Fake news - you ain't seen nothing yet

How the media will look in 10 years time

I’d like to thank loyal reader in Singapore Gary Anstey for some of the insights in this article

I know a lot of you only look at these pieces for 2 or 3 seconds before deciding whether to continue reading. I may have blown it already with that last sentence, almost certainly with this one.

This is a long bleat with only a few sporadic attempts at humour, so some of you may want to stop reading now.

..

Right, if there’s anyone left here is what this piece is about:

• Reporters are increasing disrespected, endangered and underpaid, and they will eventually disappear.

• In the absence of investigative reporting, news will be what government, large corporations and celebrities tell us it is. It will be reported on by AI newsbots and commented on by bloggers and podcasters. Whistleblowers may sometimes reveal things the rich and powerful don’t like, but there won’t be independent news organisations to have the courage and financial resources to dare to report it properly.

• The printed press will disappear and everything will be digital. In the pursuit of ad revenue, AI will generate different versions of the same story tailored to individual preferences. In our post-truth world, “facts” will vary too. We won’t know what the truth is any more.

Fake news

You might think it was Trump who coined this phrase but it was actually Hillary Clinton. In December 2016 she complained about an epidemic of fake news that year, including 140 fake news websites clustered in Veles, a small town in Macedonia. These sites were producing completely false stories that made Hillary look bad and Trump look good. The most notorious fake news story was “Pizzagate”, that Hillary and Bill used the Ping Pong pizza restaurant in Washington as the front for a paedophile sex and child-trafficking ring. The owner received death threats and a man entered the restaurant and fired a rifle then went to prison for four years.

Trump was quick to appropriate the phrase, calling CNN fake news in January 2017. And then he never stopped. RSF (Reporters Without Borders) found that he verbally attacked the press 108 times in public speeches or rallies during an eight week period leading up to the 2024 election. Trump would often point out the “fake news media” during his rallies and encourage the crowd to boo them.

Threats to journalists

Meanwhile in Gaza, 137 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces, at least 32 of them were targeted and killed while working, and Israeli authorities have closed access into Gaza for foreign journalists, except those operating under the strict surveillance of the Israeli army. Throughout most of the world journalists can no longer operate freely. A UN report says that 1700 journalists have been killed between 2006-2024, many of them seeking to uncover corruption, some of them investigating environmental issues.

Even if you are not killed, your life can be ruined. Imprisonment, torture, harassment and surveillance are common in autocratic countries like Russia and China. In free countries like Britain investigative journalists are attacked financially by what have become known as SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation). Recently the Guardian journalist Carole Cadwalladr was ordered to pay costs of over £1m to Arron Banks, the millionaire Brexit party backer, because of remarks she made in a TED talk about his alleged connections to the Russian government. He only got £35,000 in damages and the court found that Cadwalladr’s journalism was in the public interest, but he sued her personally and she was nearly bankrupted as a result.

Carole is bitter that The Guardian did not support her, even though the content of her talk was reviewed by the Guardian’s own head of corporate communications, at his request. Carole recently posted an interesting piece about why Guardian journalists just staged a two day strike over plans to sell The Observer. But that’s another story.

So why be a journalist?

Because it’s a respected profession, right? Wrong - in the US only 31% trust the media either a great deal or a fair amount (that figure is only 12% among Republican voters). In the UK it’s also 31%, bottom out of 28 countries in a recent survey. In almost all countries the trend is relentlessly downward since the 1970s.

You make a lot of money though? No. The median average UK journalist’s salary is £32,000, though some reports say less. That’s less than the UK median average salary of £34,000. Starting salaries are rarely more than the minimum wage of £24,000 for full-time work. And journalists almost always have degrees and student debt. It’s a mug’s game.

Migration from mainstream media

Helen Lewis wrote in the Atlantic recently that podcasters like Joe Rogan now have a bigger reach than the mainstream media now - in effect they are the new mainstream media. Some of these guys are making millions (Joe Rogan is estimated to make $60m a year). Even in the UK it is estimated that Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell make £100,000 a month each from their twice weekly Rest is Politics podcast. Even some Substack bloggers make seven figure revenues in subscriptions (not including the Goat, unless you count in hundredths of pence).

Why suffer the abuse, the danger, the poor pay, the financial insecurity, when you could be sitting in the warmth with steaming mugs of coffee making witty little comments off the back of what reporters have reported. And potentially earning millions.

But no-one will be getting the stories any more, just making witty little comments about whatever news has appeared.

AI

This interesting article from Newscatcher describes an experiment carried out by Pangram Labs, which found that on a given day in July 2024 7% of online news stories were AI generated. Now we all know humans whose writing style is indistinguishable from a computer, so that figure may be overstated. But it still amounts to 60,000 AI produced articles on that day. Meanwhile Amazon have introduced a new rule that you may only publish three books a day, because so many people are uploading AI-generated content. And it’s so easy - even a dinosaur like me just has to click on the Copilot tab on Bing and tell it to write 500 words on the claims about Gregg Wallace and out it pops in seconds - perfectly serviceable, dull copy.

If I own a struggling newspaper or magazine, I can sack all my journalists except one and get that person to review and edit the AI stories, in the same way that the harassed Aldi supermarket check-out staff member supervises the over-sensitive self check-out tills at the supermarket.

The new news

So independent investigative reporting will disappear. Content will be produced by AI and those witty commentators. But where will the news actually come from? It’s not inconceivable we will have AI bots asking questions at the Prime Minister’s press briefing (any robot could surely have done a better job holding Boris Johnson to account than Laura Kuenssberg managed) but by and large it will be a while before AI is smart enough to uncover the next Watergate.

So news will be made by the people in power - governments and large corporations, billionaires like Musk and Bezos and celebrities. They will communicate directly with us, AI will report on those communications for us, and commentators will commentate on them.

What if these announcements are misleading or omit important details? I would of course be shocked, like Captain Renault in Casablanca.

In some countries, we may have investigative reporting bankrolled by a corporation or billionaire who opposes the government, but that will likely be impossible in most states as democratic processes and free speech suffer under increasing attack. It will be interesting to see what happens in America in the next four years.

In any case, it will not be long before truly independent media with investigative reporting resource ceases to exist.

We will still have whistleblowers - people filming and blabbing what they shouldn’t. We’ve seen how the vast majority of people daren’t do this, because they won’t be believed, they are ashamed or they fear for their jobs or life. Savile, Weinstein and MeToo, Al Fayed, even Wallace. Almost everyone stays quiet until the story has already leaked. These stories, if they do come out, will go viral on social media and be picked up by the newspapers with their AI bots and the witty commentators sipping their steaming mugs of coffee.

But stories like this that harm people in power may not get far - in less free countries governments will crack down on social media outlets that disseminate them, and those social media outlets may self-censor in their own interests, as TikTok does now. In freer countries there will be the threat of libel actions and injunctions - commentators without the support of a substantial news organisation behind them will be SLAPPed down.

An exception may be if someone like Elon Musk finds himself in opposition to the government - his resources may make him too big to SLAPP down so he becomes someone broadcasting the things the government doesn’t want you to know about - but Musk is a bad example as his credibility is fatally compromised. You could not trust him any more than the government, probably less. You would need a mega-rich individual without a personal agenda, dedicated to uncovering the truth for the benefit of the people and for the general good. It’s an inconceivable individual, a contradiction in terms.

The new newspaper

The printed press is already disappearing, with UK daily newspapers declining from over 20 million at the turn of the decade to under 3 million today. Over 50% of subscribers are over 55 (and I suspect well north of that figure).

Though funnily enough print copies are more profitable than digital editions, because digital ad revenue has been a major disappointment to news organisations. That’s because Google and Facebook have eaten their lunch. Google is high-intent advertising - i.e. you search on Google for something you want, whereas Facebook and newspapers have low-intent advertising - you are reading about something else but an ad is placed there strategically just in case. As this interesting article by Thomas Baekdal observes, Facebook generally has a better 'mood'. Better for a brand to advertise when people are having a good time than it is when they are reading about someone being murdered.

My prediction is that newspaper organisations are going to get more like Facebook - more interaction with digital readers, more data analytics, so they can get better at placing ads strategically with a higher chance of conversion. And like Facebook, the more they know about you, the greater their ability to tailor the news that you get.

This will be a fundamental shift. Newspapers will realise that “the newspaper” is far too restrictive and rigid a concept. Why does every reader get the same content when it will be relatively simple to tailor the content you receive based on your perceived preferences, just like social media feeds?

And it gets better. With the benefit of AI, the newspaper news articles can be tailored too. They know I am obsessed with Brexit, so my article about Keir Starmer’s latest reset and new set of objectives can moan about why he didn’t mention Brexit, whereas my mother’s version can moan about why he didn’t say more about immigration. Dozens of different versions might be prepared. Each reader gets news confirming their existing biases, for the most part meaning they are more likely to read it and see the ads.

As an example, witness how Donald Trump and Kamala Harris sought to appeal to Jews and Arabs with directly contradictory ads before the election. Republican messages aimed at Arab American populations claim Harris will “ALWAYS stand with Israel”, she has a Jewish husband, and describes the pair as “America’s pro-Israel power couple”. Meanwhile, texts and mailers sent to heavily Jewish areas claim “two faced Kamala stands with Palestine”, picturing her in front of a Palestinian flag.

It gets darker

It wouldn’t be a long bleat without some apocalyptic element.

We are in a post-truth polarised age, where conspiracy theories abound. Most if not all politicians lie sometimes. The man about to become the most important man in the world lies all the time, aided and abetted by the richest man in the world. (By the way isn’t there something nauseating about the richest man in the world being cheered for pledging to fire thousands of ordinary people? What has happened to some of us, like a bunch of apes cheering on the chief as he beats to death weaker members of the tribe.)

Newspapers will not only offer slanted versions of the same story, they will offer completely different versions of the same story, with different “facts” an option, as long as they support the broad thrust of the story. As JD Vance said about the lie that Haitians were eating pets in Springfield “if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do”. Facts can be created if they are illustrative of the point that needs to be made.

Once you are free to tailor or invent facts, then you can really lean in on content that maximises advertising. Scare your readers with a story about immigrants eating pets next to an ad for pet security tags and a pet-mounted go-pro camera. Invent some things that Keir Starmer said that are even more boring than the reality, next to adverts for Nurofen and alcohol. That last one may be a challenge.

Meanwhile the news archive will be a thing of the past as everything is tailored. In fact, it may be in the interest of news organisations to quietly amend any articles available on the internet to suit their agenda. You won’t need Winston Smith to rewrite historical documents for you when a trusty newsbot can do the job in seconds.

The BBC remains the most trusted news outlet in the UK (44% trust it) but with hostility from right wing politicians even it may eventually go the same way - the BBC news replaced by an AI-produced summary tailored for you and read by a deepfake AI celebrity of your choice.

“I want the truth” yelled Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men. “You can’t handle the truth” Jack Nicholson famously replied. It will be worse than that - we won’t even recognise the truth when we see it.