Fears that ‘pink slime’ sites could be as harmful to political discourse as foreign disinformation in 2016 and 2020
Political groups on the right and left are using fake news websites designed to look like reliable sources of information to fill the void left by the demise of local newspapers, raising fears of the impact that they might have during America’s bitterly fought 2024 election.
Some media experts are concerned that the so-called pink slime websites, often funded domestically, could prove at least as harmful to political discourse and voters’ faith in media and democracy as foreign disinformation efforts in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections.
According to a recent report from NewsGuard, a company that aims to counter misinformation by studying and rating news websites, the websites are so prolific that: “The odds are now better than 50-50 that if you see a news website purporting to cover local news, it’s fake.”
As with so many things, you can blame Ronald Reagan.
Prior to Reagan, there was a thing called "the Fairness Doctrine.’ A company could only own two local radio stations [AM and FM] and one VHF television station. If a station ran an editorial, they had to allow the opposition equal time for rebuttal. And half hour commercials like “The Transformers” and “GI Joe” were not allowed.
What people often leave out of this is that it only applied to broadcast publicly available television. It did not pertain to subscription cable tv which is why it was deemed unfair to local stations leading to its demise.
Considering this and other “public” versus “paid” examples in commerce and welfare, it says a lot about our culture. We care more about our freedom to spend money than we care about the general welfare of the population. We Americans want the freedom to be “bad” people (for lack of a better term) while rejecting a government that would promote our wellness and prosperity.
This is because our federal guidelines (aka The Constitution) merely outline the root level philosophies and leaves the majority of government responsibilities to the states. And in a time when borders are nearly meaningless in an always instantly connected world, beginning with nationally distributed cable television channels, a lot of people are ignorant to their own state’s legislation and power of their local representatives and own voices.
This country has changed a lot in 250 years. The old rules and guidelines are failing us. The death of the Fairness Doctrine wasn’t unfair, so to speak, but there’s a desperate need for new legislation that does the same on a national level. That’s never going to happen because the federal government can’t limit the “free speech” of entities people have to pay for to gain access to.
I would guess that anything that requires an account to gain access to it, even just an email log in or ISP / cellular subscription, skirts around the same rules that apply to free over the air television. To reiterate, we want the freedom to pay to be lied to. And our Constitution grants us that right.
That’s correct. It’s also where the false notion of the FCC not regulating cable came from. The FCC absolutely regulates cable and satellite, as well as broadcast TV and radio. They’re just toothless now.
https://www.fcc.gov/sites/default/files/broadcasting_false_information.pdf
The problem with that is some topics don’t deserve equal time. For example, should we allow Dow Chemical to dump their toxic waste into the environment? No, absolutely not, no question. We shouldn’t give them a platform to misinform people.
And yet we give Dow all the platforms to misinform people now because they have more money.