I have a confession to make. I’ve recently broken my own rule: I’ve been following the news online, specifically about the truckers’ protests. One of the reasons I broke the rule is because I believe this event to be of historic proportions and transformative in ways we can’t begin to imagine just yet, but I digress.
While spending an inordinate amount of time looking at the news I’ve noticed something: a lot of ”news” articles (I use the term very liberally) are really just opinion pieces masquerading as news. One of the techniques they employ is to embed tweets from random people, who happen to have an opinion on the topic at hand and most of these opinions happen to agree with the thesis of the piece.
I don’t have a problem embedding tweets if they bring some facts to light, say a video of an event happening that illustrates a point, or a piece of breaking news that is not available elsewhere, but when writers (because these aren’t journalists) try to manipulate their readers by using the old tactic of the third-party endorsement to shore up their point, that’s where I draw the line, because it’s transparently deceptive.
Scott Adams, in his book “Loserthink” explains this phenomenon: that media companies, with the advent of the internet, have had to adapt to a new economic reality and gained access to insights about their work that they never had to before. Indeed, it is now possible for media companies to get analytics with such a level of granularity, such as which kinds of headlines get more clicks, that they invariably ended up moving closer and closer to constant fear-mongering, anxiety inducing headlines, because it is what sells. Others too, have made this argument, but Adams’ has so far been the one most clearly laid out that I’ve seen.
What this means is that in ad-based news outlets, no matter how hard one tries, the economic reality will always push them towards outrage porn, as opposed to the old fashioned ethical journalism of yore. I’m not trying to claim that the olden times were perfect, merely that by virtue of the technology at hand, they couldn’t be as morally corrupt as they are today. Journalism’s history is littered with examples of obvious bias and morally questionable opinions.
Adams add that, as individual humans, we’re not intellectually equipped to fight this trend, because media companies have enormous resources that one human brain cannot fight, let alone spend the time trying to separate the truth from the bullshit, because we all have lives to live and bills to pay.
However, being aware of this issue is a good first step. In spite of all evidence that it is harmful, if you do end up reading the news online, you’re a little better equipped with a healthy dose of skepticism toward any news source, no matter what side it comes from.
But if you do see articles that “support” their “facts” with opinions from random, angry, twitter trolls, you’re probably better off closing that browser tab and looking for less transparently manipulative news sources.
If you’re curious about one such example of empty, meaningless, deceiving coverage that is solely created to create fake outrage at a non-existent problem, look at this piece through the lens of my argument above. That ought to be enough to prove my point, just scroll all the way down to watch it happen.
Remember: garbage in, garbage out. The quality of information one ingests, directly impacts one’s life in real ways that are not always very obvious.
PS: there are increasing numbers of subscription-based news sources, where good journalists are writing great stories and getting paid directly by their readers. No middlemen, no click-bait and click-based revenue models. Jen Gerson, Matt Gurney (The Line), Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi are some of those among many. I truly believe this to be the where the ethical, balanced journalism of tomorrow will live.