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NATALIE LOCKE, HOST: Hey everybody, guess what. The Prime Minister in the house.

NATHAN MORRIS, HOST: Isn't it amazing?

SHAUN MCMANUS, HOST: Hes not waiting for anybody.

PRIME MINISTER: Hey, everybody.

MORRIS: Hello, Prime Minister.

LOCKE: Fresh from the coronation, Anthony Albanese.

PRIME MINISTER: Great to be here.

MCMANUS: Tiredness out of, between one and ten please sir?

PRIME MINISTER: 9.5, I think. Had a bit of sleep last night, but I have no idea what time it is. It's dark outside, so it must still be night.

MORRIS: I cannot believe you didn't even get to experience the excitement of the Coronation concert.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, there's this little thing called the Budget happening tomorrow.

LOCKE: Yes, which is tomorrow.

MORRIS: People aren't interested in that, are they?

LOCKE: Yeah but thats the Treasurer's job, isn't it?

PRIME MINISTER: So we ducked straight out after the Coronation, straight to the airport. We actually got to the airport quick and were then waiting because there was a bit of a queue.

LOCKE: Yeah well Prince Harry had to get out too.

PRIME MINISTER: There were a few planes at Stansted waiting to take off.

LOCKE: Is that right?

PRIME MINISTER: And so we went by Dubai, had to refuel there for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. So I have no idea what time it is, my body clocks just off the scale.

LOCKE: You don't need to figure it out till you get back to Canberra.

PRIME MINISTER: 7:30 tomorrow night, I have to be in the chamber for Jim Chalmers Budget speech. I know that. If I wasn't there, people might notice.

MORRIS: It's amazing, we were just talking about the fact that you are looking, you're in history, like you're attending history. We're watching it. You're in it. You're in it.

PRIME MINISTER: Well, it's an extraordinary event, of course. The first time in my lifetime. First time in 70 years. And you absolutely had that sense of history. And the British, no one does pageantry and ceremony like the British.

LOCKE: It was like an Anne Hathaway movie.

MCMANUS: And that was slimmed down they said.

MORRIS: I tell you what, we need more fancy hats. Like we don't have enough fancy hats in Australia.

LOCKE: Thats where weve gone wrong obviously.

NATHA: Everyone had like a big furry one and a cone shaped one and a princess one.

LOCKE: We're gonna get more details on the Coronation. We've got to get a song on.

PRIME MINISTER: We have caps and Akubras.

MORRIS: I know, corks on strings.

LOCKE: Alright, were going to find out all the details of the Coronation, coming up next with the Prime Minister.

(Song break)

LOCKE: Nathan, Nat and Shaun and the Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, in the house on his way home from the Coronation. You're a republican, right?

PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, absolutely.

LOCKE: How was that, did you feel a bit conflicted sitting there watching the pageantry and the pomp?

PRIME MINISTER: Not at all. I want an Australian as our head of state. But there are, of course, 57 countries in the Commonwealth. Only 15 countries are part of the realm, which means that the King is the King of Australia.

MCMANUS: Its like Game of Thrones.

PRIME MINISTER: And so it's important as Prime Minister that I respect institutions which are there.

LOCKE: Until we change it.

PRIME MINISTER: Exactly, and that you do the right thing. I wasn't there to have a protest, which is what some people seem to think I should have done. I mean, it's ridiculous.

MCMANUS: Albo, that's really interesting to hear because I didn't know there was only 15 left that are ruled by the King. Because my thing was that, and I think we should be a republic, we've got to that point. But I was thinking, if we do that, then we're out of the Commonwealth Games. And that's one thing that we win all the time.

PRIME MINISTER: No, not at all.

LOCKE: Canada.

PRIME MINISTER: No, Canadas one of the realm countries.

LOCKE: Is it?

PRIME MINISTER: Yeah, Canadas in.

LOCKE: Dont they have a President?

PRIME MINISTER: No, they have a Governor-General like us. So, the 15 realm countries, you get a better seat if you're a realm country.

MORRIS: Oh really?

PRIME MINISTER: So there are the realm countries, then the non-realm Commonwealth countries.

MORRIS: And then Harry.

LOCKE: And then Prince Andrew.

PRIME MINISTER: It's the only time where the United States representatives and France and some of the big G7 countries, they're further back from Australia.

MCMANUS: Oh, that's good news.

PRIME MINISTER: Antigua's first, we're always second of the realm countries.

LOCKE: Oh, so its alphabetical.

PRIME MINISTER: Its always Antigua, Australia, Bahamas. So, I've got to know the Prime Ministers of Antigua and Bahamas very well.

LOCKE: They bit of fun?

PRIME MINISTER: They are. They are actually.

LOCKE: Talk about cricket?

PRIME MINISTER: Exactly. Well, particularly Antigua.

MORRIS: We need to know, the one question that everyone was asking about the Coronation, and this actually is from the Queen's funeral as well is, the toilet situation there? My dad was flipping out watching it, going, what if you have to go to the toilet? Because you're there for hours and it doesn't look like it's a situation where you can get up from your seat and go to a porta-loo. So, what's the deal?

PRIME MINISTER: The deal is, don't drink water in the morning, literally.

MORRIS: Really? So, do they say if you need to go to the toilet you cannot?

PRIME MINISTER: No, I think in an emergency you could, but it would be pretty disruptive.

MORRIS: Embarrassing.

PRIME MINISTER: And you're conscious of the cameras. So, literally, the night before we had.

LOCKE: You start the drying out process?

PRIME MINISTER: We had a gathering of all of the Australian representatives, and of course, we had three Victoria Cross winners, including the wonderful Keith Payne, who's just an absolute legend. And we had Sam Kerr.

MCMANUS: What a champion.

PRIME MINISTER: Great West Australian, chosen by me to be the flag bearer. And she just looked fantastic and she's so awesome. And so we had Sam, and we had Nick Cave, and we had Adam Hills, and we had a nurse from the NHS, and we had people from the arts, Yvonne Kenny. And we had an amazing group.

LOCKE: The AstraZeneca developer.

PRIME MINISTER: And we told, we got told, everyone, make sure in the morning, you don't drink a whole lot of water.

LOCKE: Adam Hills said in an interview that he did a dummy run the day before, of just having a little bit of coffee in the morning to get himself up and about and then not drinking for the rest of the day to see how long he could hold on for, so that he knew that he was prepared.

PRIME MINISTER: Training, you need training for an event like this.

MORRIS: And then a bowl of sawdust for breakfast.

MCMANUS: When youre at the Coronation, because we all watched a fair bit of it on TV, but it gets to the point, right, where we're seeing it and like, okay, where's the sport, not for everyone.

LOCKE: Well, the Dockers were playing Shaun, so what were you going to do?

MCMANUS: But, you know, did you get bored there?

PRIME MINISTER: No, not at all.

MORRIS: Oh, come on.

PRIME MINISTER: Nup, not at all.

LOCKE: How far before it started, did you have to be in, sit you in your spot?

PRIME MINISTER: Well, not too long before, and some were there many hours beforehand.

MORRIS: Not the important realmers, though.

PRIME MINISTER: The realm, exactly, exactly. So, when you're from the realm, you get in just before just before other royals, and then the actual Royal Family. So, Princess Mary was just sitting just across, the same aisle as we were, and so you get to see all the royals moving in and then the Royal Family coming in, and then it's on. And there is something about the acoustics in a cathedral, or in this case an abbey, that is just magnificent. And the singing and the music was beautiful.

MORRIS: But was there, there was a bit too much of it. There was twenty-one of those choir songs. Twenty-one, fifteens probably enough, tens enough.

PRIME MINISTER: Hang on, it went for two hours, the last one went for more than double that.

MCMANUS: Whoah, okay.

MORRIS: And the worst thing is, like Katy Perry was there. It's like, can you just not stand up and do a bit of I Kissed A Girl?

LOCKE: Alright, we've got more with the Prime Minister coming up next.

(Break)

LOCKE: Nathan, Nat and Shaun, were just unpacking the Coronation with the Prime Minister, who's joined us here in the studio. Anthony Albanese, it's always a pleasure to have you in town.

PRIME MINISTER: Its good to be here. And I'm sorry I've disappointed you, mate, by you not being the flagbearer.

MORRIS: It was very upsetting for me.

LOCKE: But we've seen your upper arms Nathan, I dont think you couldve.

PRIME MINISTER: It was Sam Kerr or you, you made the final two on the list.

MORRIS: Yeah I know, but like, I understand that Sam Kerr has done some things, but like Shaun, come on.

PRIME MINISTER: She's pretty handy. We beat England two-nil.

Read more:
Radio Interview - Nova 93.7 Perth breakfast with Nathan, Nat & Shaun - Prime Minister of Australia

On the one-year anniversary of the leak of the Supreme Court's Dobbs decision, the Senate Judiciary Committee is hearing from legal experts Tuesday on ethics and the Supreme Court. "Amicus" podcast host Dahlia Lithwick joins us.

And, there are reports that Vice Media is preparing to file for bankruptcy. Roben Farzad, host of public radio's "Full Disclosure," tells us more.

Then, does rent control improve housing affordability in the long run? Economist Rebecca Diamond was part of a study in San Francisco that found that in the long run, rent control drove up rents because it led a number of landlords to convert their housing to other uses and it reduced the supply of rental units.

Connect with us:

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Email the show at letters@hereandnow.org

Original post:
Research finds rent control reduces affordability in long run ... - NPR

That is the economic story of publishing in the age of Web traffic, but Smiths insights concern mostly the editorial story, about the way that traffic-chasing changed media coverage. He had come to BuzzFeed from Politico, a magazine that made its digital name with lively, first-rate, fire-hose reporting aimed at political junkies. He seems to have recognized earlier than his bosses that many of these junkies were drinking from his Twitter feed at least as much as from the magazine, and that knowledge changed his working methods: My brain had been pretty well rewired. I spent my distracted days only half listening to the people I was talking to, or the politicians I was covering. What was happening on Twitter often felt more real than the person in front of me.

When Peretti courted Smith about a BuzzFeed job, they parted in a state of mutual incomprehension. Smith understood the value of buzz-feeding, but not Perettis fascination with the machine aspects of traffic. He declined the job. Everyone, including his wife, told him that this was a mistake. The opportunity, it was explained to him, was about big stories, and scoops, spreading around the internet, using that sites tools. Smith backpedalled and pitched himself for the position hed turned down.

BuzzFeed has the structure and the tone of a website that could be central to peoples lives, he wrote Peretti. But its built on sharing everything BUT the big stuff. Load the trailer with valuable cargo instead of chintzy toys and you could do real business. Their collaboration put medias editing and distribution operations together again.

When Smith created BuzzFeed News, he took the form from his Politico blog: a mere repository for things I hoped would go viral on Twitter. The little scoops that insiders would share and the articles with more cultural resonance, all chewed up into Twitter-size, context-free fragments. He hired eager young whippersnappers and accelerated his news-gathering operations to a blur. When, during the election year of 2012, Smith called a reporter to tell her she was now on the Rick Santorum beat, she pulled her car over to the side of the road, visited Wikipedia to see who Santorum was, and changed direction. He explains:

As older news organizations wrung their hands about whether they should allow journalists to waste their paid time and energy typing on someone elses platform, we dived into it gleefully. I told my reporters, a group of hungry kids excited at the opportunity to compete with their pompous elders, that I didnt want a story that didnt live on Twitter. One reporter, Zeke Miller, was simply the fastest tweeter on the draw, which was actually enough to get attention back then, copying and pasting a press release headline before anyone else.

Everything fast had to get faster. Value emerged only on Twitter. A person doing serious political coverage at an outlet known for which-Disney-character-are-you quizzes is presumably in the business of making distinctions, and Smith doesnt shy from reminding his readers how his fiefdom was different from Perettis prankish domain. (When Smith published his first post, on January 1, 2012, the Web-page formatting went awry: BuzzFeed had never printed a full paragraph before.) But the marriage wasnt just one of convenience. BuzzFeed and BuzzFeed News shared a conviction that winning the attention game was a media companys first priority, and went to bat for each other. In 2015, when BuzzFeed posted what became its best-known viral feata photograph of a dress that looked blue and black to some viewers and gold and white to othersSmith abandoned his son mid-fairy tale to frantically assign more stories to capture what I knew would be a flood of traffic.

The speed and volume made a lot of intersections dangerous. In October, 2012, one of Dentons sites posted a sex tape of the former professional wrestler known as Hulk Hogan, accompanied by a thousand-word rumination on the proceedings. (Smith, possibly typing in a fugue state, likens it to the work of Ernest Hemingway.) When Hogan sued, the litigation dragged on; at trial, in 2016, he was awarded a hundred and forty million dollars, driving Gawker Media into bankruptcy and forcing Denton to sell. Peter Thiel revealed himself as the funder of Hogans suit. By then, the weather of the blogosphere had changed. Perettis craving for the quick viral fix will not be satisfied by the nourishing fare, Denton had predicted of BuzzFeed News, but it was his approach that faltered first.

I told yousome people are lost without the rehearsal.

Cartoon by Drew Dernavich

BuzzFeeds rise is the crucial turn in Smiths account of the traffic chase. It is also when, more than a third of the way into the book, our previously cool, omniscient narrator suddenly shows up as a character with his hands on the wheel. The effect is jarring, prompting questions about perspective in the narrative to that point, especially because Smiths storytelling is buffed and upbeat. Young outsiders here glow with ambition and set off in junky cars: Denton drives his blue Mazda across the border to cover the violent Romanian revolution; Drudge builds his empire while driving a shitty little red Geo Metro; Peretti, following a windfall, treats himself to a new Honda Odyssey. The vehicles allude to a certain leadership canonJeff Bezos likes to talk about driving his Chevy Blazer across the country to found Amazon; much has been made of Mark Zuckerbergs Honda Fitand are a genre giveaway. What Smith has written is a Builder Bio: a story of scrappy oddball heroes with one weird business idea who gather the gang, suffer the slings and midnight crises of entrepreneurship, and, to the chagrin of the stuffed shirts, emerge powerful and rich and mysteriously well groomed. (Drudge in full bloom is said to be almost absurdly fit.) Chris Poole, who founded 4chan, a platform that has hosted bomb threats, child pornography, and snuff photography, is described in just one paragraph as sweet, handsome, productive, and hot. In Smiths telling, it is Dentons loss of the killer instinctnot his exercise of that instinct in the first placethat caused his empire to fall.

The villains are exactly where youd expect to find them, and, when they show up, farty tuba music plays. Andrew Breitbart, the longtime Drudge Report deputy who simultaneously worked behind the scenes at the Huffington Post, is variously described as fat and stressed, a pudgy fire starter, a frenetic, overweight fleabag of a man, a hyperkinetic embodiment of attention deficit disorder, and a hyperactive pigpen of a right-wing lunatic, whose belly hung out from underneath his ratty T-shirt. Breitbart died in 2012, before his eponymous Web site of conspiracy and defamation experienced its flytrap efflorescence, so he is not in a position to respond, but it is safe to say that most people, no matter where their pitchforks point, will find what they want here. A cynic could posit that Smiths approach to narrativethe crosscutting chronological march, the relatability of the principals, the greasepaint on the easy villainsis prepackaged for a streaming-media series, as everything now seems to be. But I suspect a more organic route. Figuring out what gets people going, and providing more of it than they asked for, is at the heart of what successful journalism in the age of traffic is about.

Perhaps the keenest insight in this book concerns the way that traffic-chasing helped create the MAGA right. In Smiths telling, it is not coincidental that Andrew Breitbart spent three months working with Peretti at the Huffington Post, a publication that, in 2008, got behind Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton partly because Peretti had identified Obama as a traffic booster. The extraordinary digital success that Obamas campaign went on to enjoy, Smith suggests, rose in part from the new way of thinking about people that came when you saw them as trafficmeasuring interest and intent, and channeling it into action. Or, to put it more directly, traffic wasnt just business; it was politics.

The opportunity was not lost on Breitbart, and it was not lost on Steve Bannon, who surveyed the left-wing media landscape for things to copy and marked Peretti as a genius. In 2012, Smith himself hired an ultraconservative writer named Benny Johnson because he represented an untapped new well of traffic, a new identity to plumb. Johnson (handsome, clean-shaven, and earnest) had distinguished himself with a post about a National Rifle Association convention which, in Smiths view, took the BuzzFeed formulaa list of fun, emotionally resonant imagesto gun culture. He was eventually fired for plagiarism, but not before settling into a proto-MAGA formula built around the idea that the media were dangerously liberal and couldnt be trusted.

When one of BuzzFeeds famous quizzes went buggy and complaints went viral, Facebooknow more BuzzFeedy than BuzzFeedliked what it saw. If we saw good-natured complaints on our Facebook page, Facebook saw something else: engagement, Smith writes. It didnt really matter what people were saying. What mattered was that they were talking at all. The engagement doctrine, in his view, changed the political climate. Trump wasnt doing anything to game Facebook, he writes. He simply was what Facebook liked. In the midst of the 2016 campaign, Smith had a chat with Bannon:

Breitbart hadnt just chosen Trump, he told me, based on the candidates political views. Bannon and his crew had seen the energy Trump carried, the engagement hed driven, and attached themselves to it. BuzzFeed, in Bannons view, had failed to recognize that Bernie Sanders could generate the same energy, the same engagement. Why hadnt we gone all in for Bernie?

Peretti asked him the same thing. Smith responded by invoking BuzzFeed Newss journalistic scruples.

Smith is a reporter of rare talent, but self-examination has not emerged as his superpower. In the case of Benny Johnson, Smiths error, in his eyes, was not hiring a guy who made fun, emotionally resonant images from a gun convention but letting his eyes skate over plainly racist Johnson posts, such as Dont Miss the Connection: Obama Delivered to Office by Black Panthers, Holder Owes Them Some Favors. As for the unverified Steele dossier, he suggests that he would publish it again. He has no patience with the idea that the responsible thing for a news organization to do with salacious information of unconfirmed veracity is frequently nothing. His great regret, he writes, is publishing the dossier as a PDF. That let it travel on its own, without BuzzFeeds caveats, and without bringing his site all the traffic it pulled in.

The long story that Smith traces, from the open Internet of Perettis early high jinks to todays atomized and factionalized splinternet, was shaped by the demands of business strategy. At BuzzFeeds height, at the start of the twenty-tens, the traffic rush was a gold rush; Disney made an offer to buy the outlet for as much as six hundred and fifty million dollars, and was spurned. By the end of the decade, traffic had become most powerful as a tool to form political identity, knocking BuzzFeeds ideological hodgepodge of emotion-stirring posts from the Zeitgeist. In 2018, the site spent three hundred and eighty-six million dollars to earn revenue of three hundred and seven million dollars, and started laying off employees. To live in traffic is to live under the rules of the platforms that run traffic, and though this revelation seems to have come astonishingly late to Smithperhaps Jonah and I, thinking of ourselves as protagonists, had been passing through someone elses story, he remarksits the biggest moral of the tale that he tells. Two weeks ago, Peretti announced that he was shutting down BuzzFeed News, which by then had won a Pulitzer Prize and nurtured a generation of fine journalists, the luckiest of whom had begun, like Smith himself, to scatter to the Times and other places.

I say that these journalists were lucky, because the Times and an ever-shrinking number of other institutional outlets have flourished with a broad-church approach; their cooking and puzzle franchises, for example, help to subsidize costly foreign reporting. (Smith wrote an excellent media column for the Times for two years, before moving on again, in 2022, to co-found a new site, Semafor, which focusses on global news and audiences.) This has kept work and careers whole. Reading Traffic, I experienced a lot of whatever-happened-to moments; many stars of the early blogosphere have yet to find a worthy home elsewhere.

At the online magazine where I worked, the measure of success in traffic-seeking kept changing. The goal was at first to maximize the number of unique page views by publishing more material. Then instructions came down that what mattered was not volume but authority (other reliable sites linking to us), and we were instructed to reach out to eminent bloggers to promote our wares. After some months of this, it was decided that, in fact, the most valuable measure of traffic was engagement (how long readers spent reading our articles); our brief was to do work that was longer, better, and nearer the headlines of the day. When that approach, too, generated insufficient revenue, volume was summoned as the solution once again.

The media business has since made at least one more complete turn on this traffic roundabout in the hope of stabilizing its future. (The line is usually that the last model isnt how the Web works.) And the will to traffic is now everywhere: on your phone, in your ears, on your screen. In dreamy moods, I sometimes fantasize about journalism dropping out of the gamenot chasing traffic, not following this years wisdom, not offering audiences everything they could possibly want in hastiest form. Imagine producing as little as you could as best you could: it would be there Monday, when the week began, and there Friday, the tree standing after the storm. And imagine the audiences pleasure at finding it, tall and expansive and waiting for a sunny day. In an age of traffic, such deliberateness could be radical. It could be, I think, the next big thing.

See the rest here:
BuzzFeed, Gawker, and the Casualties of the Traffic Wars - The New Yorker

In the latest chapter of the tussle between Disney and the state of Florida, the newly appointed board for a special tax district encompassing Walt Disney World sued the company in Orlando on Monday to try to regain control over expansion at the theme park complex.

The districts complaint involves a pair of contracts that Disney World struck with a prior board that Disney controlled. The agreements adopted at public forums lock in a comprehensive plan for growth on Disneys 25,000-acre property near Orlando, including the possible construction of a fifth theme park and 14,000 additional hotel rooms.

These agreements reek of a back room deal, the districts new board said in its 188-page lawsuit filed in state court. Out of haste or ignorance, Disneys deals violate basic principles of Florida constitutional, statutory and common law. As a result, they are null and void not even worth the paper they were printed on.

Disney declined to comment.

The lawsuit, which had been expected, is the latest volley in a 14-month dispute between Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida and Disney World, the states largest tax payer and the nations largest single-site employer. Last week, after the new board voted to nullify the development agreements, Disney sued Mr. DeSantis and the new board members, claiming a targeted campaign of government retaliation. Disney filed its lawsuit in federal court in Tallahassee.

The conflict started in March 2022, when Disney joined other companies in criticizing a contentious state education law that, among other things, prohibits classroom discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for young students. (Opponents labeled it Dont Say Gay.) Mr. DeSantis and his Republican allies in the Florida Legislature immediately started to attack Disney as a woke company and began efforts to restrict its long-held autonomy in the state.

At the center of the fight is a 56-year-old special tax district that includes Disney World. The district effectively turned the property into its own county, giving Disney unusual control over fire protection, policing, waste management, road maintenance, bond issuance and, crucially, the planning of real estate development.

In February, lawmakers stripped control of the districts five-member board from Disney and handed it to the governor. When Mr. DeSantiss appointees reported for duty, however, they were incensed to discover that the outgoing board had approved certain development agreements, limiting the new boards power for decades to come.

Disney has repeatedly described the agreements as appropriate and struck in public meetings advertised in The Orlando Sentinel. Florida lawyers who are not affiliated with Disney and experts on development contracts in Florida have said that Disney acted legally.

In its lawsuit on Monday, the new board said otherwise, contending that the agreements were illegal. The board said that the notifications in The Sentinel, for instance, did not fully inform the public or other property owners of the purposes or contents of the development agreement.

Notably, the new board members are trying to wrest back control over a growth plan that was already cleared by the DeSantis administration.

But that was before Disney concerned that a new, politicized board could interfere with the growth plan took the additional step of locking in the approvals.

More here:
Disney Sued by Florida for Control of Theme Park's Expansion - The New York Times

The appeal comes in his message ahead of World Press Freedom Day, celebrated annually on 3 May, in line with a 1993 UN General Assembly resolution.

The focus this year is on the connection between press freedom and overall human rights.

Freedom of the press is the foundation of democracy and justice. It gives all of us the facts we need to shape opinions and speak truth to power. But in every corner of the world, freedom of the press is under attack, Mr. Guterres said.

The Secretary-General is away from New York and a video of his message was played during a ceremony in the General Assembly Hall to commemorate the 30th anniversary of World Press Freedom Day.

Prominent journalists and the heads of media and human rights organizations from around the world are attending the event, sharing their experiences and opinions in several panels on subjects such as multilateralism and freedom of expression.

Delivering opening remarks, Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UN cultural agency UNESCO, which advocates for the protection of journalists, said 2022 was the deadliest year for the profession.

Last year, 86 journalists were killed, mainly outside war zones. Oftentimes, they were at home with their family, she said. Hundreds more were attacked or imprisoned.

She said the level of impunity for these crimes sends a chilling message because the security of journalists is not a matter just for journalists or international organizations. It is a matter for society as a whole.

Furthermore, reporters are also coming under attack in cyberspace. A 2021 report revealed that three out of four women journalists have been the victim of online harassment, prompting UNESCO to issue recommendations for digital platforms to step up protection.

Ms. Azoulay noted that these challenges are happening at the exact moment when journalists are needed more than ever, as the advent of the digital era has changed the entire information landscape.

Although the Internet has opened new channels for information and expression, it has also provided fertile ground for those seeking to sow disinformation and conspiracy theories.

We find ourselves at a new crossroads, she said. Our current path is leading us away from informed public debates. Away from the very notion of a shared reality on which it depends. A path towards ever more polarization.

She called for greater action to ensure that information can remain a public good, noting thatUNESCO is supporting some 20 countries to develop educational policies in media and information literacy in the digital era.

The agency also organized a major global conference in Paris in February to discuss draft global guidelines for regulating digital platforms, which will be published later this year.

In his keynote address, A.G. Sulzberger, Chairman and Publisher of The New York Times, voiced concern over how threats to press freedom globally ultimately impact multilateralism.

Without journalists to provide news and information that people can depend on, I fear we will continue to see the unraveling of civic bonds, the erosion of democratic norms, and the weakening of the trust in institutions and in each other that is so essential to the global order, he said.

Mr. Sulzberger reflected on how the media landscape has evolved since 1993 - a period of optimism characterized by the apparent end of Cold War divisions, the emergence of fledgling democracies, and technological advancements in information and connectivity. News organizations also enjoyed historic financial strength and seemed well positioned to inform the public.

He said the moment was short-lived as the same technology that allowed journalists to reach people everywhere also forced many thousands of newspapers to close, and digital outlets that emerged were unable to fill the void, particularly in providing critical local and investigative reporting.

The Internet also unleashed the avalanche of misinformation, propaganda, punditry and clickbait that now overwhelms our information ecosystem, often drowning out credible journalism and accelerating the decline in societal trust, he said.

Mr. Sulzberger warned that erosion of the free press is almost always followed by democratic erosion.

And sure enough, this period of weakness for the press has coincided with destabilized democracies and emboldened autocracies. And when democracy erodes, you can be sure that the free press will be the first target, he said.

All over the world autocrats and those who aspire to join their ranks have used censorship, media repression, and attacks on journalists to consolidate power. That's because gaining control of information is essential to gaining control of everything else, he added.

He provided examples from across the globe, including Russia, where journalists who dare to even acknowledge the war in Ukraine face long prison terms.

He also highlighted the case of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested in Yekaterinburg last month for alleged spying, saying the former Times journalist remains in Russian custody for sham charges and should be released.

Mr. Sulzberger told UN Member States that countering the worldwide assault on the press will only be solved if they take action.

For nations with a strong tradition of a free press, including the United States, this means leaders standing up to secure legal protections for independent reporters and their sources, he said.

For nations where reporting the truth remains perilous, this means the international community must make clear that we'll call out and punish the crackdowns and attacks against journalists no matter where they occur.

He further emphasized the need to address the challenges facing the press, including developing clear financial models for sustaining independent journalism.

We still need a commitment from the digital giants to elevate independent journalism and ensure it stands apart from untrustworthy information on their platforms, he added. And we still need more of the public to value independent journalism enough to support it with their time, their money and their trust.

Read the original post:
Freedom of the press under attack worldwide - UN News