The business model of the news media is “broken” and with it, our fundamental right to information is at risk, a new Unesco report examining global trends in freedom of expression warns.
In the past five years, both news audiences and advertising revenues have moved in huge numbers to internet platforms, with only two companies – Google and Meta (formerly known as Facebook) – soaking up half of all global digital advertising spending.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) analyzed media development trends from 2016 to 2021 and found that global newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by half during the five-year period.
The report indicates that news outlets often struggle to get clicks from readers that determine advertising revenue, and many find themselves “squeezed out” by the proliferation of new voices in the online space and algorithms of digital intermediaries.
“The digital ecosystem has unleashed a flood of competing content and turned large internet companies into the new gatekeepers”, the study explains.
Moreover, with social media users nearly doubling from 2.3 billion in 2016 to 4.2 billion in 2021, there has been greater access to more content and more voices – but not necessarily with the distinctive added value of journalistic content, the study says.
The Covid-19 pandemic has only made the trend worse by exacerbating the decline of advertising revenue, job losses and newsroom closures, the report finds. In a pandemic, journalism is a life-saving frontline service. However, false content related to Covid-19 spread rapidly on social media, while journalistic job cuts created a “significant vacuum” in the information landscape, particularly in low and middle-income countries.
“In September of 2020, over one million posts circulated on Twitter with inaccurate, unreliable, or misleading information related to the pandemic, according to the Covid-19 Infodemics Observatory, an initiative of the Fondazione Bruno Kessler”, Unesco details.
Meanwhile, a survey among 1,400 journalists found that at least two-thirds of them now feel less secure in their jobs, because of the economic pressures of the pandemic. Besides the economic and misinformation/disinformation hurdles journalists face, in the past five years, they have also continued to be targeted around the world.
From 2016 to the end of 2021, Unesco recorded the killings of 455 journalists, who were either targeted as a result of their work, or while on the job. Almost nine out of ten killings remain unresolved, shining light on general impunity for these crimes around the world.
A 2021 Unesco paper found that more than seven out of ten women journalists surveyed had experienced online violence and a fifth reported being victims of offline violence in connection with online threats. At the same time, attacks against journalists covering protests, demonstrations, and riots are “worryingly common” while imprisonment of journalists has reached record highs. In many countries, laws do not protect journalists against these threats, and in some, they actually increase the risk of them.
According to the report, since 2016, 44 countries have adopted or amended new laws that contain vague language or threaten disproportionate punishments for actions like spreading so-called fake news, alleged rumors, or “cyber libel”, leading to self-censorship. In light of the worrying trends, Unesco urged governments to take policy-driven action in three key areas to protect independent media and journalists’ safety.
