I’m a concerned global citizen in Canada who tries to do deep dives on world issue causes/solutions that impact a sustainable, just economy. The media landscape/accessibility of factual and insightful information came into sharp focus to me prior to our 2015 election when Postmedia purchased 300 Canadian media properties. Journalists slashed, more paid editorial “comment” passing as reporting and no progressive voice left in MSM primarily hedge fund/Conservative owned landscape. New journalistic properties necessarily requiring paywalls that a fact starved public increasingly can’t afford (due to decrease in disposable income that Conservative/inflationary policies effect).
So, meeting people “where they are” now requires journalists to move into evolving technical platforms…that has led this old lady into having to expand my search to find published and podcast material on Substack, Bluesky and Threads.
There will be a lot of older voters who will stay in silos and fail to keep up…and there will be many low information voters who cannot afford time/money to find out …what they don’t know (and how to stave off propaganda). The autocrat/oligarch messengers will be well funded to continually confuse us and buy policy that makes it harder to amplify and descern truth.
Thank you for writing this. My only quibble is with your calling social media commentary and ChatGPT summaries "bullshit," since bullshit fertilizes soil. It contributes to a circular, nourishing ecosystem.
I'm only taking this opportunity to chime in here because I attended a webinar from one of these misinformation profs at the UW, and it was fascinating! They didn't think "mis/disinformation" captured the scope of problem, and began to focus on what they explicitly call "bullshit," which is a problem of a different kind. Anyway, readers may be interested:
Funny how I've been sitting on a Naomi Klein book for like 3 months now. Distraction is a new way of life and getting news updates on my phone occupy way too much time. The distraction is constant throughout the day. No wonder so many younger folks have no clarity on real issues and what political policy actually means. I am more pessimistic now (could be an age thing since I'm 65). I don't know how we can maintain or regain Democracy in this current state of misinformation. It might be impossible.
I kid you not, I was just having this discussion this week with some journalism friends about the impact of ChatGPT on the next generation, does anyone read anymore and how the flywheel that starts with print media seems to be breaking. Thanks for laying that all out and also for striking the note of optimism at the end!
Well said. I realize that writing books only informs those who read them. As I read Bob Woodward's latest book, the intricate work done in the leadup to the invasion of Ukraine by the experienced President Biden and his State Dept. and other advisors will be absent in the years ahead.
Love seeing you continue banging the drum about this, Matt. Brings to mind this quote from George Horne (1786): "Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity 30 pages to answer. When this is done, the same question will be triumphantly asked again the next year as if nothing had ever been written on the subject."
See also Brandolini's Law (2013): "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."(Also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.)
lordy mama, I am the choir to whom you are preaching. This is exactly what I have been feeling. Your explanation of the macroeconomics of producing quality news is spot on.
I'm 80 and have been a prodigious reader since childhood. (I just looked at my Amazon "achievements"--I read kindle only thanks to my eyes and hands. In the past four years I've finished around 700 plus books--that doesn't count ones I have not finished, but just dipped into). My kids were great readers too. My go-to present to anyone has always been books. So I was horrified when my son told me that my grandkids (teen and young adult) do NOT READ BOOKS FOR PLEASURE. WTF? They are smart, gifted, doing incredibly creative work with computers. But books are, I guess, "too slow." I can't imagine a world so constrained, so absent varying points of view.
Even on Substack I've noticed an increase in podcasts--they permeate everything. I'd MUCH rather read the transcript--much more time efficient. I listen to them mostly when I REALLY have to do things like sort the mail.
And I agree this whole attitude towards how we get information is something that underlies so many of our problems. We are, amongst other things, experiencing a growing failure of imagination, not to mention empathy, when we only consume sound bite zipping past us, and never experience the lives of others as one can through books or deep reporting.
Thank you for your excellent perceptive comments. I spent 10 years working on a national story in which over 100 years ago (1909) the newspapers played a critical role in a mother's fight for the truth when her Marine Corps son died after a brawl at the Naval Academy. The Navy said it was suicide; she was convinced he was murdered. https://robinrcutler.com/2022/10/16/the-power-of-the-press/ Rosa Sutton declared “Governmental actions should be neither secret nor unjust. . . . If we cannot get justice through the courts, every newspaper in the United States shall have the facts as we have them and then see what the opinion of the world will be.” This was a headline story across the United States because tabloid and investigative journalists took up her cause – including those at the Los Angeles Times. It is both scary and fascinating to think what might've happened to her fight for justice in the current media ecosystem.
While writing many (many!) letters to the LA Times, I would distinguish between ‘hard news’ and ‘soft news’. Using this framework, hard news is produced like an OSINT version of the president’s daily brief, and soft news is produced using traditional journalistic practices. Hard news does not manipulate the reader, but soft news is expected to be somewhat manipulative (a celebrity is giving an interview when their new movie is released – what a coincidence!)
My suggested mission statement for the LA Times was “We answer the question: What’s going on.” Satisfying this statement requires both hard news (what’s happening within government?) and soft news (what’s there to do this weekend?). Seen this way, it’s not surprising that hard news engagement lags soft news engagement, even though it is more costly to generate.
But engagement doesn’t measure value. People are attracted to ‘secret knowledge’, and will pay for it. Being ‘in the know’ has cachet: wouldn’t you like your news briefing to rival the president’s daily brief? Unfortunately, media executives increasingly use soft news techniques for generating hard news; perhaps for both easier content and for increased engagement.
Hard news must satisfy a higher standard than soft news. When media outlets cooperate with information campaigns, they corrupt hard news, changing it from ‘an OSINT of president’s daily brief’ to ‘an amplifying conduit of propaganda’.
P.S. In hard news, bothsides and balance don’t exist. Imagine giving a ‘bothsides’ intelligence briefing to the president. Hopefully you would be kicked out of the room!
Great piece that more people need to read. Just a little quibble: folk-story it is not. Yellow journalism it is. Or click bait. Folk stories are imbued with bits of wisdom and problem solving structures. What you are talking about is something quite different. Folk-story sounds good, but is inaccurate. Which is kind of funny, given you’re writing about the swarms of inaccuracies, falsehoods and lies today. From your neighborhood Folklorist :)
THANK. YOU. SO. MUCH. I was just commenting on this phenomenon recently and many of my friends and online community really don’t understand this large-scale continental shift in our culture. Disposable media has long since flooded our search engines; finding writing of substance is itself quite the chore, after all the work it takes to produce and publish it. Next step in evolution in many ways 😅
It's been increasingly frustrating for me that even primarily "print" information outlets have been overtaken with the desire to give video content. When I read a thing, I am an active participant in the information exchange. When I watch it, I am a passive consumer. McLuhan knew this way back in the dark ages before digital media.
Thanks for writing this, and for the reminder that citizenship is a conscious act, not a state of being. I worry about how much worse things will need to get before we find the will to put down our phones and pick up the torches and pitchforks, let alone books.
Very well written. This is such a complex problem. I don’t know how we undo the knot. Smartphones and all the tech associated with such has really screwed up our society. As a former movie lover, I barely watch movies anymore either. I strongly dislike the experience of selecting a movie from a streaming library, not to mention how much long form media itself has changed. The “tent pole” Marvel releases, etc. have “ruined” the Hollywood art form; in addition, there’s just too much damn content. It’s more product and filler than anything else. There’s a good book called Republican Gomorrah in which the VHS camcorder is mentioned as a piece of technology which heavily contributed to the Christian Right ratcheting up their and disinformation their agenda in the early 80s.
I’m a concerned global citizen in Canada who tries to do deep dives on world issue causes/solutions that impact a sustainable, just economy. The media landscape/accessibility of factual and insightful information came into sharp focus to me prior to our 2015 election when Postmedia purchased 300 Canadian media properties. Journalists slashed, more paid editorial “comment” passing as reporting and no progressive voice left in MSM primarily hedge fund/Conservative owned landscape. New journalistic properties necessarily requiring paywalls that a fact starved public increasingly can’t afford (due to decrease in disposable income that Conservative/inflationary policies effect).
So, meeting people “where they are” now requires journalists to move into evolving technical platforms…that has led this old lady into having to expand my search to find published and podcast material on Substack, Bluesky and Threads.
There will be a lot of older voters who will stay in silos and fail to keep up…and there will be many low information voters who cannot afford time/money to find out …what they don’t know (and how to stave off propaganda). The autocrat/oligarch messengers will be well funded to continually confuse us and buy policy that makes it harder to amplify and descern truth.
Glad I stumbled on your writing.
Thank you for writing this. My only quibble is with your calling social media commentary and ChatGPT summaries "bullshit," since bullshit fertilizes soil. It contributes to a circular, nourishing ecosystem.
I'm only taking this opportunity to chime in here because I attended a webinar from one of these misinformation profs at the UW, and it was fascinating! They didn't think "mis/disinformation" captured the scope of problem, and began to focus on what they explicitly call "bullshit," which is a problem of a different kind. Anyway, readers may be interested:
https://callingbullshit.org/tools.html
Funny how I've been sitting on a Naomi Klein book for like 3 months now. Distraction is a new way of life and getting news updates on my phone occupy way too much time. The distraction is constant throughout the day. No wonder so many younger folks have no clarity on real issues and what political policy actually means. I am more pessimistic now (could be an age thing since I'm 65). I don't know how we can maintain or regain Democracy in this current state of misinformation. It might be impossible.
"The work of obtaining facts has a major economic disadvantage against the production of bullshit."
This sentence is lovely, thank you. You've brought Chesterton's quip about the Truth getting its pants on into the 21st century.
I kid you not, I was just having this discussion this week with some journalism friends about the impact of ChatGPT on the next generation, does anyone read anymore and how the flywheel that starts with print media seems to be breaking. Thanks for laying that all out and also for striking the note of optimism at the end!
Well said. I realize that writing books only informs those who read them. As I read Bob Woodward's latest book, the intricate work done in the leadup to the invasion of Ukraine by the experienced President Biden and his State Dept. and other advisors will be absent in the years ahead.
Love seeing you continue banging the drum about this, Matt. Brings to mind this quote from George Horne (1786): "Pertness and ignorance may ask a question in three lines, which it will cost learning and ingenuity 30 pages to answer. When this is done, the same question will be triumphantly asked again the next year as if nothing had ever been written on the subject."
See also Brandolini's Law (2013): "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."(Also called the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle.)
lordy mama, I am the choir to whom you are preaching. This is exactly what I have been feeling. Your explanation of the macroeconomics of producing quality news is spot on.
I'm 80 and have been a prodigious reader since childhood. (I just looked at my Amazon "achievements"--I read kindle only thanks to my eyes and hands. In the past four years I've finished around 700 plus books--that doesn't count ones I have not finished, but just dipped into). My kids were great readers too. My go-to present to anyone has always been books. So I was horrified when my son told me that my grandkids (teen and young adult) do NOT READ BOOKS FOR PLEASURE. WTF? They are smart, gifted, doing incredibly creative work with computers. But books are, I guess, "too slow." I can't imagine a world so constrained, so absent varying points of view.
Even on Substack I've noticed an increase in podcasts--they permeate everything. I'd MUCH rather read the transcript--much more time efficient. I listen to them mostly when I REALLY have to do things like sort the mail.
And I agree this whole attitude towards how we get information is something that underlies so many of our problems. We are, amongst other things, experiencing a growing failure of imagination, not to mention empathy, when we only consume sound bite zipping past us, and never experience the lives of others as one can through books or deep reporting.
With you 100%! It does help to limit screen time for those young kids before they become teens but that's hard though many parents do try.
Thank you for your excellent perceptive comments. I spent 10 years working on a national story in which over 100 years ago (1909) the newspapers played a critical role in a mother's fight for the truth when her Marine Corps son died after a brawl at the Naval Academy. The Navy said it was suicide; she was convinced he was murdered. https://robinrcutler.com/2022/10/16/the-power-of-the-press/ Rosa Sutton declared “Governmental actions should be neither secret nor unjust. . . . If we cannot get justice through the courts, every newspaper in the United States shall have the facts as we have them and then see what the opinion of the world will be.” This was a headline story across the United States because tabloid and investigative journalists took up her cause – including those at the Los Angeles Times. It is both scary and fascinating to think what might've happened to her fight for justice in the current media ecosystem.
It would help if establishment news media owners cared to or had any interest in reporting truths.
They clearly do not. The brief period in the late 1960s to mid-70s was a historical anomaly.
IMO, there's an untapped, ignored market for honest, truthful reporting. Major media owners have no interest in that group.
If one feels ignored by establishment media and wants to be informed nonetheless, yeah, of course it's a crapshoot.
While writing many (many!) letters to the LA Times, I would distinguish between ‘hard news’ and ‘soft news’. Using this framework, hard news is produced like an OSINT version of the president’s daily brief, and soft news is produced using traditional journalistic practices. Hard news does not manipulate the reader, but soft news is expected to be somewhat manipulative (a celebrity is giving an interview when their new movie is released – what a coincidence!)
My suggested mission statement for the LA Times was “We answer the question: What’s going on.” Satisfying this statement requires both hard news (what’s happening within government?) and soft news (what’s there to do this weekend?). Seen this way, it’s not surprising that hard news engagement lags soft news engagement, even though it is more costly to generate.
But engagement doesn’t measure value. People are attracted to ‘secret knowledge’, and will pay for it. Being ‘in the know’ has cachet: wouldn’t you like your news briefing to rival the president’s daily brief? Unfortunately, media executives increasingly use soft news techniques for generating hard news; perhaps for both easier content and for increased engagement.
Hard news must satisfy a higher standard than soft news. When media outlets cooperate with information campaigns, they corrupt hard news, changing it from ‘an OSINT of president’s daily brief’ to ‘an amplifying conduit of propaganda’.
P.S. In hard news, bothsides and balance don’t exist. Imagine giving a ‘bothsides’ intelligence briefing to the president. Hopefully you would be kicked out of the room!
Great piece that more people need to read. Just a little quibble: folk-story it is not. Yellow journalism it is. Or click bait. Folk stories are imbued with bits of wisdom and problem solving structures. What you are talking about is something quite different. Folk-story sounds good, but is inaccurate. Which is kind of funny, given you’re writing about the swarms of inaccuracies, falsehoods and lies today. From your neighborhood Folklorist :)
THANK. YOU. SO. MUCH. I was just commenting on this phenomenon recently and many of my friends and online community really don’t understand this large-scale continental shift in our culture. Disposable media has long since flooded our search engines; finding writing of substance is itself quite the chore, after all the work it takes to produce and publish it. Next step in evolution in many ways 😅
It's been increasingly frustrating for me that even primarily "print" information outlets have been overtaken with the desire to give video content. When I read a thing, I am an active participant in the information exchange. When I watch it, I am a passive consumer. McLuhan knew this way back in the dark ages before digital media.
Thanks for writing this, and for the reminder that citizenship is a conscious act, not a state of being. I worry about how much worse things will need to get before we find the will to put down our phones and pick up the torches and pitchforks, let alone books.
Very well written. This is such a complex problem. I don’t know how we undo the knot. Smartphones and all the tech associated with such has really screwed up our society. As a former movie lover, I barely watch movies anymore either. I strongly dislike the experience of selecting a movie from a streaming library, not to mention how much long form media itself has changed. The “tent pole” Marvel releases, etc. have “ruined” the Hollywood art form; in addition, there’s just too much damn content. It’s more product and filler than anything else. There’s a good book called Republican Gomorrah in which the VHS camcorder is mentioned as a piece of technology which heavily contributed to the Christian Right ratcheting up their and disinformation their agenda in the early 80s.