"Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He's not a journalist; he's the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake." (Photo: Legal Loop)
What If Ida B. Wells Depended on Facebook?
We need a tax-dollars-funded, just-for-journalism's-sake, public commitment to public media.
If Ida B. Wells had depended on Facebook, would we ever have had a National Lynching Memorial?
Two stories collided in my head this week. One of which was the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama--this country's first major effort to confront the vast scope of the racial-terror lynchings that ravaged the Black community under a pervasive, prevailing culture of white supremacy. It is the first because, until now, that same majority culture of white supremacy hasn't wanted to look.
At the memorial, a special place is set aside for Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to these murders. Over a lifetime made shorter by repeated attacks, she documented and publicized the killings, collecting names, dates and descriptions.
She wrote editorials for various newspapers, but her longest running outlet was her own, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she edited and published until it was burned to the ground by her critics. And this is where the opening of the memorial intersects with another important story from this week.
Would Wells's Free Speech ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1st in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by trust.
News sources that score higher will be promoted, while those with lower scores will be suppressed.
As he put it, "You're not going to be able to bridge common ground in society if people don't have a common set of facts."
To determine trustworthiness, the company plans to survey its two billion users about the sources with which they're most familiar and best recognize.
American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
However, by that standard, we'd never have had Tom Paine, Ida Tarbell or Ida B. Wells. We'd never have had a revolution, broken up the robber-baron monopoly corporations, or heard enough about the lynchings to have anything resembling a memorial--or even, probably, to make them stop.
We'd certainly have gone off misinformed into a misbegotten set of wars without end against nameless, nationless wrong-doers called terrorists...
You get my point.
From Paine to Wells, it has always been media at the margins--not the center--that has brought critical issues to a boil so that bigger, "recognized" media could inhale the steam. American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
After Ida B. Wells published a column on May 21, 1892 denouncing "the old threadbare lie" that lynching was used to "protect white womanhood," a white mob marched to her office in Memphis, destroyed her presses and left a warning that they would kill her if she tried to publish her newspaper again.
That lie was the most heard, most accepted, most familiar, trusted, conventional, common fact. It has taken the nation a century to wise up. If we want to preserve American democracy, we should learn from the past. We don't have that long, and we have no reason to repeat history.
Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He's not a journalist; he's the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake. He's not deluded, but we are if we believe that the Wellses of today can rely on Facebook. We need a tax-dollars-funded, just-for-journalism's-sake, public commitment to public media. Otherwise, we risk allowing the commontruth to become the onlytruth we hear.
Urgent. It's never been this bad.
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission from the outset was simple. To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It’s never been this bad out there. And it’s never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed and doing some of its best and most important work, the threats we face are intensifying. Right now, with just three days to go in our Spring Campaign, we're falling short of our make-or-break goal. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Can you make a gift right now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? There is no backup plan or rainy day fund. There is only you. —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
If Ida B. Wells had depended on Facebook, would we ever have had a National Lynching Memorial?
Two stories collided in my head this week. One of which was the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama--this country's first major effort to confront the vast scope of the racial-terror lynchings that ravaged the Black community under a pervasive, prevailing culture of white supremacy. It is the first because, until now, that same majority culture of white supremacy hasn't wanted to look.
At the memorial, a special place is set aside for Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to these murders. Over a lifetime made shorter by repeated attacks, she documented and publicized the killings, collecting names, dates and descriptions.
She wrote editorials for various newspapers, but her longest running outlet was her own, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she edited and published until it was burned to the ground by her critics. And this is where the opening of the memorial intersects with another important story from this week.
Would Wells's Free Speech ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1st in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by trust.
News sources that score higher will be promoted, while those with lower scores will be suppressed.
As he put it, "You're not going to be able to bridge common ground in society if people don't have a common set of facts."
To determine trustworthiness, the company plans to survey its two billion users about the sources with which they're most familiar and best recognize.
American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
However, by that standard, we'd never have had Tom Paine, Ida Tarbell or Ida B. Wells. We'd never have had a revolution, broken up the robber-baron monopoly corporations, or heard enough about the lynchings to have anything resembling a memorial--or even, probably, to make them stop.
We'd certainly have gone off misinformed into a misbegotten set of wars without end against nameless, nationless wrong-doers called terrorists...
You get my point.
From Paine to Wells, it has always been media at the margins--not the center--that has brought critical issues to a boil so that bigger, "recognized" media could inhale the steam. American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
After Ida B. Wells published a column on May 21, 1892 denouncing "the old threadbare lie" that lynching was used to "protect white womanhood," a white mob marched to her office in Memphis, destroyed her presses and left a warning that they would kill her if she tried to publish her newspaper again.
That lie was the most heard, most accepted, most familiar, trusted, conventional, common fact. It has taken the nation a century to wise up. If we want to preserve American democracy, we should learn from the past. We don't have that long, and we have no reason to repeat history.
Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He's not a journalist; he's the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake. He's not deluded, but we are if we believe that the Wellses of today can rely on Facebook. We need a tax-dollars-funded, just-for-journalism's-sake, public commitment to public media. Otherwise, we risk allowing the commontruth to become the onlytruth we hear.
If Ida B. Wells had depended on Facebook, would we ever have had a National Lynching Memorial?
Two stories collided in my head this week. One of which was the opening of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama--this country's first major effort to confront the vast scope of the racial-terror lynchings that ravaged the Black community under a pervasive, prevailing culture of white supremacy. It is the first because, until now, that same majority culture of white supremacy hasn't wanted to look.
At the memorial, a special place is set aside for Ida B. Wells, the crusading journalist who forced Americans to pay attention to these murders. Over a lifetime made shorter by repeated attacks, she documented and publicized the killings, collecting names, dates and descriptions.
She wrote editorials for various newspapers, but her longest running outlet was her own, the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight, which she edited and published until it was burned to the ground by her critics. And this is where the opening of the memorial intersects with another important story from this week.
Would Wells's Free Speech ever have made it into my news feed on Facebook? I doubt it, because Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced May 1st in a meeting with media executives that his company had started ranking news organizations by trust.
News sources that score higher will be promoted, while those with lower scores will be suppressed.
As he put it, "You're not going to be able to bridge common ground in society if people don't have a common set of facts."
To determine trustworthiness, the company plans to survey its two billion users about the sources with which they're most familiar and best recognize.
American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
However, by that standard, we'd never have had Tom Paine, Ida Tarbell or Ida B. Wells. We'd never have had a revolution, broken up the robber-baron monopoly corporations, or heard enough about the lynchings to have anything resembling a memorial--or even, probably, to make them stop.
We'd certainly have gone off misinformed into a misbegotten set of wars without end against nameless, nationless wrong-doers called terrorists...
You get my point.
From Paine to Wells, it has always been media at the margins--not the center--that has brought critical issues to a boil so that bigger, "recognized" media could inhale the steam. American democracy has not advanced thanks to the mainstream media, but rather thanks to reporters on a mission and with the means to tell the uncomfortable, unfamiliar, uncommon truth.
After Ida B. Wells published a column on May 21, 1892 denouncing "the old threadbare lie" that lynching was used to "protect white womanhood," a white mob marched to her office in Memphis, destroyed her presses and left a warning that they would kill her if she tried to publish her newspaper again.
That lie was the most heard, most accepted, most familiar, trusted, conventional, common fact. It has taken the nation a century to wise up. If we want to preserve American democracy, we should learn from the past. We don't have that long, and we have no reason to repeat history.
Zuckerberg is free to suppress. He's not a journalist; he's the head of a for-profit corporation with a track record of mendacity and billions of private dollars at stake. He's not deluded, but we are if we believe that the Wellses of today can rely on Facebook. We need a tax-dollars-funded, just-for-journalism's-sake, public commitment to public media. Otherwise, we risk allowing the commontruth to become the onlytruth we hear.