When the incentives of the news ecosystem participants are to hoard your attention, they distort news itself. Here’s how:
There is disproportionate attention to politics, not policy making – see the front page of any physical or online newspaper. In general, there is not enough focus on the stuff that really matters. This directly affects what people think is important: as Steven Pinker argues in the Guardian (yes, itself a newspaper):
The nature of news is likely to distort people’s view of the world because of a mental bug that the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman called the Availability heuristic: people estimate the probability of an event or the frequency of a kind of thing by the ease with which instances come to mind…
Plane crashes always make the news, but car crashes, which kill far more people, almost never do. Not surprisingly, many people have a fear of flying, but almost no one has a fear of driving. People rank tornadoes (which kill about 50 Americans a year) as a more common cause of death than asthma (which kills more than 4,000 Americans a year), presumably because tornadoes make for better television…
Similarly, there is disproportionate coverage of what’s wrong and less on what’s being done to fix it – this is required to produce the sort of adversarial content that keeps readers and viewers hooked. Again, Pinker:
Consumers of negative news, not surprisingly, become glum: a recent literature review cited “misperception of risk, anxiety, lower mood levels, learned helplessness, contempt and hostility towards others, desensitization, and in some cases, … complete avoidance of the news.” And they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”
News is also driven entirely by events (witness the continuous ‘Breaking News’ on TV and large-font headlines on websites). There is little issue-based coverage. As Rob Wijnberg of the slow-news site Unbreaking News argues, this prevents us from understanding true causality because we no longer view our world actively as a set of systems, merely as as passive objects of a set of events that ‘happen’ to us.
… news also makes us blind to the influential that is not exceptional at all. That’s why we often don’t hear about major developments until something highly improbable happens (events the Lebanese-American philosopher Nassim Taleb dubbed “black swans”).
The 2008 financial crisis, for example, didn’t become huge news until the Lehman Brothers investment bank filed for bankruptcy — a highly unusual event. But the lead up to this event — banks that kept piling risk on top of risk, little by little, day by day — never made it to the front page because of the fundamental mismatch between what was happening (gradual risk increase) and the way news commonly signals what is happening (event-driven sensationalism).
Therefore, in the relentless rolling news-cycle, context is lost:
Almost everything that’s news must be something that has just now taken place. But the most recent thing isn’t by definition the most influential one. Everything in the world has a history. And that history determines in large part why something happens. Because the news usually keeps its eye trained on today, it blinds us to the longer term, both past and future.
As entertainment, news is now delivered to us in premasticated,easy-to-digest chunks, no thinking or reasoning required. Matt Taibbi, in his letter to his audience about going independent, cites this as one of things wrong with journalism:
…journalists in the Trump era are trained to narrativize everything, with the consequence that we’ve drifted away from complex issues and toward saleable, simplistic, sports-like controversies. Heading into the Covid-19 disaster, we argued about Bernie Bros, Lev Parnas, Russian Facebook ads, and a host of other things that don’t seem all that important now… The media business as constructed is expert at mass-generating binary streams of hot takes and talking points, and selling ads to a public engaged by them.
Starved of critical reasoning, readers and viewers of news act how Taibbi described in his book Insane Clown President:
“Trained for decades to be little more than good consumers, we had become a nation of reality shoppers, mixing and matching news items to fit our own self-created identities. We rejoiced in the idea that reality was not an absolute but a choice, something we select to fit our own conception not of the world but of ourselves”
All of these – negative, politics-centric, event-driven, context-less hot-takes – reward bad actors. As we have written previously,
The most obvious symptom of that is clickbait online, but more broadly, topics that shock and outrage receive coverage disproportionate to their impact on society.
At some point – we are probably past it – this behaviour becomes self-fulfilling, and personalities that are the most skilled at shocking and causing outrage end up being the ones most imbued with power.
To state the obvious, the epitome of this is the presidency of Donald Trump and how it utterly dominates coverage online and the TV and serves his ends. This has a profound effect on society (Rob Wijnberg)
…our news addiction — is to make us afraid of other people, skeptical of the future, and cynical about our own ability to affect it. Day in, day out, the news confirms our most stubborn prejudices and our greatest fears. It makes us pessimistic and suspicious. It even makes us unhappy.
and is harmful to democracy itself (Pinker)
…they become fatalistic, saying things like “Why should I vote? It’s not gonna help,” or “I could donate money, but there’s just gonna be another kid who’s starving next week.”
An important note: we are not even focused in this series on the impact of the large-scale or pirate ownership of most news media and the influence of advertising on editorial, although these are equally important problems. This article from the non-profit American media watchdog FAIR is a good summary of the matter.
It’s abundantly clear how broken the existing news ecosystem is. It’s time to visualise what an alternative one could look like in the 21st Century (part 4).