Selling credibility to the highest bidder

I invite you to look at the two Facebook posts reproduced below and think of the underlying subtext.

I know, I know – some of you are probably already thinking “oh dear, here he goes again, ranting and raving about media houses raking in money from advertising. What’s wrong with that?”

I mean, who the hell even thinks about these things midway through Santa Marija season? Well, unfortunately for some, I don’t seem to have an off switch, and so here we are.

Look, I get it. Newsrooms across the globe are strapped for cash and it’s become a race to the bottom. I myself have had to spend half my summer chasing potential donors and sponsors to keep this project afloat (more on that soon), so I’m keenly aware of how exhausting this process is.

To some extent, I empathise with any newsroom facing this struggle, even the ones which do not prioritise public interest journalism.

The key differentiator here is who you choose to accept money from, and on what terms.

There is nothing inherently wrong with advertising. Major newsrooms get plenty of eyeballs looking at their websites. Ambitious companies with sizeable marketing budgets want to be seen on the biggest spaces they can find. The tradeoff is mutually beneficial, if it comes with no strings attached.

However, when you’re accepting money from some of the dodgiest people in the country, there is no such thing as no strings attached. Your reputation becomes inextricably linked with theirs, for better or for worse.

Anyone who’s ever done a day’s work in the advertising industry knows that the transaction itself hardly ever occurs in a vacuum.

It doesn’t really matter what type of advertising we’re talking about. All of these types of financial collaborations are client-provider relationships. Like any other relationship, it is based on trust, mutual alignment, and intent. In this case, the intent of prospering together.

This relationship must be nurtured for it to benefit everyone involved. The obvious implication is that a media outlet that takes money from big business will be loathe to bite the hand that feeds it. There is nothing accusatory or inflammatory here: I am simply following the cold, hard logic of money.

Of course, some editors at these media houses will go out of their way to justify it, even if we’re talking about operators who are known to conduct their business in a highly questionable manner. One glaring example was highlighted in one of our recent investigations about Exante.

Sanctioned Russian-Maltese firm with deep government ties to hold major compliance conference

Times of Malta loves to use the tired old excuse that editorial is separate from the commercial arm of the company.

To be fair, it is evident that the company’s commercial arm is actually investing in higher quality content. It is a well-staffed newsroom that comfortably retains its position as the country’s dominant media outlet.

Which begs the question: why is the Times desperate enough to partner with the likes of SiGMA, known to most of the island as the gaming industry’s poster child for industry networking and traffic nightmares? Why is a 90 year old newsroom unable to sustain itself without selling front-page banner ads to a sanctioned Russian-Maltese firm?

I’d ask those questions to the fabled commercial arm of the company, but since they’ve refused to answer literally every question I’ve ever asked them, I won’t bother.

Judging from the open mockery that almost always animates the comments sections of these kinds of sponsored posts, whatever revenue is generated from them must surely be outweighed by the loss of credibility that comes about as a result.

As for Lovin Malta, well – as far as I know, their shriveled newsroom doesn’t even have a chief editor to speak of, in spite of the fact that they’ve been looking for one since at least June of this year.

To be sure, I reached out to directly to their director and co-owner, David Grech, to verify whether this is the case. I also asked them to confirm how many journalists are actually working in that newsroom.

No reply or acknowledgement was sent by publication time.

Everybody knows that db Group holds excessive influence over Maltese politics.

The towers they are building in Pembroke are like two giant middle fingers to the rest of the country, and practically nobody in either major party would dare oppose them openly without fear or favour. The sponsored post about db’s project had 371 comments in two days by publication time, and none of them were expressing excitement about this “bold new destination.”

SiGMA is a major player in an amoral, destructive industry whose links to the Labour Party stretch all the way back to the early days of disgraced former prime minister Joseph Muscat’s career.

So, we are not talking about a simple exchange of digital real estate and money.

What mainstream media outlets are really selling isn’t just visibility – it’s credibility (assuming they have any of it to speak of, to begin with).

What a bad actor really wants is to launder their absurd talking points through an outlet which can lend it some sense of legitimacy. Nobody accepts the logic of a press release issued through the company’s own channels. Mainstreaming it through an otherwise respectable outlet is a convenient workaround to that problem.

One of the main counter-points to my argument is the notion that, as long as the news content is clearly labeled as such and is published in a separate stream from the sponsored garbage, then the news content is still legitimate – especially if the outlet reports on any negative exposure their advertising partners may be getting.

How could I, the freelancer at the bottom of the news pit, ever doubt the integrity of a newsroom that is fearless enough to publish about anyone, even if they are paying for content? If anything, that shows off how powerful they are, right? I mean, do you know anyone who can give adverse coverage to a paying client and live to tell the tale?

Here’s the thing about accepting money from dodgy interests, however – it will almost inevitably come back to bite you in the arse at some point.

Last week, the IĠM was resurrected from its summer slumber by Papaya Ltd’s ill-fated attempt at imposing a gagging order on Times of Malta.

We heard plenty of stern condemnation at the brazen way in which Papaya attempted to silence the Times’ reporting about its run-ins with the Financial Intelligence Analysis Unit (FIAU) and other regulatory authorities.

And yet, guess whose website is littered with sponsored content and press releases from the very same operator who tried to shut them up?

Now, contrast that with the following journalistic content and tell me how any of this makes any goddamn sense.

The fact is that Times’ editors can distance themselves from the commercial arm of their company all they want – nobody in that newsroom can deny that their own news portal legitimised a dubious operator to generate revenue, granting Papaya Ltd a reputational foothold when it needed one the most.

And before anyone accuses me of unfairly highlighting this disparity, note that all it took for me to find almost half a dozen bits of sponsored content was a quick Google search. I didn’t have to go combing through the Times’ archives to structure my argument; they were among the very first search results that cropped up, right alongside the same news portal’s actual investigations on the subject.

Ironically, one of the first things I learned at the Times back when I started out in journalism five years ago was that credibility is the newsroom’s lifeblood. No media house can survive without it.

It appears that the parameters of what passes off as credible are awfully flexible these days.