News only matters if you want it to
Posted on: August 26, 2008Think that's controversial? It is, and with good reason: in an era where Stephen Colbert (playing a character… many people don't know that) and Jon Stewart are regularly touted as being more entertaining and informative than so-called "serious" anchors and reporters, we choose what comes to us.
In many cases, that means we'd rather listen to what makes sense and appeals to our values, what makes us feel that we're right. Opinions we can agree with, facts — well, nevermind the facts, Ma'am — there's a newspaper or a blog for each & everyone. And in cases where those voids aren't filled yet, they will soon be, often out of passion and/or moneymaking opportunities.
On one hand, there are rational signs of danger: pseudoscientific quackery being touted as "herbal cures", bigfoot bloat, CNN's front page prioritizing celeb gossip that rivals Perez Hilton sans the crude white scrawlings (but isn't that what the people want?), and too much nonsense to… make sense of.
On the other, not only is it in our power to choose, we feel more active getting a voice out there, lending a slant to stories we care about. I know this daily through popurls, the mighty 1-page aggregator. The sites it tabulates are many of the Net's prominent voices, with politics, sex, scandal (a mix of the aforementioned two), and WTFness colliding with more casual human interest and tech tales. It is a stark, gripping overview of what we want to matter.
It wouldn't be long until people paid news to be written for them.
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August 27th, 2008 at 1:34 AM PDT
I have a feeling that something like this could be a reaction to "Information Overload".
With more information and news available, people tend to try to "filter" what they're receiving. Unfortunately, some of it is made to be true, simply because they feel it's true. In some cases, like in science and other things, it can lead to disaster.
As for what people want, they tend to gravitate towards stories of sex, scandal, intrigue and so on. Personally, I tend to shy away from the media, because most of it, to me, is all too depressing.
August 27th, 2008 at 1:38 AM PDT
Somehow reminds me of epic…
Fascinating and scary at the same time.
August 27th, 2008 at 4:04 AM PDT
"It wouldn't be long until people paid news to be written for them."
Sure, people have been paying for news. Ask Armstrong Williams.
The same argument could be made for Fox News, which pretty much says whatever the Republican Party wants them to say. The straight-line connection between stimulus (payment) and effect (editorial product) isn't as clean as in the Williams case, though. Rupert Murdoch does, however, own Fox News; his personally conservative bias flows pretty freely.
August 27th, 2008 at 5:29 AM PDT
Good Morning Torley,
It's simply a sign of the times. It will remain this way. Soooo if you want a child to have an edge in this world (RL or SL), or if you want an edge … Continue to study / apply:
1) "if, then" logic;
2) the proverb "The first to present his case seems right, till another comes forward and questions him."
3) and the proverb "He who answers before listening - that is his folly and his shame."
Know that few will question, most will scoff, few are listening to compare, most are searching for a place to say "me too" … a place that confirms their desires before any logic can reach them.
Plan accordingly.
Enjoy have fun,
Mari
August 27th, 2008 at 5:55 AM PDT
I totally agree with you, Torley. "Free" information is not always "good" information; that's the major reason why I actually don't really subscribe to any RSS feeds. Instead, I rely on people — people I trust; friends, acquaintances, colleagues — who share similar interests with me to filter an astonishing amount of information that crosses their digital lives, and share with me what they found more interesting.
All these people are actually providing me a valuable service: I don't pay them (lol I hope they don't get any ideas from your post
) but they spend hours and hours wading through the news, and come up with just what might be interesting. Well, that's definitely a service worth selling. Right now, we rely on semi-automated tools (like, well, Google News) to sort out things for us, by profiling our interests and coming up with information that is a bit more useful than "raw data".
However, nothing beats human beings as pattern matchers. We're really so good at this. A typical example is someone saying "I have no interest in sex" and checking a box on an automated feed somewhere. But information fed by a human — as opposed to a 'bot — might read a sex-related article that might be interesting and feed it to me. I would have never found Regina Lynn's amazing articles (both at Wired and on her blog) if I hadn't some humans looking it up for me.
So, yes, paying for people to sort out information and present it in a way that interests me is a business opportunity. It used to be called "journalism"
Who knows, it might become fashionable again… 
August 27th, 2008 at 6:12 AM PDT
Propaganda. Pure & simple. Why else does the serious news always start out with a "Bang" then end with a feel good story? To help us "digest" the other crap (pardon my language) that they force fed us between commercials for prescription drugs & soda. The mental state of Brit Brit chosen over knowing the outcome of the talks between the Dali Lama & China. "Intelligent" topics of conversation is considered discussing "The Hills" instead of the last good book we read. Propaganda & the drive through marriage culture. Such a waste.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:35 AM PDT
It does matter. Behind the entertainment value, behind the corporate agendas and MSM, behind the official government (ours and theirs) lines, lie the stories of humanity, and these matter. Historical context, and our continuing re-evaluation of it, matters. "Facts" are understood together in interpretation, which is subjective.
Sometimes facts do not line up in a linear fashion, some might be missing, some might be out of proportion to the "whole picture." We have this odd idea of journalistic "fairness," if I have 20 examples of x on one side and 2 examples of x on the other side, and my "factual" report compares 2 of the 20 to the 2, is that a fair analysis of the whole?
Free information is not good information? When did the vetting of fact/analysis become entwined with corporate/organization sponsorship? There might be a lot of whistleblowers who disagree with this statement.
Part of the promise of news is precisely to take you out of your cultural comfort zone, to take you outside of your circle of friends and experiences, to expose you to myriad and often conflicting points of view.
A really great TED talk from Alissa Miller at PRI on the economic realities of MSM non-US reporting is here.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:33 AM PDT
LOL Hi Torley.
I am Fail, we are Fail, everyone is FAIL.
ILU!
August 27th, 2008 at 3:07 PM PDT
Yes, we are free to choose! … our beliefs, how we interpret our world, etc. We are free to think for ourselves. Basically we are free to create our own reality. There have been times where I've read a news article and thought "OMG, I didn't know that!"… then the next day I've read the same news article and thought "OMG, that is a bunch of hogwash, what they're saying doesn't even make sense!"
Mahalo to you Torley for a great topic this morning!
August 27th, 2008 at 4:54 PM PDT
I already have the news written for me, and have had it so for a few years now. It's an amazing combination of technological advances comprised of Google News alerts and my RSS feed reader.
Oh, and the BBC. Can't forget the wonderfulness that is the BBC.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:54 PM PDT
The great rational argument we hear about news is "we get the news we deserve". The implication is that news is market controlled, so the news we choose to consume dictates what we get…. well that's problematic. Economic market theories rely on a basis of "rational self interest" in the population.
We know that people aren't rational, or advertising and marketing wouldn't work. We also know that it is not the market we the people exist in which dictates what we see, because mainstream media ownership is so highly concentrated. It's only a market we have an effect on when we have choice, and when it comes to our major media channels it's a choice between different products from the same few companies.
Over the last few years, (some say from facing competition from internet sources,) the major news providers have moved even further towards news as entertainment - so much in fact that several studies have shown that viewers of the Daily Show or the Colbert Report are _more_ informed on average about what we think of as news than those watching the "real" news. That the major providers of news consider it more important to entertain than to inform is a very poor situation indeed. Jon Stewart has occasionally called the major news providers on this during intervews - for example when inverviewed by CNN several years ago when he was almost thrown off air for telling them they should be "ashamed of themselves".
We also know that the major news providers lie. This came out in the infamous (but surprisingly under-reported) Florida court ruling in favor of Fox news. The Florida Court of Appeals unanimously agreed with an assertion by FOX News that there is no rule against distorting or falsifying the news in the United States. This was of course about Fox defending the fact that they'd falsified reports to cast their stakeholders in a better light, and that their right to lie to the public was covered by American free speech provisions. Lying to the public is perfectly legal.
This is a pretty poor shape for the "fourth estate" to be in. Trustworthyness and informativeness should be the foundations of the press, and yet we find that we may be able to trust and be informed more by comedy shows than our greatest media institutions. If I want LOLcats and amusing rants, I'm happy to hit the blogs for that. There's nothing wrong with news as entertainment. Not being able to trust our multi-billion dollar public information infrastructure though to tell the truth and inform us of what's really going on….. well all I can say is it's a very unfortunate state of affairs.
It's true we can view whatever media we wish to, and mash up our own reality. It's fun to do. When we get bored of that though it would be encouraging to think we could fall back on integrity of the press for a reality check. Unfortunately, in it's present state, we can not.