Big Tech Can’t Save Journalism. Democratic Socialism Can.
We need a plan for public funding of the media that can revive the ability to do more in-depth investigative reporting, hold power to account, and prioritize local journalism. Socialists have solutions.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during a media event at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto, 2011. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
The news industry is hurting. For years, advertising revenue has been declining, and journalism jobs have gone with it. Now, the pandemic could be an existential threat. On both sides of the Atlantic, media companies have been shedding jobs with more than 2,000 job losses in the UK and tens of thousands in the United States. For people paying attention to the media industry, the reason for this will come as no surprise: a lot of the advertising money that used to go to newspapers has shifted onto digital advertising platforms, especially those controlled by Google and Facebook. That duopoly controls 70 percent of the US ad market and over 65 percent in the UK. There are growing calls for some of that money to be redirected back into news, and Australia is trying to make it a reality.
Making the Tech Giants Pay
On July 31, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) published a draft of its new mandatory code for the bargaining process between news publishers and tech giants, beginning with Google and Facebook. This was no surprise — the Australian government had been signaling for months that this was the direction it was headed.
In 2019, Google and Facebook pulled in A$400 million more in Australian advertising revenue than the combined total of five major domestic media companies. Meanwhile, the tech companies are notorious for paying low tax rates in Australia — the same as in many other parts of the world — because they use shady tax schemes to book the revenue in low-tax jurisdictions like Singapore.
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