Content creators give mainstream journalists valid competition

Social media content creators are offering political commentary that is more trustworthy than some of the major news outlets, writes Dr Victoria Fielding.

DURING THE Democratic National Convention (DNC), there was much discussion from U.S. and Australian journalists about the Democratic Party’s decision to give over space and access that journalists once monopolised to 200 high-profile content creators.

At the same time, journalists criticised Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for not giving enough traditional media interviews, accusing her of ducking scrutiny. Even those who agreed that when mainstream journalists did have access to Harris they asked silly questions, ‘Seeking campaign drama rather than substance’, nonetheless they still argued that she should ‘do what’s right’ by accepting interviews with major networks.

This attitude from mainstream journalists that somehow they are the only ones who can sufficiently scrutinise Harris, communicate about her policies, hold her accountable and interpret her ideas for mass audiences is nonsense. If the “old” news organisations are not serving the public, it’s only natural that newer voices will have a go.

News media has changed but our needs stay the same

Although the internet, smartphones and social media have destroyed the world of print journalism, needs haven’t changed — only the means of assembly and discovery.

For decades, mainstream media have taken for granted their power, assuming nothing would change as long as they held onto their three key ingredients: access to politicians, mass media audiences and cultural authority.

At the same time, they have ignored the changing world around them and refused to be accountable for how responsibly they use their power. The sudden inclusion of content creators at the DNC feels like the moment the mass media frog realised the water was boiling. Rather than face up to their failings, they blame politicians and content creators for a problem of their own making.

Old media’s first ingredient – access to politicians – has always given professional journalists a privileged position ahead of those who want to create news, information and commentary, but aren’t allowed in the coveted “tent” to scrutinise the powerful directly.

The Democrats have shown how this coveted access can quite easily be widened when it suits them, particularly since the other two ingredients are no longer unique to mainstream news outlets.

Their second ingredient – media platforms that communicate with mass audiences – has slowly yet surely been chipped away by social media. Content creators don’t have instant access to mass audiences like professional journalists do, so they have to work harder. Because content creators have to grow their audiences from the ground up, they seek out niches and communicate authentically with audiences who aren’t well served by elitist mainstream coverage.

One example is content creator Carlos Eduardo Espina, the son of Mexican immigrants, who has built a following of 10 million people on TikTok, communicating in English and Spanish, and talking about the policies and lives of communities not served by mainstream news.

For example, here is Carlos interviewing President Biden about the Government working to provide legal status to undocumented spouses, an issue that impacts the lives of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. Compare the relevance and quality of this information to this mainstream news piece which splits hairs about exactly where Kamala Harris grew up.

@carlos_eduardo_espina
Un mensaje de corazón para nuestra comunidad 🙏🏼❤️
♬ sonido original - Carlos_Eduardo_Espina

Another piece dug back 20 years in Harris’ career, desperately searching for something to criticise her about. It is clear what is more relevant to voters today — the policies Harris plans to implement, not where she lived or what she said about her career 20 years ago.

The third ingredient – cultural authority – is a more complex problem for journalists. Once upon a time, it would have been unheard of for a presidential candidate to talk to content creators ahead of journalists because content creators are ostensibly commentators.

The cultural authority of a journalist was in their apparent ability to scrutinise, challenge and analyse a politician’s position from a supposedly objective perspective. Yet, the rise of unashamedly hyper-partisan outlets like Fox News has put mainstream news outlets on the same plain as social media content creators. Although Fox News might pretend to be producing journalism, everyone can see that it is actually creating content no different from openly partisan social media influencers.

In some ways, social media content creators are more trusted than the likes of Fox News. Content creators are openly and transparently partisan, unlike Fox News which manipulatively claims its journalists to be objective when in reality they’re using the façade of journalism to overtly campaign for Donald Trump. The overt advocacy of outlets like Rupert Murdoch’s is damaging the collective legitimacy of journalism, yet the institution itself refuses to acknowledge the problem.

Some mainstream outlets have resisted the blurred commentary-partisanship-campaigning style of Fox News by refusing to spread partisan-inspired disinformation and maintaining the clear delineation between hard news and opinion. For those outlets, the shallowness and meaningless horse race template and false equivalence of their election news has fed mistrust and pushed audiences to find more meaningful coverage of politics elsewhere.

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Add to this, the biggest hit to mainstream journalists’ credibility has been their collective failures to adequately scrutinise Trump. Whether Trump did interviews or not, mainstream media has contributed to the crisis facing U.S. democracy by failing to adequately challenge Trump on his illegitimacy — his attacks on democracy, his sexism, racism, hatred, bigotry, corruption, lies, manipulation and criminal activity.

As Rex Huppke pointed out, why should Harris be cowed by mainstream progressive or conservative pundits, when ‘mainstream news outlets have bent over backward to normalise such a wildly abnormal and destructive politician’ as Trump?

Soon after the DNC, Kamala Harris did sit down with vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz for an interview on CNN. Watching this interview and the analysis that followed, it’s clear that journalists need to move on from their outdated assumption that they are unique in having some magical ability other people do not have to get exclusive information out of a politician or to analyse their policies and ideas.

Having whined about Harris and Walz not doing enough interviews, their CNN interview was assessed as “ordinary”. Well, what did they expect? Mainstream journalists need to get over the idea – including Australia’s New Daily – that one interview will “make or break” a candidate’s campaign. One interview is just content like any other in an environment where politicians communicate directly with audiences, through content created by influencers and through traditional mass media.

As it turns out, the apparently biggest and also pettiest scoop the CNN interviewer could muster was that Walz said his family used IVF to conceive their children, when in fact they used IUI, which is commonly referred to as IVF. The public cares about the threat of the Republicans banning IVF, not the terminology Walz used to talk about his family’s traumatic infertility journey.

If this is the best watchdog journalism the mainstream media can do, it’s no wonder the Democrat campaign sees them as irrelevant. As content creators Nimay Ndolo and Sari Beth Rosenberg so eloquently explained, the inclusion of content creators at the DNC should not cause conflict with traditional journalists. There is no reason they cannot all work side by side to scrutinise politicians, cover the reality of politics for their audiences and communicate valuable information to as many Americans as possible.

As these content creators said, they are working alongside journalists to democratise the information environment. A little competition might improve the work of journalists, forcing them to provide something of value to compete with new voices. And that can only be a good thing for democracy.