Welcome to The Counterfeit Times
“If it looks like news and it’s all over the news, it’s probably legit.”
This is an instinctual shortcut in an open society that we’ve all been using to navigate the media landscape for hundreds of years. It has served us fairly well. But those days are done.
Welcome to The Counterfeit Times.
When you are wandering through a marketplace you are bombarded by subtle signals of “sunk cost”. Sunk cost describes the amount of effort, either financial or reputational, that someone has put into a particular endeavor.
Imagine seeing two objects on a shelf. One is a large crumpled paper bag with the misspelled words “Use this Blender to make smoothies” written in crayon on it. The other is a sharply-cornered durable plastic box with a crisp multi-colored logo of a brand that you’ve heard advertised on your favorite podcast, complete with the tiny copyright C next to it, all emblazoned above a beautiful aerial photo of a fitness model running along hills near the golden gate bridge.
Immediately, you calculate a very low sunk cost to whomever manufactured the paper bag and without a conscious thought, you have a hypothetical running ledger line adding up all the costs of the other object: the printing of the box, the designing and registering the logo, the execution of that cool photoshoot, the factory costs of actually making the product, the marketing teams salaries the were tasked with promoting the product. You even instantly register the unreadable fine print at the bottom of the box and, without reading a word of it, imagine a team of lawyers helping them write it while advising them against costly lawsuits if consumers get hurt. I mean, it is a blender after all. In other words, the “sunk cost” is high for this object.
A thought emerges somewhere in your mind, “Only a fool would go through all this trouble and spend all this money and time just to sell me a terrible product. Fools like that don’t survive long in a marketplace.” All of this happens before you look at the actual price tag at which point a crumpled paper bag can start to look pretty enticing.
But what if the product we consider is not a blender but “The News”?
Let’s shift this analogy to that marketplace and consider that history. Perhaps surprisingly, very little had changed. Until recently.
We all know that Johan Gutenberg’s breakthrough invention is cited as “the printing press.” This is too simple. Moveable type and similar precursors of the printing press had been in use throughout the world for a millennia before Gutenberg.
The true engineering breakthrough was a method for creating, and re-creating, small letter molds which were used to produce the metal squares of letterpresses for moveable type machines. Johan, after all, came from a family of jewelers. This was the piece of the puzzle which allowed the technology to scale, as the venture capitalists like to stress.
Take a close look at those little flags on the edges of the letters here. They’re called serifs.
Serifs aren’t necessary for producing a letter which can be easily understood. “Sans serif” fonts actually are more legible from a distance. So what are they for? We can call them decorative, but that sells it short.
Imagine Gutenberg making the serif in the mold, using all of his jewelry making skills and engineering prowess to perfect the curve just right on this seemingly minute and meaningless detail. This extra step is a signal to the eventual consumer that shouts something like, “Hey, this thing is expensive and hard to produce! Check out all the sunk costs I’m putting into these words!”
Gutenberg famously sunk this cost into producing the Bible. No doubt, he considered those words to be the most important and legitimate news in the universe.
These subtle signals of sunk cost in something like printing can get quite elaborate. Newspaper logos and headings engaged in a “check out the sunk cost of our printing press” arms race to signal their seriousness and devotion to the cause of “news” to their readership to request and earn trust. The cost of owning, maintaining, customizing, operating, and repairing a printing press were enormous. Caring about their product was a pretty safe bet.
Fast forward a few hundred years to 1977. We were three years away from the launch of CNN. The internet age was in the womb of history. The printing press had evolved quite a bit with the advent of cold type and offset printing. But the cost of producing precision type and high fidelity images was still high.
Large glass plates and photographic equipment was required. Huge spools churning through reams of paper was costly. The intricate serifed fonts and logos still remained, though they were already hollow signals. We had retired nearly all the moveable type machines that indicated the hired hand of a skilled jeweler to get the lines just right, but the signal stayed with us. Perhaps it morphed into a reminder that these brands sunk their cost long ago and wouldn’t be keen on squandering it now. The news still thrived on the trust they built with legacy brands flexing their trust muscles.
This familiar heuristic had become second nature to the consumer in any capitalistic marketplace; it feels mundane to even put it in words. But then the television came along with the internet hot on its heels. Things started to break.
This is a scanimate machine. It took up an entire wall. A specialized operator was needed to set it up and run it. It was, as you could guess, expensive. But what did it do? It created bumpers and lower thirds on the screen. That’s right. It put the name of the person on the screen just below them. You could manually fade it on and off with a lever. It had some other novel graphics generators that could be customized by turning dials which produced colorful effects and pixelated drop shadows.
If you saw the name of a news anchor appear on the screen like magic and then fade away, you could bet that the producers spent some real cash and effort into making that happen. There were competitors like the “Chyron machine” which even I am old enough to have played with while earning my degree in film less than 20 years ago.
But just like the serif, the lower third ID (as they are called) is not an entirely necessary piece of ornamentation on the news. The anchor could simply say their name. Or not. Do we need to know the name of the person at the desk? The primary effect of these graphics was just like the elaborate typeset logos of newspapers. “We spent good money on this, pay attention, it’s important and have tried to ensure its accuracy.”
The barriers of entry into the market of producing moving pictures was lowering. By the 1990’s, at a cost which didn’t break the entire bank, one could buy a VHS camcorder and a reel to reel editing machine which would have to live in your garage and “make some news”. But the difference between seeing a “highly produced” piece of television news media, complete with music stings, Chryon animations, and frame in frame interviews and what the guy down the street could produce was still rather stark. For example, there was no way the garage VHS guy could have a new “Breaking News” animation customized with a title for the specific piece of news just hours after it happened. The sunk cost rule was holding, but it was beginning to slip.
And then the internet happened and everything broke.
I don’t need to tell you that today all of these signals are leading us astray. I am currently typing this essay on a digital screen at almost no cost to me or the website that is running the software to allow it. The physical printing of it is unlikely and even if that were to happen, it wouldn’t impress a reader much given the relative ease of production. I could use a new Font right now but you’d know all I had to do was click a button. And a lower third? That’s child’s play for anyone with a subscription to Adobe’s creative suite of software.
I could have a studio ready to roll with good lighting, 4K cameras, good microphones, and a complete graphics package of any style you’d like within a matter of days at the cost of a tiny fraction of what CNN paid for in 1980.
And social media? Well that’s even easier. In fact, it’s free for your tweets to look just as professional as anyone else’s. Maybe that little blue check separates the wheat from the chaff? Consider me unimpressed.
I recently was filming with a woman who was deeply into the Trump QAnon media world. I saw an “Epoch Times” on her desk. Her Facebook page was splattered with posts from various “news” websites. They all had professional looking logos and fine print which successfully signaled the sunk cost heuristic. And all of this is amplified by social media algorithms which ensure that stories like that populate her “newsfeed”, thus fulfilling the other half of the old equation - that it is, in fact, “all over the news” in her world.
We are really up against it here. We should notice just how long the basic sunk cost math of marketplaces has served as our purchasing compass and how quickly it has been smashed.
Perhaps, I am expecting too little of the news audience. Shouldn’t we be interested in vetting the information ourselves? Shouldn’t we all check sources, click through embedded links, find the original studies or unedited video evidence, and read the full court opinions? I think that is asking an awful lot of busy people who already have been primed to believe a headline by their own confirmation bias, an effect that is supercharged by social media’s psychological targeting.
I’m not sure how to fix this. I won’t take a strong stance on the banning of Donald Trump from social media, though I do support it and understand it. I’d be happy to see them extend that to the Khomeini and MBS’s of the world who use the platform in far more vile and deadly ways than even Trump did. But setting those thorny issues aside, I think there is an obvious north star.
We ought to aim for a world which contains as much freedom in the markets as possible while enduring an acceptable amount of the concomitant risks. That world would need to have a highly educated populace with built in mental immunities to false and conspiratorial information. People would be less taken in by the subtle slickness of the presentation and more concerned about the contents. They would be interested in and have the luxury to dig into the sources of a news story. They would be plugged into the standards of journalism and be able to snuff out well-vetted information which is no longer exclusively coupled with all the aesthetic signals and packaging.
Conversations about improving science education and reducing economic stress sound a bit pie-in-the-sky. Efforts in these areas are universal solvents which would improve any problem that ails an open society. Shifting the problem to this solution feels like a cop-out on my part so let me try to explore some other targets of intervention.
We could take our ire out on the social media companies for their role in all of these cycles. Their feedback loop with televised “legacy” media has blurred the lines between them as to render them as nearly indistinguishable. Shutting them down entirely feels like trying to put toothpaste back in the tube but perhaps we can target their business models which incentivize the worst in us. Their zero cost to the user results in the perverse situation where the user’s attention itself becomes the product to be bought by advertisers. We all know by now that outrage inducing false news captures our attention even better than real stuff, no matter if we love it or hate it.
Requiring subscriptions to use social media might pop that balloon, but already you can hear the echoes of dictators applauding this idea in the hopes of unplugging their poorest and most vulnerable citizens from accessing information or, even worse, criticizing the regime. “Social Media taxes” have been deployed for precisely these reasons in places like Uganda by nervous authoritarians.
Publicly owned and operated media channels exist and can compete, but they can’t outdo the already fungible graphics packages of video bloggers down the street and aren’t immune to becoming state biased news sources anyway.
Outlawing private news is a non-starter conversation for a democracy which is built upon the nearly sacred notion of freedom of the press.
So, I’m not sure we have many other choices than to build up our personal defenses and educate ourselves to sus out the good news. The first thing we should do is recognize that we’ve completely erased an important rule which worked for hundreds of years in just the last decade. Almost everything can look like news and be all over “your” news. We must develop and teach new rules, and it has to start now.
With any new “disruptive” technology, there are always unintended consequences, and yes, opportunities. The “democratization” of news producers and the collapse of the formerly high barriers of entry are not necessarily bad things. A 4K camera which puts to shame even the best technology of just a few years ago in everyone’s pocket has it’s obvious benefits of capturing important events and can lead to meaningful change.
But we can’t be blissfully clicking our heels towards what comes next. After false news propelled the events at the Capitol on January 6th, I doubt that many of us are. This “democratization” of news production might ironically end up canceling democracy itself.
Oh, and I didn’t even mention deep fakes.
Good luck©.