Does Personalized News Lead To Ignorance?

blackbearnh writes "As newspapers struggle to survive and local broadcasts try to find a way to compete with cable news, more and more news outlets are banking on what people want to hear about, rather than what they need to hear. Thoughtful analysis of problems is being pushed out of the way to make room for more celebrity gossip. Electronic news guru Chris Lee thinks that as people get news increasingly tailored to their tastes, the overall knowledge of important issues is plummeting. 'I think one of the observations about how consumers are behaving in the past five years that has surprised me the most is, again, this lack of feeling responsible for knowing the news of their country and their local government of that day. I don't think it's just a technology question. I think if you asked people now versus the same age group 20 years ago, I think they'd be stunningly less informed now about boring news, and tremendously more knowledgeable about bits of news that really interest them.'"

Comments

Re:Well duh!

[SailorSpork]

Or said another way, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Works for news, too.

Re:Well duh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Newspapers are out because no-one has the time to read them. Real life TL;DR.

The sheer amount of news that you can get makes it hard to actually pay attention to it. Ten years ago I was glued to the evening news at eight-o-clock. That was about the only news you could watch on TV. Nowadays the news is on for 25 hours a day, iterating and re-re-re-iterating the same shallow 'reports'. Who watches that? No-one I know does.

To much of a thing becomes annoying.

Besides, it used to be that local news was covered much more then international news. What do I care about someone on the other side of the planet that just bumped his big toe? That isn't news to me!

And, lastly, watching TV in general is a pain because of the commercial breaks that are longer than the normal programming. It isn't watchable anymore.

Re:What they NEED to hear!? Goebbels quotation??

[Schraegstrichpunkt]

So if I substituted my news sources with, say, the Washington Post, would I be better informed about Darfur? A suppressed report on Ivory Coast toxic waste dumping? Policy laundering during the ACTA negotiations? Iranian protests? SCO v. IBM? Homeopathy? Anything involving science?

My ears are deaf to these arguments as long as the mainstream press continues to do such a terrible job of keeping the public informed.

I think I'll make another donation to Wikileaks

it's worse than ignorance

[a2wflc]

People discuss the controversial news on sites with other people who agree with them. And they get depth of knowledge about "their side" and get attacks, misrepresentations, and lies about "the other side". Then they often "forget" which was news, facts, or opinions and treat most of what they read on a biased site as true. It would often be better if they were ignorant on the subject.

What they need to hear?

[MikeRT]

This coming from the same mainstream media that usually just regurgitates whatever the police and prosecutors allege in a criminal report? Case in point, what happened to Ryan Frederick. Absolutely questionable and "juicy" from the beginning. At the very least, the papers should have made a scandal about why the police would be so moronic as to raid a small-time pot user 3 nights after a man with a vendetta against him burgled his home. If that isn't a public interest scandal right up there with "sex offenders are in your neighborhood," then I don't know what is because when the news poured out about what really went down, it made a lot of his community deeply uncomfortable about what the police would do to "protect them" (BTW, it gets worse, like the police using men who are active burglars to get them evidence).

Excuse me, but if Google or someone can create an active intelligent search agent which will build me a comprehensive list of public corruption news, political news, civil liberties issues, etc., then I'll be a hell of a lot more informed and less "ignorant" than I would be if I had to read a paper or magazine that caters more toward the assumption that the only thing people want to read about is celebrity news and what pretty white girl got killed after hooking up with 3 strange men in a foreign country.

Politicial labels are relative

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a right-winger, then yes, you will consider Obama a leftist. If you're a leftist (not a Democrat, those guys are center-right at best), no, Obama is not a leftist.
In the end though, it doesn't matter, both "rightists" and "leftists" are in the pocket of the same corporations and will essentially pass the same corporation friendly and regular people hostile laws.

I must say

[ZeroExistenZ]

Alot of the news in my country is a joke. Really, it's a big joke.

Politicians are like little children and are arguing and pestering eachother through the media and there's indeed the tendency to serve more news which seem to draw in more people, align with their soap-series, or magazine style "sex-facts", upskirts and what have you.

I've disconnected from "tv" because of that purpose, but now the crap is entering into my online experience and I choose to ignore it; for one it causes less frustration when "yet another important sounding headline" preaches nonsense. Or there's yet someone pushing some FUD through articles...

Important news will reach me one way or another, but I don't care about 90% in "news" these days and wont waste time being "in the loop" constantly... I would if the quality would be much much better.

Why do people choose personalized news?

[wjc_25]

I don't think it's just a matter of liking the flexibility, customization, individuality, etc. We live in a world where we're barraged with news sources; there's far more than any one person could keep up with, even if they spent most of their time worrying about it. People are overwhelmed, so they throw up their hands and stick to their little corner. It's a distinctly modern phenomenon.

I Disagree, That's the Only Model That Works

[eldavojohn]

I disagree with you. I think giving people the news they want is the only way this has worked. Because who else is there in the equation to please with the news? You have the newsmakers, the government and the newsreaders. And only the last one makes sense.

Allow me to point out what is wrong with your simplified explanation. Sure, news has relied on "Mycountryian Idol" and movie reviews on slow news days or even on a site where they can present a dearth of information. However, once the jaywalking impalement law is passed, some people are going to experience a loved one being impaled for jaywalking. Now what do people want to hear news about? TV or the impalement of citizens for jaywalking? The reporters understand this and know that breaking this now ... even breaking the possibility in advance before the law is passed ... will generate higher ratings than their competitor.

This sort of capitalistic scheme for news is not without faults but your example is down right disingenuous. A single news source breaking the story of someone passing laws to impale jaywalkers would bring down their site as people rushed to read more about where and how this is happening. Despite the lack of bad things happening resulting in crap news on TV and in print, you must understand that people (at least Americans) still are very concerned with themselves and their well being above anything or anybody else.

Re:I Disagree, That's the Only Model That Works

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem lies in that the GP was talking in what we call "hyperbole".

There is no data in the news.

The story about the impalement would certainly get a story about the poor old person that got killed for jaywalking. There would also be a story about the poor old person that was killed by an evil jaywalker (assuming there was a market for it-- even if there isn't they may run it just to start controversy which they can then tell you about on the news...).

In a complex issue the facts can be twisted to make up anything you like, and the news does just that to fit the news to the demographic.

Imagine instead that the law in question is a quagmire of boring politics rolled into a massive 1900 page essay of law that even intelligent people admit is a pain to read. Let's say it's about, oh I don't know, health care reform.

What intelligent information has the news brought you about the reform bill?

So far I've heard that it's socialist, will save millions of lives, will lower the quality of service costing millions of lives, will cost us a hojillion dollars, will cost less than it does now, will cost more than it does now, will go the way of social security and dissappear, will be forced on the country, can't be forced because of Brown, that Brown is Bush and therefore is evil, that Obama can't keep campaign promises, that he hasn't because of evil republican's blocking healthcare, that evil democrats want to control my freedom of choice, that people in Canada can't get higher level services because of their system, that people in Canada have worse healthcare than the US, that people in Canada have better healthcare than in the US, that England healthcare is better than Canada, that England healthcare is worse than ours, that some states have their own systems, that Nebraska won't have to pay for it...

ad infinitum.

There is no data in the news. Why should their be? The news is stereotypically "boring" and why is that? Because real news means sitting and listening to facts and weighing them in your mind. But this requires news organizations to collect a LOT of data only to appeal to a shrinking group of people who'd rather get their news from the most reliable of sources... the internet.

The news makes money by presenting facts. The more they can present using less facts, the more profitable. Better to make hours of cheap news out of a few facts than one good hour dedicated to hundreds of facts. No one seems to be able to tell the difference, and when they can, they call it "boring".

Re:Why Single Out Fox

[Mononoke]

Sounds like your just angry and pick out Fox because Fox News is the undisputed leader in news today

Thank you for so eloquently proving my point.

Re:Who decides what's important?

[elnyka]

I really have to wonder what metric they use for deciding whether or not news is important. I stubbed my toe today, is that important?

The president of Monaco (.7 square miles) tried to push his/her agenda onto Canada, is that important?

Man, your education is showing. There is no president of Monaco. I know that little detail is unimportant to the argument at hand, but come *the fucking* on!

Anyways, taking your comic hypothetical scenario, it could be, depending on the agenda, which might affect, I dunno, banking or investors who own assets in your country, or what not. If you are in the habit of taking news superficially, in particular international news, with nothing more than country size, population or distance from your TiVo and super-sized McDonalds combo, of course you will be tempted to ask such a silly question (who decides what's important).

But that's a function of you, not the news. The importance of a piece of news is not a function of your perception, or anyone. It is important or it is not.

You can't measure the importance of news by their (apparent) immediate impact on your life or your impression of how important and impervious your country is to external events originating from a seemingly unimportant (and perhaps backward-looking) place in the world... like Afghanistan in 1991.

Remember that time, when no one gave a shit, when many retarded animals used to say Afgha-what-how-the-fuck-you-call that shit? That "Arab (or whatever)" place where people where towels on their heads and ride camels. Whatever, I'm so like whatever! Why should I care? Fucking SuperBowl, that's important, lemme watch Chuck Norris kick some ass, we are awesome!!!!. Remember that time?

Turn the clock to 1994 for another example... being aware of the Rwandan Genocide over following the O.J. Simpson shitfest would seem to have been a very important news to watch and be aware off, even for someone living in a little cow town in the middle of nowhere. Not because it might have a direct impact, but at least showing you have something resembling a moral compass.

But that's just me... plus the media is incredibly guilty at that:

http://www.journalismethics.ca/interviews/media_failure_in_Rwanda.htm

All in all, a piece of news does not have to have an immediate, tangible and direct impact in your life, your town or your country. Gross violation of human rights, international news, science news, global and regional politics, global/regional/even local historic events, those are important news. The mark of the uneducated is that he will find those boring and "non-important" compare to watching "American Idol", some dude dancing on his head on MTV or "Real Shallow Stupid Whores of Orange County."

The idea that you need to have someone decide which news are important or not is stupid. There are important news, and there are non-important news.

The perception of their importance is a function of the audience's intelligence, education, and to a degree, their moral ability to give a shit about things. Important news are important news, independently of whether people can understand their importance.

Re:What they NEED to hear!? Goebbels quotation??

[happy_place]

One trouble is that news sources are no longer monolithic, and therefore folks don't know how to quantify objectivity and quality. Name any news source, and you're likely to find some sort of bent, depending upon who you are and where you come from... It has been noted that Slashdot is a specialized/personal technical news source (for geeks!). It is a great place to get a smattering of all sorts of news going on out there, but if one considers the sorts of stories as being objective, well, they'd have to be daft. Slashdot is full of opinion pieces, entertainment pieces, news rumors, leaks and actual news stories, and then there's the political leanings of this place, and the way the stories are summarized, and the tendency to favor certain software rights models... etc... I guess the question arises, exactly who decides what is a decent news source? Is it based upon popularity? Is there some sort of objectivity sensor that I'm unaware of? And what criteria would that broader, less specialized news content be based upon? Locality? Topicality? Banality? Frivolity? There will always be an expectation for a more objective newssource, and more than enough nonobjective news sources claiming they're filling that gap, but as the audience and news provider communicate, the profit model and the desire to please one another for profit corrupts the whole.

Re:Two Fine Examples

[2obvious4u]

That is because he cuts through all sides bull shit and calls it like it is under the guise of satire; when in fact all he is doing is telling the truth that the other sources are afraid to tell because it might offend someone.

stop that nonsense

[elnyka]

Good God, folks, he graded out as the most leftist Senator, by far.

Why the hell is anyone surprised that he's governed from the hard left?

As a republican who voted for McCain, I gotta tell you, stop that stupid shit. Who graded him out, creationists? I don't like some of his policies (fuck I didn't even voted for him), but he's far from being a leftist.

In fact, you have no idea of what a "hard left" is. People like you whorify what it means to be to left or to the right, to the point that those labels become meaningless. They become more and more like elementary school taunting name tagging than actual classifications of ideology and policy. I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.

Re:stop that nonsense

[elnyka]

I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.

I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.

Having lived (and suffered) myself at one point in my life under a real hard leftist yoke, I gotta say this: Nope. Not even closed.

All the policies he's been trying to push are remarkably mild (more of a pragmatic mid-center social-democrat nature) compared to an actual "hard left" which is what the anonymous OP I replied to attempted to imply.

I have issues with his "spread the wealth" speeches (specially when they are not coupled with a "and by the way, we also have to share responsibilities" part.) I have a problem with trying to increase taxes to the wealth-and-work-generating people, corporations and enterprenaurs, a sector of the population whose tax contributions to the public coffers are disproportionately larger than their usage of public infrastructure or their size % relative to the population of the entire country.

That kind of thing is not necessarily conductive to the promotion of entities capable of producing jobs and generate wealth.

But that hardly qualifies as a leftist policy, and it's more of a different take of the role of government and tax distribution in a capitalist system. You might need to brush up on what leftism and socialism actually entails.

On a side note: I do agree, whoever with his health care plans, or at least with a need for reform. What we have now is not workable.

I know what policies he's passing, but let's play devil's advocate. Please pray tell which policies he's passing that are emulating left policies in those countries very well.

Re:stop that nonsense

[elnyka]

Once the government starts taking from one person to give to another, that is socialist, even if it doesn't run any part of the economy.

In that case, pretty much all forms of government in human history (including tribal ones) are of a socialist nature... even absolute monarchies (specially absolute monarchies.)

It is also ridiculous to that a government is socialist even (as you put it) it doesn't run any part of the economy considering that the essence of socialist is of being a class of economic theories of human organization (with Marxism being the bitter extreme case for attempting to explain all human aspects, even psychological and behavioral ones, in economic terms.)

Your statement is a generalization on the nature of governments, a generalization based on absolutes. You are simply making up a new definition of what a socialist government is just to give credence to your opinion. It is not a valid logical argument.

A government, by its most basic functions, will take something from someone and give it to someone else. Taxes, they take your taxes and give it to someone else in many ways, in infrastructure, in support for people under the poverty line, in the form of subsidized student loans and federal grants, etc, etc, etc.

If that's what a socialist government is, then hell, the US has been ruled a socialist government for a very long time.

Re:Two Fine Examples

[Ephemeriis]

I think you prove the point that people only hear what they want. MSNBC is just as biased as Fox News. CNN is trying to stay in the middle, but they are getting the same pressures to target an audience. The most popular cable news shows draw 1-3 million people daily (1% of the US population), they don't have an incentive to be balanced and general. I suspect newspapers, online and paper, magazines, etc. all have the same issues. DON'T piss off the target audience.

I don't know if I could call MSNBC biased the same way that Fox News is...

Certainly most of the "reporters" on MSNBC are biased... But not all in the same direction. Compare Morning Joe to Countdown with Keith Olbermann. Quite the difference of bias there.

Fox News, on the other hand, seems to have a very fixed message they're trying to deliver 24/7.

CNN, in my opinion, ceased to actually be a news network years ago. The reason it seems more neutral is because it doesn't deliver anything of substance. It's hard to work up much of a bias when all you talk about is kids floating away in balloons and which celebrity is sleeping with which.

But you are certainly right. These days people can see what they want to see. If all they want to hear about is food, or pets, or reality TV... There's probably a network out there dedicated to their tastes.

I disagree...

[bjk002]

60 years ago most people did not even own a television, let alone even know about the existence of the internet. Many had a newspaper and perhaps a radio. Neither of which offered the volume of content available to individuals today.

I think the OP missed the point. It's not the availability of news that is the problem, nor is it the filtering to tastes, it's a combination of apathy, time, and format.

Voters just do not feel connected to their government anymore, and many politicians have a hard time connecting with voters. Reporters have a 30 second spot on which to discuss a topic - plenty of time I'm sure to explore anything complex. The Internet offers the ability to more closely follow a given subject, but time pushes back as to what extent the individual can digest information in volume.

What you see now are a bunch of semi-informed folks jumping from one site to another, posting witty comments based on their narrow view of a subject, without ever really appreciating the depth/breadth of the subject.

I would attribute this in part to the culture shift underway in our society, where discussion among individuals has been relegated to trite comments on /. and bulletin boards, as opposed to attending meetings and engaging in real dialogue with other individuals in a face to face fashion. People are not invested in the dialogue, therefore their knowledge suffers as does the content of the conversation.

Something is being lost when we are not held accountable for our words, and not expecting our words to count. Have you ever watched a politician attend / speak at a town hall meeting? They struggle through with their sound bites, because the format forces a more thorough dialogue of the subject matter.

Re:What they NEED to hear!? Goebbels quotation??

[krou]

Todays youth have a much more balanced and informed opinion than any other time in history

I think the opposite is true: people who are using the internet as their main source of information are entrenching their views, not challenging them, and personalization is certainly playing a large role in that. I remember a graph I saw a while ago (would need to try find it again) which showed the political leanings of blogs in the US, and their breakdown according to left, right, or balanced (in the middle). The vast majority were at the two extremes, hardly anyone in the middle, and I would also suspect that an analysis of the links between them would show interlinking between left and right is nowhere near as strong as those linking amongst themselves.

The irony for me is that we have at our fingertips such an incredible range of information, but at the same time, we restrict ourselves to the information we're most comfortable with.

Oh please, stop making excuses for them

[MikeRT]

In the case of Ryan Frederick, when the public caught wind of what went down, the public outrage was so high that the prosecution desperately tried to move the trial to another region of Virginia because the public was so incensed that they seriously feared that they would get a nullification.

The media is brilliant at manufacturing controversy in cases like Natallee Holloway. Now, if only they'd turn that power to good instead of evil, they'd be able to do a two-fer: a public service and bring in the viewers/readers. In any given community, there's always something rotten going on with which they could whip up the public like they do with stories of pretty white girls going missing.

For God's sake, the media in Maryland could have had a field day when the Mayor of Brewyn Heights was thrown to the ground and forced to lay handcuffed, in his boxers, in the blood of his two dead dogs by Prince George County police after they raided his house over a monumentally stupid, obvious drug bust screw up. If that can happen to a mayor, that can happen to any white or asian middle class family.

Re:What do I care about someone on the other side

[theIsovist]

I now use google news and tailored it according to my points of interest, and I get the luxury of actually ignoring the rest as I DON'T CARE. I also get to make my own opinion.

I think this answers the question with a solid "YES!" By putting blinders on you at best lose any concept of the broad effect that some events have on the rest of the world (even influencing those news events you may care about). At worst, you're missing out on half the argument because you don't care to acknowledge anything other than what you care to see.

"A specialist is someone who knows more and more things on less and less subjects" So I am now a specialist news consumer.

No, you're quite possibly an idiot, because if you're only reading opinions that you care to read, you're only getting a partial story. That's not an expert, that's someone who thinks they know a lot more than they do. Pull your head out of the sand.

Re:More pervasive than just news

[Kelbear]

Except sports, the more sports you know, the better off you'll be.

Re:What they NEED to hear!? Goebbels quotation??

[LWATCDR]

Interesting list.
I know about most of those issues except Homeopathy.
The thing is that the current news system leads to extreme polarization. You do not just get to see the news subjects that you are interested in you get to see them covered the way that you want them. These days everybody gets to have their view point reinforced.
I feel this leads to extreme intolerance. Every one is so sure they are right that they think that anybody that doesn't agree with them is an idiot.
Republicans think the Democrats are idiots and the Democrats think the Republicans are idiots. I consider myself an extreme moderate...
Some of the news you mentioned you can do nothing to really influence. SCO vs IBM? That is a court case and frankly public opinion should have nothing to do with court cases. The public should be informed so they can protect the process and change unjust laws only.
The Iranian protests where all over the news.
Wikileaks I have to say I am not a fan of. Some of their leaks have the same level of journalistic integrity as the National Enquirer. I feel their publishing of the unedited pager messages from 911 to been a disgusting case of Yellow Journalism.
Had they just published some of the Governmental pages and sanitized some of the personal pages they would have been able to show just how bad the security of pagers really is and accomplished what arguably needed to be done.
I have to say at this time I have seen nothing of real value come out of wikileaks.
That is of course just my opinion.

Re:Well duh!

[Kelbear]

There's a problem for those who aren't interested in sports, because unlike national healthcare, I can't ignore it.

I know all the top headlines, I can't bring myself to set aside time to study sports. It's so painfully boring to read about sets of people reperforming the same actions every week, every year. They even attach numbers to the repetition and find amazement and wonder in it. All I see is that somebody put a ball through the hoop...AGAIN, what makes it different this time? They do it all the time!

Nobody wants to talk to me about the news, and nobody wants to hear me talk to them about it. But sports? It's /everywhere/, and I have to either study it, or sit there numbly while everybody else bonds and networks around me.

Re:Well duh!

[LKM]

They may spend an hour each day being acquainted with world affairs, but 90% of that news will have absolutely no effect on their lives other than to let them feel smug about being well informed. (...) If anything, I see this as a positive trend.

I don't, and I can't see how you could possibly say that. I think the problem here is your idea that people who know stuff are just smug know-it-alls. This anti-intellectual concept is misguided, as can be plainly seen in American politics, where the minority party is currently capable of pretty much stopping one branch of government from working, without anyone caring much about it. Why don't people care about it? Probably because the specific rules of who gets to filibuster, how exactly that works and what can be done about it is boring. It's much more interesting to read about the latest sex scandal.

The simple fact is that most of these things you think have no effect on people's lives actually do have an effect on their lives. And they are important things to know when you decide, say, who to vote for. These people are not smug, they are simply doing their part in the political system. They are informing themselves so they can make informed decisions when they're asked to.

Re:Well duh!

[svtdragon]

You know what the difference is between socialized medicine and the system we have today?

In a socialized system, you have a group of government bureaucrats who decide if you qualify for lifesaving procedures based upon your potential contributions to society versus the rationed care available.

In our system, you have a group of insurance company bureaucrats who decide if you qualify for lifesaving procedures based upon your potential contributions to their next paycheck. (Of course, when it turns out that their salary depends on denying you an expensive procedure, what exactly do you think their inclination will be?)

I don't know about you, but I'd rather have the one that's accountable to the public at large.

Re:Well duh!

[Hognoxious]

You're not going to win people over to your point of view by using labels such as 'nutter', 'moon hoax', and 'death panels'.

Like I care. I'm not trying to win them over - it's a pretty pointless exercise. These kind of crackpots - and there are many more kinds - have already made up what passes for their minds. Any evidence to the contrary is fake. The lack of evidence supporting their rantings just proves that there's a cover up....

If you take the issue of 'death panels' with an open mind, for example, you will find that there is some substance to the fear that underlies it.

It's not a question of having an open mind. I've lived in the UK for thirty years, and I've never heard of them. There are people out there who think it's lucky for Stephen Hawking that he isn't English or he'd have been put to sleep years ago. Am I closed minded if I think my personal first-hand experience somehow trumps the hysterical ramblings of someone who's never been there and couldn't even point to it on a map?

Unfortunately, in your world, if an issue is poorly worded, articulated by a soccer mom, and/or broadcast on Fox News, the concepts behind it may never reach your consciousness.

If they never reach my consciousness then how and why did I mention them? Lucky guess?

It's quite possible to be aware of a point of view without having to agree with it or even taking it seriously. It's an entirely different thing to be completely unaware that a different point of view even exists. Fragmentation of news causes the latter, not the former.