Why trade unions need to get
serious about new media in 2017
Aaron Bastani 22
November 2016
The far right funded
new media networks and took the highest office in the world. It's time for the
left to learn from that.
The events of the last
year mean that many of the core assumptions around politics – particularly who
can win and how – are in need of thorough re-examination. That doesn’t just
apply to goings-on in Britain and the United States – with Brexit and the
election of Donald Trump – but also the failed coup in Turkey against Erdogan
and the ruling AKP, as well as the impeachment of Dilma Roussef in Brazil. Each
of those events personifies, as I’ve said elsewhere, how 2016 represents the
political overhead of an economic crisis which started in 2007. The new
volatility of Sanders, Farage, Syriza, Trump, Corbyn and Podemos, are, in
different ways, the electoral expression of ever more people being open to
radical solutions.
And yet that economic
crisis, which has seen a polarisation of politics across Europe – along with
the rise of the far-right – has been accompanied by a technological shift as
well. While Lehman Brothers collapsed in 2008, and Northern Rock was
nationalised, it was also the year the first 3G iPhone was launched. Over a
billion handsets have been sold in the meantime, and if the old economic order
has carried on like a zombie since then, IT and new media have been the
exceptions.
What are the
consequences of that latter shift, and how does it intersect with politics? The
short answer, as many predicted, is that individuals have been empowered while
organisational incumbents – in politics, media and business – have been
undermined. Only a few years ago that claim, of new media giving resources to
individuals and small groups which was previously unimaginable, appeared to
exercise net positive effects. Now we know that networked individualism is as
much the terrain of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage and Geert Wilders as it is
activists at Gezi Park or Occupy Oakland. Furthermore, while declining costs of
information have meant the cost of entry to media production have plummeted,
that has meant a blossoming of ideas, news sites and personalities on the far
right as much as the left. ‘Fake News’, for me at least, is nothing new. Just
look at the BBC, the Sun and the New York Times ahead of the invasion of Iraq
in 2003.
‘Fake News’, for me at
least, is nothing new. Just look at the BBC, the Sun and the New York Times
ahead of the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Miscommunicating the
facts to millions, or flat out lying, has always happened. What has changed is
anyone can now do it so long as they have an internet connection, snappy
writing skills and an over-active imagination. It turns out that while social
media can help us make more informed choices, discovering context and detail at
the speed of light, it also compounds confirmation bias like never before, giving
us more of the information that we want to see.
It’s important to
highlight that new media’s role in Trump’s victory wasn’t just because of
fictitious stories made up by nonsense websites however (my personal favourite
being how Hillary Clinton purchased $137 million of weapons). While this was a
variable, and it’s astonishing to think such stories were shared hundreds of
thousands of times, we must also accept that new media actors on the right – organisational ones – have taken the lead.
Because many of them, like Drudge Report and Alex Jones, were beyond the
parameters of Republican party respectability, I always thought they didn’t
really matter for electoral politics. I was wrong.
Take Breitbart. Sure,
everyone is talking about it right now since its Executive Chairman, Steve
Bannon, will be Trump’s strategist-in-chief once he enters the White House; but
even without that news its success has been a big story in 2016. Four years ago
Breitbart received 12 million views a month. This year, they received 300
million. By traffic the site has overtaken the New York Post in the US and is
fast closing on the likes of the LA Times and the Guardian there.
Yet Breitbart’s most
impressive accomplishments came in the final few months of the race for the
White House with social media. According to analytics company Newswhip, the
site ranked number one in the world for most shared Facebook content in the 24
hours surrounding the third presidential debate – ahead of any major media
company as well as both candidates. Newswhip have also calculated how Breitbart
was the biggest global publisher of political content on social media for the
months of May and June, beating the likes of Huffington Post, the Hill and the
Guardian. Given 150 million Americans use Facebook every day, around twenty
million more than voted in the Presidential election, and for an average of
fifty minutes each, that’s a big deal.
The relationship
between Trump’s success and the rise of Breitbart can’t be overstated, with the
President-elect sharing the site’s content, through both his Facebook and
Twitter channels, an amazing 186 times at time of writing. His approach (or
more realistically Steve Bannon’s as his campaign CEO) has been to amplify
favourable, non-mainstream media, giving them bigger audience share while
legitimising his arguments through approving journalism. For both sides it’s
been a win-win. What is more, his attitude to the mainstream media didn’t lose
him anywhere as many votes as one would have expected. That’s because they don’t
matter as much as we think they do, especially when the alternative candidate
isn’t particularly compelling.
Britain isn’t the
United States. Because it has a far more right-wing print media, as well as a
public service broadcaster – the BBC – which is allergic to meaningful debate
for fear of seeming politically biased (not unreasonable, but also a result of
repeated government intervention) there have been fewer incentives for the
right to invest in new media like in the US. Here, instead, they rely on the
force of the likes of the Daily Mail and Sun which, even with declining
circulations, are still very powerful print publications, setting the broadcast
news agenda to a significant degree. Where there have been newer players in the
UK, like with Order.Order.com, they tend to have more of an agenda-setting
power, interfacing with favourable papers to take stories, like the Labour
anti-semitism ‘scandal’, to scale very quickly. Unlike the increasingly
resource poor mainstream media, they have time to work on patient journalism,
isolating individuals and groups they find disagreeable; because of their
online-only presence, they are able to respond to the news cycle with
incredible speed and facility, sometimes shaping news in real time.
Nevertheless, even that
picture may be changing. Breitbart does already operate in the UK with plans to
expand both here and elsewhere. As print papers experience further decline and
many eventually disappear, it is perfectly foreseeable that similar sites will
take root in the UK. In the future virtually no media company will make money,
but if you are a Tory party donor or Arron Banks, that doesn’t really matter. A
couple of million pounds, as well as some leadership and gravitas, and you are
away. Personally, if I was an ultra-nationalist millionaire, I’d create a
powerful stable of YouTubers under a new brand, including people like Milo, to
further influence mainstream broadcast, set print agendas and hit ever larger
online audiences with outrageous content. I’d be surprised if this kind of
project doesn’t happen in the next several years. It would be comparatively
cheap and very effective.
In fact something
politically worse than the status quo is highly likely by the next decade.
Sure, a slew of new mass sites – either apolitical or right wing – would be
counter-balanced by the BBC, but between it and what remained of the print
papers, (and the Sun and the Daily Mail (with the exception of the FT) will be
the last ones standing) that wouldn’t mean much. The BBC, with its commitment
to impartiality and triangulating between any two points of view, no matter how
ridiculous or bizarre, follows agendas, it doesn’t set them. In fairness, John
Reith never intended it to.
So what do people who
care about the welfare state, the NHS and tax avoidance do to get their voices
heard, reach one another and find a national audience rather than speak among
themselves? After all, polling data consistently shows majority support for
things like rail nationalisation and defending the NHS, as well as increasingly
critical attitudes around things like tax avoidance. What the last year shows
is that in isolation none of those polls mean anything if there isn’t a
conscious effort, backed up with a strategy and resources, to create a media
environment to inform, inspire and grow progressive opinion.
Unions have been
talking about funding new media for years. Indeed I can’t count the number of
times people, including those active in the labour movement, have said it
should be a priority. The reality is, however, that it isn’t. The country’s
biggest unions, and I focus on them because they are the most important civil
society organisations aiming for a more progressive Britain, couldn’t be
further away from getting it. I don’t write this to attack anyone, or to be
right, but because, given the last twelve months, its highly possible we’ll
look back at the right wing print media in 2016 with relative fondness in a
decade time. It could get much worse. In fact, it’s likely to.
To be clear, I
understand the argument in response: that unions should only focus on issues
and allocate resources to extend the interests of their members. And I agree.
But the objective must be, surely, to also create a broader body of opinion to
convert those interests into legislative change. You don’t get that without
investing in new media, and, as I’ve already said, the appalling status quo is
liable to only get worse.
Trade unions, as with
all progressive civil society organisations, must, as a matter of urgency, now
make plans not only to exert greater media influence through media both old and
new, but also examine how to fund external media organisations who advocate
their values and champion their objectives. Some will say that isn’t what
unions do, but if they don’t the cultural environment will only deteriorate
further, in turn making any gains for their members ever more unlikely.
Britain, like much of
the world, stands at a political crossroads. This intersects massively with a
media environment changing almost by the month. If the unions don’t have a plan
to address that, and turn a crisis into an opportunity, they’ll face ever more
challenging conditions.
2016 illustrates how
quickly things can change; how the old way of doing things seems to only offer
diminishing returns and is a route to failure rather than safety. In the new
politics you are on the front foot or you are nowhere. 2017 must be the year of
building left new media, powering a politics of hope, abundance and prosperity.
It is critical that trade unions are at the forefront of that, bending history
to the needs of the many, not the few.
And if they don’t do
that? Well, that just makes it more likely that the Breitbarts of the world –
racist, sexist and without answers to our failing economic model – will be in
the driving seat. That cannot be allowed to happen.
About the author
Aaron Bastani is the
co-founder of Novara Media and Silke Digital. He is an expert on digital media,
protest and political communications and has published with, among others, the
Guardian, Vice and the LRB. He is currently completing a Ph.D at the New
Political Communications Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. You can
follow him on twitter @aaronbastani
Comments
Post a Comment