On June 4, an article by Elahe Izadi titled “The new journalism — and the PR firms behind it” appeared in the Washington Post. The article detailed that the Checks and Balances Project website and blog:
Looks like a traditional if scrappy news site — an ‘investigative watchdog blog,’ as it bills itself, filled with serious stories scrutinizing corporate activities and government officials. It employs an editor who used to work at USA Today. For more than a decade, its investigations of powerful interests have been picked up by local and national news outlets.
However, on further investigation, Izadi found that:
Yet a closer look suggests the site is not always the independent crusader it appears to be. When it investigated the hotel industry, it was after it had received a grant from Airbnb. A high-profile investigation into Arizona utility regulators came after Checks and Balances received money from a solar power company, the company disclosed in 2015.
Now Checks and Balances is investigating a massive hospital system in Virginia named Sentara, publishing regular stories and asking patients and employees to send tips that might reveal how the nonprofit hospital “piled up $6 billion in liquid assets,” among other issues.
These stories started appearing the same month that a medical school in a complex dispute with Sentara hired a public relations firm that happens to share a founder and financial ties with Checks and Balances.
Scott Peterson, the executive director of Checks and Balances, said that its funding sources do not influence the course of its investigations. In the case of Sentara, he said the site’s two-person staff chose to cover a powerful institution that has largely been overlooked by mainstream media. And the PR firm and medical school said the payments between them did not fund the website’s investigations into the hospital chain.
But the relationship was not divulged to readers, nor publicly acknowledged until The Washington Post inquired about it — an arrangement that unnerves transparency advocates who have been keeping tabs on a proliferation of unconventional news sites and watchdog outfits that may be blurring the lines between PR and journalism.
What is “the relationship” that readers should know about?
Let’s pause for some definitions. A customer is someone who buys a product. A consumer is someone who uses a product. For radio, television, newspapers and news websites and blogs, the consumer is the reader or viewer. Pretty straightforward. Who the customer is is a lot more complicated.
For radio, broadcast television and printed newspapers and magazines, the traditional customers have been advertisers. When media customers are advertisers, the customer is almost always right. In other words, when advertisers are the primary customer, media tend to tailor their content to fit advertiser’s needs.
Cable news channels such as Fox News, MSNBC and CNN have two customers – a dual revenue stream – consisting of cable systems such as Comcast and Spectrum that pay the news networks a monthly fee per subscriber per month. The more popular the cable network, the higher the monthly fees the systems pay the network. So, cable networks have two customers that want the same thing –high ratings. The cable systems want high ratings because, even though they pay a higher monthly per-sub fee eventually when the contracts are renegotiated, in the short run they can charge more for local advertising they sell in networks’ local breaks.
Fox News has another customer, who I will discuss later in this post.
But who is the customer for Checks and Balances? I went to the website and there is no advertising. Therefore, the customer pretty much has to be, as the Washington Post story suggests, PR money.
OK. What is the difference between PR and propaganda? The definition of propaganda is: “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view.” Sounds like PR to me. The goal of both PR and propaganda is not to communicate the truth or the facts, but to sell a point of view.
So, who is the customer for the opinion column by Michael Goodwin in the June 5, New York Post? The headline of Goodwin’s column reads: “A battle over the future of news,” and supports the decision by the Board of Trustees of the University of North Carolina to withdraw an offer of tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The New York Times’ Pulitzer-Prize-winning series “The 1619 Project.”
Goodwin over-dramatically writes: “…the outcome will signal whether traditional standards of journalism can survive the onslaught of racialized advocacy the Times embraces.” He goes on to claim:
The clash is especially noteworthy because of the two main antagonists. Both are UNC graduates, but their views of journalism could not be more different.
On one side is Nikole Hannah-Jones, the flame-throwing creator of the …’1619 Project.’ She won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for an extended essay, but some of her claims were debunked by historians and her push for rewriting American history is cited as a reason why she should not get tenure.
Her chief critic is Walter E. Hussman Jr., the publisher of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and CEO of a family firm that owns newspapers, magazines and TV stations in the South and Midwest. As an evangelist for impartial, fair journalism, he is the polar opposite of Hannah-Jones and says he wishes the Times “would get back to what it once was.”
Most important to the case at hand, Hussman has pledged $25 million to UNC, and its journalism school now bears his name. In an interview, he told me he selected the school for his gift two years ago after it agreed to adopt a code of core values based on impartiality he publishes in his 11 newspapers every day.
We see, once again that money talks to the Board of Trustees. The Hussman Journalism School had awarded Hannah-Jones tenure, which the Board withdrew after vocal criticism from conservatives, and, now we find out, from Hussman himself.
Goodwin is obviously taking a strong right-wing conservative position in his New York Post column. Who is his customer?
If you look at the Post’s website, there aren’t a lot of ads, but there is a ton of salacious clickbait. As of several years ago the Post, which is owned by the Rupert-Murdoch-controlled NewsCorp., reportedly lost over $50 million dollars a year. Therefore, there aren’t enough advertisers to be influential customers. Murdoch is the customer.
Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan are also the primary customers for Fox News because they control the hiring and firing of the Fox News entertainers. Sean Hannity. who reportedly makes $25million a year knows who his customer is and that his customer is always right (pun intended).
I guess the point I am making is that when you consume news content, consider who the customer is. If the customers have values and ideas that are compatible with yours, then with confirmation bias, read/view ahead. However, give some thought to the positions taken by the media to please their customers.
I subscribe to digital version of The New York Times. I realize that the Times’ revenue comes primarily from subscriptions. Therefore, the Times’ main customers are subscribers, not advertisers. I have to remember when I read the Times to ask myself, “do I have the same values as the majority of Times subscribers?”
My answer is usually affirmative, but lately, I find that my values are a little more moderate than where the Times seems to be. I think maybe the Times sees their customers to be their younger employees, not their much older subscribers.
