“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” If you drop the Latin nomenclature, this point ain’t moot. It directly translates into “Who will guard the guards themselves.” Today, it’s best known as the blurred graffiti, “Who watches the watchmen?” in the movie, Watchmen.
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Let’s start here. The other day, I needed toothpaste. So, I trundled off to Duane Reade at 47th Street and Lexington Avenue. That’s a busy area in a bustling part of the midtown Manhattan business scene.
For those who don’t know, a DR isn’t just like a Walgreens, it’s what Walgreens calls their pharmacies in New York City. And this wasn’t just any DR. It won a chain-wide award for best customer care. That’s what the manager told me. Which meant the urine smell wasn’t domestic, it was probably imported.
Hey, I’m just painting a picture for your old factories here people. Don’t shoot the sketch artist.
Well, the toothpaste was, of course, locked behind 14” of bullet-proof, tamper-proof, and, likely, acid-spilling proof Plexiglas. Since my alter ego is not Superman and I don’t have laser eye superpowers, I pushed the unlock button.
While waiting for the guy with a janitorial level of keys on his belt to fish out a five-dollar box of toothpaste, a homeless guy walks into the store. Drunk. Ripped shoes. Muttering to himself. Pants around his ankles. Butt and winkie exposed for all to see. Apparently, no shirt, no shoes, no service doesn’t apply here. It doesn’t need to. Everything is on lockdown.
Still, it’s pretty clear that he’s looking for something to steal. Literally casing the place. He’s pulling on the clear locked doors to see if one happened to be open. Nope.
Then, he realized that there is stock all over the place in cardboard boxes 2’x2’x3’. The contents hadn’t been emptied into their secure spots. The dude was smart. He looked at the labels of many of these brown cardboard boxes until he settled on one. He grabbed an entire box filled with stuff that hadn’t yet been locked and walked out right out.
A few minutes (yes, minutes) later a guy unlocked my door so I could get the toothpaste.
Maybe to Duane Reade, I fit the profile of someone who’s going to secure a five-finger discount. They lock stuff away from me. That allows their staff to go about their duties secure in the belief that their system prevents theft.
I don’t see it that way. I like to see me as a typical consumer. I got to their site. Browsed. Saw stuff. Paid for things. And go to the next site. Which sounds an awful lot like digital media. Site → browse → read → pay (perhaps by seeing a video or clicking on an ad) → going to the next site. Oh, that, plus using cookies to track me.
Let’s start here. The other day, I found this hysterical story on the New York Times site. If I hadn’t been laughing so hard, I would have written about it. It was behind a paywall, natch. Fortunately, I have a tool to extricate stories from their plexiglass prison. What do you know, I do fit the five-finger discount profile.
[tl;dr.] Elon Musk brought his Starlink satellite internet service to a, “Remote indigenous village in one of the most isolated stretches of the planet.” Within months, the Marubo were, “Grappling with the same challenges that have racked American households for years: teenagers glued to phones; group chats full of gossip; addictive social networks; online strangers; violent video games; scams; misinformation; and minors watching pornography.”
The subhead was delicious, “Elon Musk’s Starlink has connected an isolated tribe to the outside world — and divided it from within.”
Sad. Funny. Poignant in oh so many ways.
Oh, and, fake.
Nine days later, The New York Times published a piece clarifying (emphasis mine) that the Marubo tribe is not, in fact, addicted to pornography and pointing out how its earlier piece was taken out of context, misquoted and widely circulated with misleading headlines.
“The Marubo people are not addicted to pornography. There was no hint of this in the forest, and there was no suggestion of it in The New York Times’s article,” NYT clarified (again, emphasis mine). The new story highlights the benefits in healthcare, education, business, and communication.
The new subhead, “A Times story about the arrival of high-speed internet in a remote Amazon tribe spiraled into its own cautionary tale of the dark side of the web.”
Just like Duane Reade doesn’t want folks walking out with toothpaste, brands don’t want to put their ads near iffy content. It’s a form of theft.
And, again, like DR, media has tried to set up guard rails to stop this. One guard rail is a service called News Guard. Their team of crack journalistic analysts uses transparent criteria to grade sites.
A publisher gets 22 points (out of 100) for not repeatedly publishing false or misleading content. When the Times themselves describes their work as misinformation and a cautionary tale about the web’s dark site, that’s pretty damning. News Guard gives outlets 10 points for avoiding deceptive headlines.
Up until April, News Guard scored the New York Times a perfect 100. In April, the Times lost 12.5 points for blurring the line between news and opinion responsibly.
Sites that agree with government get better grades than sites that don’t. Sites that don’t conform to News Guard’s view of the world can be demonetized. It helps that the world’s third-largest ad agency is an investor in News Guard. Which gives the service a lot of power. And, they wield that power like the blessed rustproof +4 Stormbringer. If they don’t like what you write, you can be toast. Like this.
Just one question, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” Because to me, media’s guards and processes seem as useless Duane Reade’s.