Understanding why media is so biased and unreliable
Ever have this feeling? You are scrolling through the web, reading about political developments in your home town, and being taken aback by how obviously partisan the news stories are. How they're framed from the headline on down in a transparently political matter. How the language is loaded to prompt outrage. How only one side gets to comment. Your reaction is accurate: in the past decade the news media has abandoned all pretense of objectivity and fairness due to fundamental changes in their business models. Leighton Woodhouse explains in The Algorithm.
Today, the media advertising model has been largely replaced by the “subscription solicited as donation” model. Under this model, readers are turned into paying subscribers, but the transaction is more than a merely commercial one. It’s more like a combination of a traditional subscription, in which you’re paying for news content that you wouldn’t be able to access otherwise, and a membership solicitation of the sort that your local NPR station makes several times a year. Readers are called upon to support the outlet not just to get past a paywall, but also for value-based, altruistic reasons: to support “independent journalism,” to uphold democracy, or, increasingly, to help give voice to the oppressed by funding reporters who will use their journalism as a tool for advocacy and activism.
News outlets, in other words, are selling themselves to partisan audiences as the producers and propagators of the political narratives those audiences favor. For a right-wing outlet, these favored narratives may be the spread of cancel culture, or the forgotten middle Americans who are standing up to the coastal elites, or the menace of Antifa. For left-wing outlets, they may be the rising threat of QAnon, or the infiltration of police forces by white supremacists, or the anti-vaxxers who are killing innocent Americans. In both cases, what is being sold is not news, or even editorial opinion. Indeed, the product that readers are buying isn’t even necessarily for their own personal consumption. What’s being sold is not a good, but a service: the service of pushing a particular political narrative onto a mass audience of Americans. It’s “native propaganda”: propaganda disguised as journalism.
One need only look at the membership pitches of outlets on both the left and the right to see it. Typically these pitches cite the outlets’ abilities to get their stories out to a wide swathe of readers — readers other than the prospective subscriber himself — as a benefit that they provide to that prospective subscriber. If the subscription were a simple commercial transaction, in which readers were merely paying to access news behind a paywall, this pitch would make no sense. It would be like a shoe company trying to pitch you on how many other consumers they’ll be able to sell shoes to if you support them with your purchase.
But the pitch is not merely about selling readers the news, the way a shoe company might sell you a pair of shoes. It’s a pitch aimed at ideologically motivated readers, selling the outlet’s ability to bring its ideologically loaded news product to other readers, whose political opinions might then be shaped by consuming that reporting. Subscribers, in other words, are being asked to support the outlet’s capacity to propagandize to others.
Read the whole thing here.
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.