California has an issue. It’s not homelessness, an absence of housing or the state’s growing unaffordability, all of which have been documented at size.
It’s fact decay.
When you imagine that info is the taproot of information and increasing private vistas is vital to studying, there’s a case to be made that the good Golden State — quietly, with scant discover — is rising extra impoverished by the day.
Within the final quarter of a century, a 3rd of California newsrooms have closed.
Almost 7 in 10 journalists have misplaced their jobs.
The relentlessly merciless economics of the information enterprise, pushed in good half by the voracious profiteering of monoliths akin to Google and Fb, has devastated the business — together with the newsroom that employs your pleasant columnist — drastically shrinking its output and leaving California, like the remainder of the nation, vastly worse off.
There’s an info vacuum and that house is filling up with rubbish.
More and more, the day by day eating regimen of “information” that the media serves up is being sourced from partisans, propagandists and self-interested promoters who falsely model themselves as prophets of the unvarnished fact.
(When you genuinely can’t differentiate between information and commentary, akin to this, or between these making an sincere try to current a good, all-things-considered account of occasions versus somebody shaving, eliding and shoehorning details to suit a predetermined narrative, right here’s a suggestion: Save time, skip the remainder of this column and switch to the sports activities or comics pages.)
Not way back, California took a child step towards addressing this rampant decay.
Now, even that tiny effort is tottering.
In August 2024, the state and Google reached a deal to take a position $175 million over 5 years in native journalism. It was a compromise of kinds, and a lopsided one at that. Lawmakers have been pushing a measure, just like these enacted in Australia and Canada, that will have compelled tech giants to pay on-line publishers for the ransacking, er, use, of their journalistic content material.
They’ll effectively afford it.
In only one 12 months — 2018 — Google made $4.7 billion from the work of reports retailers, in line with the Information Media Alliance, a commerce group. The corporate’s share of its settlement with California — $55 million — is barely a speck on its stability sheet; income for Alphabet, Google’s guardian firm, topped $102 billion in its most up-to-date quarterly earnings report.
Google spent $11 million lobbying to kill the journalism-support laws, however ultimately agreed to kick in a minimum of one thing. Fb took an oppositional stance — greed and amorality apparently being endemic to its company tradition — and threatened to take away information posts from its social media platforms if California compelled the corporate to cough up for the information it used.
Gov. Gavin Newsom hailed the take care of Google, modest although it was, with attribute grandiosity.
“This settlement represents a serious breakthrough in guaranteeing the survival of newsrooms and bolstering native journalism throughout California,” he stated. “The deal not solely supplies funding to help a whole bunch of recent journalists however helps rebuild a strong and dynamic California press corps for years to come back, reinforcing the very important function of journalism in our democracy.”
The truth, nevertheless, has turned out fairly otherwise.
In Could 2025, Newsom slashed the state’s first-year dedication to the newsroom-subsidy program from $30 million to $10 million, citing finances constraints. (In the identical finances 12 months, California vastly expanded its movie and TV tax credit score, exhibiting the place the governor’s priorities lay.) Google then stated it will match the state’s $10-million funding and no extra.
However even that $20 million has but to succeed in newsrooms. And going ahead, the prospects for reinforcing California’s stretched-thin newsrooms look exceedingly dim.
In his most up-to-date finances proposal, launched this month, Newsom proposed exactly zero {dollars} for the so-called Newsroom Transformation Fund. Which implies Google is on the hook for exactly zero {dollars} — although any contribution in any respect is topic to the corporate’s goodwill.
“The deal was by no means etched in paper and signed by any get together — it was a handshake settlement in precept,” Erin Ivie, a spokesperson for Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, advised CalMatters. (The Oakland Democrat was a key participant in negotiations with Google.)
“There was by no means any penalty or consequence constructed into the settlement,” Ivie stated, “because the association is voluntary, not coercive.”
Steve Glazer, a former Democratic state senator from Orinda, authored laws that will have imposed an “extraction” charge on the main tech platforms, elevating about $500 million a 12 months that California information retailers might have used to rent native journalists. It handed the Senate in June 2024 on a two-thirds vote however was torpedoed as a part of the compromise that resulted within the take care of Google.
Glazer, who left the Legislature in December 2024, has continued his combat to maintain native journalism, serving as a senior advisor to the group Rebuild Native Information, a nonpartisan, nonprofit group that seeks to do what its title suggests.
“A functioning democracy has unbiased information as [a foundation] for oversight and accountability,” Glazer stated, noting the erasure of two-thirds {of professional} journalists in California within the final 25 years. “The power of the general public to get info, discern the details and have reasoned opinions about who’s in cost and doing what’s in severe jeopardy and not using a strong native information group.”
Forcing social media platforms to pay for the information and data they pilfer and monetize appears a fairly modest and affordable step. Not simply to supply information publishers the equal of a good and sincere wage, but additionally to bolster our wobbling democracy by fostering an engaged and educated citizens.
It’s not an excessive amount of to ask of lawmakers: Make California robustly knowledgeable once more.
