BuzzMachine

In my paper on the California Journalism Preservation Act (CJPA), I examine the history of newspapers’ hostile reception of new technologies and competitors, reaching back a century to the dawn of radio.

NiemanLab published excerpts from the paper on the flaws in the legislation and alternatives. I thought some might enjoy other sections, including this one about the tactics newspaper publishes have brought to bear against intruders in what they claim as their turf: news. I also write about some of this in The Gutenberg Parenthesis. It’s a wonderful if in some ways appalling tale: 

With the birth of radio a century ago, print as a medium faced its first competitor for attention and advertisers. It is instructive to examine parallels to publishers’ tactics today, involving copyright, antitrust, criticism in editorial coverage, and political lobbying.

Newspaper publishers were, to say the least, inhospitable to the new medium. As early as 1922, the Associated Press — as a cooperative owned by publishers — forbade the use of its news on radio. In 1932, members of the AP sought the help of the American Newspaper Publishers Association “to curtail broadcasting of AP news,” but an association attorney warned that the groups could not collaborate “without violating the statutes relating to conspiracy in restraint of trade.”¹ 

In Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939 (Praeger, 1995), Gwenyth Jackaway recounts the many efforts publishers made to exclude broadcasters from news, most notably strong-arming the two nascent networks at the time into signing the Biltmore Agreement of 1933. It prohibited the networks from building news operations (Columbia Broadcasting disbanded its news operation with a half-dozen bureaus, a few dozen on staff, and 1,000 correspondents globally); required them to pay for news updates from the publishers’ wire services; forbade commercial sponsorship of news; and limited twice daily news broadcasts to 5 minutes each, filled with 30-word bulletins, which could air only after local newspapers had come off the press at 9:30 a.m. and 9 p.m. The bulletins had to be written to encourage reading newspapers. In a perverse rendition of the hot news doctrine, according to Jackaway, on-air commentators were not allowed to discuss news until 12 hours after the event.

Why would radio networks agree to such concessions? Politics. As Broadcasting reported in 1934, they thought “a friendly and cooperative attitude would preclude newspaper agitation against radio during the coming session of Congress.”² “If you ask why broadcasters accepted such an unsatisfactory and humiliating agreement, the answer is simple,” said H.V. Kaltenborn, who straddled both media. “They feared the power of the press. That power was ready to swing into action against them.”³ In Harper’s, Isabelle Keating called the agreement “a metaphorical Versailles Treaty which by inference, placed the war guilt on the broadcasters, disarmed them, and sought to make them pay.” Senator Clarence Dill called it “news suppression.”⁵ 

The Biltmore Agreement fell away because, from the start, independent stations ignored it. Also, newspaper publishers entered the radio business, with 208 of 717 American stations owned by newspapers by 1937. By then, 80% of homes had radios. As Harper’s reported, newspapers “found that news broadcasting stimulated the sales of their papers.”⁶ The New Republic editorialized, “For years, newspaper publishers have fought the bad fight, using boycotts, reprisals, intimidation, ridicule and injunctions in a relentless effort to make radio shut its many-tubed mouth.” Newspaper publishers would regularly complain about filching, stealing, and pirating of content and also contend that radio was a breeding ground for disinformation, for they contended that the eye was superior to the ear for learning. But their underlying complaint was this: “Their revenues were dropping, radio’s were mounting — ergo: radio must be stealing the business from the newspapers… Radio was not only hamstringing advertising receipts, but it was dishing out free what newspapers had to sell.”⁷ Or as Editor & Publisher complained, “But the newspaper, apparently, is only a queer kind of business which gives its product away to a competitor, and stands idly by to see a natural and rightful function supplanted.”⁸

The California Newspaper Publishers Association called for “the return to the people the air channels now used by commercial interests, similar to the plan now in effect in England.”⁹ Throughout their battle, newspapers threatened to drop publishing of broadcasters’ program listings, but when they followed through, readers protested and listings returned. Most profoundly, newspaper publishers lobbied for broadcast to be regulated, leading in 1927 to the creation of the Federal Radio Commission and its successor, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), in 1934 — thus carving a considerable exception to the First Amendment and its protection of freedom of the press. With no apparent sense of irony, after forcing radio to be regulated by government, newspaper publishers then tried to ban radio reporters from Congressional galleries, asking, in the words of Keating, “whether radio was not in fact subservient to the reigning political party because of its governmental license; whether, as a result, it was not unqualified to purvey disinterested news.”¹⁰

H.O. Davis, publisher of California’s Ventura Free Press, waged a campaign to organize small, independent newspapers — those less likely to own broadcast towers — against radio. According to Broadcasting, Davis sent publishers letters advising them to use their news columns to “show up the moronic quality of most programs. Get interviews with all kinds of people who are disgusted with the character of radio programs and annoyed by the constant intrusion of advertising…. Emphasize the danger of uncontrolled broadcasting for the spreading of insidious propaganda.” He suggested enlisting clergy against “the evils of broadcasting supported entirely by advertising…. Tell them of the danger that uncontrolled commercial television will bring movie sex smut and idealized gangsters right into the home.”¹¹

Publishers draped themselves in “the invocation of sacred rhetoric,” in Jackaway’s words. “Radio journalism, they warned, posed a threat to the journalistic ideas of objectivity, the social ideals of public service, the capitalistic ideals of property rights, and the political ideals of democracy…. Now they are no longer simply annoying competitors; they are invaders who pose a threat to some of the culture’s most sacred ideals.”¹² See for comparison, the sacred rhetoric in the preamble to the federal Journalism Competition and Preservation Act: “A free and diverse fourth estate was critical to the founding of our democracy and continues to be the lifeblood of a functioning democracy.” See also the opening of The New York Times’ suit against OpenAI: “Independent journalism is vital to our democracy.¹³ It is also increasingly rare and valuable.”

Radio would not be the last new competitor to inspire such sacred claims. As Jackaway observes, “When people feel threatened by the arrival of newcomers who do things in a new way, they often respond with hostility. They frequently claim some form of superiority over these outsiders, and thus dismiss them as lacking any value.” Come television, we see a replay of the drama between newspapers and technology. “For the past dozen years,” Morris J. Gelman wrote in Television Magazine in 1962, “newspapers with little regard for facts or proportion, have used television as the nation’s number one whipping boy.”¹⁴ Publishers complained about the still-new kid on the block taking their national ad revenue, even though the industry at the time was enjoying record circulation and held a third of the total ad market, more than double TV’s take. And one-third of TV stations were affiliated with newspapers.

The script was acted out once again against telephone companies when, following the 1984 breakup of AT&T into Regional Bell Operating Companies (RBOCs), the Baby Bells were freed by court order in July 1991 from a prohibition against offering information services. “Stunned, the publishers are now scrambling to persuade Congress, in effect, to overturn the court ruling,” The New York Times reported. “Behind the scenes, the publishers and telephone companies have hired some of Washington’s most prominent lobbyists and political advisers. The American Newspaper Publishers Association, for example, has hired several heavyweights.” One year later, both sides were taking out full-page newspaper ads and Congress was debating a bill to again limit the telcos, but that came to nothing. Another year on, however, the mood changed when, as one might say today, enemies became frenemies and Times Mirror was in talks to collaborate with the phone companies in its newspaper markets, L.A. and New York.¹⁵

And now, with the arrival of the internet and lately artificial intelligence, the leitmotif of newspapers’ fears, objections, accusations, and lobbying can be heard again. Journalists write headlines asking, in The Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid” and “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” while The New York Times declares, “It’s Time to Unfriend the Internet.” Meanwhile, publishers worry about competition, contending once again that “their” revenue has been “stolen” from them and trying to protect news as their property. In early days online, when Reuters began licensing its content to the then-king-of-the-web, Yahoo, AP management was met with stiff resistance to doing the same by its board of newspaper owners. (The compromise: the AP could sell its main wire but not its local wires.)

(One further quote by Jackaway from The Gutenberg Parenthesis:) 
“Never,” said Jackaway, “is there the admission that public opinion might be manipulated by the printed word as well as the spoken word, or any recognition that by attempting to control radio news the press was actually infringing upon the broadcasters’ freedom of expression. Instead, the print journalists cloak themselves in a mantle of self-sacrifi cing virtue and depict the broadcasters and the government as enemies of the most essential values of our political system. Throughout these journalistic criticisms of radio is an appeal to an idealized model of the press, in which newspapers dutifully protect the people from the abuses of governmental excess or political propaganda. The radio in contrast, is portrayed as a medium through which the public could be manipulated and exploited.” The old medium is always the solution to the problems the old medium says the new medium is causing.

Note recurrent trends: Publishers react to competition by trying to extend copyright and deprive others from using news, by accusing others of antitrust or seeking exemption from it, by decrying the methods and morals of the new medium, and by seeking protectionist legislation.

¹ Rudolph D. Michael, “History and Criticism of Press-Radio Relationships,” Journalism Quarterly, Vol. 15, №2 (June 1938), 179.
² Gwenyth Jackaway, Media at War: Radio’s Challenge to the Newspapers, 1924–1939, Praeger (1995), 27–29; Martin Codel, “News Plan to End Radio-Press War,” Broadcasting (January 1, 1934), 10, 30.
³ Codel, 10.
⁴ Kaltenborn quoted in Robert McChesney, “Press-Radio Relations and the Emergence of Network, Commercial Broadcasting,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio & Television, Vol. 11, №1 (March 1991).
⁵ Isabelle Keating, “Pirates of the Air,” Harper’s (September 1, 1939), 468–469.
⁶ Keating, 464.
⁷ T.R. Carskadon, “The Press-Radio War,” The New Republic (March 11, 1936), 132–133.
⁸ “Editorial: Radio and Elections,” Editor & Publisher (November 10, 1928), 30.
⁹ Quoted in Jackaway, 100.
¹⁰ Keating, 468.
¹¹ “A Vicious Fight Against Broadcasting,” Broadcasting, December 1, 1931, 10, 33.
¹² Jackaway, 44.
¹³ Jackaway, 7–8.
¹⁴ Morris J. Gelman, “Newspapers,” Television Magazine, November 1962, 88.
¹⁵ Edmund L. Andrews, “‘Baby Bells,’ Newspapers In a Brawl,” The New York Times (November 11, 1991): www.nytimes.com/1991/11/11/business/the-media-business-baby-bells-newspapers-in-a-brawl.html; “Bill to Curb ‘Baby Bells’ Advances,” The Washington Post (May 28, 1992); William Glaberson, “The Baby Bells Are Finding an Unlikely Ally in the Information-Services War: Newspapers,” The New York Times (July 5, 1993): www.nytimes.com/1993/07/05/business/media-business-press-baby-bells-are-finding-unlikely-ally-information-services.html.

There is so much to parse in this Times column inspired by a paper examining alleged political leanings of large language models.

First, the myth of a “center” is imposed on the machine as it is on journalism. That is an impossibility, especially when extremists weigh down the equation & move “center” by gravity downhill, towards them.

Second, in its raw state the model reflects the collected corpus of digital content from those who had the power to publish. Thus, it will reflect that worldview; it is a reflection of that power. Imposing left/right/center on that says little about the machine, much about the that imposition.

But, third, given that — as the Stochastic Parrots paper preaches — the models are too huge to audit. It is impossible to judge the effect of the choices made in training them. That is the problem with size-matters, macho model-making.

Fourth, when, as the article says, models are “fine-tuned,” some of that effort comes in reaction to fears of political and media pressure on the model-makers, to compensate for what is lacking in the material used to train the model. Thus, the tuning says more about that pressure and those fears than it does about the technology per se. See: the fuss over Gemini’s images. So when a model puts a Black person at the US Constitutional Convention, its makers are trying to account for society’s biases; when it is called “woke” by the right, that reveals their further biases. The issues are all human.

All this is why I argue that we must study technology in the context of humanity, examining not the software as if it had a worldview but instead understanding the conflicting worldviews imposed on it and what that reveals not about the machine but about us.

The tl;dr of all this is that just as there is no mythical center in politics, there is no neutrality in technology (AI or social media) and there is no objectivity in journalism. Each is an attempt to impose a given view as a norm.

In my upcoming book (coming not soon enough), The Web We Weave: Why We Must Reclaim the Internet from Moguls, Misanthropes, and Moral Panic, I quote Terrence Sejnowski on his theory of the Reverse Turing Test in the context of Kevin Roose’s affair with ChatGPT. The episode says more about the reporter than the machine he reported on . That snippet:

In my book, I argue we should understand the internet not as a technology but as a human network and enterprise. Similarly, we should not try to analyze the biases in AI so much as we should endeavor to \understand human biases imposed upon it in design or reaction.

AI as it exists could be understood as a reflection on society, in what it summarizes of the collection of human text and image it is trained on, in how our reaction to it exposes our fears or dreams, in how we choose to command it. 

Regarding the supposed furor over #WokeGemini…

If we saw generative AI as a creative tool, then I’d say imagining the founding of America with women & Black people at the table and the Catholic Church headed by Black women and Native Americans is a proper revision of history the way it should have been.

The reaction to #WokeGemini says more about society than the tool itself; that’s what fascinates me about AI: its reflections. Right-wing columnists fear the anti-white machine programmed by commisars of what we used to call political correctness.

And the extremist Murdoch media and pols hunt for enemies: technologists who dare to recognize “white privilege.” Their strategy of projection works in media today: calling anti-racism racism to deflect from their deep racism, just as calling Biden old and doddering deflects from the truly doddering Trump. In today’s credulous media, it works.

Ultimately, this little episode shows the folly of “guardrails” in AI, for a tool can be made to do anything and what it is proscribed from doing — and reaction to that — can be more revealing and risky than the tool alone. It is like telling Gutenberg what movable type must never say. The Church tried to do just that with his successors as, at first, the technology was held responsible for what it produced: printers were beheaded and behanded for what their machines produced. Then booksellers were held liable and controlled via licensing and the Stationers Company in Britain. Finally, authors were the responsible parties — and Foucault says that is the birth of the author. 

We debate responsibility over the technology of AI today: Some want the model makers to be responsible for everything that could (or now could not) be produced from their machine. Some try to blame an application of the model (looking at you, Air Canada). Some want to blame the technology for making just what it was asked to make (looking at a certain lawyer and a certain reporter). 

The episode also reveals the fraud in associating generative AI with truth. If it were seen instead as a concordance of all society’s biased text and images and a creative tool that can be told to remake that, then there’d be no story here, only interesting reflections of ourselves, our aspirations, our faults, and our fears.