Another media bloodbath underscores the need to break up Big Tech
And small bits of good news elsewhere
Welcome to a premium Tuesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
It hit 61 degrees here in New York and I’m remembering once again that so much of my outdoor time during the week used to come during commutes to an office, traveling to events elsewhere in the city, or seeing friends after work. I’m sure I’m no different than most people, so do me a favor and get outside for at least a few minutes tonight. Or don’t, whatever works for you.
Tonight’s big headline: The House of Representatives passed the PRO Act, organized labor’s biggest legislative priority. Its fate in the Senate is unclear, given uniform Republican opposition and the sticky little matter of the filibuster in the Senate, but between the slow evolution that Sen. Joe Manchin has begun to make on reforming cloture rules and Democrats’ renewed emphasis on labor priorities, I’d say that this thing has at least a decent chance of becoming law. Democrats inexplicably whiffed on card check for unions back during Obama’s first two years and repeating that mistake would be very costly.
If I had to make a prediction, I’d say that Democrats will institute a speaking filibuster, requiring Republicans to give marathon (and eventually unsustainable) speeches if they want to gum up the works on legislation. But I think they’ll only really invoke the rule on a few big must-pass priorities, including new voting rights laws, a giant green infrastructure spending package, and perhaps the PRO Act. Maybe they’ll pass a lower-than-$15 minimum wage increase indexed to inflation, too. I assume all of the legislation they pass this way will be weakened by GOP demands and then not supported by any Republicans, but baby steps, I guess.
Look at this great endorsement of HR 1!
Time for more news and analysis!
Important News You Need to Know
The Media
I don’t usually cover the media much in this newsletter, but today I’ll make an exception. Over the past few days, the companies that control much of the media in both the United States and UK have responded to current events and external pressures exactly as we’ve come to expect, surprising no one but drawing outrage for the brazenness of their cynicism nonetheless.
Today, HuffPost laid off 47 employees, most of whom were journalists for the site. Many of these journalists had been there a decade or longer — I worked at the site in 2010-12 and nearly all of the former colleagues I had remaining at HuffPost seemed to have been let go. Jonah Peretti, the CEO of BuzzFeed, which just recently bought HuffPost, said that they had enough money to run the company for the next few years but blamed the layoffs on the losses that HuffPost incurred last year, when it was part of a shambolic media portfolio owned and operated with arrogant cluelessness by Verizon during a historic pandemic.
Incidentally, my career has also included stops at BuzzFeed and Yahoo, which is now owned by Verizon, so I’m pretty familiar with the lay of the land and how they function. You don’t get much different than BuzzFeed and Yahoo in terms of audience, at least as far as mainstream web outlets go, but the story is really the same everywhere that isn’t subsidized by right-wing oligarch money (ie Ben Shapiro’s websites and their ilk). Each of my former employers has rolled out the guillotine for employees (mostly journalists) again and again over the past few years, even with unions in place at two of them. A friend was laid off from another media company in a mass casualty event this winter (after being furloughed for months) and my former team at NBCUniversal, which had several dozen employees, was wiped out in November.
This isn’t just a product of the pandemic — before I got laid off at NBCU last March during a first wave of cuts pegged to a “pivot” (ie cost-cutting), I’d been fortunate to have avoided round after round of executions at my previous employers. (And in a way, I’m lucky to have gotten the ax early last year, because I’ve been able to focus on new opportutnities during this weird interminable pandemic year.) After the huge layoffs across the industry last spring, the continued cuts aren’t necessarily shocking, but the manner in which they’ve been conducted is consistently needlessly cruel.
For example, today HuffPost employees were invited to a private Zoom event, the password to which was “spr!ngisH3r3,” and then told that the guillotine blade would be coming down throughout the afternoon. It was like a cheerful version of Game of Thrones, without the sex appeal but a similarly terrible ending.
Sitting alone at home, the journalists and other employees were forced to wait to see if the grim reaper would pop up in their inboxes. This kind of staggered firing-by-email has become the standard, at least at digital media companies, with none of the faux-empathy that accompanies in-person layoffs. It’s even worse than the corporate HR dystopia envisioned in the Jason Reitman/George Clooney movie Up in the Air in 2009.
The people let go at HuffPost were generally in their mid-30s, having graduated from young intern and associate editor positions at the start of last decade to accomplished reporters, designers, and managers. Many had gotten married and some had become parents during that time span. Now, they are left to pick up the pieces and navigate a ruined industry as the company to which they’d given countless late nights and an incalculable portion of their youth tossed them a few months severance and undoubtedly began the search for the next generation of young journalists who are willing to sacrifice the same at the altar of content and the false sense of family these places foster.
The rest of the internet over the past few days has been wall-to-wall coverage of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s interview with Oprah. It was undoubtedly a significant historical event, the accusations levied by the pair against the British monarchy unprecedented in their directness and publicity, with Markle’s openness about her mental health also a major groundbreaking moment. The coverage in the British tabloids has been as vicious as expected, with Rupert Murdoch’s portfolio of right-wing rags and the rest of the bottom-feeding industry devoting nearly all of their online space and most of their physical pages to racist hysteria.
While generally exhibiting a kind of online millennial/zoomer identity progressivism that is the exact opposite of the out-for-blood British tabloids, American coverage of the royal rumble has focused on both the importance of the mental health aspects and the memes and Twitter jokes that emerged in real-time as Buckingham Palace was set ablaze.
BuzzFeed has done some very impressive hard journalism, but it was built on perfecting the art of capturing and gamifying the internet hive mind, which still provides the bulk of its content. It does not take expert journalists to put together these posts, and I say that as someone who put together plenty of them back in the day. It just takes energetic, cheap labor with an addiction to the internet, and I say that as someone who served as energetic, cheap labor.
In a way, it’s hard to blame these companies for that approach, in so much that it’s really the only way to be profitable on a broad scale online. They have to present enormous statistics to potential advertisers who buy sponsored posts that are hardly distinguishable from the “independent” stories. The more traffic, the higher the payday, but it’s become increasingly hard to even make money that way. Advertisers can use social media and their own sites to reach customers, even if they often do so in staggeringly idiotic ways.
It’s not as if the internet doesn’t present boundless opportunities to advertise and innovate; the real issue, as with most things when you get down to it, are corporate mega-monopolies. In this case, it’s Google, Facebook, and Amazon, which own nearly 63% of the online ad market and allegedly collude on prices. The vulture hedge funds that continue to buy up newspapers, layoff career journalists, push down wages, and sell the outlets for parts are also responsible for a solid chunk of this ongoing misery.
Biden today nominated Lina Khan, an anti-trust antagonist to Big Tech, to the Federal Trade Commission, which follows on the heels of his nominating Tim Wu, the godfather of Net Neutrality, to the National Economic Council. Clearly, his team understands that these matters require urgent addressing and that Big Tech companies that control the market using unfair practices must be regulated. Given the contraction in the media, their dominance, if left unchecked, will only grow.
Workers Rights
Remember how both of Delaware’s Democratic senators voted against the $15-an-hour minimum wage increase last weekend, citing some disproven nonsense about hurting the economy during a recession? Well, we can officially say that the lawmakers back home disagree with them, as Delaware’s legislature is moving forward on its own statewide minimum wage increase.
Speaking of not representing a home state’s interests, Kyrsten Sinema, who pissed off half the Democratic Party with her enthusiastic thumbs down on the $15-an-hour amendment, is officially out of touch with her own constituents. Not only is Arizona’s minimum wage over $12 now and climbing after voters there approved a hike several election cycles ago, a new poll shows that 61% of Arizonans support enacting a $15-an-hour minimum wage even if it means killing the filibuster. Hey, that’s enough to invoke cloture!
In better news, Virginia Democrats have been on a roll this session, with labor policies highlighted by a big expansion of workers protections. Now, Attorney General Mark Herring is launching a Worker Protection Unit to strengthen worker protection laws (obviously) and focus on wage theft. The PRO Act, by the way, would eliminate “right to work” laws entirely.
Voting Rights
Georgia: On Sunday, Republicans in the state Senate passed — by the barest of margins — a bill that would eliminate no-excuse absentee voting and automatic voter registration. These numbers underline just how damaging this will be for people of color, should Gov. Brian Kemp sign the legislation:
A full quarter of voters in Georgia used mail-in voting last year, leading to record turnout, including amongst Black Georgians.
This will reduce the number of voters eligible to use absentee ballots to just 2.8 million of the more than 7.7 million voters registered in Georgia.
It should be noted that the GOP knows these are shameful laws. Four state Senators sat out the vote because they did not believe in them (they should have voted against them, but that takes courage) and the Lt. Governor decided not to preside over the chamber because he doesn’t support them, either.
And yet, not enough of them have any sense of shame. Legislators are continuing to push other bills that would cut back on early voting (including the Sunday “Souls to the Polls” drives so crucial to Black voters), adding voter ID requirements to absentee ballots, and render ballot drop boxes almost functionally useless. The session ends on March 31st, so it will be a sprint to get as many of these draconian rules passed and signed as possible.
Listen to Stacey Abrams:
Iowa: Not to be outdone, Republicans in Iowa have passed their own new slate of voter suppression changes, which were signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds yesterday. The list includes:
Cuts early voting days from 29 down to 20 days.
Closes polls at 8 pm instead of 9 pm.
Establishes the close of polls on Election Day as the deadline for returning absentee ballots, whereas before they were considered valid so long as they were postmarked by election day.
Creates a limit of one drop box per county, regardless of their size or population.
New Hampshire: Democrats blew it big time in New Hampshire in November, losing both houses of the legislature and ceding total control of the state government to the GOP. As a result, Republicans are quickly moving to install their own voter suppression laws.
Healthcare
Wyoming: Hey, some good news! The Biden administration’s expansion of Medicaid funding seems as if it’s enticing the far right-wing GOP government in Wyoming to finally expand Medicaid. The law is being sponsored by a Democrat, but it passed a GOP-held committee in the state Senate. Bipartisanship!
Colorado: Unwilling to wait any longer on drug prices, Colorado Democrats are moving to create a pharmaceutical price review board, which would set limits on how much drug companies could charge for certain medications. Other laws under consideration would allow Colorado to import prescription drugs from foreign countries other than Canada, which seems odd and counterintuitive.
Florida: Did Gov. Ron DeSantis have COVID-19 this fall? Florida Agricultural Commissioner and presumptive gubernatorial candidate Nikki Fried thinks that he came down with the virus and went AWOL to cover it up before Election Day. Wouldn’t be a surprise, considering how little regard DeSantis has shown for Covid safety and how politically craven he is.
And Finally
Yet another accusation of sexual harassment and impropriety has been leveled against embattled New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. That makes six. He’s got to resign.
Oh, and speaking of boorish New Yorkers, I would love to see this happen:
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