Illustration: Jim Cooke/ FMG
Not so long ago, Nick Denton used to boast that Gawker Media was the last true beachhead of independent media in America. How quickly things change. Does independent media even mean anything, any more? Did it ever?
Today, we are owned by Univision, a multibillion-dollar international media company controlled by a partnership of private equity firms. There is nothing wrong with that, per se. But whatever independent media means, it is not that. Then again, perhaps it is not anything.
Independent media is not as easy as it sounds. Can a media company be independent if its shares are bought and sold on the stock exchange (like the New York Times)? Is a company with predatory private equity (Univision) or hedge fund or venture capital investors (Vice, Buzzfeed) really independent in a meaningful way? Is it more independent to be completely owned by a single rich guy (like Gawker Media was, or the Washington Post is), insulated from competing whims of investors but subject to the singular whims of a mercurial all-powerful owner? How about when the rich guy gets tired of losing money (The New Republic), or gets old and cranky (Harpers), or passes his leadership position off to his wastrel kid (Rolling Stone)?
I wont keep you waiting: The answer is no. True financial independence in the media is almost impossible to find. The closest model is probably enterprising do-gooder publications that beg their own readers and foundations for monetary support (Mother Jones, The Nation), although this model tends to reward more ponderous and self-conscious WE DO PUBLIC SERVICE journalism, rather than outlets that leaven their do-gooderism with less noble but more enjoyable content. Unless you are a very rich person who self-publishes your own thoughts on your own fully owned platform, you are beholden to someone.
What is actually being insinuated by places that declare their journalistic independence, then, is editorial independencethe idea that they answer to no one but the truth. But this assessment always includes a degree of fantasy. The same credible media outlets that spend their days following the money to report on the web of power and influence in the business or politics world will proclaim themselves free of any such outside influence from whichever money person sits atop their own pile of funding. Bullshit. This does not mean, as simpletons often shout, that Carlos Slim is dictating coverage in the New York Times, or that Jeff Bezos is secretly seeing to it that the Washington Post runs fawning stories about Amazon. For publications that want to be seen as mainstream, raw political ideology is too crude an instrument. The influence of money in the media is more often expressed by defining the boundaries of a news outlets conception of what news is. It is the insidious, unspoken self-censorship that causes an editor to turn down a story not because it is bad or wrong but because its just not what we do here. Whether the root of this self-censorship is fear of losing advertisers, or fear of pissing off the boss, or fear of offending someone that you might run into at a party later this year, or just a deeply internalized and ill-understood sense of what is and is not respectable, the effect is the same. The New York Times, which answers to the most establishment of establishment families, and Breitbart, which answers to an unhinged right-wing hedge funder, draw their boxes of acceptability in different places, but they both have boxes. The near-impossibility of true independence in journalism is expressed not by what is published, but by what is not published.
All the news thats fit to print is not the same as All the news. The gulf between those two concepts represents the black hole that would be filled by a wide variety of independent media outlets in a perfect world. The tougher the economic climate of the media industry is, the less free money is sloshing around to grow all the fun new publications that should be filling in the gaps. And all money comes with a price. You may have a varied media diet. You may read publications that are large, and small, and print, and online, and serious, and wild, and sober, and fun. But it is very unlikely that you read many publications that are independent. Dont let them sell you too hard on that idea. It sounds nice, but it may kill you.
See the article here:
What Is Independent Media? - Fusion