Newspapers historically were not driven by facts but by classified ads and cartoons.
TV, even in its golden age, was always about advertisement. And as much as we pine for the days of Walter Cronkite etc, the truth perpetuated in media has always skewed white (fear of the minorities), status quo (fear of a revolution), and capitalist (fear of commies).
Tweet storms and pontifications like these are grand standing but devoid of any real grounded perspective. Just because you're 40 now, and realizing that there's a bunch of bad shit that you don't have control over (and maybe even contributed to) doesn't mean that "tech" or "media" has "gone away from truth."
This is a profoundly naive view of how media works. In the past, advertisers made ad buying decisions based in part on the reputation of the outlet, and circulation of media was dependent on public consensus that something was a reliable source of fact. Tabloids were a niche market that people did not take seriously. Newspapers might make their money on ads and cartoons, but the only reason they were able to command money for their ad space was because people bought and trusted the paper. Now, the profit motive for content creation relies far less on reputation effects. It is possible to make enormous amounts of money even when most people think your content is complete bullshit.
The reputation is where the bias lies. Consider the new york times: you probably respect it if you agree with it. If you don’t, it’s crappy narrative journalism. This certainly aligns with the parent comment’s claim that “facts” have never been the forte of any media; they simply need to agree with their readers. There’s simply little need to get 100% accuracy when 70% suffices to continue subscriptions.
Also, note that you can only see the issues in reporting if you’re closer to the story than the reporter is.
Media barons didn't hire journalists because they were ethical and factually accurate. They created that narrative because otherwise those people wouldn't churn out relevant and timely content to suit their readership. When the readership changes, media follows it. There is no intrinsic value in serving up the truth as it pertains to stock price.
Now you may argue that places like the NYT are the exception. But even here, this high falutin branding is there only to justify the power of ads for a different (read: intellectual) audience. If the NYT was forced to focus on one of their verticals today, would it be news? No. It would be food, fashion, and lifestyle because that's what drives all their traffic.
Today, to make money in a fact-driven business, you must restrict access to information.
For example, those who originate high-quality news have large payrolls of journalists in the field, layers of editors and fact-checkers, etc. They typically fund the business by restricting access with subscriptions, paywalls, premium content, and the like.
Fact-based businesses have small audiences with high cost per customer.
But signal-based businesses that sell opinion, tribal identification, status and emotion thrive through broad distribution. They need to maximize social sharing and generate large audiences.
Signal-based businesses are typically free or have very low per-user costs. They selectively remix content from fact-based businesses for their audiences, and add commentary, outrage, emotion and tribal identity.
most people is far more anecdotal than you might imagine.
Lies are only unmasked as lies months/years later where no one even remembers the whole arc of the conversation well enough, or sees the actors that spread lies to think "huh if we all had known the truth at the outset, none of this shit would have happened".
Its the same problem with online education - you can put up courses but there are many more courses than motivated learners, even fewer who would pay for it except to signal worth to employers.
Do you have any ideas on how to make truth even slightly profitable?
One might have thought that as the cost of obtaining facts dropped by 100x, people would consume higher-quality facts. But consuming higher-quality facts requires more effort, so in the end people consume more low-quality facts, like listicles of celeb gossip.
As a thought experiment, what is the cost per-fact that would make people consume the maximum quantity of high-quality facts? Too high and they consume less facts overall. Too low and they consume crap.
Even inside of it, there is obviously difference between the fixed cost of obtaining one fact, and the marginal cost of each additional fact. Riding to the library took time, but once you were there each additional fact cost less due to curation. In fact, the traditional library seems close to optimal for encouraging consumption of facts in volume (modulo institutional/cultural biases like the winners writing history).
Furthermore, while being able to look up a fact quickly ostensibly reduces the work to obtain that fact, it also discourages one's ability to perform educated guesses, reason from first principles, operate with uncertainty, etc. Intellectual effort/ability isn't zero sum.
This ability adds almost no actual value to my life, while taking time. But each individual thing is so quick to find.
It's also much easier to get lost trying to find the very best resource(s) for something, wasting time on that rather than digging into what's at hand. Because it's possible to refine one's selection now, it's so tempting to do so, even if a few hours' head start on lesser works would have been a better use of time. The same extends to entertainment.
What's lost is peace of mind, focus, serendipity, and contentment. I'm not sure the benefit's really been worth it, for me. Libraries were actually a pretty good solution for finding useful-enough information, fast enough, in most cases. How much would I pay for a mini-OED-style IMDB? TVtropes? Zero dollars, probably. I might not even keep them around if I received them for free. Not worth the fraction of a cubic foot each takes up. But I've got this Internet connection and all these devices anyway, so....
[EDIT] OECD corrected to OED. I've clearly wasted too much time arguing politics on the Internet.
Ironically, this only works well if ~everyone does it; if ~nobody does, it isolates those who do.
There won't be any escape, just a move toward smaller more focused online groups each with their own mores. The future looks more like a world of Slacks than a Facebook.
It's fascinating that this is happening in both social media and the world (Brexit and the fragmentation of Europe) at the same time.
So, more what the Internet looked like before 2007 or so. I was there for that, and won't say it was without its drawbacks - but it is starting to look as though the drawbacks of the current fashion outweigh them.
> It's fascinating that this is happening in both social media and the world (Brexit and the fragmentation of Europe) at the same time
Indeed it is. Perhaps there's a larger lesson to be drawn.
Finding and distributing facts has a lower cost / benefit than finding and distributing opinions.
I feel this similarly for constructive debate online. The cost of creating constructive comments is much more than the cost of creative "destructive" (not sure it's the right word) comments. So more comments are "destructive" than constructive.
Unless the value of constructive comments is larger than the perceived cost (hn might be an example?).
Tell me about it! It’s gotten so bad that many times I would respond to someone’s comment to expand on what they’re saying or provide context for readers who might not have it and they will reply back to me with something like “I already know this. That’s what I was talking about.”
I know that’s what you were talking about! I’m just further reinforcing what you were trying to say! I think I probably fall into this sometimes myself. Online comments are just so reflexively argumentative sometimes it's hard to switch gears into discussing things.
Said a guy...on Twitter...
But, the point still stands if you replace "fact" with "opinion".
The problem isn't an absence of facts. It's whether the layperson is both capable and motivated to seek out correct facts vs incorrect facts or unfalsifiable narratives.
Half-baked unempirical soap-boxing with your Headline Hits from "College Campuses Arent What They Used to Be" to Oh! Think of the Children! and the New York Times Best Seller: "STOP LABELLING YOURSELF PEOPLE!?!?!"
Ugh. It's a parody of itself. If you want to make this point then you need to do so by presenting an actual analysis of social dynamics on the internet, their changes, and so on. Not this pseudo-intellectual apocalypticism that was once phoned-in to broadsheet Op-Eds and now fills 20 tweets.
