop trust in journalism and in the news media as an institution. And so if peoples connection to local news providers is strengthened by this which does happen sometimes in civic emergencies, like hurricanes, for example that could change things a little bit.

I dont think its going to change opinion at the level of Fox versus NBC and Trump versus Jonathan Karl. It doesnt touch that. But reestablishing trust and utility with local publics could help journalism quite a lot.

That would be great. And it would be great if we have local news outlets that are still around to perform that function.

Well, this is part of the problem. Those newsrooms are themselves impoverished. And so it makes it extremely difficult.

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Trump vs. the media: How hes using his war on the press to deny his coronavirus failings - Vox.com