Mainstream Media Gaslights Readers to Support New Zealand Link Tax Law

New Zealand is apparently is the latest country that is, unfortunately, dealing with an impending link tax.

The link tax is failed policy, plain and simple. The idea is to demand that platforms pay publishers for the “privilege” of hosting news links the media themselves post on there in the first place. It’s about as backwards as it sounds, but the greedy mainstream media has pushed for the idea of having their cake and eating it to.

The laws were foolishly tried in multiple countries like Canada and Australia. In the US, it was even tried in California. It was either a catastrophic failure or is on the way to being an abysmal failure. Being from Canada, we know every excruciating detail of how badly the link tax law, known as the Online News Act, went.

One of the side effects of the link tax is the fact that the mainstream media proved that if they had to choose between factually reporting the news and pushing something that is in their business interest, they’ll choose their business interests every single time. As we saw in Canada, the mainstream media will lie their asses off and turn on a firehose of disinformation to try and get their way. They really could care less about their reputation in such a scenario and the dwindling trust they have is just a small sacrifice to the broader goals of, in this case, stealing money from others.

Today, I learned that mainstream media is up to their usual tricks. In this case, it came from the Associated Press which is chock full of misleading statements and convenient omissions. The article really doesn’t waste time as they started directly with their headline:

Google says it will stop linking to New Zealand news if a law passes forcing it to pay for content

The headline is highly misleading. It implies that Google is using “content” and should be paying for it. This obviously is not true. The “content” that they are talking about is links, headlines, a snippet, and a postage stamp sized sample of the image at most. This has long qualified for various fair dealing and fair use exceptions in copyright law. What’s more, it is publishers who not only derive the benefit of those links appearing on Google’s services, but jump through the hoops to ensure that their content is posted up there in the first place. They are the ones posting this content on Google. If they didn’t want their links appearing on Google services, it’s as trivial as posting a robots.txt file on their services. It’s really that simple.

Verdict: Misleading statement

The first paragraph doesn’t make things any better:

Google said Friday it will stop linking to New Zealand news content and will reverse its support of local media outlets if the government passes a law forcing tech companies to pay for articles displayed on their platforms.

This is false because this isn’t what is happening on the platforms. Whole articles are not, in fact, being posted on the platforms in the first place. Throughout the debates in Australia, the US, and in Canada, not one person has stepped forward to provide evidence that this is happening. It is similar to the scraping claims we’ve heard in the past, but it still wasn’t true.

Verdict: False

Moving on to the fifth paragraph, we get this:

But the loss of more than 200 newsroom jobs earlier this year — in a national media industry that totaled 1,600 reporters at the 2018 census and has likely shrunk since — prompted the current government to reconsider forcing tech companies to pay publishers for displaying content.

This is misleading in a number of angles. First, it implies that the losses in journalism is thanks to the existence of the platforms. This is simply not true. If anything, the platforms have been helping journalism outlets keep their businesses afloat thanks to the traffic they send their way. Evidence of this includes the fact that the media outlets often advertise on these platforms on top of it all, paying the platforms to display their links on top of it all.

Second, it implies that a link tax will inherently help slow the losses. There is no evidence to suggest that it will and plenty of evidence to suggest that the opposite problem will happen. When Meta dropped news links in Canada, an estimated $230 million in value went up in smoke along with the move for news outlets in general.

Staring down the barrel of the imminent demise of the entire news sector in Canada with Google preparing to block news links as well, the government folded to Google, handing them everything they asked for and called it a “deal”. That being a $100 million fund model in exchange for killing the link tax in Canada. Canadian mainstream media spun this loss into a “victory” and proclaimed that they had scored a $100 million deal that would bring about a new era of prosperity for media outlets. The reality is that the mainstream media actually lost an estimated $130 million overall.

Even worse is the fact that the $130 million loss per year is actually the most optimistic way of spinning what happened in Canada. That $100 million isn’t even all new money. It actually folds existing deals made by publishers made previously into the $100 million. For some outlets that had already inked deals, they wound up losing money in the process.

Even if you don’t believe all of these figures pointing to losses, the reaction to all of this pretty much speaks volumes. The mainstream media wound up being on the receiving end of bailout after bailout after bailout after begging for more bailouts. Even with all of these massive bailouts from the government media companies issued wave upon wave upon wave of layoffs across the sector – a situation that mirrored what happened in Australia no less. For other outlets, the situation was even worse. At best, there were major consolidations that took place. For others, however, it was a trail of business destruction that saw bankruptcies upon bankruptcies upon bankruptcies. For those outlets that did manage to survive the news media apocalypse, they saw their traffic get absolutely decimated.

Make no mistake, the Canadian link tax law has wreaked havoc in the Canadian news sector. It was a situation of unmitigated greed and shortsightedness that led to this self-inflicted disaster. Yet, conveniently, all of that evidence mysteriously gets left out of the Associated Press report. Had the reporter actually bothered to do actual research, at least some of these facts would’ve turned up in the research. At minimum, I consider this negligence. This especially considered that the paragraph was followed up with this:

The law aims to stanch the flow offshore of advertising revenue derived from New Zealand news products.

This paragraph implies that the platforms are taking money from the publishers. This is absolutely false. The media companies are not actually entitled to ad revenue. If another company finds a better way to advertise to consumers, that is, at worst, setting up a better advertising system. If advertisers choose the platforms over the media outlets, that’s just the market making the decisions and not some grand conspiracy to “steal” money from the publishers. Moreover, many of the media companies in question utilize Google Adsense for their revenue in the first place, encouraging advertisers to choose to advertise with Google instead of them.

In addition to that, the comment about paying “publishers for displaying content” is also misleading for reasons I’ve already covered.

Verdict: Misleading on 3 counts

What’s more, the article also carries misleading statement from others:

The News Publishers’ Association, a New Zealand sector group, said in a written statement Friday that Google’s pledge amounted to “threats” and reflected “the kind of pressure that it has been applying” to the government and news outlets, Public Affairs Director Andrew Holden said.

The government “should be able to make laws to strengthen democracy in this country without being subjected to this kind of corporate bullying,” he said.

This has long been an easy thing to debunk. The publishers are claiming that platforms are “stealing” from them. So, in response, the platforms say that they are going to drop news links so they are no longer “stealing” from them. The publishers then proclaim that they are “threatening” them. If anything, they should be happy that the platforms have decided to stop “stealing” from them, but they are upset for their lack of “theft”. You really can’t help but notice how self-defeating and contradictory these arguments are.

Verdict: Failure to fact check misleading claim

The misleading statements continued with this:

Australia was the first country to attempt to force tech firms — including Google and Meta — to the bargaining table with news outlets through a law passed in 2021. At first, the tech giants imposed news blackouts for Australians on their platforms, but both eventually somewhat relented, striking deals reportedly worth 200 million Australian dollars ($137 million) a year, paid to Australian outlets for use of their content.

The problem with this paragraph is that this is not what happened in Australia. What really happened is that the platforms (foolishly) agreed to pay media companies a set fund. This in exchange for being exempt from the Australian News Bargaining Code.

Verdict: False statement

The omissions then get repeated with this paragraph:

As Canada prepared to pass similar digital news bargaining laws in 2023, Google and Meta again vowed to cease their support for the country’s media. Last November, however, Google promised to contribute 100 million Canadian dollars ($74 million) — indexed to inflation — in financial support annually for news businesses across the country.

This paragraph carefully omits the losses, layoffs, bailouts and traffic getting gutted as I already covered earlier. What’s more, this paragraph also omits the fact that Meta continues to not allow news links on their platform in Canada. Following the dropping of news links, Facebook’s traffic remained unchanged and Meta’s stock value soared. As Meta said it themselves, users don’t primarily use their service for news.

Verdict: Omits several critical facts

From there, the mainstream media whining was showcased:

While Google pointed Friday to its support of local outlets, Peacock said one of its funding recipients – the publisher of a small newspaper – had told a parliamentary committee this year that the amount he received was “a pittance” and not enough to hire a single graduate reporter.

… except for the fact that paying journalists employed by other media outlets is not, and never will be, the platforms jobs. That’s the news organizations damned jobs.

Verdict: Failure to fact check misleading statement

Ultimately, this article is pure gaslighting and propaganda. It depends on the readers not knowing how the internet works and resorts to misleading statements, false statements, and very particular omissions to sell a story. What is infuriating in all of this is the fact that these lies the outlet are telling is not only going to harm themselves, but everyone else around them. If they are lucky, deals with smaller values will be reached, only leading to massive market distortions in the media sector. It’s still highly damaging, but at least the damage will be comparatively limited to what happened in Canada.

Either way, you can add this latest attempt to the pile of reasons why the mainstream media is losing credibility in the public. They are straight up gaslighting their readers. If the media is wondering why people are trusting them less and less, I’ll once again point to the content they are producing. The content is providing ample reasons why people trust them less and less.

Totals

Misleading statements: 4
False statements: 2
Failures to fact check claims by others: 2
Omissions: Too many to count

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.