The Hellscape's Business Model
Why U.S. news media is so bad, why your relatives have become insane, and why the only solution is to buy your way out of the hellscape. Also, why the capitalists have the best info.
Greetings,
Over the last 5 to 10 years a number of folks that I know seem to have become insane. You may have noticed a similar phenomenon among your loved ones. This is where I diagnose causes and offer solutions with a great deal of unearned confidence.
Some of my friends and acquaintances have developed exceedingly dark visions of the world, particularly of the motives and actions of those with whom they disagree politically. Their worlds are filled with imminent catastrophes and powerful, diabolical villains. There are white supremacists and Marxist revolutionaries everywhere. One of the odd things about this creeping insanity is that it seems to be more common among those who see themselves as well informed and who are almost constant consumers of news media. What gives?
Some of this is just garden variety political tribalism. There is a lot of social science research suggesting that those with strong political identities consume a lot of media, but use that media to construct and defend inaccurate visions of the world that are largely driven by false perceptions of the hostility and ideological consistency of others. Education and intelligence don't necessarily mitigate this much. We just use our big brains and fancy theories to construct somewhat more baroque versions of the downmarket tribal vision. For my money, the basic problem is that we are hardwired to live in small, highly threatened groups. The roots probably extend to our pre-human progenitors. We all seem to be chimps under the skin, and chimps are basically vicious. Treating most people as enemies was probably a good survival strategy, even if it's epistemically suspect.
But I also blame our news environment and in particular its interaction with social media. My thinking here has been seriously influenced by three books: Broken News by Chris Stirewalt, Traffic by Ben Smith, and Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke. The problem begins with the internet. By making media distribution close to costless, the web destroyed the barriers to entry that had sustained the traditional business model for journalism. The default assumption for consumers became that news should be free, which meant the sole business model for journalism became online advertising, which pays little and depends on very high levels of traffic. So news providers have to boost traffic and cut costs. The latter goal was done by cutting reporters, especially reporters who went out and discovered actual facts about the world, an expensive activity. In their place we had the rise of opinion journalism and punditry, which is comparatively cheap to produce. Another strategy is what I think of as "Google search journalism," which consists of stories that simply recycle online content. The quintessence of this kind of journalism are stories about wholly online phenomena like social media kerfuffles, basically any story containing the phrase "So and so took to Twitter to…" Punditry and Google search journalism are both only tangentially related to providing information about the world. It's certainly possible to be a successful practitioner of both genres without ever writing a story that will generate any new information.
Then there is the search for eyeballs. These eyeballs are to be found on social media, which has become the most important distribution channel for much of the media. The social media algorithms, in turn, exist for one purpose: to keep people on Facebook and Twitter. They do this by optimizing for engagement, feeding content to people based on their propensity to click, like, or otherwise express interest. The media properties need eyeballs to survive so they produce content for the algorithms. It turns out that what engages us on social media is content that gives a little dose of neural-chemical stimulus to our brains. That means content that makes us angry (especially anger accompanied by the emotional pay off of contempt) or content that makes us scared. Also pictures of cute animals. So what we get is a lot of alarmist and tribal punditry and a lot of scary Google search journalism, all individually optimized for the fear and pleasure centers of our particular brains and our personal and political anxieties.
Two things to note about this system. First, it is not a truth seeking mechanism. It's not based on procedures like scientific experiment, academic research, or even old school journalism, all of which are designed with greater or lesser amounts of success to find the truth. The current news media environment as filtered through social media isn't designed to get at the truth. That's not its function. It's designed above all else to keep users engaged. Website engagement simply isn't the same thing as discovering truth. It's not even close.
Second, it might make you a little bit crazy. In some cases it might make you completely nuts. Twitter or Facebook superusers are in effect turning their minds over to the companies' algorithms. This is unlikely to be a process that will lead to either happiness or enlightenment. A more likely outcome is high levels of fear and anxiety and at best a kind of ersatz simulacrum of understanding. At worst, one will become nested in a fully furnished alternative reality as the algorithms master every nuance of one's particular ideological priors. All indications are that the algorithms are just going to get better and better at infecting brains not with truth but with whatever keeps eyeballs on the site.
As is appropriate for the kind of screed you've just read, I'll end with my suggestions. Feel free to dismiss these along with my Jeremiad, as I can't claim any real authority on any of this. Still, here are my rules of thumb for not becoming insane:
Make sure that most of your news comes from a source for which you must pay money. The origin of our current hell scape is the interaction between technology and the free media business model. Media produced by a subscription business model will simply be better and more fact rich. A subscription to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal or better yet the Economist on the Financial Times is expensive, but the alternative is clickbait journalism. That's the basic logic of the free media business model. The only escape is to buy your way out. (Cable news doesn't count, even though you give them money. Sorry. That's the rule.)
Recognize opinion and Google search journalism and just don't believe it. Assume that the information it gives you will be distorted or incomplete. If most of the news media you consume falls into one of these categories, the chances that you are forming an accurate picture of the world are remote.
The financial press is the best source of information followed by the wire services. News is produced based on how consumers will use it. People consume political news either as voters or else as political spectators, spectators who are generally cheering for one team or another. The primary purpose of such news is to entertain and to maintain and reinforce the ideological self-conceptions of readers. It's much like sports journalism. The financial press, on the other hand, exists to provide investors and others with information with which to make money. This places a premium on information and understanding over what philosopher Harry Frankfurter usefully called "bullshit" (ie identity maintaining talk rather than truth seeking talk). To be sure, there is plenty of bullshit in the WSJ, the FT, or Bloomberg. But there is less bullshit than in the NYT or the Washington Post. Likewise, the purpose of the Associated Press and Reuters is to provide "commodity news" (the basic who, what, when) to other news outlets. They aren't in the bullshit business. They are in the business of giving basic info to the bullshit business.
Beware social media. If most of the media that you consume is pushed to you by social media, be worried. Find mechanisms for pushing information to yourself that you control rather than turning your brain over to the algorithms. That said, there are some things that Twitter does well. Social media is a great platform for easily disseminating information from experts in very niche areas. My wife uses it to find out about new developments in kidney transplant medicine. I think it's a great source for niche legal news, e.g. what's the Delaware Chancery Court doing today.
But as a primary window onto the world social media sucks. It will rot your brain.
Until next time,
Nate