The information environment is rapidly changing. And with more media sources at our disposal than ever before, we’re constantly navigating between online and IRL, or in real life spaces. How does that affect our understanding of the world around us, particularly in this unprecedented moment? Our guest this week has spent a lot of time thinking and writing about this. Matt Pearce is a journalist and serves as the president of Media Guild of the West, which represents unionized journalists in Southern California, Arizona and Texas. Pearce is also a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and writes his own Substack, which you can find at mattdpearce.substack.com. He joins WITHpod to discuss what’s happened to the press, its role post the 2024 election and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
Matt Pearce: Human nature has a change. Human nature produced investigative journalists in a curious public and people’s willingness to associate and to want to know the truth. I do think that the truth is out there and an economy that helps us pursue and produce the truth, or at least produce some accounting of what the truth really is, whatever that is. I think we can build that again, but I do think that requires some proactive engagement on our part to create the ability for journalists to succeed, to create the ability for content creators to make money off of the work that they do for like the really good quality stuff and to feature the stuff that is really morally upright and accurate and serves the public.
Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome to “Why Is This Happening?” with me your host Chris Hayes. You know, there’s a saying people used to use about back when the site X was called Twitter. I still tend to call it Twitter just stubbornly. I’m like, you can’t rename the site you bought. It has a real name. If you would say Twitter is not real life. And the thing that they were getting at is that sometimes little small and unrepresentative ideological bubbles would form on Twitter of people talking to each other all of whom in the broad bell curve of American political opinion were like to one side or the other, you know, very small, unrepresentative sample of folks with extremely developed, intense and extreme views on things.
And so people would say Twitter is not real life and it was a useful corrective. But one of the key things to understand about life now is that there is no distinction between online and real life. People that came with the internet at a certain age would talk about IRL, in real life, like IRL friends or going to see people IRL. And one of the most profound things to reckon with is that it’s useless to distinguish, I think, between online life and real life. Everyone is seamlessly and constantly moving between the two and they’re essentially fused at this point.
And the reason that’s so important, I think, is that when we think about the information environment in the context of American politics and specifically this last campaign and what will happen going forward, sometimes I think we make a distinction between like real stuff and the information environment, which is the distinction between prices really did go up. Like inflation actually happened. It really did squeeze people. That is a truth about the world. And then there’s the information environment and how it represented the change in those prices.
My point is that it’s very hard to distinguish between these two things. It’s all kind of woven together. And I am obsessed with this topic because as you know, and I promise I won’t just constantly be talking about my book, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while, I wrote a book on it, it’s going to come out next year. That’s not the topic of today’s show. What is the topic of today’s show is how to think about what has happened to the information environment. I said this many times on the show, in my 20 years of being a journalist basically, I think the information environment is as bad as I’ve ever seen it.
Now, again, that might just be a thing we called age, which is like I’m older and I don’t like what the kids are doing. And that’s totally possible. One of the things we’ll talk about in today’s conversation is maybe that’s the problem. I don’t think it is. And someone I think who agrees with me, who also thinks the information environment is really bad is a really sharp journalist, writer and thinker who I’ve been reading for a long time, following for a long time. He’s been on my show. His name is Matt Pearce. He’s a journalist in Los Angeles. He’s also the president of the Media Guild of the West, which represents unionized journalist in Southern California, Arizona, and Texas. He was a long time reporter for the “Los Angeles Times” where he covered a whole bunch of topics. He’s a great like first rate reporter. He now does a lot of thinking and writing about the information environment and he writes his own Substack, which you could find at mattdpearce.substack.com, and he’s been writing a lot. He’s got a few posts in the last week or so about the election. And I thought he’d be a great person to talk to about where we are with the information environment. So Matt, welcome to the program.
Matt Pearce: Chris, it is so great to be here. Longtime fan of the show. Longtime fan of yours.
We’re actually in Ferguson together at the same time back in 2014.
Chris Hayes: I think that’s where we first met, yeah.
Matt Pearce: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: At that point, were you a reporter for a Kansas City paper at that point?
Matt Pearce: No, I was from Missouri originally.
Chris Hayes: Oh, you’re from Missouri, right.
Matt Pearce: Rural Missouri, but I was actually a national reporter for the “Los Angeles Times” and I happened to be in the region covering another story for the national desk of the “L.A. Times,” and had heard about this shooting that had happened in Ferguson, Missouri, where there was a white police officer who had shot an unarmed black teenager named Michael Brown. And protests broke out pretty quickly there. And so I just drove over from where I was on assignment in Nebraska and was one of the first national reporters to get there to Ferguson to report on what turned out to be one of the single biggest stories of the internet at the time because that was the event where police shootings, unfortunately, they happen in the United States all the time, many of them not very well covered. And this one got the attention not just of the entire country but the entire world, international media coming in. But one of the things that was really notable about it is that it was one of the first truly gigantic Twitter events. And it was one of the first huge news stories that was really significantly mediated by social media rather than traditional media like you and me.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And in fact, I think you can almost bracket it. There’s almost a decade, I think that just came to a close.
Matt Pearce: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: So, you know, Ferguson was summer 2014. I think that was the birth of a certain era of the media in the digital age, I think kind of 2014 through 2023, maybe that I feel like has changed. We’re in a new place now. I guess let’s just open it up like, what do you think about how the information environment is here in the current 2024?
Matt Pearce: I mean, I don’t review it positively. And I also have a lot of those same thoughts that you do where I’m just like, is this because I’m getting into middle age that I’m starting to get anxious about media being consumed in a new way that I’m not familiar or comfortable with or don’t understand. And to be honest, I can’t eliminate the possibility that’s true. But I actually do think there have been a few major phenomena that have happened over that past decade. And I think I think you’re totally correct.
I think there was a decade in which social media was this environment that was significantly shaped with and in part by major media institutions like the kind that we had in the 20th century, something like MSNBC cable news, something like the “LA Times,” the newspaper. But we’ve entered, I think, what comes after that, which is this new space where we still have social media and we have even newer things that are less social versions of social media actually. And they’re not influenced as much by what traditional media covers. Those of us who are in the journalism industry and in the profession of fact-finding and truth-seeking or whatever you want to call it, are really starting to roll that boulder uphill because we’re working with platforms that have become monopolies in the space that we’re talking about, Google and Meta.
We’re talking about companies that had once shifted from anybody who posts, you kind of know that your post is going to appear in a timeline. We’ve shifted to algorithmic sorting of information. So there’s now much more duration and selectivity from these platforms that we’re using to consume information which is broken. This sort of direct connection between media or content creators like us and consumers.
Chris Hayes: Wait, can we stop right there? Because actually that alone I think is worth taking some time with. So, the point you’re making there, and let’s go back just as a comparison of like 2014, what would happen on Twitter is you would find people that you would follow. And you would choose to follow or unfollow them based on were their posts good or funny, which a lot of it was that. But then sometimes something would happen. It would be like, you would find someone who was an expert in something, who genuinely was, right? And there was a way of sort of figuring this out. You could see what their bio was and often the verified check would help you a little bit with that.
But it’s like, I run a company that does shipping logistics and there’s a barge stuck in the Suez and here’s what is going to happen. And you wouldn’t just sort of credulously, if you were like say, oh, well, whatever they say is true, but you would follow and you start to be like, oh, this person actually has some chops. You might even contact them. And there was a relationship, a direct relationship of like capital and credibility that would build up with individuals, right?
That now the algorithm, so that’s the like follower method that has been supplanted by the algorithm method in which you don’t know who’s showing. There’s just some random person just showed up saying like, oh, HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. Here’s a cute new mini skirt. Oh, look at this, Caleb Williams missed this open throw on third down.
It’s like the non-algorithmic version, at least there were these trust relationships you could establish with the individuals you chose to follow. The algorithmic version, there’s just like stuff being thrown at you. It’s like, I don’t know who that dude is. Like if they know anything or not, I just saw it on the feed.
Matt Pearce: I mean, you’ve landed on like also one of the major features that’s changed here, which is that the internet that used to be more work. Like you have to put in a lot of your own work to figure out what you wanted to see and who were you going to follow and who you were going to listen to and what you were going to share, like the onus was on you. And what has happened essentially these last five and 10 years in particular is that we have shifted to this more passive version of consumption through all of these platforms.
And it’s like, once you think about it, once you look for it, you see it everywhere. And it’s not just from something like this for you page for TikTok, which has this brilliant black box. Nobody knows really what influences it, but it’s excellent at figuring out what kind of stuff you’ll linger on. And it’ll just serve you up an incredibly random slurry of content that is not necessarily timely.
Chris Hayes: Slurry.
Matt Pearce: Well, I say slurry because —
Chris Hayes: Slurry is exactly the right word. Like someone just put it in a blender and then you just put the hose in your mouth and they just pump it into you.
Matt Pearce: Like there’s been a breaking of chronology that has happened here actually —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — because news used to be timely. Like you turn on —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — your cable television and it would be what is happening right now. But that’s also one of the new dislocations, which is that you pop open X, the Elon app or TikTok. And like what you’re looking at could have been from last year or six months ago or whatever.
Chris Hayes: And you have no idea like nothing is, well, I was going to say postmarked, which is a funnily antiquated term. This really struck me the other day because I didn’t quite realize how much that had happened with Instagram.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it occurred to me the other day, I had a moment of realization of how non-chronological the Instagram feed has become. Because a day or two after the election, I’m scrolling through Instagram and it’s showing me all these people excitedly going to vote on Tuesday. And like, let’s go do this showing me their vote, I voted sticker. I’m like, no, I do not want this content. Why are you showing me this?
Matt Pearce: If you looked at the other Meta product, Threads, which they created sort of as a Twitter killer or a Twitter replacement after Elon bought X, it was one of the single most bizarre user experiences that you could have in an app exactly because of this dynamic where the election was basically over on election night. Donald Trump was elected president effectively.
And for a day or two on that app at least, because of this platform decision to prioritize this kind of ambient rather than timely information, you would get all the stuff about the early returns and people being excited to go out. It just emphasizes how much that you’re not quite living in the same information reality as the other people using the exact same service as you because you’re time traveling a little bit —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — in a weird way. And that’s so unique because all the trends and information and media development for like, what, the past two centuries had been to bring the news to you faster and then —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — even more timely versions.
Chris Hayes: More timely —
Matt Pearce: All the way up. More timely.
Chris Hayes: More chronological. Yes. Up to the minute.
Matt Pearce: There was this whole phenomenon.
Chris Hayes: Up to the second.
Matt Pearce: Up to the minute. And it drove everyone crazy. When CNN was created, Ted Turner, like it was this whole phenomenon that you would have a 24 hour news cycle, which was not a thing before then. And it was really disruptive to elected officials who suddenly realized that they kind of had to be on all the time or that there was a story all the time and it’d be different from what the story was in the morning. So that had been the like single direction of technological development up until that point. And it is really weirdly suddenly broken very recently.
Chris Hayes: That is so true. It’s so weird that, yes, after all these developments towards live, up to the minute, up to the second, to now break into this non-chronological universe, which by the way, I just want to be clear why that’s happened. It’s happened because eventually you run out of things that are happening, but the algorithm still needs your eyeballs. So you have to break away from chronology because not enough stuff is happening.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: So you reach a terminal point of stuff happening. The chronology, you’ve gotten up to the second. But you still need growth after people know everything that’s happening every second. So then you have to be like, here’s a clip from the “Taxi” sitcom from the 1970s. Like here’s a football highlight from 1997 because I got to keep you here. Like, we got to throw you a straw. So it is a market incentive that broke it. Because once you hit the hard limit of it’s as up to date as it can be, and you still need to throw content to people, you have to just depart from it.
Matt Pearce: I mean, it’s the craziest thing in the world. And it’s one of the ironies of journalism as a business or essentially as a factory in line where you send a worker like me, a journalist out there to go put the raw materials together for a story and we’re going to pump out the story in a cube at the end. The factory’s kind of broken a bit because we need more and more consumers. And it’s very expensive to get more consumers in a highly competitive media environment where I’m not really competing with the “New York Times.” I’m not really competing with MSNBC or CNN.
I’m competing with Netflix, which, by the way, crack open Netflix, and it has all the exact same features of the algorithm and trying to guess what you’re going to like. And it features stuff from the archive of like old sitcoms that are the beloved classics. And this is also an illness that’s affecting Hollywood now too, because so many viewers are kind of stuck in the archive rather than just sitting there on your Thursday night NBC schedule watching what’s new.
Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: On this question of the sort of the business side of this, the industry, you have chronicled this well and you are in a unique position to understand it because you’re the president of a regional wing of the union that represents journalists. I think, again, if we’re thinking of this Ferguson era, which I think is really useful, like the 2014, the decade that was, there was an understanding of some symbiosis between the platforms and the media outlets. The platforms amplified the work of the media outlets, amplified their reach.
And in the case of Facebook, particularly, less so Twitter, could drive traffic that could be monetized. So you had this ecosystem in which each part was kind of getting something out of it. It didn’t feel zero sum. Is that a fair characterization for at least the contemporaneous understanding back then of how it was working?
Matt Pearce: Yeah. It was like what would it be like? It would be almost like a free trade agreement where —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — you have this old country of old media that suddenly got access to this brand new, vastly rapidly growing market of social media users who, if you’re the “L.A. Times,” that means that you can suddenly reach people who are outside of Los Angeles, Southern California, California. You could talk to people in Missouri, New York, Canada, the United Kingdom. We sort of globalized media in a way that I think even the internet before social media hadn’t really accomplished because it wasn’t as if people were just sort of sitting there at their browsers at home in 2005 being like, I’m just going to go wander over to look at “The Guardian” or something and see what’s going on in Britain. That wasn’t the way that most people were exactly using media and at least not at scale.
Social media changed all that. It gave news companies access to this huge new market of consumers. And you saw investment piling into the media industry, which had been struggling for decades. This form of these venture capital funded firms and like buzzy digital news startups like BuzzFeed, Vice, and they were partially premised on this idea that digital media is kind of this new thing. It’s transmitted to the public in this new way. We’re going to try to meet the platforms and create stuff that’s going to be really good and go viral on social media. I mean, the BuzzFeed logo is literally like an arrow that like points up.
Chris Hayes: Goes up.
Matt Pearce: It is —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Matt Pearce: — the number go up media outlet that was created to try to capture this concept of what people thought the internet was going to be. And then it all kind of fell apart, I think, for a variety of reasons. And there have been some other journalists who have kind of chronicle a little more closely how the relationship between places like BuzzFeed and Mark Zuckerberg collapsed. And part of it was that when your platform is serving up a lot of hard news and political content that those publishers tend to also want to get paid for producing that stuff.
And I think the mentality of the platforms, the mentality of companies like Google are like, well, we’re a marketplace. We’re not the newsstand that needs to buy copies of your newspapers so that we can sell them to people. You need us more than we need you. And I think that’s been the mentality that has driven a lot of these hostile architecture changes from these companies because I don’t think they see the whole scope of the world because these are truly global companies.
They see the whole scope of billions of potential users and customers who are looking at their digital advertisements. And they’re like, we actually don’t need these legacy media companies that are producing all this like complicated information and demanding money for it, because first of all, it doesn’t seem like the consumer demand for that information is necessarily all that significant if we stop featuring it so much.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, and basically, right. What was symbiotic became a kind of clientelist relationship.
Matt Pearce: We are a captured industry, to be clear. Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. And it shows up in the bottom line of journalism outfits, shrinking bottom lines, more economic scarcity, it’s harder to make a profit, more dependent, and you get more and more dependent on whatever tweak they do to the algorithm. So they can make some change in the code in the black box that sends a lot of traffic your way, which is what Facebook basically did because they wanted to compete with Twitter, and that lasted, and then they could take it away.
And once it went away, the relationship to the readers had been so intermediated by the feeds, by the platforms, that people were going to the platforms. They weren’t going to the outlet. And then the platform can be like, well, we’ll just show them dance videos and talk shows. And people were like, yeah, that’s fine.
Matt Pearce: Yes. I mean, the consumers are the other part of the story, which is that we do have these monopolistic platforms that make design and sort of political economy decisions that dramatically affect us and the kind of information we get. But it is in partnership with users who love to be served slurry. I mean, that is a big part of it, and that’s one of the big challenges.
Chris Hayes: Well, and part of it too is that there’s a few things going on. I mean, one is that journalism is a business, but it’s a business that is endowed with a bunch of values and a role in democracy that makes it different than like restaurants. You know, like restaurants, there’s always going to be restaurants. Restaurants are a hard business. Lots of restaurants go out of business. It’s really hard to make them work. But there’s always going to be restaurants and restaurants are a key part of like urban and civic life and life in general, but they’re not enshrined in the constitution and they don’t play a central role in self-governance.
Journalism is a business that is a business, but also just functions differently in the constitutional fabric. And it also functions with a different set of like principles like people. And again, this is where I sound fuddy duddy, but when we get things wrong, we correct them. But that’s just not true for an enormous world of people that are feeding people information without the sense of, I don’t know, responsibility. What’s the right word?
Matt Pearce: I think what you’re describing is that journalism and publishing, unlike other businesses has this unique labor tradition that has a kind of anti-commercial bent that doesn’t really make sense. I mean, talking about like the role of local restaurants in the economy, restaurants are very important in the economy. Their owners and employees will vote in elections and maybe they’ll make political contributions or lobby or whatever, but a restaurant’s not going to go and take down the Pentagon. Your Domino is probably not going to be publishing the Pentagon papers because it thinks that Lyndon B. Johnson’s doing something wrong in Vietnam.
I mean, over the past century in particular, I mean, there’s always been a history of exposé journalism in the United States and that started with publishers. But if you look back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, which was our sort of modern era of accountability journalism, that attitude of having an adversarial approach with government of engaging in investigative reporting, which is not super-efficient and sometimes not very popular. That was inculcated by groups like The Investigative Reporters & Editors membership association, which I’ve been a proud member of longer than I’ve been a member of my own union.
And you have this weird, this bizarre phenomenon, it’s such a bizarre sociological phenomenon, which is that over the last several decades, the practice of investigative reporting spread across corporate newsrooms in the U.S. at companies that like Gannett or whatever that normally a lot of us are yelling at because we don’t think they’re very responsible as newspaper owners. And yet in these same companies, which are very much commercial enterprises, you would have in these newsrooms, these very kind of like commercially inefficient, kind of economically irrational acts of journalism happening that are very much cloaked in the First Amendment and the idea of holding the government accountable and essentially acting as an anti-authoritarian institution.
And especially if you look back to Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, a lot of what investigative journalists are writing about are abuses of power with the kind of authoritarian character. It’s keeping the national security state in check. It’s keeping an eye on local law enforcement, which has the power to kill and sometimes does. And that’s where you see this strange labor tradition that I think if you were an investor or a venture capitalist thinking about like, what’s the form of media that I could create that would make a lot of money, they wouldn’t come up with investigative journals.
Chris Hayes: Right, and that point of like, there’s market forces and non-market forces working, sometimes across purposes, but within the institutional culture of these specific businesses that are businesses, but then also have institutional cultural forces, organized labor sometimes within them, like they’re actual workers.
Matt Pearce: Protecting them. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yeah, protecting them. Again, towards non-market purposes, like that there are non-market ends and that has been really destroyed and shorn away. And so now it’s like there’s a small group of us that still retain these ideals, but we’re shrinking.
Matt Pearce: I love using this illustration. So this year there was this very, very popular YouTube video by this creator named Jenny Nicholson. And she created this four hour YouTube video about Disney’s Star Wars Hotel and like what a disaster it was from every possible perspective. So, Janie Nicholson, first of all, if you go watch that thing, four hours long, I had to set inside like half my Saturday to go watch it. But it’s just a great piece of media because she edited it, it runs on rails.
She like totally picks apart everything that was wrong with this stupid hotel. And you know, it’s like, I guess, yes, not the most important thing in the world. But what was really interesting about it was that this was kind of a new riff on that thing that had always existed before, which is kind of like the reported criticism where she went to the hotel and she was sort of examining the economic forces that like led Disney to create the hotel the way that it was.
But like one of the central storylines in her video was about the corruption in the creator space of all these people who are like Disney fans and content creators who essentially became part of Disney’s PR arm when this hotel launched to describe how great it was and what —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Matt Pearce: — a great experience and going there and describing how cool it was. And some of them may have been like getting comped or something. They get to go on a trip. And her whole video is about everything. You make a four hour video about everything, it’s going to be in there. But the point was that I took away from that video was that the new wave of people who are replacing people like you and me, content creators on YouTube, TikTok, anywhere else, one of the things that’s really different about them compared to you and I is that they are far more exposed to market forces than even we would be inside us —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Matt Pearce: — like large commercial —
Chris Hayes: Yup.
Matt Pearce: — companies because we exits.
Chris Hayes: They are the business.
Matt Pearce: They are the business because they are entrepreneurs. They’re going to eat what they kill. They have to get what they can from fan contributions or from partnerships or sponsorships and they can like literally see what they directly produce is either popular or not popular and that directly affects whether they get money or do not get money. And that —
Chris Hayes: And pay their mortgage.
Matt Pearce: — is not something that happens in these newsrooms. Yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Like will my kids have a place to live next month? Will we be able to pay the mortgage? Will we be able to make the car payment? Like what is my kid’s college fund looking like? Oh, I did this viral post and that worked. Like they are completely exposed to market forces in a way that even folks like you and I in more traditional, you know, news organizations are insulated from. Now, I don’t look at ratings and I haven’t since 2020 COVID, but when I used to look at ratings, like we were very exposed to like whether what ratings were doing and that had its own effect, which I think was often pernicious.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Everyone in newsrooms sees what pieces are generating traffic.
Matt Pearce: It’s very depressing.
Chris Hayes: Oh yeah. I mean, and people don’t understand. People on the outside, this is the big fight I love having with people and they hate it, but they’re always like, why aren’t you covering X? And it’s like, you won’t watch it.
Matt Pearce: People have the consciences of saints, but they have the consumption habits of monsters and you’re trying to reconcile the two.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. That’s a great way of saying it. So yeah, that sort of corruption, it’s also not corruption in the sense that again, if you were a journalist and you took money from Disney to say good things about them, that would be corrupt. But if you’re a content creator and you take money from Disney to say good things about them, marketing firms do that, advertising firms do that, PR firms do that. So, it’s not inherently a corrupt market exchange to take money from Disney to say good things about their product. There are non-corrupt versions of that.
In our world of journalism, with our norms, that is a corrupt and completely unethical thing to do. But if you don’t consider yourself a journalist and you’re like, well, marketing firms do that. Like, it just doesn’t have the same ethical valence because there’s not the same codes and you have more exposure to market forces. And so there’s nothing stopping you, is basically the answer.
Matt Pearce: Yeah, we are fighting a tidal wave of economics, my friend. And I mean, that’s been one of the interesting conversations that come out of this election, which is that there was this whole dialogue in the closing weeks of the campaign about Kamala Harris. Is she going to go on Joe Rogan to try to tap into the manosphere and all that? The independent male voters that ultimately ended up a lot of them breaking for Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. And now after that didn’t happen, people are like, oh my God, you should have gone on there.
But also can the left create its own Joe Rogan? Like can we create something that’s that kind of a cultural phenomenon where there’s essentially like a platform for our values and our politics to be there to tap when there’s another really important election happening? I guess so, and people can argue about that, but like my bigger takeaway from that is that like Joe Rogan’s not really like a political show. He’s kind of like a bullshitter that happens to have some politics and is available. He’s daytime talk TV, it’s just in a new form.
Chris Hayes: So this gets to another really important point here. A, I agree with all that. The idea of Joe Rogan on the left for some reason, it’s like a funny setup for a joke. I will say I would audition. I would be the Joe Rogan on the left. I could be the Joe Rogan on the left, but I only bench like 225 now and I think I would need to do some more work and perhaps need to change what chemicals I put in my body to get up past that. But the idea, the reason that I think this is another kind of profound place is the way everything is mixed together now, that news is in its own category. And because folks who are doing talk shows, like Joe Rogan is a good talk show host. That’s what I would say about Joe Rogan. He’s a really good talk show host.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: He’s not a reporter. He’s not a journalist. And what he says is about as trustworthy as like your best friend in high school’s older brother, who like first showed you how the pyramid on the dollar bill like represents the Illuminati, which was an awesome moment in all of our lives. But like, you’re not going to like take that to the bank. And you know, in that case, there’s versions of that are totally harmless. But because the borders have totally broken down, like again, there’s nothing wrong with talk shows and there’s nothing wrong with people saying stuff that isn’t true at like low stakes levels. But this was an election in which like, this was what was holding up the public discourse.
Matt Pearce: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Like the stoner older brother with the Illuminati pyramid on the dollar was like, that was the fulcrum of public information in this election.
Matt Pearce: Well, here’s the thing. This is one of the arguments I make about how the information ecosystem has become rotten from top to bottom. Because, I mean, journalism like the kind that you produce, I produce, it’s basically in a very macro sense, it’s for the nerds. Like most Americans are not watching TV news. Most Americans are not reading the newspaper. Most Americans are probably not looking at news apps on their phone. When they encounter that information, it’s often from somebody else. It’s from their dad, it’s their sister, it’s somebody at city council brings it up and like passes a resolution on something that people are talking about.
Like the kind of journalism for nerds that the sort of ethical journalists produce, it’s part of this flywheel where you get out into the ecosystem and the good stuff ends up getting filtered out into TV shows, local radio, newsletters, whatever. And I mean, that’s the thing. If you pop open TikTok, you will encounter creators who are talking about the news. They’re there on the new platform and they’re talking about your story and maybe they’re even like reading it and like pointing to it in the background. Sometimes like the journalism’s still out there. It’s just —
Chris Hayes: Oh, definitely.
Matt Pearce: — we’ve lost a lot of control over the distribution of it on the front end because of the control by the platforms. And also that means that like we’ve lost the ability to monetize it because a lot of these platforms have become hostile to hyperlinking. So even if people are talking about your stuff, one of the things that marks this decade that’s different from the last one is that these platforms are hostile to hyperlinks so there’s a lot less of a culture of sourcing and linking —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — than there was in the 2010s.
Chris Hayes: They don’t want you to link.
Matt Pearce: They don’t want you to link because that means you’re leaving —
Chris Hayes: Then you leave the platform.
Matt Pearce: — the platform and you’re not looking at their ads, which is where they make the real money.
Chris Hayes: Again, it’s the sort of slurry, it’s the seamless. Again, there’s nothing like, people have always listened to talk shows or read gossip, but all this stuff is human. Like, no one has to, you know, just like, you need to read serious white papers. It’s just that there were borders formerly that at least had this sort of communicated this thing, even if you’re watching the evening news and also often the local evening news can be really bad, sometimes can be really good, it ranges. But it had this border around it, which was different than like, here are two guys BSing, here’s the evening news, and they had some different standards around it. And now all of that, everything is across the board the same.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Someone is in front of your camera and they’re pointing to some article. Maybe you’re sure not like, here’s a great example of how this works and I’m actually was going to do on my show. Although as I’m talking to you, I’m seeing that Matt Gaetz just got nominated to be the attorney general of the United States.
Matt Pearce: Is that real?
Chris Hayes: That is real. Tulsi Gabbard is director of national intelligence and Matt Gaetz as the attorney general of the United States. So I’m going to have to —
Matt Pearce: That’s very interesting.
Chris Hayes: I’m going to get off this podcast and I’m going to go deal with that. And it’s probably going to mean that my precious little monologue is going to get killed. So I’ll just do it here because it’s fitting, which is we’ll see if it survives, but I was going to do a piece. There’s a perfect example of how this works. Are you a football fan, Matt?
Matt Pearce: Kansas City Chiefs.
Chris Hayes: Nice. Well, good for you. That’s —
Matt Pearce: Thank you. I know.
Chris Hayes: What a fun football fan to be, buddy.
Matt Pearce: I won the lottery.
Chris Hayes: I’m a Bears fan. That’s on the other side of the spectrum. So Jared Goff, who’s a Detroit Lions quarterback, who’s actually quite a good quarterback, had this crazy game. I think it was a Sunday night game where he threw four interceptions, I think it was in the first half, and then they came back to win the game. And some random X user posted as a kind of prank joke, just made up like, it’s crazy Jared Goff is 7-0 in games where in which he threw four interceptions. Which is sort of a funny and ludicrous stat because it’s so rare that a quarterback throws four interceptions in a game.
Matt Pearce: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: And it would be insane to do that and win seven times.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And then it went viral. It had like 25,000 likes. And then underneath it, he was like, if people don’t believe me, like check it out. And he cut and pasted what he had photoshopped. There’s a site called StatMuse, which has these like this very recognizable iconic graphic where it’s a kind of cartoon figure of the person at issue. And so he had put together a fake StatMuse image of Jared Goff, 7-0 in games in which he threw four interceptions. Again, this was completely fabricated, okay? Well, lo and behold, on the Pat McAfee show on ESPN, which started as one of these podcasts, YouTube shows would show up in your feed on social media.
Aaron Rodgers, who flirted with becoming RFK’s V.P. nominee, anti-vaxxer, conspiracy theorist sort of. Aaron Rodgers brings up casually like, did you know Goff is 7-0 in games that he threw four picks? And McAfee goes, oh yeah, it’s crazy. I saw that. And then the guy comes back to X to be like, haha, this is so hilarious. Look how easy it is to push something false into the discourse. I made this up while lying in my bed. And it’s like, here’s a very low stakes version of this. It doesn’t matter, but it’s false. Now take that and all of policy discussions, all of politics, everything about life is being run through the same machine in which something like that just gets into the atmosphere and then we all breathe it in.
Matt Pearce: I mean, my brain rot version of this is with the NBA because I don’t have an NBA team because Kansas City doesn’t have an NBA team. So I like basketball, but the way that I end up consuming it is through TikTok clips. And so I actually like have gotten to know a lot of the players in the league and how they play based off just watching short clips of them on TikTok. But like I’m not watching the games. I have no idea who’s winning, but you know, I know who’s a good dunker. I’m getting lots of clips of Wembanyama. Like I have no relationship whatsoever with the NBA, except for like what’s getting infringingly sent to me on these platforms. And so I wouldn’t know if any of these teams had won a single game through the entire season or not. And that is the way that most people encounter information, right?
Chris Hayes: Yeah, that sort of fracturing effect. The kind of prismatic shards of broken glass that you get and that you have to then kind of assemble into something. So if we’re talking about the sort of this era, I think the story of this era is there’s this vision of a world in which there was symbiosis between what we call traditional media and the platforms. I think that era has ended. The platforms have kind of extracted all the value. The media outlets are increasingly kind of at their whims, have a harder and harder time with a business case. So that era I think is coming to a close.
To return to my restaurant metaphor, starting a restaurant is basically always a bad business and yet people do it.
Matt Pearce: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And they do it because there’s other reasons people start restaurants. They love to cook, they like to host, they want to have a place that people can go. There’s reasons people get into journalism that aren’t because it’s a good business and they want to make money. They want to affect public discourse. They like the prestige of having their name as publisher of something. So I think there’s a similar kind of psychology around this business that even if it’s not a great business to be in, people are going to get into. The question is, can you start to think about what this next era looks like that isn’t just the slurry of like a mix of like garbage and some nutrients that we’re being fed.
Matt Pearce: I mean, the real question here is, are we talking about the internet as it’s likely to be or the internet as it ought to be because —
Chris Hayes: Well, let’s establish what ought is. Like, what would they ought be? What do you want if you can make the world?
Matt Pearce: So I think that we have at least a couple of trillion dollar internet companies that we need to break up. I think Google is a monopolist probably many times over to the point that it’s like infrastructure of the internet. When people are just looking at something, they just mindlessly go to Google to try to find it. And I think having monopolies has been bad for innovation. I mean, it’s so ironic when we talk about tech companies because they do represent in many ways the forefront of the economy and they’re developing new things.
But like in the media space, like what’s remarkable about the homogenization of media. It’s not a homogenization of content. It’s like a homogenization of form where Google has a certain way that it likes your websites to look if you want to be featured on their algorithm, which again is a black box and people fight about it and they want to be on the top of the 10 blue links. Like Google’s overwhelming force over connecting people with web pages has shaped what web pages look like. And I think that’s given us an extremely narrow idea of even what a web page should look like.
Meta, its own hostility to linking these days is going to result in people trying to create a bunch of native content on an app that is never going to surface it unless you are engaging in engagement bait to try to like troll people into having responses on sort of like nonsensical issues. TikTok, it’s going to require you to shoot your videos in a certain way to get people’s attention in the first literally half second of a video before people move on. Like all these things, it’s the classic. Marshall McLuhan, the form produces the content and the content produces the form, which is that we have this existing ethic and journalism of going out there and telling the truth and getting in people’s faces, even when it’s not very popular and even when it’s not very commercial. And we’re trying to shove it into these, you know, text sized boxes that weren’t really made for us. And I want to be clear that like, you can totally do journalism on TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever.
Chris Hayes: And there are people are. I also don’t want to be like annoyingly disparaging about influencers. Like there’s lots of people doing fantastic stuff in all those places. Like genuinely, there is great stuff, smart people, conscientious people, people surfacing and bridging stuff. Like I don’t want to sound like you’re not doing real journalism, which is what people used to say to us when we were like writing blogs. Like there are tons of people doing great stuff.
Matt Pearce: No, and I completely agree because basically having been a content creator myself as a journalist who was also like big on Twitter for a while, like I get it. The problem is that the people who should be replacing us in these new mediums are basically far more exposed to the massive power of these companies and they don’t have the ability to push back because they’re not attached to these existing institutions like newspapers and publishers and broadcasters that act like a firm level and not like the sectoral level had some kind of bargaining power to essentially like negotiate with companies over like, hey, it would be great if your platform featured news like here’s what that would look like and here’s how you could place it and here’s what compensation would look like.
There was some counter-valence when tech companies were smaller that I think has totally broken down in this sort of monopoly era. And that’s non-existent at all for users. Like users have no bargaining power whatsoever with the platforms that are serving their stuff and the algorithm change can destroy your entire livelihood.
Chris Hayes: Yeah. So, one thing is there’s too much power concentrated in these big tech firms. The platforms have this kind of monopoly or oligopoly, I guess it would be, because there are a few of them, and you think they just need to be broken up. I mean, it’s interesting. In some ways, when you’re talking about how all the internet now looks like websites that Google will rank, how stultifying the formal constraints of the big platforms is, it’s almost like its own version of central planning versus free market. There’s this kind of central planning of the algorithms of the big tech firms. And you can’t allow like flourishing experiments and genuine entrepreneurship, which is like different things to happen because everything’s happening within this fiefdom. Whereas what you need, and one of the things I care deeply about is like some return to what we would call the open non-commercial internet. Like the whole point of the worldwide web originally was it no one controlled it. It was all there.
Matt Pearce: Yeah.
Chris Hayes: Anyone could put up a website. Anyone could respond to a website. Like that ethos, I feel like, okay, break up the big tech firms, but then recreating or creating a new version of the open internet, the non-commercial internet where the platforms don’t control what you see and how you connect, that to me is the next step as well.
Matt Pearce: Yeah, I think it has to be. I mean, to bring it back to Louis Brandeis, who’s one of the early and great champions of antitrust in this country. I mean, this was actually a version of a conversation that was happening during the trust era in the United States more than a century ago. It’s like whether the trusts and having massive, gigantic companies that essentially control each feature of the economy, maybe that was more efficient, maybe that was a good thing.
And then people realized, I mean, the paper that made FTC Chair Lina Khan famous, the Amazon antitrust paradox, I think is one of the skeleton keys to this conversation, because it really kinds of gets at this problem that Brandeis mentioned, which is the curse of bigness is that there is a point where companies get so massive that the real antitrust problem isn’t necessarily like price gouging their customers, which is the common standard that we use to evaluate whether something’s a monopoly or not that’s breaking the law, but it does all sorts of other things.
It influences our politics in a way that’s really nefarious and bullies other companies and kind of just creates this private sector kingship that seems anathema to the way that we live as Americans, which is to be free people in theory. And like Brandeis’ thought was that, maybe we should have this kind of wilder, more yeoman small business person economy where people have the freedom to run small businesses and maybe they weren’t giant productive firms, but they were something that gave people more freedom closer to ground and let the country be a more interesting place to flourish and for people to practice their civic virtues rather than just being captured by giant companies.
And I think the internet’s in the same place too, because I think that there all these people who are capable of doing so much more interesting things with the technology that we now have —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Matt Pearce: — that I think if you broke up these companies, some really interesting stuff would start happening and we wouldn’t even realize it until then what we’ve been missing for all these years.
Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: It is worth noting that one of the things that gave rise to the internet was the breaking up of Ma Bell, which was the telecommunications monopoly that had controlled the telecommunications infrastructure of the country. There were some key decisions made too about how they had to let you put modems on their phones, which they wanted to object to. So there’s precedent here that breaking things up is a key part of it. The other big question is like the revenue source. And I want to sort of talk about this. You know, all the monetization now basically works through advertising. Advertising incentivizes the exploitation and extraction of people’s attention so as to sell it.
Newspapers since the Penny press of Benjamin Day back in the early 1900s have used that model to monetize people’s attention and sell it to advertisers. What do you think about this question of will people pay for news or how the finances scan?
Matt Pearce: The finances don’t scan is the problem and there are a lot of reasons for that. Part of it’s because we flooded the market with cheap junk that people are willing to consume. So if they can get interesting content, I hate that word content, but that’s what journalism is competing against. If people can get it for free, they’re probably going to go with the free stuff more often than they go for the expensive stuff. And producing journalism is expensive, unlike many other parts of the economy.
Journalism’s not really getting much more efficient. There’s not a lot of technological advancements that you could spin on, like going and knocking on a judge’s door or something, or talking to a federal bureaucrat to like, leak you a record. Like that stuff is not getting more efficient, which is the thing that makes stuff cheaper to do and creates more profitable companies, which brings in capital to hire more workers, to do more stuff like that. It’s broken. It’s the same reason that like healthcare is expensive and childcare is expensive, which is that like the labor of doing that stuff just doesn’t get more efficient like other parts of the economy do.
So that’s just a fundamental problem that journalism has on an economic basis.
And that’s on top of like every other problem, which is that digital advertising dollars had gotten captured by Google and Meta again, as monopolies. Amazon’s starting to break into in a big way, the digital ad marketplace too. But it used to be that you didn’t have to buy a subscription to read journalism on the internet. A lot of it was subsidized by advertising. And I don’t think people realize how expensive it is to pay people to do work if it’s not being subsidized by something else.
If you’re asking readers to pay full freight for a journalist, that’s really expensive. And you see that on Substack. Actually paying $5 to pledge a subscription to me on Substack. I’m not monetized, but just for argument’s sake, that you’re getting like fewer journalists and less journalism for a dollar than you would with a larger, more efficient company that you would have in legacy media. That’s because you’re losing out on the stuff that would subsidize your subscription.
Chris Hayes: I think, look, I think if you remove the sort of constraints of the oligopoly, I don’t know if that’s going to happen, but that there’s space for innovation and different models. One of the problems too is that like, you also need scale to go toe to toe with powerful institutions and people. Like this is the other issue, which is you can do good accountability reporting from a Substack, but “The Washington Post” kind of had to be “The Washington Post” to do Watergate because they needed a bunch of lawyers and they needed a bunch of like institutional heft. And I worry about that.
I do think ultimately to end on some kind of hopeful note here that curiosity and civic desire to hold people to account does find a way. Or like the impulse is still there, even if the market forces are against it and the technological forces. I don’t think that has been squelched and to return to what we were saying before, that like there are really smart, good people doing what I would call good journalism on all these platforms in interesting ways. That impulse is still there. People desire to do that. It’s a question of getting the market structures and institutions in a way that can allow that to genuinely flourish.
Matt Pearce: I totally agree and I think that’s why antitrust is a really important subject to bring into this conversation about journalism because we talk so much about headlines and journalists that you hire, and the stories that they choose to cover, and whether certain decisions were ethical or not. But we don’t talk so much about the stuff that we’ve lost control over. We’ve lost control over distribution. We’ve lost control over the ability to use advertising to pay for this kind of work. And markets structure labor. Markets structure consumer behavior. Markets structure competition.
And I think the truth has a major, major competition problem. And I think you’ve, you’ve landed dead on it, which is that human nature has a change. Human nature produced investigative journalists and a curious public and people’s willingness to associate and to want to know the truth. I do think that the truth is out there and an economy that helps us pursue and produce the truth or at least produce some accounting of what the truth really is, whatever that is.
I think we can build that again, but I do think that requires some proactive engagement on our part to create the ability for journalists to succeed, to create the ability for content creators to make money off the work that they do for the really good quality stuff and to feature the stuff that is really morally upright and accurate and serves the public. I think that needs some nurturing too, and I think all of that is within our power. We just need the will to do it and to recognize what the problem is in the first place, which is honestly most of the battle at this point.
Chris Hayes: Matt Pearce is a journalist in Los Angeles. He’s president of Media Guild of the West, which represents unionized journalists in Southern California, Arizona and Texas. He’s a former reporter for “Los Angeles Times.” You could find his writing at his Substack, mattdpearce.substack.com. Matt, that was great. Thanks so much.
Matt Pearce: Chris, thank you so much for having me.
Chris Hayes: Once again, great thanks to Matt Pearce. Really enjoyed talking to him and we’d love to hear what you have to say. This is a topic that people have lots of thoughts on. E-mail us withpod@gmail.com. You can get in touch with us using the hashtag #WITHpod. You can search for WITHpod on TikTok. You can follow me on Threads and what used to be called Twitter and Bluesky, which is blowing up these days and which I’m really enjoying. My handle at all those places is @chrislhayes.
Be sure to hear new episodes every Tuesday. “Why Is This Happening?” is presented by MSNBC and NBC News, produced by Doni Holloway and Brendan O’Melia. This episode was engineered by Cedric Wilson and features music by Eddie Cooper. Aisha Turner is the executive producer of MSNBC Audio. You can see more of our work, including links to things we mentioned here by going to nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening.