Consuming media - News algorithm are making news bad for eveyone

News algorithm are making news bad for eveyone

Reference: https://slate.com/business/2024/03/news-algorithm-why-weve-gotten-so-bad-at-the-news.html

People complain that the reporters/media doesn't write about <some subject in which they have an interest>.

Reporters/media companies are not vending machines. It is not their responsibility to write about everything that is interesting or urgent to everyone, every day.

Everyone inhabits a news bubble and consumes their own reality. Traditionally, the news apparatus didn’t work precisely that way. But now, the news apparatus is starting to operate precisely that way.

Now, people complain that the reporters/media doesn't write about <some subject in which they have an interest>. But many, many people have expounded on that topic, in many, many places. But the readers have not personally been exposed to that body of work, and thus they believe that that work doesn’t exist. They are topics that a number of journalists and investigative reporters and also TV and radio pundits had published pathbreaking work.

Blaming or finding fault with “mainstream media” or “commercial journalism” for failing to be targeted in precisely the ways that algorithms guarantee is not a good idea. The blame here is not so much about “the media” and its failure to cover some story that matters a great deal to the future of lawful democratic self-governance. Instead, it’s a way to fault journalism writ large for the fact that we now live in bubbles so tiny they can only deliver the same content every day.

In the old days, the news usually consist of sports/cooking/princess photo scandal/weather/Dow Jones Industrial Average/Oscar fails.

But today, the news is being accused of failing to deliver existential, live-reporting on creeping fascism, and global authoritarianism.

Today, the complaint is not that nobody is producing important news, but rather that the Media is failing to deliver that news directly to readers and listeners. The critique isn’t so much that reporters are not writing the right things, as it is that readers are not reading the right things, which is somehow also the fault of corporate media. But, stories are written and broadcast every day in prominent, fact-checked, sober publications. But those publications are probably not making it to your doorstep or your television screen or your phone.

The widespread critiques as to the clickbait headlines, the lack of depth and context and stakes are still spot on.

But there is something else that can’t be blamed on “journalism” so much as on ourselves as consumers of it. Large swaths of readers don’t read what they read. It’s not that they simply fail to “pay attention”; it’s that they have quite specifically organized their news not to tell them about it.

Long before thinkers like Cass Sunstein warned us about the dangers of a media that gives us exclusively more and more of what we want - it was clear that media bubbles and epistemic closure would ensure that most of us could travel through life without encountering an idea that alarmed or discomfited us, even as we consumed ideas nonstop. What has changed is not so much that the “news” we consume has been foamed and frothed up in the form of sound bites and circus and entertainment - that is both true and, to some extent, has always been the case and is now just exponentially faster, and more targeted. Rather, the big change in our relationship to the news these days is how little enters our world that is different from what came yesterday. A media architecture created to give us more and more and more of what we thought we wanted turns out to give us less and less.

This infinitesimal pivot, of being confident enough to declare “the press missed this” when the reality is that “I missed this” is an alluring way to shift blame from all that is broken about the media landscape in this moment to blaming only the New York Times. Reporting the news is expensive. Fact-checked, edited, non-A.I.-generated news is ever more expensive, and it is disappearing when we need it most.

If we want to change the way news is disseminated, we will have to do more than stand in our bubble, hollering at the bubble. Or we can ask ourselves what matters to us, and why we aren’t seeing it, and how we might find it.