“The public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed,” says journalist Sarah Kendzior. In this episode of “Movement Memos,” Kendzior and host Kelly Hayes discuss the decline of journalism in the U.S. and how we can resist the erosion of our shared history, our values and our shared reality.

Music by Son Monarcas & Pulsed

Note: This a rush transcript and has been lightly edited for clarity. Copy may not be in its final form.

Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the collapsing state of journalism in the U.S. and resisting the erosion of our shared history, our values, and our shared reality. I will be navigating these topics with my friend Sarah Kendzior, author of The View From Flyover Country, Hiding in Plain Sight, and They Knew. Sarah has a PhD in anthropology from Washington University in St. Louis, where she researched politics and digital media in authoritarian states. Sarah is also the author of one of my favorite newsletters, which is aptly titled Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter.

Sarah and I became friends when I was visiting St. Louis, during the protests in Ferguson, about a decade ago. Over the years, we have both been derided and dismissed by fans of the status quo and the establishment — people who ridiculed our analysis until it became undeniable, at which point, they attempted to co-opt it, and reduce it to Democratic talking points. Those people probably don’t want to hear anything Sarah or I have to say about the political terrain in 2024, because if you don’t have anything nice to say about Joe Biden, they would rather you didn’t say anything at all. Well, we are going to say a lot over the next hour, and my hope is that we can leave you with some meaningful ideas and questions to engage. Because, while I believe elections matter, I think it’s incredibly dangerous to reduce our political work to electoral questions and to oversimplify our political analysis into electoral talking points.

One of the topics we will touch on today is the importance of independent media. I have talked a lot, over the years, about how thoroughly corporatized the U.S. media landscape has become. With so many publications going under, and so many media workers being laid off, I believe the award-winning work we do at Truthout is more crucial than ever. So, if you would like to support “Movement Memos,” you can subscribe to Truthout’s newsletter or make a donation at truthout.org. You can also support the show by subscribing to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, or by leaving a positive review on those platforms. Sharing episodes on social media is also a huge help. As a union shop with the best family and sick leave policies in the industry, we could not do this work without the support of readers and listeners like you, so thanks for believing in us and for all that you do. And with that, I hope you enjoy the show.

[musical interlude]

KH: Sarah Kendzior, welcome back to the show.

SK: Oh, thank you for having me.

KH: I want to begin today by talking about the current media landscape. The layoffs just keep coming. Being a writer or journalist has never been an easy way to make a living, but the situation has gotten increasingly bleak. You and I both have newsletters, which is a route a lot of writers are taking these days to make ends meet. As publications collapse or simply lay off workers en masse, more and more writers are vying for subscriptions to their newsletters. Most newsletter writers do not have editors, fact-checkers, or legal support, all of which places a greater strain on folks like us — and, of course, the average reader can only afford so many subscriptions. Can you talk about what’s happened to journalism in the US in recent years and over the course of the last few decades and how it intersects with the troubling political situation we’re experiencing?

SK: This is the worst that I’ve ever seen it, and I’ve worked in journalism now for 25 years. And I can’t believe that I have nostalgia for these previous eras of crises. For example, in the early 2010s where people were expected to write for free or to intern at large corporations that could certainly afford to pay them. And journalism became a way only for people with inherited wealth to make a living while the rest of us basically tried to survive.

My first job ever was at the New York Daily News from 2000 to 2003, so I watched digital media destroy print and I watched people have no backup plan when that occurred. And the fact that 25 years later we’re still in this position where there’s no sustainable model, it’s not just bad in terms of how it affects journalists, it’s much more dangerous in how it affects democracy and how it affects society.

And with this many decades having gone by, my biggest concern is how it affects memory. We have digital memory, we have investigative pieces, exposes, day-to-day coverage of all of these momentous political events from the last few decades housed online. But they can be deleted or altered at the whims of the plutocrats and oligarchs that buy them. And we saw this with Gawker back in, I believe it was 2016, and we’re seeing it now with Vice. And we’ve seen it with a lot of smaller outlets and a lot of individual websites. And this is disastrous because it’s our history that is being erased. And it’s also coming, of course, when there’s an attack on libraries, there’s an attack on free speech, there’s a rise in book banning. It’s all part of a greater project. I’m very concerned about that. I’m concerned about the information that was lost.

I used to have this mantra about Trump back in 2016 when I said, “This is not actually a laughing matter. This is a very dangerous candidate with lifelong ties to organized crime and lifelong financial misdeeds and just other abhorrent behavior.” And it’s all been publicly recorded through writers like Dean Barrett or David Cay Johnston or publications like The Village Voice in New York and Vanity Fair. They were all covering him throughout the ’80s and ’90s. And so my knowledge of Trump never relied on any kind of inside information, it relied on works that were in the public domain. And now the public domain is being purchased, and it is being purchased in order for it to be destroyed.

If I were to right now attempt to find the exact same information on Trump and his cohort that I found in 2016, I would not be able to do it. A lot of those articles have been deleted. A lot of them are paywalled. This is a problem that plagued academia for a long time and now plagues journalism where most people just cannot get basic access to factual information relevant to a candidate in an election. For that matter, they can’t get it on other essential matters like public health issues like what’s happening with COVID. You have to pay for that knowledge while propaganda and lies and memes and all of these other things just roam around free. There’s a real struggle. I’ve been talking for a while, so I’m just going to end it there and see what your thoughts are on this too.

Kelly Hayes: I really appreciate your thoughts on this. I was really lucky to come into journalism through the blogosphere, and to get hired as an intern, then as a fellow, and ultimately as a staff member at Truthout, where we have not had any layoffs in recent years. And I do want to emphasize the importance of supporting the kind of journalism that we believe should exist, and supporting ethically produced publications, because those outlets are an endangered species in these times. The corporate landscape is configured against us, on a number of levels, as are social media algorithms, which is why it’s important to sign up for newsletters, to directly connect with the material we want to read, from trusted sources, because algorithms are not designed to maintain a healthy media ecosystem. In fact, they’ve gone a long way toward destroying a lot of publications. It’s like we have a dying media ecosystem, on a toxic landscape, and now we have so-called AI, further corrupting the information sphere with mass-produced misinformation. The fact that social media platforms are incorporating AI tools is only going to accelerate this enshittification.

And speaking of social media, I was actually on the verge of deleting all my tweets last year, on that platform that Elon Musk wants us to call X but that we all still call Twitter. I had tried and failed, using a particular service, and I was about to go about it another way, and then I read something you wrote about how you were keeping your Twitter account intact because “chronology is the enemy of autocracy.” I really appreciated those words and they immediately rang true to me. Can you talk about how the idea that “chronology is the enemy of autocracy” applies to social media?

Sarah Kendzior: Yes, absolutely. I encourage people who have social media accounts, even if they’re leaving that platform for good reason, to keep their account intact because often it is the only record of something that occurred. Particularly if you’re an activist, a dissident, a journalist, a firsthand witness to a crisis, your record is an important historical contribution. And you might not feel that way, but with mainstream outlets and other sources of information being either paywalled or deleted, this is what remains. This is the people’s voice. This is the story that is told from the streets, told from the ground. These are people’s immediate personal reactions to what is happening untainted by retrospect and the biases that come with it, and so it is crucial.

We also live in an era where politicians lie. They lie across the political spectrum about some of the worst crises of our life. They lie about COVID, about climate change, about coups, about corruption, and so it is important to maintain a chronology and establish who knew what and when and what could have been done. Because what a lot of politicians do in particular is they feign ignorance or feign shock. In order to avoid accountability, they pretend the news they’re hearing is something that they’re hearing for the very first time, so therefore they had no responsibility or obligation to stop this crisis before it spread. And they do this on a number of issues.

What Twitter is is a large file of evidence, and it’s incredibly valuable. And this obviously doesn’t just correspond to the United States but to all of these countries around the world where you often saw activists using Twitter as a way to disseminate information. You saw this during the Arab Spring, during Occupy Wall Street, during Ferguson, during all of the protests that took place during Trump’s era, during the summer of 2020. All of that is recorded on there.

And I do wonder if one of the main things that they want to delete are all of the records coming out of Palestine, coming out of Gaza. And I don’t just mean what’s happening now, but 2014, 2021, all of these other eras where you saw the Israeli military massacring people and you had firsthand accounts including video, including photos from the ground written by Palestinian citizens. And this is something brand new.

I think 2014 was a turning point for how people considered that conflict and where their sympathies lay because the mainstream media reporting was so biased and we so rarely heard directly from Palestinians in the news, and we suddenly were hearing straight from the ground these atrocities that were being committed by the Israeli military and these horrific statements often said in Hebrew only by the Israeli government. But they would be translated by reporters from Haaretz or from other Israeli publications or just by speakers of Hebrew, speakers of Arabic. We suddenly had insight into that world and we knew the order in which things played out. And all of that is valuable.

And this is a very bleak thing to say, but a lot of folks who were involved in all of these battles for freedom that I just mentioned have died. They have killed over 100 journalists this year from Palestine. And a number of activists from civil rights movements and labor movements in the United States are dead as well. And their record is on Twitter, their record is on these social media sites, and it’s preserved. And there’s always an effort for powerful people to try to besmirch and smear someone’s reputation while they’re alive, also while they’re gone. And so that record of what people actually said and what they stood for and what they did is preserved on there. And I think it’s very important that we keep it.

And I think there should be a greater collective effort to archive the tweets, the articles, the content created by people involved in activist movements so that when powerful people try to tell the story of what happens and put all of the blame on the activists, on the dissidence, and I think we see a growing tendency of politicians to do that right now, we have the proof. Your best evidence is your own words. I’ve always felt that way. And that’s one of the reasons that I don’t paywall my own work because I’m so frequently falsely accused of saying things that I never said or having beliefs that I don’t hold that it’s just much easier to point people to what I’ve written and when I wrote it and say, “This is who I really am and this is what I really said, and it’s right there. Now you have something to work with.” And I think that’s a useful thing, an important thing for everybody.

KH: I really appreciate that perspective, and I was really grateful for your intervention, around preserving all of that information in a public way. It made sense to me, the moment I read it, because I really believe that part of what Elon Musk was trying to do with his takeover of Twitter was to obliterate our shared reality. With the media landscape in collapse, and with so much of the historical record paywalled, social media is a deeply important record of our shared reality and of our firsthand experiences of political life. It’s always been a messy, troubled realm of communication, but making it........

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