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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 1/25/22

Is It Already Too Late to Say Goodbye?

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Jonathan Cook
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It seems we may have reached the moment when it is time to say goodbye. It has been fun, educational and sometimes cathartic - for me at least. I hope you got something from our time together too.

I am not going anywhere, of course. Not for now at least. I love to write. For as long as I feasibly can, I will continue to rail against injustice, call out corporate power and its abuses, and demand a fairer and more open society.

But I have to be realistic. I have to recognise that a growing number of you will not be joining me here on this page for much longer. And it feels rude after so much time together not to bid you a fond farewell before it is too late. I will miss you.

Many of you may have assumed it wouldn't end this way. You probably imagined that I would get banned by Facebook or Twitter. You would be able to rally round, send in complaints worded in the strongest possible terms, and lobby for my reinstatement. Maybe even sign a petition.

But it isn't going to end like that. There will be no bang. I have been too careful for that to be my fate. I have avoided rude and crude words. I have steered clear of insults (apologies if my responses have sometimes been a little caustic). I have not defamed anyone. I have avoided "fake news" - except to critique it. I have not peddled "conspiracy theories", unless quoting the British Medical Journal on Covid now counts as misinformation (yes, I know for a few of you it does).

But none of that has helped. My blog posts once attracted tens of thousands of shares. Then, as the algorithms tightened, it became thousands. Now, as they throttle me further, shares can often be counted in the hundreds. "Going viral" is a distant memory.

No, I won't be banned. I will fade incrementally, like a small star in the night sky - one among millions - gradually eclipsed as its neighbouring suns grow ever bigger and brighter. I will disappear from view so slowly you won't even notice.

Which is why I am saying my goodbyes now while I can still reach you, my most obstinate followers.

But this isn't really about one small light being snuffed out. This isn't just about our relationship coming to an end. Something bigger, and more disturbing, is taking place.

Journalists like me are part of an experiment - in a new, more democratised media landscape. We have developed new reader-funded models so that we can break free of the media corporations, which until now ensured billionaires and the state controlled the flow of information in one direction only: to speak down to us.

Cook - New Media Talk

The corporate media needs corporate advertising to survive - or the owners' deep pockets. They don't need you, except as a captive audience. You're both their prisoner and their product.

But the lifeblood of a reader-funded journalist, as the name suggests, are readers. The more of you we attract, the better chance there is that we can generate donations and income and make the model sustainable. Our Achilles' heel is our dependence on social media to find you, to keep reaching you, to offer you an alternative from the corporate media.

If Facebook (sorry, the Meta universe) and Twitter stop independent writers from growing their readerships by manipulating the algorithms, by ghosting and shadow-banning us, and by all the other trickery we do not yet understand, then new voices cannot grow their funding base and break free of corporate control.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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