Journalism

$4.7 billion is the amount that Google made from the work of news publishers in 2018 via search and Google News, according to a study by the News Media Alliance. That $4.7 billion is nearly as much as the $5.1 billion brought in by the United States news industry as a whole from digital advertising in 2018 — and the News Media Alliance cautioned that its estimate for Google’s income was conservative. For one thing, it does not count the value of the personal data the company collects on consumers every time they click on an article like this one.

Legislation in the House and Senate would provide a temporary “safe harbor” — a four-year antitrust exemption for news publishers as they negotiate with Google and Facebook over how news content is used and how advertising dollars are distributed. While Google and Facebook gave media organizations new, and popular, ways to distribute their journalism, they also sucked up much of the advertising revenue. Meanwhile, the tech platforms benefited because they drew lucrative audiences for “content” — the journalism produced by local reporters who, as a rule, are hard-working and not well paid.

The fundamental right to seek and disseminate information through an independent press is under attack, and part of the assault has come from an unexpected source. Elected leaders in many democracies, who should be press freedom’s staunchest defenders, have made explicit attempts to silence critical media voices and strengthen outlets that serve up favorable coverage.

Many Americans say the creation and spread of made-up news and information is causing significant harm to the nation and needs to be stopped. Indeed, more Americans view made-up news as a very big problem for the country than identify terrorism, illegal immigration, racism and sexism that way.

President Donald Trump kicked off his state visit to the United Kingdom with a complaint about CNN, urging a boycott of the network’s new corporate owner, AT&T. He fired off a pair of tweets complaining that CNN, whose coverage the president often says is unfair to his administration, "is the primary source of news available from the US" in the UK.

Behavioral advertising, which involves collecting data about readers’ online behavior and using it to serve them specially tailored ads, often through bits of code called cookies, has become the dominant force in digital advertising in recent years.

President Donald Trump has a penchant for ganging up on the "mainstream media," but lately his attacks have spread to ganging up on any information gatekeeper — from Big Tech platforms to newscasters on his favorite network. His ire lately has turned toward Sunday political shows, specifically. Last weekend he tweeted multiple times about the "Fake News Sunday Political Shows," even calling out Fox's own Chris Wallace for interviewing Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

This report presents a quantitative assessment of how the presentation of news has changed over the past 30 years and how it varies across platforms.

We are a coalition of 103 civil liberties, civil rights, corporate responsibility, faith-based, human rights, immigrant rights, journalism, media, privacy, and government transparency organizations, legal service providers, and trade associations. We write to express our deep concern with reports of surveillance and targeting of activists, journalists, and lawyers by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).