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      Can democracy work without journalism? With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out | Margaret Simons

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      It is commonly claimed that democracy can’t work unless you have journalism, and a free media at that. How are people to decide how to cast a vote if they don’t access independent, reliable information?With the US election upon us, we may be about to find out.Because, more than ever before, the people who decide the election will be those who are least engaged with professional news media – the kind of researched, fact-checked content that you are likely to find in the New York Times or, for that matter, the Guardian.Forty-three per cent of US citizens avoid the news, according to the latest Digital News Report – a worldwide survey of media use conducted by the Reuters Institute for Journalism at Oxford University.Most of these people nevertheless encounter some news – not because of loyalty to a brand or because they actively seek out a preferred outlet, but because it comes at them, so to speak.And what comes for free is either partisanly motivated, or funded by advertising – which means heavy with content pitched to draw eyeballs – sensationalism and clickbait.It is the low news consumers on which the campaigning candidates are concentrating, and on which the result of the election depends.There are significant things about news consumption that are different, this time around, from the last US election.But before I get to how things have changed since 2020, the facts I have already given mean that all the controversies, among the politically engaged, about whether mainstream media are “sanewashing” Trump, or whether or not outlets such as the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times publish editorial endorsements of a candidate, won’t affect the election result.It is a debate of principal and morality, playing out among people who, overwhelmingly, have already made up their minds on how to vote. The citizens who will decide the election probably don’t even know about these controversies, and if they did they probably wouldn’t care.The researchers at the Reuters Institute report that once disengaged from the news, people struggle to get back in, even if they want to.Benjamin Toff, the author of a book on news avoidance, writes: “It’s like trying to tune into the fourth episode season of Game of Thrones without knowing who these people are, or what difference any of this makes. For a lot of people, that’s their feeling about the news.”Traditionally, the journalistic mission has included making the important understandable, seeking to engage the disengaged. But while this still forms part of the rhetoric of the profession, the truth is that most serious news organisations publishing political news are not serving the politically disengaged.Instead, with so much advertising having disappeared from media outlets to online platforms, the path to financial sustainability for serious journalism outlets lies in trying to get people who already read the news to spend more time with the outlet, and to convert them into paying subscribers.This is essential to survival, for serious media. Yet also represents a failure of the journalistic mission.All this challenges our conventional ideas about the connections between democracy and journalism.It is true that democracy and journalism grew up together, and that each strengthens the other, but they are not as indivisible as the journalism profession suggests. Ancient Greece had democracy (though not for slaves) but no journalism. Al Jazeera provides journalism, but has its headquarters in non-democratic Qatar.And, in today’s western democracies, we now have political journalism that risks no longer being mass media, but elite media.And then on top of that, playing to the mass, we have content. All kinds of content, much of it partisan, distorted and sometimes straight-out lies.In the last US election in 2020, we worried about misinformation and conspiracy theories spread through social media, and Facebook in particular.Four years later, news consumption on Facebook is in decline across the world, largely because owner Meta has actively discouraged it. TikTok is on the rise as a source of news, overtaking X (formerly Twitter). Facebook and Twitter, for all their faults, did carry content from mainstream media outlets to new audiences.But now, increasingly, it is podcasters and vodcasters and influencers who reach new audiences on social media. And they have at least some chance of reaching the disengaged and persuadable. That is why both Trump and Harris have been spending time with them.It is fashionable to blame all our current societal ills on social media. Blocking access to social media for the young is now bipartisan – if ill-defined – policy in Australia. It is, after all, so much easier as a response to the mental health crises among the young than tackling the climate change crisis, which makes depression and anxiety almost inevitable.Likewise, traditional news media outlets tend to blame social media for the spread of misinformation and the undermining of quality journalism.But that is only partly right.Surveys in Australia and the USA have shown that mainstream news media was in a crisis of trust from at least the 1970s, long before the internet, let alone Facebook and TikTok. It was therefore in rotten shape to respond to the challenges of the means of publication being in many more hands.Meanwhile, a recent research paper published in Nature suggests, based on a survey, that fake news and misinformation is not as influential as we may think.The survey showed that most people have low exposure to false and inflammatory content, and they tend to distrust it. However a narrow, partisan fringe seeks it out, believing content that confirms already hard-set views.This suggests that political partisanship drives consumption of misinformation at least as much as the other way round.There are a few bright spots in all this. The Reuters Digital News Media survey shows that countries that have strong investment in public service media – such as the public broadcasters of the BBC in Britain and the ABC in Australia – have much higher rates of engagement with news and more political engagement.But that doesn’t apply to the USA, where public broadcasting is tiny.Solutions? I don’t have any easy answers, and the problems are fast-moving targets. By the time of the next US election, many citizens may be consuming news written by artificial intelligence. If we are lucky, or if governments have been smart with their regulatory responses, the robots will be aggregating reliable sources.But we have been neither smart nor lucky so far.In the meantime, with the sands shifting beneath us, if we want voters to be well informed, we have to find a way of financially supporting and reinvigorating the journalistic mission – beyond internal chatter among an elite.

      Margaret Simons is an award-winning freelance journalist and author. She is an honorary principal fellow of the Centre for Advancing Journalism and a member of the board of the Scott Trust, which owns Guardian Media Group More

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      Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot

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      This is what happens when successive US governments fail to tackle inequality. While millions of people live in poverty, a handful grow unimaginably rich. Wealth begets wealth, and they acquire political power to match. It was inevitable that one of them – now the richest man on Earth – would launch what looks like a bid for world domination.A vote for Donald Trump next week is a vote for Elon Musk. Just as Trump is using Musk, Musk could be using Trump as a springboard to perhaps even greater power than the US president can wield. Musk’s secret conversations with Vladimir Putin, reported by the Wall Street Journal last week, and his contacts with other extremist world leaders, suggest a pattern of power-seeking that could be even more alarming than the prospect of a second Trump presidency.Trump, if he wins, will do to the nation what Musk did to Twitter: the US will be e-Muskulated. What this means is that those with the power to swarm, harass and crush people who do not share their noxious ideology will be unleashed.Elon Musk claims to be a “free speech absolutist”. But his absolutism seems to extend only to his allies. Since he bought Twitter and renamed it X, the platform has complied with 83% of requests by governments for the censorship or surveillance of accounts. When the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, demanded the censorship of his opponents before the last general election, the platform obliged. When Indian government officials asked it to remove a hostile BBC documentary, X did as they asked, and later deleted the accounts of many critics of the prime minister, Narendra Modi.Last month, X blocked links to a dossier about Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, and suspended the account of the journalist who revealed it. Musk has sued organisations that criticise him. Because the most vicious and antisocial people – racists, antisemites, misogynists, homophobes, even outright Nazis – have been reinstated and often boosted, millions of other users have been driven from the platform, their own free speech diminished. Musk’s own posts are reportedly amplified a thousandfold by a boutique algorithm. Free speech absolutism? My left foot.Now he has bent his immense wealth, power and blatant double standards to a frantic effort to get Trump elected. Some of his tactics – cash rewards and cash prizes – look to me like attempts to buy votes and interfere in an election. His lawyers were able to prevent him having to attend court this week for a hearing challenging these tactics: another privilege of wealth. He has used his X account to spread rampant misinformation on Trump’s behalf, giving him many millions of dollars’ worth of advertising. He has poured $118m into his pro-Trump super Pac (political action committee).What would the world’s richest man gain from the e-Muskulation of US – and perhaps global – politics? He would gain what capital has sought since workers acquired the vote: the truncation of democracy. Democracy is the problem capital keeps trying to solve. Why? Because it ensures that workers have rights and fair wages; that the living world has some (though never enough) protections; that we cannot be ripped off, poisoned and robbed without restraint.Capitalism has used two powerful tools to try to solve its problem: fascism and neoliberalism. But now, though drawing on both those ideologies, it reverts to an older and cruder mode: oligarchy. Why, the billionaires might wonder, should they rely on intermediaries to wield political power? After all, in every other sphere, the world bows to them, not to their concierges. This, I think, is where Musk and some of his fellow tech authoritarians have been heading.A Trump victory would allow Musk to escape the regulators with which he is often in conflict. In fact, if he takes up Trump’s offer of running a government efficiency commission, Musk becomes his own regulator, able to erase the rules that make the difference between a good society and barbarism.But Trump’s election might also permit even greater opportunities. Musk controls key strategic and military assets, such as SpaceX satellite launchers and the Starlink internet system. As Ukraine discovered to its cost last year, he can switch them off at whim. The kind of decision-making powerful states deploy has been privatised. The Kremlin is reported to have asked him to withhold Starlink access from Taiwan, as a favour to the Chinese government. Terrestrial broadband operators claim that Starlink could interfere with and degrade their own systems. Starlink has refuted this. It is not hard to see how his power could grow to the point at which governments feel obliged to do as he demands.He might not look the part. Villains bent on world domination are meant to be suave, laconic, self-possessed. Musk dresses like an attention-hungry teenager and behaves accordingly. Yet he has been equipped with the means to multiply his power beyond any that a plutocrat has wielded in the democratic era.For decades now, the centrist pact with capital has worked as follows: we might seek half-heartedly to improve the lives of people at the bottom, but we will do almost nothing to hold down those at the top. As a short-term tactic it worked: Rupert Murdoch and other members of the plutocrats’ trade union struck an uneasy truce with Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and their ilk. But the long-term result is that the ultra-rich became so wealthy that they could present a direct threat to sovereign nations, even to the most powerful nation of all. Some of us have spent decades warning that this was the likely outcome: appeasement makes your opponents more powerful. But our governments claimed they were simply being “pragmatic”: it didn’t matter how rich some people became, as long as the lot of the poor improved.Decades of studies, some of which were summarised 15 years ago in The Spirit Level by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, show what nonsense this is. A highly unequal society, whatever its absolute levels of wealth and poverty, is devastating for social outcomes, for wellbeing, cohesion and democracy. But “pragmatism” prevailed, and turned out not to be pragmatic at all. The slippage from democracy to oligarchy should surprise no one.So now we face a generalised e-Muskulation: of public life, of trust, of kindness, of mutual aid, of a world in which the poor could aspire to something better, and in which all of us could aspire to a healthy living planet. Governments that have not yet fully succumbed must do what should have been done long ago: make the poor richer, and the very rich poorer.

      George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist More

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      US election answers the question: how do you spend a billion dollars?

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      It was one of the most striking images of the final full week of the presidential election campaign: a giant projection of Kamala Harris’s face on the 516ft-wide, 366ft-tall Las Vegas Sphere.At a reported $450,000 per day for what is believed to be the first political ad to appear on the futuristic new attraction, it was also one of the most expensive. But even at those rates, it barely made a dent in the staggering election war chest of almost $1bn that Harris has built since replacing Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket this summer.What the Vegas investment did answer, in part at least, was the question of how a campaign spends a billion dollars – an amount larger than the gross domestic product of at least 14 countries, according to the World Bank – in a single election season.Cash-hungry stunts such as this one in battleground Nevada are often targeted at undecided voters in specific swing states and regions; and Republicans and Democrats alike have shown a penchant for splashing out on costly endeavors to try to reach those who are still persuadable, and therefore the most high-value. Bang for the buck, in other words.As another example, the campaigns of Harris and Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, booked pricey prime-time spots during games involving Pennsylvania’s two professional NFL teams – the Philadelphia Eagles and Pittsburgh Steelers – on Sunday and Monday nights.Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral college votes could tip the election one way or the other, and with polling showing the state on a knife edge, Democrats in particular have made younger, male voters – a demographic they see as politically less engaged – a priority. Earlier this month, the New York Times reported, the Democratic National Committee paid “a six-figure sum” to fly pro-Harris banners over four NFL games involving teams from six of the seven key swing states, Pennsylvania among them.“It is an extraordinary amount of money that the candidates are raising, and there’s no shortage of places to spend it,” said Steve Caplan, a professor who teaches a course on political advertising at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.“Back in the stone age before the explosion of digital media, there were four TV networks in the US, and even after cable there was only so much what we would call inventory, or space, to get your message out.“Now, because of an explosion of channels and media outlets, there’s countless ways to spend that money, to slice and dice it by audience and by demographic, whether it’s on digital advertising, YouTube, Facebook and other social media. Interestingly, Snapchat has become a really big channel for Kamala Harris. It’s very cost-efficient and can reach younger voters.”Caplan said campaigns had invested in honing their digital content creation, from videos to podcasts, into a powerful and effective messaging tool.“There’s an entire infrastructure of producers, writers, editors and ad makers who just crank these things out for every conceivable audience, almost 24 hours a day for weeks and weeks,” he said.“We’ve also seen massive changes in the last few years where more consumers are cutting the cord: you get a smart TV and can stream through your provider. Those sort of platforms were really in their early stages just four years ago, and now they’ve become massive and very important. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars are now being spent on these platforms in swing states. It was virtually zero in 2020.”Other expenses that campaigns must cover include staff costs, printed materials and advertising, staging rallies and transportation. But broadcast advertising, especially television, remains king.Analytics company AdImpact says Democrats have spent $1.1bn on aired ads and future reservations alone since Harris became the candidate in July, $400m more than Republicans. Jointly, the two presidential campaigns have spent an eye-watering $2.1bn since March.For the entire election cycle, including Senate, House and partisan down-ballot races, plus ballot initiatives in many states, political advertising is expected to reach a record $10.7bn, a 19% increase from 2020, AdImpact says.Democrats have significantly out-raised and outspent Republicans in this cycle, disclosures to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) show, in both campaign funding and money raised by and for political action committees (Pac), which are allied with the presidential candidates but, by law, are set up and run independently of them.Up to 16 October, the most recent date for which returns were available, Democrats hauled in $1.05bn and spent $883m, leaving almost $120m in hand. Republicans, by contrast, raised $565m and spent all but $52.6m of it.When Pac money is included, however, the figures swell exponentially. While individual contributors are limited to $3,300 donations directly to the presidential candidates, there are no such limits for Pacs, which raised $13.5bn between January 2023 and the end of last month, according to the FEC.The rules, framed by the 2010 Citizens United v FEC supreme court ruling, allow corporations, special interest groups and wealthy individuals – such as the billionaire Elon Musk through his controversial Trump-aligned America Pac – to make eye-popping and almost unrestricted contributions, and to buy oversized influence in elections and their aftermath.“Citizens United, and subsequent other cases, opened the door for corporate contributions to related entities to campaigns, and allowed for what are commonly referred to as dark-money groups to spend money on politics without disclosing who that money came from,” said attorney Noah Bookbinder, president and chief executive of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew).“Wealthy people have always been a political force, but a small group of billionaires have become just a huge part of the machine, fueling political campaigns now, both in terms of giving to dark-money organizations and giving to Super Pacs. In the case of Elon Musk, his Super Pac is essentially operating as an unchecked piece of the Trump campaign apparatus.“It’s troubling because we don’t want this country to slide into being the kind of oligarchy you see in a place like Russia where a small number of very wealthy individuals have outsize influence over the people in charge.”Musk’s self-funded Pac reported $130m in receipts, the latest FEC disclosure showed. Democratic-aligned Pacs ActBlue, the Harris Victory Fund and the DNC, filled three of the top four places with receipts of more than $5bn. The leading Republican Pac, WinRed, reported $1.4bn.A new report from Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), meanwhile, shows Musk in third place among individual donors, behind banking and oil magnate Tim Mellon ($172m) and the Las Vegas-based Adelson family of hoteliers ($137m). All three donated to Republicans.In all, the ATF said, 150 billionaire families have so far contributed $1.9bn among them to Pacs supporting presidential and congressional candidates in the 2024 cycle, a 60% rise from the 2020 total given by more than 600 individual billionaires.“Billionaire campaign spending on this scale drowns out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans,” said David Kass, ATF’s executive director.Bradley Smith, professor at Capital University law school and FEC chair during the administration of George W Bush, said it was wrong to blame Citizens United for the cash swishing around in Harris’s, or Trump’s, coffers.“The vast majority of the money is coming from individuals subject to campaign finance limits. All the money Kamala Harris has raised directly in her campaign comes from individuals in amounts of $3,300 or less,” he said.“The law has played a part but more than that, it’s maybe a little bit of a cultural zeitgeist. People seem to really feel there’s a lot at stake in this election and one of the few ways people can participate in a campaign beyond voting is by giving money.“Most people don’t have time to go knock on doors, and a lot of it has been supercharged by the internet, which makes it really easy and low-cost to get small donors to contribute: ‘Click on this button, send us $20.’ Some of these people do that 30, 40, 50 times, and all of a sudden you’re talking real money.” More

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      Alexi Lalas keeps tweeting Maga propaganda. Does it matter?

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      As the US men’s national team prepared to kick off against Panama earlier this month, Soccer Twitter warmed up for the first game of the Mauricio Pochettino era.Amid his routine match analysis, America’s most prominent soccer pundit retweeted old footage of Barack Obama discussing immigration policy that surfaced in an attempt to make the former president appear hypocritical and discredit Kamala Harris by association.The jarring mix of sports and politics is normal for Alexi Lalas, who stands out among soccer broadcasters for his open engagement with the imminent American presidential election and for his party affiliation.Lalas gave an interview on the Fox Business channel in July from the Republican National Convention which careened from how the event is “a cool place to be” to a discussion of the Barcelona prodigy Lamine Yamal. Speaking on Fox News radio from the convention, Lalas said he wants to challenge “the stereotype that exists when it comes to Republicans and certainly the right side of the political spectrum … I live in California, I work in soccer, I’m like a unicorn when it comes to politics out there and yet there are a lot of things that can unite us.”To judge by the volume of online abuse he attracts and airs on X – and to which he often responds with wit and generosity – his political output is having the opposite effect. That’s not surprising when his feed amplifies right-wing talking points, such as Lalas’ recent rehashing of video of a publicity stunt in which Donald Trump served fries to fawning supporters at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s in a specious attempt to taunt Harris.The ginger-bearded face of American soccer in the 1990s, a defender and rock musician who played in Serie A and won 96 caps for the USMNT, Lalas played every minute of the host nation’s four matches at the 1994 World Cup and became, wrote The Los Angeles Times, “the cult figure of America’s high summer”. After retirement he worked as an MLS executive, including for the Los Angeles Galaxy when they signed David Beckham.The mellow, mumbling kid who let David Letterman trim his pumpkin-hued goatee after USA ’94 is now a 54-year-old greying purveyor of indignant tirades for Fox Sports, proudly repping a segment of society who equate the profundity of their patriotism with the prominence of their Stars and Stripes flags and the decibel level of their bellowing about American greatness.With viral clips often attracting more views than live broadcasts on traditional TV channels, there is clear value in being the blowtorch of hot-take merchants. Given the sonic vanilla that is the corporate agenda-driven coverage of MLS on Apple TV, there may be a market for a celebrated American personality who provides and provokes trenchant opinions. But does that hold true when the talk moves from Pochettino’s right-wing to that of the GOP?“When you’re in the entertainment sector, going political tends to have very little upside because this country seems to be perpetually split, 49 to 48, and just in general it’s not going to make one side love you more because they’re just looking at what you’re doing on the field and in the announcer booth. But it will set off the other side,” says Mike Lewis, professor of marketing at Emory University and author of Fandom Analytics, a data-driven analysis of sports supporters.Lalas, a Ron DeSantis fan whose soccer podcast is called State of the Union in a nod to the president’s annual address, has more than 400,000 followers on X. “It’s my channel. I program it with what I like and what I find interesting. If it offends your sensibilities, there are millions of other channels for you to choose from. Go in peace,” Lalas wrote this month to a reader baffled by his divisive posts, which are typically retweets without additional commentary – an unusually coy style for him.That’s true for social media. But given his centrality to Fox’s coverage and the exclusivity of their rights, viewers will find it harder to swerve Lalas if they want to watch some of the biggest matches in the sport. And given how polarised and piqued the nation is and how intertwined party affiliation has become with personal identity, if viewers are aware of his political leanings, can they divorce that from his on-screen presence, even when he’s purely talking soccer? Do liberals want to hear a verdict on Christian Pulisic from Lalas any more than they want to buy a Tesla from the Trump super-booster Elon Musk?View image in fullscreen“It’s almost like a reflexive thing,” Lewis says, “that that’s an enemy now, and I don’t want to listen to an enemy while I watch the US men’s soccer team.” The risk of alienating roughly half your consumer base may be partially offset by the appeal of being perceived as bucking the liberal consensus as an unafraid and unfiltered Republican ambassador from deep blue Los Angeles in a progressive-leaning sport historically disparaged by conservatives.Like Trump, Lalas suggested the US were too woke after they went out of last year’s Women’s World Cup, and did not deviate from Republican orthodoxy in 2020 with a critical tweet when NWSL players took the knee for the national anthem. The Republican Party’s widespread antipathy towards diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging initiatives conflicts with the mission statement of the US Soccer Federation, which declares, “we integrate DEIB into everything we do”.There is a balancing act in playing a high-profile role in a mainstream channel – Fox, after all, has the rights to the 2026 World Cup – then sliding into the right-wing media ecosystem, where many conservatives have found audiences by stoking grievances and trolling the libs. One recent Lalas repost reads: “I check X for two reasons. Elon’s latest meme and seeing who Alexi ticked off today”.Fox Sports and Lalas declined to comment for this article. Like Fox News, Fox Sports is part of the Fox Corporation, which is controlled by Rupert Murdoch and family. So is the conservative-leaning sports news site, Outkick, which vows to question “the consensus and [expose] the destructive nature of ‘woke’ activism” and often cites Lalas.Politics and soccer are far from strangers. Two of the UK’s leading soccer broadcasters, Gary Lineker and Gary Neville, drew ire from British right-wingers for their criticism of the last Conservative government, with Lineker briefly removed from the BBC’s flagship football programme in 2023 for tweets about asylum policy that the broadcaster said breached impartiality rules.The American landscape, however, has changed since Jemele Hill was suspended by ESPN in 2017 for calling Trump a “white supremacist” on X and the network introduced a social media policy discouraging employees from openly taking sides and offering commentary beyond sports. Sticking to sports now seems blinkered. The ESPN star, Stephen A Smith, frequently opines on politics on other platforms and recently sparred with Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd also talks politics, as does Dan LeBatard, who started his own podcast after criticisms of Trump contributed to his departure from ESPN.“There’s a price to pay for it. That’s why it is so hard to figure out the right policy, it’s very challenging to sort through what is a restriction on someone’s free speech” versus protecting the employer’s brand and reputation, says Patrick Crakes, a media consultant and former Fox Sports executive.“One of the reasons a lot of major sports personalities don’t [talk politics] is because you are a very general market, and do you really want to have to take 50% of the people that see you and fight them, or alienate them or make them uncomfortable with you? Sports, traditionally, I feel it was neutral ground. That’s increasingly changed.”Though political talk remains rare during game broadcasts and few commentators have overtly revealed political stances, perceptions of partisanship have become ingrained. “Republican-identifying sports media consumers find NBC Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet; Democratic-identifying sports media consumers find Fox Sports to be the most biased sports media outlet,” according to a survey for the University of Texas’ annual Politics in Sports Media report. “This suggests that the sports networks are reputationally connected to their parent news organizations.” The poll also found that 80% of Republicans do not want athletes to share their political beliefs compared with only 42% of Democrats.The line has also blurred between voters and spectators. “In the Trump era, we’ve started to see these political rallies that look like sporting events where you can have guys essentially face-painted up, they’ve got the red hats, the matching uniforms,” Lewis says. “I think there’s really powerful similarities between sports and politics in the way fandom works, particularly in the way fandom is so closely related to people’s identities.”The subordination of issues to identity and policies to personality means affiliations are ossified and compromise impossible, with Democrats no more likely to switch to supporting Republicans than would a Liverpool fan change allegiance to Manchester United. “If I’m teaching a class on sports marketing and I’m talking about fandom and I ask someone a question, ‘who are you a fan of,’ if they start to tell me two teams, there’s almost a reaction: ‘well, you’re not really a fan. You can’t like the Yankees and the Mets!’” Lewis says.“I think of it all as culture at this point. There’s almost this seamless connection across all these categories, entertainment to sports to politics,” he adds. “They are the culture, they are all happening simultaneously and all affecting each other.” Strangely, when everything is linked it feels like everything is fractured.Last year, Lalas wrote of the USWNT: “Politics, causes, stances, & behavior have made this team unlikeable to a portion of America.” Well, they could respond: right back at ya. And left-leaning observers might doubt the analytical prowess of a professional critic who, to apply a football metaphor to the politics on his X feed, focuses on one team’s shirt-pulling while ignoring the two-footed tackles flying in from the other side, and hails the “authenticity” of a serial liar and flip-flopper.More broadly, though, in a climate where it’s standard that politicians speak out on sports and countless celebrities issue political opinions and endorsements, why shouldn’t sports personalities enjoy the same freedom of expression? If we feel Lalas should keep quiet, shouldn’t we also feel that way about Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift?One difference: other forms of artistic expression, such as music, drama and writing, are often conceived and performed as explicit political statements while sports have been treated as a break from reality, not a reflection of it. That’s no longer sustainable as social media entangles news and opinion, the public and the personal. Wisely or not, Lalas isn’t only opposing a liberal consensus, he’s contributing to the erasure of a naive illusion. More

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      Washington Post cancellations hit 250,000 – 10% of subscribers

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      Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.A survey published by the New York Times over the weekend found that the mainstream media were trusted less than social media and 55% of poll respondents thought the media bad for democracy.The Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement follows a growing trend in the newspaper business, which has mostly been hemorrhaging revenue and readership.Gannett-owned USA Today, with the fifth-largest print and fourth-largest digital subscriber circulation, said on Tuesday that neither it nor more than 200 local papers under its umbrella would endorse a candidate.“Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” a USA Today spokesperson, Lark-Marie Antón, said in a statement to Politico. “Our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”The non-endorsing papers have said they still plan to make political recommendations at local and state levels.Bezos wrote in defense of the Post’s decision that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election … what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” More

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      The Washington Post is a reminder of the dangers of billionaire ownership | Siva Vaidhyanathan

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      Last week the Washington Post refrained from endorsing a candidate in the presidential race for the first time in 36 years. The decision was reportedly ordered by Jeff Bezos, the Post’s owner and one of the richest men in the world. The Seattle billionaire, who owns Amazon, purchased the flailing newspaper in 2013 in a rare fit of civic duty.The blowback was immediate and substantial. Within 48 hours of the announcement as many as 200,000 paying readers cancelled their subscriptions to the already money-losing news organization, according to reporting by NPR.Such withholding of revenue is usually more a symbolic message than a real threat to the viability of a company. But for the Post, which has been teetering for decades, any loss in subscribers is threatening. Hundreds of good journalists who had no influence on Bezos’s decision remain unsure of the viability of their employer. Residents of the District of Columbia and much of Virginia and Maryland also rely on the Post for coverage of state and local issues, culture and sports. All of this is threatened by Bezos’s decision and the public uprising against it.Some angry citizens also cancelled their subscriptions to Amazon Prime, the service that provides free shipping for many Amazon products and access to video and music streaming.While a widespread Prime resignation would not damage the public sphere or the prospects for democracy and good government the way that hurting the Washington Post does, it’s still a futile gesture that probably will not alarm or injure Bezos in the slightest.That’s because Prime is a classic loss-leader feature: Amazon uses the service to crush competitors by offering cheaper goods and services while the company makes its money elsewhere. Prime has about 180 million members in the United States, so if a few thousand quit, Amazon would hardly notice and Bezos hardly care.Amazon and Bezos are far more powerful than most people realize. The company’s power is deep, broad and largely invisible. The books and dog toys we buy through Amazon remind us of its public face and original mission. But it’s not 2004 any more.Amazon is not a normal retail company or a normal company in any way; it’s a sprawling leviathan wrapped around the essential processes of major governments, commerce and culture of most of the world.Amazon’s major source of revenue and profit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), is the leading provider of computing and data services in the world, ahead of Microsoft and Alphabet. AWS hosts the sites and data of more than 7,500 governmental agencies and offices in the US alone, including those of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Reserve.Just about everything a 21st-century state or firm might want to do probably goes through Amazon and makes Bezos wealthier and more powerful in the process. All of this happened over the past 20 years as we enthusiastically chose convenience and mobility over all other human values. We clicked Bezos into power – and not by buying things through Amazon retail; we did it by choosing the internet again and again.In blocking the Washington Post endorsement, Bezos is not acting cowardly as much as slyly. Secure in his fortune and status regardless of the potential rise of fascism in the US, he has some more selfish concerns about the nature of the next administration.One potential Bezos-centric consequence of the election on 5 November is that Donald Trump will prevail over a bacchanal of greed and corruption, potentially opening federal contracts to all sorts of favored players and – more importantly – stifling investigations and prosecutions into firms and people Trump might favor.The other possible consequence is that a Kamala Harris administration would continue the aggressive and much-needed investigations into the ways internet companies like Amazon have restrained trade, concentrated wealth and solidified power by leveraging networks and scale.Bezos also founded and owns Blue Origin, a rocket and space technology firm that has many government contracts. Limiting the government’s regulatory oversight over space technology or contracting is in Bezos’s interest, which might explain why Blue Origin staff met with Trump around the same time as the Post announced its decision not to endorse. It’s also likely Bezos would like to muscle out Trump’s pal Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, for what is to come.Given all this, it makes sense that Bezos, who is generally liberal and supports Democratic candidates, would try to limit how much Trump hates him (and Trump has long hated Bezos – a lot), if there is a small chance to curry favor with the once and future president. Perhaps Bezos figures his newspaper should not help Harris more than it already has by reporting the basic news.So there are many reasons to fear a Bezos-Trump rapprochement. Still, it does not make much sense to cancel a Post subscription or Prime membership. Neither would hurt Bezos at all.Most boycotts, especially when they are tiny, disorganized, ad-hoc, emotional and aimed at enormous, global companies, are mere expressions of self-righteousness. They have no significant influence on the world but they can make the boycotter feel a bit better for a few days. What’s worse, they often distract energy from real political action that might curb the excesses of the companies in question.Here is the problem: billionaires are mostly immune to consumer pressure. That’s how they became and remain billionaires.So how do we solve a problem like a billionaire? First, we must be blunt about the nature and scope of their power. It’s not a matter of describing their wealth, which flashes before us in numbers we can’t properly grasp or feel. We must describe their influence and how they control things in the world.Second, we must find ways to limit their wealth by taxing the various ways they accumulate and hide it.Third, we must be enthusiastic about breaking up big companies that do too many things in too many markets and thus crush or purchase potential competitors and insurgents. It’s not about prices. It’s about power.Most of all, we should do our best to elect leaders who are not beholden to billionaires, but actively seek to turn them back into millionaires.

      Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy More

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      Washington Post writers say don’t dump subscriptions over non-endorsement

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      The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement. More

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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More