5 ms·

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not sui

> One of the things that COVID has taught me is that the concept of a “story” in the news media is a relic that needs to be completely re-thought. It is not suited to the challenges of media communication today. > Specifically, there are challenging and complex public-policy questions which require robust engagement from an informed electorate. The problem is that the media is not intended to inform the electorate, nor to communicate truth. The sole job of the media is to win eyeballs, so that those eyeballs can be shown ads. The profit motive is what these entities exist, and the profit motive pushes them toward actions that are harmful to society as a whole. Fear and anger drives engagement, and engagement drives profit. Clam reason and subtle nuance do not drive engagement, and therefore have no place in today's media.

kiba 5y ago
Is an informed electorate by definition a group of people who sat through a series of free college level lecture taught by an expert virologist? Even then, I found an error or two because I did exhaustive surface level fact checking. Or is it about the public being informed of accurate surface level facts and big picture views?
- Mezzie 5y ago
  This also ignores that there are multiple perspectives to being 'informed'. For example, as someone who's studied online communication and social computing at the graduate level, my main disagreement with a lot of policy decisions isn't due to my disagreement with scientists, but rather because I think that the policy decisions made are pouring gasoline on our infosphere problems. So am I not informed because I don't have a biology related degree, or are THEY not informed because none of them seem to have a clue how people or the Internet work? Somebody that only understands virology doesn't understand the PANDEMIC, as a social construct/an impact on human societies. (And vice versa.) And that's without getting into history and geopolitics: Since variants are a global concern, the optimal choices are also impacted by what other countries are doing. And understanding those in context means different legal systems, different ideas of human rights, different patent and pharma laws, blah blah blah. I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    > I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen. Entirely reasonable, and also universally accepted in many domains. When it comes to figuring out how we next put someone on the moon, nobody thinks that an informed electorate is an important part of the process. We just generally keep quiet and let "them" get on with it. The difficulties start when there is an issue (such as a pandemic) about which huge numbers of people are neither informed nor will they shut up.
taneq 5y ago
> The sole job of the media is to win eyeballs, so that those eyeballs can be shown ads. Don't you miss the good ol' days, when the media was just there to manipulate public opinion in favour of whichever oligarch paid the piper?
coldpie 5y ago
The ad-based business model is probably the single largest contributor to bad outcomes in our time.
- carabiner 5y ago
  Go for news sources that are less reliant on ads for revenue, and more on subscriptions. That would be the Financial Times.
gpm 5y ago
Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term reporting that OP is talking about would do that. Surely inducing people to read the same story multiple times, get's more eyeballs. Being reliable enough that people check your news every day, wins eyeballs. Being frequently uninformative, makes people less likely to come back (loses eyeballs). Etc. You say that "subtle nuance doesn't drive engagement", but don't we also see that people like "knowing more" than everyone else, or even just thinking they do (the latter of which seems to be a large driving force behind conspiracy theories)? So I don't think that this really explains the entirety of the media's behavior. I think a lot of it is based on things like institutional inertia from when news was delivered via physical news papers, and optimizing for just the metrics that are easy to measure.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pjscott 5y ago
What you're talking about is a real problem, but I don't think it's the same problem that the article is talking about. There's a lot of journalism that isn't trying to stir up strong emotion, that actually does look like it's trying to be calmly informative -- and when I see it, it's usually what the OP calls a story: "[...] a temporal snapshot of one journalist's interpretation of an issue. Just a tidy little pile of motivated reasoning with a few cherry-picked citations, and then we move on to the next story." I suspect that news sources that are trying to brand themselves as impartial and trustworthy could get more trust without sacrificing many eyeballs if they'd switch from a story format to a regularly-updated "Here's what we think we know, how we think we know it, and how confident we are about it" format.

kiba 5y ago

Is an informed electorate by definition a group of people who sat through a series of free college level lecture taught by an expert virologist? Even then, I found an error or two because I did exhaustive surface level fact checking. Or is it about the public being informed of accurate surface level facts and big picture views?

Mezzie 5y ago
This also ignores that there are multiple perspectives to being 'informed'. For example, as someone who's studied online communication and social computing at the graduate level, my main disagreement with a lot of policy decisions isn't due to my disagreement with scientists, but rather because I think that the policy decisions made are pouring gasoline on our infosphere problems. So am I not informed because I don't have a biology related degree, or are THEY not informed because none of them seem to have a clue how people or the Internet work? Somebody that only understands virology doesn't understand the PANDEMIC, as a social construct/an impact on human societies. (And vice versa.) And that's without getting into history and geopolitics: Since variants are a global concern, the optimal choices are also impacted by what other countries are doing. And understanding those in context means different legal systems, different ideas of human rights, different patent and pharma laws, blah blah blah. I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > I sincerely doubt if an informed electorate is possible on some issues (such as COVID) because I think the time investment to be informed is too much to put on the average citizen. Entirely reasonable, and also universally accepted in many domains. When it comes to figuring out how we next put someone on the moon, nobody thinks that an informed electorate is an important part of the process. We just generally keep quiet and let "them" get on with it. The difficulties start when there is an issue (such as a pandemic) about which huge numbers of people are neither informed nor will they shut up.

taneq 5y ago

> The sole job of the media is to win eyeballs, so that those eyeballs can be shown ads. Don't you miss the good ol' days, when the media was just there to manipulate public opinion in favour of whichever oligarch paid the piper?

coldpie 5y ago

The ad-based business model is probably the single largest contributor to bad outcomes in our time.

carabiner 5y ago
Go for news sources that are less reliant on ads for revenue, and more on subscriptions. That would be the Financial Times.

gpm 5y ago

Even taking the view that the media's sole goal is to win eyeballs, it seems like making an investment in the longer term reporting that OP is talking about would do that. Surely inducing people to read the same story multiple times, get's more eyeballs. Being reliable enough that people check your news every day, wins eyeballs. Being frequently uninformative, makes people less likely to come back (loses eyeballs). Etc. You say that "subtle nuance doesn't drive engagement", but don't we also see that people like "knowing more" than everyone else, or even just thinking they do (the latter of which seems to be a large driving force behind conspiracy theories)? So I don't think that this really explains the entirety of the media's behavior. I think a lot of it is based on things like institutional inertia from when news was delivered via physical news papers, and optimizing for just the metrics that are easy to measure.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

pjscott 5y ago

What you're talking about is a real problem, but I don't think it's the same problem that the article is talking about. There's a lot of journalism that isn't trying to stir up strong emotion, that actually does look like it's trying to be calmly informative -- and when I see it, it's usually what the OP calls a story: "[...] a temporal snapshot of one journalist's interpretation of an issue. Just a tidy little pile of motivated reasoning with a few cherry-picked citations, and then we move on to the next story." I suspect that news sources that are trying to brand themselves as impartial and trustworthy could get more trust without sacrificing many eyeballs if they'd switch from a story format to a regularly-updated "Here's what we think we know, how we think we know it, and how confident we are about it" format.