Reader mistrust, disinformation and AI are among the reasons why the global media landscape continues to suffer
From disinformation campaigns to rising skepticism, plummeting trust and economic downturns, the global media landscape is taking one blow after another.
World News Day takes place today with the support of hundreds of organizations and aims to raise awareness of the challenges that are putting the struggling industry at risk.
“Broken business model”
Photo: AFP
In 2022, UNESCO warned that “the business model of news organizations is collapsing.”
Advertising revenue, the lifeblood of news organizations, has dried up in recent years, with Meta, the owner of Google and Facebook, siphoning off half of that spending, the report said.
According to a study by the World Advertising Research Center, Meta, Amazon, and Google’s parent company Alphabet alone account for 44% of global ad spending, with just 25% going to traditional media organizations.
Photo: AFP
The Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report found that platforms like Facebook are “clearly deprioritizing news and political content.”
As a result, traffic from social sites to news sites plummeted, causing a decline in revenue.
Few people want to pay for news. Just 17% of people surveyed in 20 wealthy countries said they had subscribed to online news in the last year.
Photo: Associated Press
These trends are leading to rising costs and leading to “layoffs, closures, and other reductions” at news organizations around the world, the study found.
Trust is damaged
In recent years, public trust in the media has been increasingly eroded. The Reuters Institute reported that only four in 10 respondents said they trust the news most of the time. Meanwhile, young people are relying more on influencers and content creators than newspapers for information.
For them, video is king, and the study cites the influence of TikTok and YouTube stars such as American Vitus Spehar and Frenchman Hugo Travers, known for his channel HugoDecrypte.
Growing disinformation
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed concerns about misinformation pervasive on social platforms, as this tool can generate persuasive text and images.
NewsGuard, a research group that tracks misinformation, has announced that there are now more partisan websites masquerading as news organizations in the United States than there are newspaper sites.
“Pink slime” news organizations (politically motivated websites that present themselves as independent local news outlets) are primarily powered by AI. This appears to be an attempt to shake political beliefs ahead of the US presidential election.
As part of a nationwide crackdown on disinformation, Brazil’s Supreme Court has suspended Elon Musk’s access to X, his former Twitter name.
The court accused the social media platform of refusing to remove accounts accused of spreading fake news and ignoring other judicial decisions.
“Eradicating disinformation seems impossible, but it is possible,” said Anne Bokande, Editor-in-Chief of Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Bokande said platforms could strengthen regulation and create news credibility indicators, like RSF’s Journalism Trust Initiative.
Beware of new players
AI has pushed news media into uncharted territory.
US streaming platform Peacock introduced custom AI-generated match reports read in the voice of sports commentator Al Michaels during this year’s Paris Olympics, fueling fears that AI could replace journalists. I did. Despite these concerns, German media giant Axel Springer has decided to bet on AI while refocusing its core news activities.
At the company’s roster, which includes Politico, the tabloid Bild, Business Insider, and the daily Die Welt, AI will focus on simple production tasks so journalists can spend their time reporting and securing scoops.
Hoping to profit from the rise of this technology, German publishers Associated Press and the Financial Times have formed a content partnership with startup OpenAI. But the Microsoft-backed company is also embroiled in a major lawsuit with the New York Times over copyright infringement.
“Silent oppression”
“Repression is a big problem,” said RSF’s Bokande, with journalists frequently imprisoned, killed and attacked around the world. A total of 584 journalists are locked up in prison for their work, with China, Belarus and Myanmar having the most journalists in prison in the world.
The war in Gaza, sparked by the October 7 attack on Israel by the Palestinian militant group Hamas, has already left a “terrible” mark on press freedom, Bokande added.
Since October 7, more than 130 journalists have been killed in Israeli airstrikes, 32 of them “in the line of duty.”
He said a campaign of “silent repression” was underway in countries around the world, including democracies, and new national security laws were hampering investigative reporting.