I make no qualms about my stances on political and social issues. I’m solidly blue and will share my reasons with you anytime. However, I typically drift a bit right on fiscal and economic issues. So, with that out of the way, these are my completely biased opinions on how I think you should vote in the upcoming election order to secure future opportunities, growth, and the success of the media industry (and a lot of other hugely critical things).
Taxes and Economic Projections
It is a recipe for a completely crippled economic outlook when we emerge from an economic crisis with the most poor and susceptible among us with plummeting financial outlooks and Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos both emerge $60 billion richer.
How each of the candidates and parties propose to address these issues of income inequality could not be more different. Trump’s signature tax cuts have not fulfilled the promises of the economic growth that would result from those cuts. The economy is now growing at less than half of the rate promised, making it below the average growth rates from the last 50 years. It was also promised that the tax cuts would spur new business investments when in reality those tax cuts just enabled the wealthiest to buy back shares of their own stocks, driving up the stock market artificially and temporarily, while very little (if any) of those investments came to fruition. So much so that business investment has actually contracted while the top 0.1% of US households actually received a 2.5% tax cut. Biden on the other hand, proposes a tax structure in which 80% of the tax increases fall on the top 1%, bringing their tax rate from 26.8% to 39.8% according to the Tax Policy Center. As publishers, we are not catering to, relying on, or seeing income from the top 1%. We see it from the bottom 98% and a healthier 98% means a healthier outlook for small businesses (your prospective advertisers) and for your prospective readership overall.
An economic projection of the plans of Joe Biden and the plans of Donald Trump show us that over the next 4 years, the disposable income of people in the United States will increase under a Democratic sweep scenario and disposable income will decrease under a Republican one. Local publishers and media companies rely on advertising revenue from small businesses. Disposable income and consumer spending go hand-in-hand. Disposable income creates the demand that keeps companies profitable and hiring new workers. Although most publishers consider themselves to be read by a more affluent population, it is true that people from all socioeconomic groups pay for news and content.
Breaking up Big Tech
Another reason that publishers and media companies should vote blue is the commitments from the democrats to break up big tech companies. Big tech (mainly Facebook, Twitter, and Google) have ballooned into digital monopolies that have been eating the lunches of publishers and media companies for years. Not only have we spent the last 10 years jumping and pivoting our business plans based on tweaks to the algorithms, but we’ve also watched these companies gobble up 70% of digital ad spending. Few publishers relying on advertising revenue stand a chance when small and local businesses represent probably 65% to 75% of search and social media spend.
Facebook has completely changed the way that media companies produce content. Remember in 2015 when Mark Zuckerburg told the world that users were using online video and that it was the future of media? Publications listened and gutted their editorial budgets to fund online video. Then the Wall Street Journal broke the news in 2016 that the social media company had been miscalculating video metrics. Facebook only ended up paying $40 million dollars (consisting of about 16 hours of profit for them at the time) to settle this, but the damage to publishers was already done. Editorial teams disbanded, website traffic crashed and when video didn’t work, companies had to lay off those teams as well.
Do we want to be in an industry when the decisions of one or two people can dramatically impact the revenue of legitimate news organizations, like what we saw happen with Mother Jones? As much as we don’t want the social media companies to be the arbiters of truth, we also don’t want the whims of said companies to have such influence that they can cataclysmically alter the reach of news content, sending publishers scrambling for alternative distribution strategies.
Section 230
Finally, publishers should be voting blue so that the eventual replacement to or amendments to section 230 are in their favor. You’ve certainly heard of section 230 in the news lately. Trump was screaming about it intelligently on Twitter a few weeks ago and democrats proposed changes to the law just this week.
Section 230 is a law that predates the modern internet but has still fundamentally shaped the internet and online media landscape. Without Section 230, Facebook, Twitter and every other social media company could be held liable for the actions of users on its platform. Imagine the differences on social media if that were not the case today. Social media companies would be forced to eliminate content and communities that encouraged hate crimes, or that fostered real-world extremists. As it is now, we have to wait for them to do it on their own well after the damage has been done.
So if these companies were forced to monitor and eliminate this type of content from their platforms, their profitability wouldn’t be so inextricably tied to algorithms designed to continue to incite our emotions, induce fear and promote divisive content in the name of clicks, shares, and engagement. Algorithms that often encourage and reward the exact opposite of the content that quality publishers and journalists tirelessly produce. One that prioritizes sensationalism over facts. But wait, if both candidates take issue with Section 230, why does voting one way or another matter? Because the specific issues that the parties take with Section 230 couldn’t be less aligned.
Republicans and Donald Trump threaten Section 230 because it allows the platforms to decide which content it permits on it’s platform. It’s why Trump’s anger and attention pivots to the law only when something he said is deemed false, dangerous or misleading by the platforms and they label it as such. In other words, they are aiming for fewer restrictions on what can be published on social media, and we’re back racing to the bottom– competing for engagement with content creators with no standards or editorial guidelines.
Democrats want to amend Section 230 because it shields the social media companies behind their ‘platform’ instead of ‘publisher’ status. The reason social media companies aren’t currently held accountable for dangerous or dangerously intended content is because they are a platform, not a publisher. A publisher is held to legal standards that a platform is not. In my opinion, we’ve seen what happens when sensationalism is rewarded and credible and thoughtful information is not. We see it in the rage of the right and the left. We see it in the decline of newspapers across the country, the institutions that are the bedrock of democracy. We see it in the fact that we elected a made-for-TV president who has thrived on the attention and outrage of his ridiculous statements and the cable news networks that chase, reward, and amplify the insanity in the name of, you guessed it… clicks, shares, and engagement.
Personally, I’m voting the way I’m voting this year for many reasons. I am massively concerned about the climate, the education system, and democratic society that I’ll pass down to my children. We need to be protecting our home, the earth, at all costs or it will ultimately eliminate us. Plain and simple. We also need a solid middle class of people in this country that enables small businesses to thrive and drives our upward mobility as a society. But finally, I’m voting blue because I cherish the vital and fundamental role that journalism plays in a functioning democracy, society, and our economy. Hopefully, if you've made it this far, you do too and you’ll vote like those values depend on it… because they do.
Thoughts? Let’s talk. Email me at melissa@twentyfirstdigital.com.