Crackpots #91: The Political Economy of The Media, part I — from Enlightenment to Mass Psychosis (Patreon)

This week's newsletter comes straight from previous guest Vincent Bevins, author of The Jakarta Method and If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution. Enjoy!

This is a shameless promotional post and it is also a contribution to the critique of political economy of communications. So please, first, subscribe to the newsletter and world-system mini-magazine that we have just launched, North South Notes. Then, please join us on a whirlwind tour of "the media," who pays for it and what it does, throughout history. The carousel will come full circle. It has four parts.

In the beginning there was the newsletter

Books are "media" and they predate the printing press by millennia. But they are long-term projects and developed on a different track than the one that concerns us today. When and how did people begin to learn recent history, other than word of mouth? How did they start to find out what was happening outside of their immediate surroundings? Where did journalism come from?

The newspaper emerged out of the avviso, the handwritten newsletter sent to wealthy clients from places such as Venice. In early modern Europe, most residents were not expected to know what was happening in the world of politics, and they were certainly not expected to have an opinion. Diplomats sent letters back to Kings and Sultan; that was it. But slowly, a small class of merchants emerged, largely in cities and operating semi-autonomously from feudal structures – in some languages, they might later be called burghers. They wanted to know what was going on elsewhere: a prince murdered here, a wedding there, the movement of major ships and rumors about ongoing battles; and they had the money to pay some enterprising Venetian or Roman to write down or copy that information and mail it to them.These avvisi (the plural for “notice” in Italian) had sections marked out by date and the origin of the news (or gossip, as it were): for example, something like: Genova, May 9. The sheets were sometimes called gazette, since copies were sold for the price of una gazzeta, a small coin.By the early 1600s, one German man worked out he could save money by using a press to make more copies, and rack up more subscribers. But the handwritten letter continued to play a role for a long time, because its wealthy customers preferred to have access to exclusive information. A small set of readers paid, quite directly, for the news.

The rise of the patron

Soon, powerful groups found it served their interest to control what people read in the papers. Louis XIII of France hired a strange Huguenot to found La Gazzete de France in 1633, which told the King’s version of events and recounted the miracles he performed. The Crowne set up its own version in Oxford in 1665. Official papers like this arose alongside the original track for the production of the news-commodity, the business man serving bourgeois clients in the private realm. These two models would enter intermittent competition, sometimes bloody, via censorship, repression, and resistance, in what liberal mythology would later call the battle for “press freedom.”

It was expensive for most people to buy a newspaper, but a member of the nascent middle class might afford to buy a cup at a popular coffee house and read a copy there. You could make a little money printing papers, but it was not common to do so for purely commercial reasons. Owners and editors had a larger interest – whether participating in public debate as publisher or intellectual, or, later, promoting the ideology of a political movement, party, or state.In 1840 in the young United States of America, for example, the vast majority of papers were party papers. Newspapers had a viewpoint, and it was declared and clearly understood by readers. By then, the bourgeoisie had already won, at least in the countries that would most shape the future of the North Atlantic. This was the era of the “party press” as well as the “radical press” in which the young Karl Marx was raised. There were advertisements in the newspapers, largely of the type that we would call “classifieds” (I need to hire a maid, young and polite) or “snake oil” (Perry Davis' Vegetable Pain-Killer). The word “classified” sounds far too anodyne for what it contains. For a long time, the American newspaper made money running “advertisements” of this type: “my slave has run away.”In this era, it was primarily the owners that paid, in order to publicize a political party or push forward a given set of ideas, and these costs were offset to some extent by sales and advertising revenue.

The "golden age" — the rise of advertising

Starting in the middle of the 1800s and picking up steam around 1880, the industrial bourgeoisie began to advertise. Over the 19th century, advertising revenue became a very important source of funding for the newspaper. Then it became the primary source.

This meant slow, often unperceived transformations in the political economy of media. Increasingly, it made sense to sell as many papers as possible, because you were selling audiences, not papers. It made sense to target a wide range of people, rather than readers who shared your ideology (but since advertisers were paying, it made a lot more sense to target people who could afford to buy their products). The radical press fell to the wayside, and a commercial press came into being. An owner could operate a newspaper purely for the purpose of maximizing profits, and properly capitalist media came into being.

Over the 19th century especially in the United States, an ethic of “objectivity” and a focus on the “fact” as the fundamental unit of human knowledge came to be central to journalism. The professional reporter, going out to collect stories (or making them up) replaced the political essayist. Even if the reader might produce a penny for the newsboy, it was the advertiser who was really paying, and he wasn’t paying to inform you.Outside of the capitalist nations of the North Atlantic, early print media was often limited to the colonial elite. At the same time, like Marx himself back in Germany, revolutionary and anti-colonial movements immediately saw the potential of the medium, and founded their own papers, seeking subscribers and advertisers to fund them while dodging the censorship and repression unleashed by the imperial core.

In the 20th century, the ruling class in the United States chose to hand the radio waves and television frequencies over to private firms that used them exclusively to advertise products (economically speaking the shows were incidental), while Western Europe funded programming with direct citizen contributions. In the year 2000, around 80% of newspaper revenue came from advertising.

The ad man departs (we go insane, we beg, we plead)

Craig and his “list” killed the classified advertisement, but it would have died a natural death without him. There was no longer a need to buy a paper to learn about commercial opportunities that genuinely interested you (like a job). In 2000, SF Weekly or the Village Voice could survive entirely by placing ads for bassists and sex workers, but that kind of thing would move online with search. One entire world-historical funding source was deleted.

Over the 2000s and 2010s, print media migrated to the World Wide Web. You will hear the story that people stopped reading, or stopped paying for news, but that is very misleading. What happened was a great migration of advertising dollars. For a while, it appeared to my class that you could make money by getting a lot of clicks, but this was a mirage with pathetic consequences. We ran around making very serious fools of ourselves, for about 20 years, losing the trust of our readers as our business model collapsed, in an endless vicious cycle.Digital advertising was a scam, or it was never going to work. You might trick this or that corporation to give you money for a while (hats off, Vice), but in the end no company that actually paid for reporting and writing could compete with firms that produce nothing, like Facebook and Instagram and (these days) Google. Thus a return, desperate and frantic, to subscription revenues and ideologically-driven media projects. The New York Times is still “objective” in the annoying way but it is far more obviously a Democrat paper than it was in 1990. Obviously, states and oligarchs are running their own subsidized outlets.While media in the second millennium interpellated a collective public into being, your phone now interpellates you as an individualized consumer with your own facts. Ad revenue goes to influencers now, instead of reporters.

In the middle of the 2010s, a new set of entrepreneurs found that sympathetic (ideologically bound) listeners would happily pay $5 a month for an enjoyable audio product. Text journalists, after being subsidized for two centuries by advertising, had lost their patron, and watched with envy. Therefore an embarrassing amount of people rushed to get in on the podcast game, a process which continues apace. Then, an embarrassing amount of journalists tried to get a piece of their own subscription revenue by founding newsletters with clear ideological commitments. The end.

How YOU can fix it

You can resolve every single problem with the political economy of the media, and heroically save the public sphere, by subscribing to North South Notes. If you sign up to any of the “paid” subscription tiers and drop the word “TrueAnon” as you do, we will send you a signed book of your choice.* Please help, my epistemic system is dying.

*Image one: A Venetian newsletter; photo Vincent Bevins, Venice, 2026.Image two: The New-York Daily Tribune, July 27, 1858. The front page is all advertisements, and Karl Marx has a report on France on the inside; photo Vincent Bevins, London, 2026.Image three: The Xiang River Review, July 14th, 1919; in this edition of Mao Zedong’s newspaper, they thank their supporters and their subscribers; image provided by Zhengyu Yang, 2026.*There is an option to “send a note” during the signup process. Instead of explaining why you are supporting, write TrueAnon and indicate you want a book and we will contact you to send out The Jakarta Method or If We Burn.