More relevant than "social media" is the shift in journalism from reporting facts to "get as many pageviews as you can", driven by the fact that we pay with our attention and our data rather than our money.
The widespread assumption that the top brands in journalism today (NYT, WSJ, Economist...) were better in the past is simply wrong.
There never was a time where newspapers printed "just the facts". That wish stems from a misunderstanding both of the concept of "fact" as well as the role of journalism in a democracy.
Firstly, it's impossible on its face to print "just the facts" because the decision of what warrants news coverage itself is already a judgement call. Otherwise, the phone book would have been the pinnacle of journalism.
Secondly, journalists were never in the past expected to be the soulless automata people seem to idolise now. They were and are expected to be arbitrators of the political process, and they were and are allowed use their experience in that process.
In addition, your mechanism of "because of more page views -> more money, quality deteriorates" is just wrong on its face. Newspapers' income was always dependent on "page views" in that sense, yet that never meant that sensationalism was the only strategy. Maybe pressure increased somewhat because it can now be measured on a per-article basis, but good publishers are actually pushing back against that very idea with all their might. That's why they are unwilling to implement what people are now relentlessly asking for: single-article micro payments.
It wasn't perfect in the past but it feels like you're arguing against a straw man more than anything else. Nobody seriously claims that news was ever pure objectivity but in the past newspapers had far more money to support investigative journalism and, with so many more of them, that meant local issues which are increasingly ignored. Sure, every outlet had a bias but there was a key difference: a newspaper is an easily sued entity - no question of identity, local presence, etc. – and far more importantly the need to maintain subscribers in the general community placed a limit on how extreme any mainstream journal could get, especially in the news coverage as opposed to editorials. The WSJ might have been reliably Republican in its editorial endorsements but most liberals respected its business reporting, the NYT was roughly the same, especially on foreign coverage, from the center-left instead of center-right, etc. because they would check sources, print names and verifiable facts, etc. even if it was no more nobly intended than defense against a libel suit. Again, not perfect but there were multiple levels where there was a check on bad behavior for any major player. There were scandals like Jayson Blair but they were scandalous because they were rare and lead to people being fired.
In contrast the modern web of news sites are all chasing the same ad dollars and the barriers to entry are orders of magnitude lower. They get paid by the page view and don't need to be in a specific area, so the old check of needing to keep subscribers is gone and there's even a profit motive for running more outlandish claims. If someone were motivated to sue, it'd be an expensive and often international slog and the likely outcome even if successful is that a nearly asset-free company would fold before inevitably being replaced.
I think you're making a good argument for the rise of fringe publications like infowars or (to keep the balance) motherjones.com.
But what I was trying to dispel was the myth that previously well-regarded institutions like the WSJ and NYT changed for the worse.
I'm pretty sure the Blair scandal (someone completely making up interviews etc.) would play out very much the same today as it did in 2003. I also cannot agree with the idea that these specific institutions are "publishing outlandish claims" any more than they previously did.
Note that these newspapers' finances are still very much structured as they ever were. The NYT makes 70% of its income from subscriptions ( https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/02/business/media/new-york-t...) and the number is probably higher for the WSJ, which started its paywall much earlier and is more stringent in its application. Digital advertisement makes up only 10% of its income.
motherjones is a long-running progressive/political literary magazine. it started as an old media, printed on paper publication in 1976 and completely precedes the trend of internet based conspiracy peddlers like infowars. the fact that you're conflating the two "for balance" (as you say) is a serious error and it undermines your credibility.
Infowars is amusing though. I wouldn't have necessarily predicted their alignment with Trump 10 years or so ago when I first became aware of Alex Jones. The old Alex Jones even had some liberal tendencies, at times.
there are cringe worthy publications on the left. Huffington Post, The Young Turks, Jezebel, etc. They are hyper-partisan, screechy, shrill, unreasonable, gossipy, (nearly) empty spectacles in their own right but I don't know of a single one of them that is even halfway as far off the deep end of "motherfuckin lizard people aliens are running satanic child sex slave rings out of a pizza restaurant" that the infowars style conspiracy stuff gets into.
and Mother Jones is nowhere even on that axis. it's a higher quality publication with a deliberate (and publicly announced) editorial bias.
Try reading actual newspaper archives from the 80's or 50's. The real difference is manpower -> investigations. Small town corruption investigations where somewhat common, but we don't have nearly the news independent coverage which suggests people are simply getting away with more corruption.
People forget that "yellow journalism" was the baseline, not the exception.
I think much of the argument over bias could be settled by "journalists" having to disclose their political contributions and voting record for the last N years. When people see that a person contributes time, money, and effort to a particular candidate, glowing reviews of that candidate can be taken with a grain of salt.
Personal political contributions (in the US) are mostly on the record, for everyone.
For voting, I don't really see how you do it officially (what do they get in return for their votes being published), so you just reward liars and punish truth tellers.
The biggest difference is probably that you now have more or less a handful of respected national US and international publications that still (in spite of cuts in many cases) spend serious time on reporting and investigations.
And there are various niche publications that have some combination of loyal subscribers and wealthy backers. (I don't mean the last point as a dig; lots of smallish publications are someone's labor of love.)
What's become much tougher is maintaining serious investigative journalism or even covering all the boring city council meetings in all the markets that don't have a New York Times or Washington Post. This is especially true because journalism looks like an increasingly precarious career choice. There may very well not be a job at the end of the tunnel for the budding reporter who would previously have paid his dues for a few years getting paid peanuts.
This is a false dichotomy, there are more options available than "complete, 100% unbiased" and "completely 100% biased".
You can present things in a relatively objective way, even if you have a bit of a bias. You can do it by treating the other side fairly, and with compassion/understanding.
That is not what happens anymore, people have carved out their audiences and play TO those audiences, and they craft their narrative based upon what that audience wants, rather than a compassionate treatment of the other side.
Journalists seem to be pushing hard on the idea that what they report is is simply the facts and there is never any such thing as "alternative facts" - that is, that anything that goes against what they report is simply a lie. Probably because it's easier to sell their complaints about social media as fighting to protect facts than as an attempt to protect their control over the political process.
It seems like people's biggest problem with the new trends is their inability to take a pulse of the voting public, and maybe their inability to steer a narrative. The fourth estate has literally been in bed with the government for too long. I see it as a win for journalism, even if there's a heap of garbage to wade through during this transition.
They aren't "in bed with the government", but, and that's probably what you mean, they are indeed "in bed with the system".
That is: they operate within the current system, meaning there are certain assumptions underlying their work. These assumptions (or heuristics, if you will) were traditionally shared by their readers, and therefore were neither mentioned, nor attacked, nor defended.
One example may be their trust in certain institutions. Before 2016, the data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reported without questioning its truth. That didn't mean the data wasn't criticised: the common critique that the statistics are collected with certain definitions that under- or overestimate unemployment go back a long time. But that criticism is very much "inside the system" because it's just a reflection of an argument playing out in academia and within the bureaucracy for a long time.
What's new is this reporting being consumed by people with a very different set of assumptions, or an incomplete understanding of these assumptions. Or, rather, what's new is everyone getting to watch this interaction.
Now, you get people reading an article about unemployment rising/falling and they'll say "These statistics are completely made up! My uncle Jim just got fired! Why isn't this journalist verifying this information before regurgitating it? They are just in bed with big government! Literally!".
The best possible interpretation here is that this person just doesn't know about the heuristics being used. They want journalism to work without any of them, meaning that, when my just-invented "Journal of alternative employment statistics" sends out a press release, it's put on the same queue as the "traditional" data reports and, when someone gets around to either of them, they audit the data and report their findings.
That is, obviously, completely removed from reality and would never work. We need a certain trust in "the system" for functioning in the same way that your family would probably break down if, any time you saw your father or brother, you demanded that they go through genetic testing to prove their relationship with you.
Note that doesn't mean that somebody could cook those statistics without any fear of discovery: if some whistleblower sends a journalist a thousand pages of proof, they'll look into it, and try to verify or falsify it. It just means that long-standing institutions with a track record get a certain benefit vs unknown, new entities.
Tim Wu wrote an entire book called "The Attention Merchants" documenting the long history (going back to the 1800s) of various forms of media being commercialized with attention and data.
The "penny press" -- starting in the 1830s -- offered low-cost newspapers, basically at a loss, which were then subsidized with advertising. (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_press) A similar business model was then used for most newspapers, radio, network television stations, national magazines, cable news/TV subscriptions and on, and on. At each stage, the level of demographic and geographic targeting became more sophisticated. The modern web-based media is basically the logical conclusion of this two-century evolution.
What's more, profitable subscriptions for media are at an all-time high. The issue is that the spoils go to only a few winners, like Amazon, Netflix, SirusXM, Spotify, Comcast/TimeWarner, etc. A real issue is that people are more willing to pay subscriptions for music & entertainment than for news & analysis. But that's changing.
NYTimes, WaPo, WSJ have large-scale digital subscriber programs, and mid-market publishers are following suit. But, it's never going to have as much scale as ad/attention-based monetization.
I tend to agree with the sentiment embedded in your statement -- that if media are subscriber-based, they tend to be better aligned with those readers. But people are definitely accustomed to free on the web.
I recommend you check out "The Attention Merchants" to learn a bit about how news and information has been paid for over time. You shouldn't blame measurement; you should, if anything, blame the media industry's unit economics: http://amzn.to/2osFiNz
I haven't come across anything that is like a "history textbook of marketing", but would be glad to read something like that one day. I am sure something similar must show up in marketing/communications/journalism graduate schools.
Page-views has always been the priority even for print media.
In agregate, there was no past where print media were know for reporting facts, where people and organisations didn't allow their biases to come through.
The sensational headlines of pre-radio print, yes, today's clickbait isn't half as fresh as we like to think.
But it's not just scale: Online has massively lowered the barrier of entry for the technical prerequisites of reaching people, but the barriers of entry for actually getting attention were still basically the same as before. Until social came along and added that skewed lottery of "viral" on top.
It probably doesn't help that journalists think they can literally just make shit up on Twitter because journalistic standards don't apply there, and it then spreads virally due to their reputation and other journalists retweeting it. It's even more unlikely people will see any corrections on social media too.
Maybe "journalists" isn't the right word for them. It's closer to "comedians", I think. But there's a twisted way how lies can be tacitly acknowledged as lies. And yet considered truth. Not in a factual sense, but metaphorically, with a wink and a nod. In a word, lulz.
> The term was coined in the mid-1890s to characterize the sensational journalism that used some yellow ink in the circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal
Uh huh... yeah. 1890. I think this sort of crap has been going on for centuries.
Depending on the subject matter, you're more likely to get more objective reporting from local/regional press than nationals because local journalists tend to live in the area they're covering, so it's in their best interests to be straight with their reporting.
So you're saying we're likely to get more objective coverage from people who are more invested in the community in question? If a local journalist writes an unflattering story about new zoning laws taking place in her city, zoning laws that will send her child to another elementary school where the children do not score as high on standardized tests, would you assume she's more objective? When a local journalist writes positively about a highway extension that's going to level a "bad" neighborhood but make it easier for him to commute back and forth to his office downtown, would you not question his impartiality?
In fact, when reporting on a local story don't national news papers and stations usually defer to the AP or reporters from a local affiliate? Whenever something in my town makes national news, NPR generally has a reporter from our local affiliate on to talk about the issue. I think most of the local/regional news coverage is handled by reporters actually on the ground who live in the areas. I just don't see how local/regional news organizations would be any more or less objective than a national organization by being based in the area.
I guess I was talking more from my experience as a local reporter for four years in the UK. If I had developed a reputation for being unfair and unbalanced, no sources would have spoken to me or given me useful inside knowledge. The same principle is true to national and international press but being geographically confined to a particular area in my experience helps to focus the mind more. At least in my case it made want to take extra steps when possible to make sure I covered all angles and different viewpoints.
Journalists in large media markets (NYC, DC, etc.) can literally not make a living with their paltry salaries. It necessitates that they come from rich families (ex: Anderson Cooper) to be supported. It is classism. The middle class choose to become doctors/engineers instead.
I don't know how much they pay staff/beat writers, but lots of published pieces are freelance, and people get paid a few hundred bucks for them, tops.
There are a lot of people willing to write for cash. A permanent position as a writer is highly coveted and extremely competitive, which means that not only is it really hard to get such a job, but they don't have to pay much.
Most "journalists" today are starving artist types.
I would argue that "journalism" as a profession is dying. With the internet, we all have direct access to the news. We're no longer dependent on someone's reporter to come back and tell us what happened, and we don't need people in an ivory tower to attempt to interpret or even collate it; we do that ourselves with aggregation platforms.
The future does not look good for people who want this to remain a viable career.
> Platforms rely on algorithms to sort and target content. They have not wanted to invest in human editing, to avoid both cost and the perception that humans would be biased. However, the nuances of journalism require editorial judgment, so platforms will need to reconsider their approach.
Suppose Facebook embraces the fact that editorial power is political power. Could they develop this without splitting into Blue Facebook and Red Facebook like the television news networks?
They don't. In fact, as a response to the "fake news" hysteria, they've gone to a completely centralized "Trending News" bar, so it's identical across the country. [0] This is after they got in trouble last year for intentionally stopping the propagation of stories that painted conservatives positively. [1]
I don't think so. I had to purposefully subscribe to far right news sources and block a lot of mainstream media outlets in order to see much right-wing news in my Facebook feed. That trending news feed is still biased left though, I can't change that.
Yeah, it's a total fantasy that most people want to hear from the other side. They're loyal to their tribe and hate anything and everything having to do with the other one. It causes them anger just to see it, it's like flashing the rival's gang sign or flying an enemy flag. It's a psychological identity thing.
This is important for community admins to understand. This is not a dialogue problem. People are given a tribe to belong to or oppose, and these affiliations are used by strategists and propagandists to affect popular anger/resentment.
That means that users don't want to see a balanced feed. They want to see things that make them feel good things, and not bad things. And the other side is "bad things".
"Social media" calls into question the entire current consumer tech landscape. What's the point of being always connected if the things we have access to or are connected to is garbage?
To be perfectly blunt though, social media is just a medium, what is garbage is what people are putting it in there. Being always connected just amplifies what was already there. So, I would argue that what social media really calls into question is our very society.
Perhaps, though it seems corporate profits have been prioritized over journalistic ethics in the mass media since at least the 1890s with the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer.
Why are people saying that social media is the problem? As far as I see, social media are just more effective at satisfying people's wants in their information consumption.
It's people's wants and preferences that are the problem. Everybody likes their echo chamber.
Ultimately democracy can't exist where there are "those people" versus "us people". Lincoln's famous speech spoke of government "of the people, by the people and for the people", which only means something if "people" is a unified whole. Not "for us people, but not for those people". After all, the American civil war was about the inclusion of a different kind of "those people" in the voting pool and the abolition of the 3/5 compromise.
National unification is incredibly hard work, but worth trying.
"We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills" -- Kennedy
(this applies very much to the UK as well, but I'm targeting a primarily American audience here)
But the question is if "pure" democracy is what you should be aiming for. It might be a flawed concept, just like a pure free market is considered flawed.
I didn't say anything about purity, which is always an impractical concept. I did mention unity, which is probably just as impractical. "Inclusivity" maybe.
The important things about both democracy and the rule of law is that people are willing to acquiesce to decisions not in their favour because they recognise the fairness of the process and have a voice in it.
I mean, there were once poll taxes and literacy tests, which were discriminatory. But how would one test for skeptical rationality? And how would that ever get implemented in a populist democracy?
An indirect approach could be to figure out if sensitivity to fake-news/populism/echo-chambers correlates with other behavior, allowing you to select.
For example, suppose that a correlation exists with short-term greediness. In that case, you could alter the voting process such that the voter can choose between a small reward or voting.
This could also be justified by saying that politics should not lean towards short-term policies, and hence people who are prone to such thinking should not participate in the voting process.
Doing that for the politicians might be a better idea there. Too many MPs and Congress members only think about the short term effects of their policies as is, and it's certainly causing issues in the political world at the moment.
The only thing that changed was the readers illusion of newspapers somehow being the source of truth and objecticity.
People used to believe that journalism was about reporing facts and objective accounts of what was going on.
In reality the newspapers who used to position themselves as objective never where, they were however mainstream.
Thanks to the internet people are now seeing the reality of journalism which is that there are many different perspectives on any subject or put another way. The post-modernists were right all along.
Journalism has never been as factual as it is today it's just that people are uneasy about the reality that different facts can be used to create different angels to the same story.
The only piece of objectivity there is in any story is the event itself. "Plane went down", "Man committed of murder", "Trump won the presidency" once you step outside of these basic facts it's mostly up to interpretation. The whys, the hows, all based on interpretation.
Thanks to social media and then fact that you can't just get away with claiming one interpretation when there are more is what make social media disruptive, not to journalism but to the way we understand journalism.
This makes sense. Social companies now own eyeballs. They sell eyeballs to advertisers, something legacy media used to do. But legacy media didn't own eyeballs through the magic of journalism, it owned them through massive monopolies in print (local) and telecom (national). Journalists don't like to talk about this, because it hurts their ego.
In the seventeenth century, media shifted from manuscripts to print.
Now print has shifted to digital, but with the rise of Social some of the earlier dynamics of manuscript circulation are coming back into play, e.g "scribal communities" can be compared with "social media communities".
What this means, I've no idea, but it could lead to a further polarising of political opinion as social media communities solidify and cross-community dialogue disappears.
