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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.'"
Or said another way, one man's trash is another man's treasure. Works for news, too.
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.
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
http://outcampaign.org/
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
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.
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.
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.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
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.
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.
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....
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?
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."