From disinformation campaigns to soaring skepticism, plummeting trust and economic slumps, the global media landscape has been hit with blow after blow.
World News Day, taking place today with the support of hundreds of organizations, aims to raise awareness about the challenges endangering the hard-pressed industry.
‘BROKEN BUSINESS MODEL’
Photo: AFP
In 2022, UNESCO warned that “the business model of the news media is broken.”
Advertising revenue — the lifeline of news publications — has dried up in recent years, with Internet giants such as Google and Facebook owner Meta soaking up half of that spending, the report said.
Meta, Amazon and Google’s parent company Alphabet alone account for 44 percent of global ad spend, while only 25 percent goes to traditional media organizations, according to a study by the World Advertising Research Center.
Photo: AFP
Platforms like Facebook “are now explicitly deprioritizing news and political content,” the Reuters Institute’s 2024 Digital News Report pointed out.
Traffic from social to news sites has sharply declined as a result, causing a drop in revenue.
Few are keen to pay for news. Only 17 percent of people polled across 20 wealthy countries said they had online news subscriptions last year.
Photo: AP
Such trends, leading to rising costs, have resulted in “layoffs, closures and other cuts” in media organizations around the world, the study found.
ERODING TRUST
Public trust in the media has increasingly eroded in recent years. Only four in 10 respondents said they trusted news most of the time, the Reuters Institute reported. Meanwhile, young people are relying more on influencers and content creators than newspapers to stay informed.
For them, video is king, with the study citing the influence of TikTok and YouTube stars such as American Vitus Spehar and Frenchman Hugo Travers, known for his channel HugoDecrypte.
GROWING DISINFORMATION
The advent of artificial intelligence (AI) has renewed concerns about disinformation — rife on social platforms — as the tool can generate convincing text and images.
In the US, partisan Web sites masquerading as media outlets now outnumber American newspaper sites, the research group NewsGuard, which tracks misinformation, said in June.
“Pink slime” outlets — politically motivated Web sites that present themselves as independent local news outlets — are largely powered by AI. This appears to be an effort to sway political beliefs ahead of the US election.
As part of a national crackdown on disinformation, Brazil’s Supreme Court suspended access to Elon Musk’s X, formerly known as Twitter.
The court accused the social media platform of refusing to remove accounts charged with spreading fake news, and flouting other judicial rulings.
“Eradicating disinformation seems impossible, but things can be implemented,” Reporters Without Borders (RSF) editorial director Anne Bocande said.
Platforms can bolster regulation and create news reliability indicators, like RSF’s Journalism Trust Initiative, Bocande said.
ALARMING NEW PLAYER
AI has pushed news media into unchartered territory.
US streaming platform Peacock introduced AI-generated custom match reports during the Paris Olympics this year, read with the voice of sports commentator Al Michaels — fueling fears AI could replace journalists. Despite these concerns, German media giant Axel Springer has decided to bet on AI while refocusing on its core news activities.
At its roster, which includes Politico, the Bild tabloid, Business Insider and Die Welt daily, AI will focus on menial production tasks so journalists can dedicate their time to reporting and securing scoops.
In a bid to profit from the technology’s rise, the German publisher as well as The Associated Press and The Financial Times signed content partnerships with start-up OpenAI. But the Microsoft-backed firm is also caught in a major lawsuit with The New York Times over copyright violations.
‘QUIET REPRESSION’
With journalists frequently jailed, killed and attacked worldwide, “repression is a major issue,” said RSF’s Bocande. A total of 584 journalists are languishing behind bars because of their work — with China, Belarus and Myanmar the world’s most prolific jailers of reporters.
The war in Gaza sparked by Palestinian militant group Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel has already left a “terrible” mark on press freedom, Bocande added.
More than 130 journalists have been killed by Israeli airstrikes since Oct. 7, including 32 while “in the exercise of their duties.”
She said a “quiet repression” campaign is underway in countries around the world, including in democracies — with investigative journalism hampered by fresh laws on national security.
May 11 to May 17 Traversing the southern slopes of the Yushan Range in 1931, Japanese naturalist Tadao Kano knew he was approaching the last swath of Taiwan still beyond colonial control. The “vast, unknown territory,” protected by the “fierce” Bunun headman Dahu Ali, was “filled with an utterly endless jungle that choked the mountains and valleys,” Kano wrote. He noted how the group had “refused to submit to the measures of our authorities and entrenched themselves deep in these mountains … living a free existence spent chasing deer in the morning and seeking serow in the evening,” even describing them as
Yesterday, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) nominated legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) as their Taipei mayoral candidate, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) put their stamp of approval on Wei Ping-cheng (魏平政) as their candidate for Changhua County commissioner and former legislator Tsai Pi-ru (蔡壁如) of the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) has begun the process to also run in Changhua, though she has not yet been formally nominated. All three news items are bizarre. The DPP has struggled with settling on a Taipei nominee. The only candidate who declared interest was Enoch Wu (吳怡農), but the party seemed determined to nominate anyone
In a sudden move last week, opposition lawmakers of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) passed a NT$780 billion special defense budget as a preemptive measure to stop either Chinese leader Xi Jinping (習近平) or US President Donald Trump from blocking US arms sales to Taiwan at their summit in Beijing, said KMT heavyweight Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), speaking to the Taipei Foreign Correspondents Club on Wednesday night in Taipei. The 76-year-old Jaw, a political talk show host who ran as the KMT’s vice presidential candidate in 2024, says that he personally brokered the deal to resolve
What government project has expropriated the most land in Taiwan? According to local media reports, it is the Taoyuan Aerotropolis, eating 2,500 hectares of land in its first phase, with more to come. Forty thousand people are expected to be displaced by the project. Naturally that enormous land grab is generating powerful pushback. Last week Chen Chien-ho (陳健和), a local resident of Jhuwei Borough (竹圍) in Taoyuan City’s Dayuan District (大園) filed a petition for constitutional review of the project after losing his case at the Taipei Administrative Court. The Administrative Court found in favor of nine other local landowners, but
RSS