Fragment the media! Embrace the shards!

For this election, think less about our ‘shared reality’ and more about information integrity

Hi, I’m Charley, and this is Untangled, a newsletter about our sociotechnical world, and how to change it.  I celebrated Untangled’s third birthday last week by announcing a new newsletter partnership and the largest discount I’ve ever offered:

• Now, when you sign up for the annual paid subscription to Untangled, you’ll also get a free one-year subscription to the paid version of The Golden Hour ($50 value), a newsletter about “thriving and caring for others on a rapidly changing planet” by Anya Kamenetz, a former NPR reporter and award-winning nonfiction author.

• Untangled is now 40% off. For those keeping track, signing up right now means you’ll get $140 in value for $54. Not bad.

👉 You can now sign up for my new course, Sociotechnical Systems Change in Practice. The first cohort will take place on January 11 and 12 from 9:00 - 1:00 pm PT.

On to the show!

---

The U.S’s pursuit of a multiracial democracy is on the ballot this week. No matter the outcome, we cannot blame the fragmentation of the media and mourn the loss of our shared reality. Yes, the power of broadcast networks are waning. Yes, Vice President Kamala Harris prioritized podcasts like Call Her Daddy and All the Smoke, and President Trump went on Joe Rogan and Theo Von’s podcast. But ‘the shared reality’ that the U.S. has long glorified was predominantly white and male, and historically, fragmentation has actually proven to be a good thing. Let’s dig in.

In News For All The People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media, Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres write a sweeping history of American media. It turns out, at times where the news media has been centralized, it has been far worse for minoritized groups, and decentralized periods correspond to advances in inclusivity and equity. As the authors explain:

Our examination of America’s media history provides abundant evidence that the white racial narrative has always been more virulent and exclusionary whenever our information system was most centralized and controlled from the top. Likewise, the nation’s news has been more just and inclusive in periods when its media system was more decentralized and autonomous.

This matters because a free press in the public interest isn’t just about the right to speak, it’s about the right to be heard. This requires more diverse voices and a more decentralized media landscape. For Gonzalez and Torres, ‘decentralized’ means that the news media doesn’t simply serve “the intelligence needs of national and transnational markets” but rather “serves first and foremost the educational and political needs of citizens in their local communities.”

Take the ‘Golden Years of Broadcasting.’ We often look back on the decades between the Depression and the Civil Rights era as a moment of shared reality. Our grandparents listened to the same radio stations, and our parents watched the same television news broadcasts, the story goes. But that ‘shared reality’ was predominantly white, male, and propagated racial stereotypes. In the 1920s, the rise of the radio led to many people of color to become amateur radio operators and on-air performers. It was a hopeful moment when it seemed possible that knowledge and information might be democratized. But it didn’t play out that way. In the Radio Act of 1927, the government knocked the new entrants off the radio waves and turned powerful frequencies over to a few centralized networks like NBC, CBS, and Mutual Broadcasting. As Gonzalez and Torres write, “As a result, racial minorities were virtually shut off from commercial radio licenses for decades.”

During the civil rights movement, courageous reporting from people like Dan Rather and John Chancellor brought critical attention to key events like “Bloody Sunday,” when peaceful protesters crossed Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge to demand their voting rights, only to be violently beaten by police on horseback. But as Gonzalez and Torres write, their individual heroics did not reflect or lead to material changes to the newsroom: “Despite the brief interlude of courageous network coverage, most local news organizations during the Civil Rights era continued to disseminate racial stereotypes and biased reporting on the country’s growing non-white communities.”

Over time, civil rights advances and federal policies like the Public Broadcasting Act led to more diverse voices in the newsroom, and more minority owned news networks. But the same pattern of consolidation played out. As Gonzalez and Torres write, “In a replay of the telegraph mergers of the 1860s, the bigger providers swallowed the smaller ones until only a handful of giant companies were left.” And then those big companies lobbied successfully (see the Telecommunications Act of 1996) to be left alone and deregulated. This allowed them to centralize power further, only to be disrupted years later by the arrival of the internet.

Online platforms facilitate speech in such a way that has the news industry centralizing and decentralizing at the same time: throughout the 2010s big social media companies consolidated news from disparate blogs and websites via algorithmically curated feeds — which inadvertently popularized extreme and outrageous content, and continued the spread of white racial narratives. Online media publishers like BuzzFeed and Vox rode this wave until social media algorithms began demoting news links — which was an intentional business decision — thus hugely diminishing site traffic for publishers. Now those news organizations are being sold for parts.

Local news outlets haven’t faired much better. According to a recent piece by NY Magazine on the state of the industry, they are being “gobbled up and then gutted” by hedge funds like Alden Global Capital. Stephen Engelberg, Editor in Chief at ProPublica, summed up the state of local news this way: “These are either zombie newspapers or soon-to-be-zombie newspapers.” At the same time, search specific AI tools like Google’s AI overview and Perplexity AI risk accelerating centralization by further hollowing out digital media and local news. By removing links from the search process, theses tools cut the connection between a search query, the returned information, and its original source. As we stop searching and clicking, news revenues will dry up, and many news companies will struggle even more.

But if you look around — past the AI slop and beyond the rubble of local news outlets — it’s not hard to see the seeds of a decentralizing ecosystem. Independent creators — writers, podcasters, etc. — have tremendous audiences and power. Companies like 1440 are proving that a daily newsletter can generate real revenue ($20M) with a small footprint (19 person team). Small independent media companies like 404 Media are popping up. So too are decentralized and federated social media platforms and protocols, and companies like Substack that help independent writers build and monetize an audience.

I don’t know how this tug-of-war will shake out. But at least three things will need to be true for this decentralizing ecosystem to thrive. The first might seem obvious — revenue! — but that is underpinned by a less obvious shift: seeing yourself not as a ‘consumer’ but a ‘generator’ of content. In an episode of Search Engine earlier this year, Ezra Klein argued that ‘consumer’ is a passive orientation. But every action you take — every article you read and share (psst!), every newsletter you pay for (ahem!), etc. — is a vote to have more of that thing in the world. It’s a vote for the kind of information ecosystem you want to inhabit. You’re not ‘consuming’ content, you’re generating more of it.

The second thing this decentralizing ecosystem needs is a greater focus on local news. Recall that for Gonzalez and Torres, ‘decentralization’ isn’t about technology or the number of voices with a large audience. It’s about a news ecosystem that supports the needs and interests of local communities. As far as I can tell, those participating in this budding ecosystem are writing and podcasting about national issues. I count myself as part of this problem — I’m not writing about tech and society issues in Los Angeles. As a result, people are increasingly getting local information from private message boards like Nextdoor and Facebook groups.

The third thing this decentralizing ecosystem needs is a sense of responsibility and stewardship. This isn’t about garnering trust. People trust Joe Rogan. People still trust Alex Jones. But an information steward is committed to the integrity of the process. I can’t just opine to my heart’s delight, I should have an informed perspective, rooted in deep-research, reporting, and fact-checking. Independent writers, creators, and the community moderators that help to guide discussions in Next Door should see themselves as stewards of information integrity. Not as a replacement of trained journalists — we still need lots of those! — but as a leveled-up complement to them. That’s why I’m inspired by initiatives like

New_ Public

’s Local Lab, which is working to support community moderators to strengthen local digital public spaces.

The U.S’s pursuit of a multiracial democracy has always been just that: a pursuit with real progress followed by missteps and set-backs. The same is true of our news media. Gonzalez and Torres conclude their book by writing,

“From the days of Benjamin Harris and the rebel printers, through the tribulations of Jose Marti and Ida B. Wells, to the bloggers of the Internet, the grand arc of the American press has been from news for the few and the powerful, to news for all the people.”

Who knows what will happen on Tuesday, but just like every action you took this election — voting, donating, organizing, etc. — is a vote for the kind of country you want to live in, so too is the future of the news media alive in your actions today. So think locally, generate thoughtfully, steward with integrity, and trust discerningly.

As always thank you to Georgia Iacovou, my editor.