The Chompsky Weekly #65
In which all the reports come out (and one is mysteriously deleted).
Hello frens.
This week three major studies about journalism were published:
The Charitable Journalism Project’s ‘Local News Deserts in the UK’ report found that often unreliable and divisive social media groups were filling the gap lost by local news reporting in the country. It also revealed a number of shocking facts, such as police PR teams outnumbering the number of journalists regionally, on average, throughout the UK.
Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism released its annual worldwide study: 2022’s ‘Digital News Report’, for which they interviewed “over 93,000 online news consumers in 46 markets covering half of the world's population”. Among many other revelations, they found that around 17% of people in wealthy countries are paying for news, but the trend is “leveling off” and that “people are also increasingly avoiding news”.
And the Public Interest Journalism Initiative in Australia has done a review of the country’s News Bargaining Code (the law requiring Google and Facebook to pay publishers for news); it shows that a year after its introduction, 41% of local print and digital news outlets still have no access to deals. PIJI expressed their concern that “an uneven playing field is emerging between those news businesses with increased financial capacity from deals and those without.”
And here’s your weekly reminder that climate breakdown is moving faster than initially predicted, and the media industry is not reporting that in the way that it really, probably, should.
It’s Sunday June 19, 2022
Media News
Carole Cadwalladr won the defamation case brought against her by Arron Banks, a funder of the Leave.EU campaign. He sued her for a comment she made during a TED Talk about “lies” he had told “about his covert relationship with the Russian government”, something the court found to be demonstrably accurate. (The Guardian)
Priti Patel has approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States. Unless he wins an appeal, he will face charges in the United States for leaking documents with his Wikileaks team revealing the US military “had killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents during the war in Afghanistan” and in Iraq “66,000 civilians had been killed, and prisoners tortured, by Iraqi forces.” (BBC)
A story about the Prime Minister planning to hire his wife, Carrie Johnson, as a Chief of Staff when he was foreign secretary was printed in initial copies of Saturday’s Times newspaper. It was then deleted without explanation. (The Guardian)
A leaked memo reveals that Amazon executives are worried they might “run out of people to hire” in the next few years. (Vox)
Fox News has paid a former broadcaster $15 million after she brought a pay discrimination case against them. WaPo calls it an “unusually large settlement”. (Washington Post)
The CEO of Standard Media, a conglomerate positioned to acquire local TV news group Tegna, has sent a pre-emptive memo to staff promising that she has “no intention, and have never had the intention, of reducing news or news staff at TEGNA stations”. (Poynter)
Russia has banned another swathe of journalists from the country, including several top UK journalists. (The Guardian)
The UK’s five major broadcasters: ITV, BBC, Channel 4, Channel 5 and Sky have announced financial support for an Independent Standards Authority to tackle bullying and harassment within the creative industries. (Independent)
Japan has made online insults punishable by up to a year in prison, after the death of a reality TV star who had received a torrent of online abuse. (Yahoo News)
The National Labor Relations Board has filed a complaint against Amazon for union-busting, which Amazon Labor Union attorneys are calling “historic”. (VICE)
Campaigns + Content
After a 10 year wait… SEASON 2 OF DON’T HUG ME I’M SCARED COMES TO CHANNEL 4 IN SEPTEMBER!
Acclaimed actor and filmmaker Sarah Polley has written about her experiences as a child actor on Terry Gilliam’s film, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the complications involved in confronting him afterward, and the industry’s insulation of supposed “white male geniuses” from the consequences of their actions.
Sarah Polley: ‘It took me years to see how responsible Terry Gilliam was for my terror’
Carole Cadwalladr has spoken at length about the toll her libel trial has taken on her mental health. She’s now described the behind-the-scenes story in an op-ed:
“I had been braced to lose and I knew exactly what would happen if I had. The headlines I would face, the accusation that I was – what my detractors have always claimed – a “conspiracist”, the social media shitstorm that would ensue. I had no doubt about how devastating it would be because every step of this litigation has felt as if it was aimed at trying to crush me. In large part, it’s succeeded.”
Arron Banks almost crushed me in court. Instead, my quest for the facts was vindicated
That’s all folks, see you next week.
Love.Eliz