quote:

We’re Being Played.
News outlets have been gunning for wide reach since the days of the penny press. This is no revelation. What’s different in our modern landscape is that the wide reach is attained using social media and platforms completely outside of the control of the news outlets. And the stuff that sells on social media is content that plays to the reader’s identity and confirms the reader’s preexisting beliefs.

Buzzfeed practically invented “identity content” and founder Jonah Peretti knew years ago that to succeed in the age of the Internet media outlets had to appeal to our own tribalism. He wrote as much a decade before Twitter was even invented in a 1996 journal article:

The internet is one of many late capitalist phenomena that allow for more flexible, rapid, and profitable mechanisms of identity formation. Connecting capitalism and identity formation requires extensive contextualization.
And later in the article (emphasis mine):

I assert that the increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism.
Americans are being played against one another because our media consumption is reinforcing the idea that we’re more different than alike. Because that’s what shares. Because that’s what builds their social media reach. Because that’s what results in better scale for native and programmatic advertising. Because news outlets have to do this to survive.

All of the means outlined above (in which news outlets mortgage their credibility for money) cause the distrust for news outlets to filter down into distrust for the people that believe or identify with those news outlets. Remember our example with The Washington Post rushing to judgement on the power grid hacking story?

Fans of WaPo could refute the example as being indicative of the paper’s larger failings. After all, the paper has demonstrably produced incredible works of journalism. Those fans would be correct. But detractors could point to the articles WaPo got wrong. Or the opinion pieces that were offensive to them. Or to the uncomfortable relationship WaPo has with sponsored content. Those detractors would be correct.

Soon we stop trusting outlets that don’t talk to us the way we’d like, because we can point to a failing of their trustworthiness. Every news outlet is not equally trustworthy. But we no longer analyze what we read on a case-by-case basis. We see who is sharing news from which outlet and make the call.

You can see this in the way ideas are discussed online. Whether you choose to divide a group by income, geography, race, industry, movement, or party we often associate a news outlet with its worst moment and a group with its worst members. We refuse to discuss ideas with people who we have disagreed with in the past, blurring the difference between ideas and the people that have them. We no longer believe in political principles, but political parties. We care less about the general welfare of our fellow Americans and instead get caught up with a cosmic score card that shows our group is winning. Barack Obama addressed the phenomenon is his farewell speech:

The rise of naked partisanship, and increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste — all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we start accepting only information, whether it’s true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that is out there.

We get sliced and sliced into smaller and smaller groups, each with its own group of pundits, publications, and Facebook memes. And as advertising mixes with propaganda mixes with actual reporting we can’t tell the difference anymore. It’s a never-ending scorched earth campaign, made possible because harming trust and encouraging tribalism is economically rewarded. In other words, the economic incentives of news directly contribute to the divisiveness of our country.
Facebook collects the ad money. Advertisers get the clicks. News outlets live to fight another day. No group has any incentive to change and the rest of us are left fighting it out.

Silicon Valley and the Unscalable Industry
But, and here’s the cruel part, history is repeating itself. As Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Medium ALSO have no economic incentive to solve these problems. It’s the reason the Twitter community continues to wait for tools to manage abuse. It’s the reason Google continues to highly rank and provide advertising for content that is purposefully meant to deceive. That Facebook can only throw several token efforts to appease those who blame the platform for spreading “fake news” while not giving publishers any compensation. The reason they can do that? They can wait it out. Those platforms control the audience and the ad market.
Facebook, Google, and Twitter (but especially Facebook) don’t make any more money by supporting journalism. The worst “fake news” ever written is that these companies somehow have a reason to care about good journalism. Facebook’s stock won’t skyrocket if its users share a hard-earned and important scoop over some meme. Medium, to its credit, is realizing what it was contributing to and is trying to do better.
But the content we read online is going to be continue to be backed by harmful business incentives. That is, until either the consumer demands otherwise or until some enterprising person can build a repeatable model that allows journalism to thrive without being mercy to platforms for advertisers that care about reach. Seeing that the latter has never happened, all we have is the former.
Common Ground
I know I’ll sound like some kind of pollyanna to suggest that if the American people demand more of their media outlets, advertisers, and social networks everything will work itself out. But I’d guess, regardless of your politics, you and everyone you know is tired of the current climate.
You’re tired of those participating in the current media landscape acting like we can keep a republic via sweet Twitter burns or made-to-go-viral videos on Facebook with no context. Tired of people who don’t think like you totally misunderstanding reality as you see it. Tired of charlatans playing to the worse instincts of their tribe and getting rewarded. Tired of pinning the promise of journalism on the good will of its members who have every economic incentive to do otherwise. And, call me naive, but I’m tired that Americans of all walks would rather find reasons to hurt one another than help one another.
Any solution is complicated and I have no illusions that it would happen in the next few years, if ever. But the first step is admitting we have a problem. Not one just one “side” or one outlet. But all players, news outlets, readers, advertisers, social media companies need to admit what we all know deep inside: Nobody is happy with this, and it’s time to try something new.

quote: (post)

Originally posted by Bashar Teg
pretty sure it was reagan abolishing the fairness in journalism act.