The current state of media is dysfunctional. Let me paint you a brief picture of what I see.
I see powerful financial institutions building gargantuan corporate media monsters which consume smaller outlets and organize their news production around profit concerns. These outlets tell stories their investors want to hear about, and don’t tell stories their investors don’t want to hear about. Transgressions against these prerogatives are rare, and involve great risk to those journalists involved.
I see state-owned media companies like those that dominate in West Asia from Iran to Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, produce and frame stories to amplify their own countries' reputations while denigrating others.
I see overall trust in these major media outlets being so low, that entirely new sub-industries are being developed for fact-checking and an explosion of crowd-sourced blogs from individual writers who have their own loyalist audiences, as well as an endless stream of podcasts seeking to analyze this media landscape.
I also see a rise in conspiratorial knowledge as people are politically disempowered and culturally alienated and thus seek a sense of understanding through playing internet detective. This creates its own news production, which communally shared.
When I try to visualize this whole ecosystem of media, I think about it as a series of disconnected islands, with each outlet occupying a certain turf, playing a constituent part in a total process. It’s disjointed and unwieldy. There’s a lot of room for propaganda to proliferate and take hold, for PR to disguise itself as journalism, for the powerful to shape narratives, and for other stories to simply never be told. Stories of extreme moral importance slip between these islands or drown beneath them without ever seeing the light of day.
Subtle trends that don’t qualify as ‘breaking news’ but nonetheless shape our political world have also been relegated largely to academia or think tanks to explore. As such, they are mystified, and presented as knowledge only available to trained experts.
Enveloping all of this in an added layer of chaos is the rise of algorithms to determine what we are exposed to and the myriad ways platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which are designed to deliver information to consumers, are wrapped up in the politics of knowledge production.
There’s no easy answer to any of this, no singular way to navigate through it. But being able to critically analyze stories you read about and hear about helps, as does being able to pick apart the motivations behind those showing you the stories. For that, The Gateway is here to help.
In May 2018, Al Bawaba launched The Gateway podcast to tell those ignored stories, demystify trends, and reveal the way power works in media. We’ve highlighted the virtually unknown immigration of Ethiopians to Yemen, talked at-length about how mercenaries and private arms manufacturers are changing warfare, and spoken about the growing power of surveillance capitalism.
Going into 2021, we’re going to continue telling these stories in each episode and hope you join us for them. If you enjoy The Gateway, subscribe to it, tell your friends about it, leave us a review on the platform you’re listening to us on. If you think there’s a story worth covering, let us know!
Thank you for your support thus far.
