4 ms·
"Balanced"? There's far more to the world than politically exciting topics. News media is entertainment, it's optimizing for engagement, not producing accurate
by concordDance 5y ago
"Balanced"? There's far more to the world than politically exciting topics. News media is entertainment, it's optimizing for engagement, not producing accurate impressions in the viewer's mind. Following multiple sources of news just means you are being focused on lots of things of questionable relevance and importance.
An example that comes to mind is the various investigative interviews being conducted in the UK about the covid response last year. The news media focuses on gossip rather than the structural issues, institutional biases and lessons. Though even covid itself is probably not the most important issue today, it'll probably be something obscure like the reverse Flynn effect in Europe.
- makomk 5y agoThe British media's coverage of the Covid-19 crisis was and still is really blatant. For example, there have been a lot of decisions which involved tradeoffs, with each option having both upsides and downsides, and the press has pretty consistently focused on the downsides - you could pretty much pinpoint the moment the government decided to put off the latest loosening of restrictions based just on when the BBC switched from pushing the reasons to delay it to focusing heavily on the downsides of doing so.