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These days I don't think you can blame the media for anything without blaming the advertising industry as the upstream cause. We distribute unbundled nuggets of
by caconym_ 7y ago
These days I don't think you can blame the media for anything without blaming the advertising industry as the upstream cause. We distribute unbundled nuggets of content that are optimized to get clicks (and to drive click rate, meaning you have to make your impact and turn the consumer around as quickly as you can), because that's what's incentivized by advertising-based revenue streams. Those optimizations are not compatible with accurate and balanced coverage of nuanced issues.
I assume something similar was true in the 90s, or starting to be true, but I don't have as good an understanding of how it all worked back then.
- gundmc 7y agoIt's pretty absurd to shift the blame to advertising. This wasn't the age of clickbait and adtech, this was over 20 years ago. 24 hour news channels like Fox News and MSNBC were in their infancy. Isn't there some responsibility to be had to uphold journalistic integrity? If anything, this article shows the danger of pop science and journalists writing authoritatively about things they don't understand well.
- caconym_ 7y agoMaybe you missed the first two words of my comment: "these days". I did not restrict my context to 20 years ago, because neither does the linked article.