Re:filtered #18: A dispatch from the European journalism support ruins of 2030

Welcome to the 18th edition of my monthly newsletter on civic media opportunities in a moment of systemic disruption.

I've spent some time in European capitals over the past weeks discussing how to support exiled and dissident media. Many people I've met genuinely want to help. Their commitment to press freedom is real, their resources are substantial.

But I keep hearing two ideas that worry me equally: either journalism gets strangled by false metrics and expectations on unrealistic outcomes, or it floats free as an inherent public good that deserves support simply by existing.

Both extremes miss the point. The first reduces journalism to a delivery mechanism for donor priorities. The second pretends journalism matters without ever asking who it serves or how.

I understand the appeal of the second approach. In conference rooms and legislatures, it feels principled to fund "pure" journalism without imposing theories of change. After years of watching many major U.S. funders demand abstract messaging backed by dashboards and KPIs that captured activity but not meaning, some in Europe understandably want to do better. They imagine journalism working at scale as a natural corrective to abuses of power.

I’d love for that to be true. But here's the trap: funding journalism without defining its purpose is like building a justice system without ensuring it's fit to administer it. We create the architecture for power but forget to specify what that power should do. The result is predictable: empty vessels that look legitimate but serve no one but power, to be filled with whatever meaning the next funding cycle brings.

Unlike the justice system, journalism faces another hurdle: people can simply choose not to interact with it. Courts can compel attendance; journalism must earn attention. While justice maintains its relevance through legal mandate, journalism survives only through demonstrated utility. We build institutions as if consumption were mandatory, hoping journalism's inherent appeal will somehow course-correct autocratic trends.

Choosing between prescriptive metrics and total freedom is a false binary that can be overcome by recognizing journalism as an information service and giving practitioners the freedom (and support) to actually serve.

When we can't articulate what service journalism provides – not in dashboard metrics but in real utility to real people – we build hollow institutions. And hollow institutions, no matter how well-intentioned their creators, are easy to capture.

I've watched both approaches fail across the world. The overly prescriptive model risks producing compliant content factories, eternally optimized and easily gamed. The hands-off model risks producing irrelevant echo chambers, self-righteous and gradually irrelevant Potemkin villages of civil society.

Future authoritarians don't care which mistake we make – they'll exploit either one.

Many funders I've met sense this tension. They're trying to thread the needle – avoiding both the heavy-handed metrics of the past and the risk of funding activity without impact. But without a clear vision of what useful, independent journalism looks like, they're navigating without a compass.

Over the next few months, I’d like share a bit of a compass. But for now, let me share a thought experiment: What if Europe continues down this path of well-intentioned ambiguity and everything that could go wrong politically goes wrong?

What follows is fiction in the aggregate, but every mechanism I describe has already happened somewhere I've worked.

Think of it as a warning from elsewhere about what happens when we fund journalism without ever defining what makes it matter.

(Fictional) Re:filtered #78: Sigh.

Mandatory disclaimer: This July 2030 newsletter has been reviewed by the Ministry of Information Integrity and received a People's Truth Score of 94/100 on the European Media Standards Index. The author's identity has been verified through facial recognition and cross-referenced with employment and voting records.

Minor deductions for excessive negativity regarding current governance models: This content violates the Gold Standard Journalism criteria for "Constructive criticism within approved parameters" and has not been approved for algorithmic amplification. For reporting concerns about this author's ideological compliance to sovereign values, contact truth@truth.gov.

Welcome to the 78th edition of my monthly newsletter remembering civic media in a moment of systemic collapse.

I'm writing from Brussels, from what was once the headquarters of Europe's €2 billion "Democracy through Journalism" initiative. The building's brass nameplate now reads "Continental Information Integrity Bureau." Same address, same architecture, opposite purpose.

We saw it coming. For years, we produced beautiful slide decks about "balance and objectivity" and "AI for storytelling" while people couldn't figure out which schools were actually good or why their medical bills kept rising. We counted retweets/retruths of our investigations into democratic backsliding as impact while citizens turned to whoever actually answered their daily questions – even if those answers were lies wrapped in convenient solutions.

The demagogues of the far-right didn't win through better journalism. They won by noticing that we'd abandoned the boring, essential work of helping people navigate their actual lives, functionally and emotionally.

While well-intentioned journalists across the continent collaborated on several series on threats to press freedom for years, the far-right built WhatsApp networks sharing (false) explanations for grocery prices. We measured success in awards won. They measured it in problems appearing to be addressed.

Last week in my go-to café, I watched a tourist ask for an independent weekly. The waiter glanced at the new compliance certificate on the wall – "Information Standards Verified per Regulation 2027/445" – then explained that independent publications require identity verification. "For statistical purposes of FIMI monitoring," he added.

The Narrative-Industrial Complex, European Edition

Looking back, we really had every opportunity to see this coming.

When U.S. international media development funding disappeared in 2025, many European funders rushed in with the best intentions. They would fund "journalism for journalism's sake" – pure, independent, free from messy theories of change that might compromise editorial independence.

Several European governments launched coordinated funding mechanisms for "storytelling for democratic resilience." The idea was that if enough journalism is funded democratic societies can course-correct.

But those beautiful words were empty vessels. They primarily benefited newsrooms with the expected structure, socialization, and connections that were similar to a romanticized ideal state notion of a Woodward/Bernstein newsroom.

What followed was a repeat of the masterclass in institutional capture. When the far-right coalition swept into power, they simply poured their own meaning into these hollow frameworks.

The infrastructure that had been built with the best intentions – peer review committees, impact frameworks, innovation labs – remains intact. But without ever defining what journalism should actually do for people, these became stages for ideological theater.

Taking inspiration from Trump's "Gold Standard Science" executive order – which hijacked the language of Open Science for ideological ends – Europe's new increasingly autocratic rulers created their own "Gold Standard Journalism" certification.

It sounds noble but it requires newsrooms to prove their reporting meets "objective truth standards." The catch is that government-appointed boards define those standards opportunistically.

Visit any major journalism school today. The one I'm looking at in one illiberal country is particularly revisionist, offering a masters program in "Constructive national narratives." Some course catalog highlights:

• "Finding the right enemies: A data-driven approach to exposing liberal lies."
• "Solutions: Celebrating our new stability, prosperity and future purity with social-first video."
• "Community engagement through approved channels. Inspiration from the Russian, Turkish and Chinese state-aligned media."

Many of the professors teaching these courses are often the ones who once taught investigative reporting. They adapted; they had mortgages. Subsidized scholarships send students to publications like Compact and Russia Today.

This is what can happen when you build institutions without purpose, when you fund activity without utility, when you mistake the performance of journalism for its function, and make salaries depend on it.

The Architecture of Capture

The transformation followed a predictable pattern we'd seen before but chose to ignore again.

First came the language hijacking.

Terms we'd carefully defined – "public interest," "editorial independence," "media pluralism" – became empty shells. The new governments didn't ban these concepts; they hollowed them out and refilled them. Public interest now means promoting national cohesion. Editorial independence means freedom from foreign influence. Media pluralism means amplifying conspiracy theories.

Second came the institutional takeover through procedure, not purges. Board appointments shifted gradually. First one "concerned citizen" joined the media regulator. Then another on the public broadcaster's oversight committee. By year three, majorities had flipped across every institution we'd built to safeguard democracy. No dramatic firings, just retirements, resignations, and strategic replacements.

The funding mechanisms we'd created became the perfect control apparatus. Those elaborate grant application processes we'd designed to ensure accountability now filter for ideological compliance. The peer review panels meant to guarantee quality are now packed with "experts" from the new think tanks. The innovation labs we'd established to future-proof journalism now provide sentiment analysis data for more accurate and better predictable user needs-based targeting, thanks to philanthropic support by Palantir.

Our transparency requirements are weapons now. Financial disclosures flag any foreign funding as "potential interference;" crowd-funding must be pre-approved and subject to lengthy tax audits. Open board meetings provide platforms for orchestrated pressure campaigns. The accountability mechanisms we'd demanded became levers of control.

They didn't destroy our institutions. They performed hostile takeovers using the bylaws we'd written.

The Networked Capture

We spent decades trying to save institutions while real power shifted to individuals. By the time we noticed, the game was already over.

The first wave was democratization, and it was truly liberating. Creators, fed up with legacy media's gatekeeping, built massive followings on TikTok, YouTube and podcasts. They speak directly to audiences we'd lost – rural communities, working families, the perpetually online.

This change also offered a promise of information resilience: The idea was that unlike capturing a few leading newsrooms, you can't control creators at scale.

But you can make compliance attractive at scale, especially if the underlying platforms are complicit. Certain content just got amplified more. And certain content just got the sponsorships, from companies that happened to donate to the right political parties.

Then came the government partnerships and the promise of institutionally-backed greater amplification. Not heavy-handed propaganda directives, but lucrative "public information campaigns." Explain the new education reforms. Promote local tourism. Share "positive stories" about national success.

Platform algorithms mysteriously began deprioritizing "divisive" content, and giving far greater visibility to partnership participants.

Some media schools now run "Digital Influence Incubators." Supported by the big platforms, graduates emerge with 10,000 followers, pre-approved brand relationships, and talking points that feel authentic. They're not propagandists; they're entrepreneurs who've internalized the system's incentives.

Watch how it cascades: A gaming streamer mentions inflation during a broadcast. Within hours, three "economics influencers" release response videos explaining why government policies aren't to blame. Their content gets boosted. The original streamer's next sponsorship deal falls through. The message spreads without a single official directive.

The journalists, indie creators and media scholars of years past?

Individual creators don't have the institutional ability to withstand lawsuits and boycotts as newsrooms once had, so many just couldn’t put up a fight when those legal threats came in. Many got burned out by the relentless of harassment they experienced in the comments.

The few who tried to build authentic alternative networks found themselves shadow-banned, demonetized, perpetually swimming upstream against algorithms calibrated for "user satisfaction."

Some persist with limited reach, retreating into newsletter silos, writing for shrinking circles of subscribers who already agree with them.

We thought distributed media meant distributed power. We didn't realize it can also mean distributed capture.

The Autocratic Intermediary

Your morning starts with your beautiful BYD Atto 10’s AI assistant's news briefing. "Good morning! There were some traffic disruptions downtown yesterday, but authorities have restored order. The economy showed strong fundamentals despite global headwinds." Every fact somewhat true, every context missing.

Ask follow-up questions and watch the elegant deflection. "What caused the traffic disruptions?" returns details about "disruptive demonstrations." Push harder about what the demonstrations were protesting, and the AI suggests you might be interested in the city's new traffic management app instead. It's not lying, it's managing your attention.

The search engines still exist, technically. But why scroll through links when AI gives you immediate, synthesized answers? Google's market research was right – people want conclusions, not sources. The pivot from "ten blue links" to "one definitive answer" seemed like progress. Now those answers come pre-filtered through "authoritative source" weightings that favor state media and "verified" creators.

WhatsApp too warns users about "unverified" news links. TikTok demands facial recognition before any posting or reactions. Substack requires "newsletter publication licenses." The platforms comply enthusiastically with requests for prioritization and moderation. Regulatory certainty in exchange for a reduction in data protection requirements can be wildly profitable.

This is what information control looks like without censorship: Every query returns results. Every question receives answers. But the answers guide you away from system-level understanding toward individual short-term solutions.

Worried about rising prices? Here are budgeting tips and discount codes, never tainted by an analysis of the abuse of market concentration. Concerned about your kids' education? Here are tutoring services and study guides, never complicated by investigations into failures in educational policy.

The brilliance is the personalization. The intermediating systems even know you're skeptical, so it includes just enough critical perspective to feel "balanced." It cites opposition voices, just carefully selected ones who make emotional arguments that can be easily dismissed. It acknowledges problems while emphasizing progress. It feels like you're getting the full picture because the manipulation is tailored specifically to your biases.

Even physical reality gets intermediated. Translation apps subtly shift the tone of foreign news. Your smart TV's news aggregator arranges stories to create narrative arcs that always resolve toward stability.

We gave away too much of the epistemic layer, the sense-making infrastructure between raw information and human understanding. Now every question you ask, every search you make, every piece of content you consume passes through systems designed not to lie to you, but to shape what questions you think to ask in the first place.

The cage is invisible because it's made of satisfaction.

The Samizdat Strategy Sessions

We now meet where the algorithms can't see us, in the dead zones of the ordinary between surveillance.

We learned from those who came before. Ukrainians and Palestinians sharing checkpoint delays on messaging services to navigate their ordeals, to survive and to save lives. Hong Kong protesters using mesh networks when authorities shut down the internet or perfected metadata surveillance. Venezuelan, Myanmar and Iranian families sharing real exchange rates while official media pretended the bolivar, the kyat or the rial were reliable (they still aren't).

They showed us that when institutions fail, information finds a way.

Now it's our turn to rebuild without the resources that come with institutional support. Friday evenings in bookshops. Saturday mornings at the farmer's market. Sunday walks in the park where phones stay home and information travels through trust.

We've learned that small is safe. The grand rhetoric that doomed institutional journalism of years past – national reach, immediate mass impact, systemic institutional preservation – are luxuries we learned the hard way that we don't have anymore.

Instead, we operate at the scale of neighborhoods. Families sharing real school performance data. Small business owners tracking actual supplier prices. Neighbors documenting which medical clinics still provide real care.

Our tools are deliberately primitive, not because we're technophobic, but because simplicity is resilience. Every tool is a potential vector of capture. Every app requires location permissions that can become surveillance. Every platform optimizes for engagement that becomes compliance; every chatbot can distort our views of the world.

The content has changed too. We don't produce investigations that no one can act on or exposés that only depress. We create navigation tools: Which doctors will still prescribe what you need and why there’s a shortage. Where to buy food without supporting the corporate cartels.

Information as utility is the new starting point to media work from the sidelines."

Trust rebuilds slowly, person by person. You help someone navigate bureaucracy, they vouch for you to their friend. That friend shares real price data from her shop. Slowly, networks form, actual human relationships with stakes and reciprocity.

We measure success differently now. Not in views or shares but in problems solved. Did people in our neighborhood find affordable insulin? Are more people able to avoid the predatory loan? Did enough parents learn about the curriculum changes to organize?

Some nights, we wonder if we're just playing at resistance while the system consolidates beyond challenge. But then we remember: they are opportunists, neither smart nor caring, and they need us to believe that alternatives don't exist.

We're not trying to restore what was lost. It really wasn’t that great for most people. We're building what we should have built toward along: information services that serve people directly, without institutional mediation, without savior complexes, without the abstract frameworks that made us so easy to capture.

The future isn't in rebuilding the journalism industry that existed once, and that some fondly remember (again, it wasn't that great). It's in using the skills that came from it in the space between neighbors who've learned to trust and genuinely help each other make sense of the world they all have to jointly navigate.

From the ruins of European journalism, this is your once-intrepid correspondent since turned tired archivist. If we could go back to 2025, knowing what we know now, what would we do differently?

Back to 2025

I need you to sit with that for a moment.

That mandatory disclaimer at the top of the fictitious future edition above is what awaits us if we keep building hollow systems. That's where "journalism for journalism's sake" leads when we can't articulate what actual problems we solve for real people.

But I'm not actually writing from 2030. I'm writing from 2025, from a small café in still-very democratic Brussels, where independent weeklies exist without any compliance certificates.

However, this dystopia isn't really fiction. It's a composite of real tactics that succeeded elsewhere. I've spent my career as a journalist in places where uninspiring operators crushed well-intentioned journalism through cynical opportunism, co-opting the language and tools built to resist them.

Mainland China, Hong Kong, Russia, Belarus, Afghanistan, Hungary, Venezuela, the United States – every little mechanism I described has already been used somewhere. The ending is always the same: illiberal mediocrity triumphs not through brilliance but through a lesser degree of abstraction.

Here are six things we can learn from others’ experiences:

1. Democracy isn't anywhere’s default setting. We can't mistake its presence for permanence. Democratic values require daily cultivation in daily life. We can’t confuse preserving institutions with preserving democracy itself.
2. Journalism isn't inherently virtuous. We sanctified the industry while forgetting it's just a craft that can be used in both good and bad ways. The same techniques that expose corruption can destroy reputations. Storytelling can build community, but it can also fuel hatred. Those producing hit pieces inspired by Project Veritas are calling themselves investigative journalists too. (I'm not saying they are but I hope you see my point.)
3. Clientelism doesn't announce itself. The moment you shape stories for funders rather than communities, you're already lost. No one has an incentive to tell you that or that what you're doing is irrelevant.
4. Professional solidarity can help but can also create ineffective heroes and unnecessary martyrs. We needed so much more civic solidarity, roots deep enough to weather institutional erosion and collapse. Instead, we've often built networks of mutual validation that can also cause harm and are quick to evaporate.
5. Abstract impact is a luxury belief. While we measured "reach" and "engagement," people always needed help navigating their own complexities (choosing schools, healthcare, understanding their changing neighborhoods). Our metrics are not a reflection of the realities of current information ecosystems.
6. Technology is politics by other means. Every algorithm is a political choice. Every content moderation rule defines acceptable speech. Every social media API restriction controls who can analyze public discourse. Every default setting shapes awareness and behavior at scale. Every recommendation engine curates reality. Every encryption and data retention policy is a surveillance decision.

Especially, regarding technology, I encourage you to read "The Locknet", just published by Jessica Batke and Laura Edelson at ChinaFile. They show how the metaphor of the "Great Firewall" is outdated, and blinds us to the real nature of the information controls of the world’s current most sophisticated state censor.

The system isn't a static wall keeping foreign content out; it's a dynamic, adaptive apparatus that monitors and shapes information flows both within and beyond China's borders. Most insidiously, China has perfected the appearance and benefits of openness while actually strengthening social control to the point where independent journalism becomes nearly impossible.

The Locknet doesn't just block content; it reshapes what people know and even what they think is possible to know. This is the playbook (aspiring) autocrats are studying, the infrastructure they're building some perhaps with gentler language but similar intent.

Unlike that fictional future self in a few years, I'm not tired right now. I'm energized by how much we can do (just look at the New York Democratic mayoral primary) if we decide to commit to actual utility, to solving real problems for real people.

The future isn't fixed. I believe we can even beat the Locknet (and am working on it).

But preventing it means we stop pretending journalism matters simply because we say it does, in generic and institutionalist terms.

Looking ahead

Writing this dystopia clarified that we already know what doesn't work. Time to build what does. My next editions are going to be about where I see some hope, and what that could look like.

At Gazzetta, we have been researching ways to undermine the Locknet and enable acts of journalism for more than a year now, thanks to the support of the Open Technology Fund. As we learn more, we try to write more about it when we find the time.

Following the Lenfest News Philanthropy Summit, Madison Karas and I started building something exciting: an Audience Help Desk.

We think of it as confidential advisory sessions available to anyone tired of creating generic "news" without purpose or eager to explore how to become more useful to other people using the craft of journalism.

We want to help with all questions around relevance of information creation, from survey design to value propositions. Think of it as emergency triage and confidential help line. Beta starts late this summer. Interested? Let us know.

I'll be at three gatherings this summer where we can plot better futures:

• DW Global Media Forum in Bonn (early July): "How authoritarian regimes build digital walls - and how to overcome them" with Gypsy Guillén Kaiser and Valentina Aguana;
• SRCCON in Minneapolis (early July): "Journalists, technologists: Opportunities in the fight for information safety" with Yanan Sun and Holmes Wilson;
• Hackers on Planet Earth XVI in New York (mid-August) – where I'm proposing a new alliance between technologists and journalists (still work in progress, would love your thoughts!);

The conversations that matter now aren't about saving the journalism industry as we now know it. They're about creating new media ventures that contribute to better information systems that help real people solve their real problems. I believe the craft of journalism and the skills it hones can help tremendously. At scale over time, this is our way of contributing to building better societies.

The future I've described isn't inevitable. But preventing it means starting with problems we can name and people we can actually help. Everything else is fiction.

That's it for this month. Thank you for reading! If this made you think, I’d love to know those thoughts! Reply here, write me on Signal at patrickb.01 or claim an open slot in my schedule.