Last month, the Department of Justice filed charges against two employees of RT, the Russian state-controlled outlet, for conspiracy to violate US money laundering and foreign agent laws.
According to the indictment, Konstantin Kalashnikov and Elena Afanasyeva used a series of shell companies and fake personas to hide the fact that they were funding a far-right, Tennessee-based production company to the tune of $8.7 million on top of $760,000 in signing bonuses.
While the indictment didn’t directly name the media company that allegedly benefitted from the Kremlin’s largesse, it didn’t take a lot of sleuthing to figure out that it was Tenet Media, home to far-right influencers Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, and Dave Rubin. The Tenet Media employees protested their innocence. They were “victims,” they insisted, who had been “deceived.”
The sums revealed in the indictment were staggering. Every month, the Tenet Media influencers were making around $400,000 for the production of four videos.
Anyone who has worked in media can attest that $100,000 for one video per week comes in a tad bit higher than the average going rate. It beggars belief that these media professionals didn’t try a little harder to figure out who exactly was paying them such handsome sums and more importantly why.
A Double Crisis of Information
The DOJ indictment has exposed a double crisis of democracy. While the indictments correctly focused attention on the fact that a foreign adversary was seeking to intervene in our political debates and exacerbate division in our country, it also implicitly revealed another issue: the crisis of American journalism.
“It’s awful. To look at cities that used to be served by newsrooms of 300, or 500 journalists, now reduced to virtually nothing, is terrible,” Jeffrey Goldberg observed recently. The editor-in-chief of The Atlantic continued, “This is the way democracy decomposes. We’re sleepwalking into an absolute disaster.”
In the past, local newspapers did the banal but essential work of covering county commissioners, school boards, and water districts. Since the digital revolution, thousands of local newspapers have stopped publishing. Over half of all newsroom jobs before the financial crisis have now disappeared. Now, in some communities, which experts call “news deserts,” there is no one around to do local accountability journalism and ensure that city and county taxpayer dollars aren’t being wasted. To say nothing of obituaries, reviews of local plays, announcements of new restaurant openings, or features about the tragedies and triumphs of local citizens.
There are some attempts at solutions. Nonprofit newsrooms like ProPublica and the Texas Tribune have found some success. Citizen-led hyperlocal sites have appeared across the country. The American Journalism Project was founded to help jump start other local non-profit digital newsrooms. And then there is also Report for America, a nonprofit group modeled on the Peace Corps. But it is an uphill battle.
Stepping Into the Void
The hollowing out of local media has created the conditions for disinformation campaigns. Recent technological leaps have fundamentally transformed how we relate to our fellow human beings. We can now converse with almost anyone in the world while not even knowing our neighbor. We follow influencers and thought leaders from across the world and yet don’t know who is covering our local city hall. The local connections that used to bind our local democracy together have frayed. Trust is in short supply.
That leaves space for bad actors. Foreign influence campaigns regularly pretend to be locally-run American groups. The dreadful state of local journalism in America springs from the same sources as targeted disinformation campaigns by foreign adversaries. Americans can get information from anywhere and everywhere these days, but they also report difficulties in finding information that is accurate, useful, and grounded. The problems are two sides of the same coin.
Promoting Values over Choosing Winners
We can all agree that the Russian government shouldn’t be paying American influencers. But do we also believe that the American government should be paying local American journalists? That is a harder question. At the national level, PBS is still the most trusted source of broadcast news in America. Government funding of journalism can work out. And yet it can also go wrong in many ways. There are legitimate concerns about how a future government might manipulate state-funded media.
Perhaps we are missing the forest for the trees, though. The American government has a history of putting its thumb on the scale to promote things it values without censoring content or choosing winners. When the Post Office was established in the Postal Service Act of 1792, our fledgling nation fixed the price to send newspapers by mail was at 1 cent for short distances and 1 ½ cents for longer ones. Letters, in contrast, cost significantly more, varying in cost from 6 to 25 cents. In effect, letter postage subsidized the delivery of newspapers in the early American republic.
Why? Because the government believed that the broad distribution of newspapers would foster an informed public and help bind a very large nation together. The policy did not favor any single newspaper or point of view, but it did prioritize the transfer of information to Americans when it was difficult and expensive to do so.
Where Do We Go From Here?
Over two centuries later, the cost to transfer information is no longer a problem. Our political discourse has never been so national. We don’t need subsidies to deliver newspapers. The problem now, at least at the national level, is one of curation: filtering the good from the bad, the static from the noise, the trolling from earnest and engaged disagreement. At the local level, there is a different but related problem: a lack of good quality information to bind local communities together.
We need something like the Postal Service Act of 1792 today. We need a generalized framework that prioritizes better local information and better curation in general. In some general way, we need to promote the production and curation of good information by real people in this country.
The solution could take many forms. It is admittedly not an easy task, but what won’t solve the problem is a piecemeal approach. A conviction in the DOJ case against two RT employees won’t address the bigger issue. Or, to take another recent issue, forcing ByteDance to divest from TikTok may address one major security concern, but it won’t solve the broader problem either.
RT’s funding of Tenet Media demonstrates that the crisis of local journalism and foreign disinformation are linked. This challenge facing our democracy requires a comprehensive legislative framework for a new era. Without a significant course correction, the crisis of information in American society in all its forms will only continue. AI has now raised the stakes. It is time for policymakers to acknowledge that we have entered a new paradigm. And new paradigms require fresh thinking and creative responses. Our current challenges are linked as never before. Our solutions should be as well.
Christopher Schaefer is communications manager at the Renew Democracy Initiative. He has a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge, where his research focused on the history of international media.
