Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
As odd as it sounds, I think that news should not ever be tailored to the "consumer". Telling the people only what they want to hear is just as bad (if not worse) than only telling them the news YOU want them to hear... If I was planning on becoming a repressive regime leader, ruling my country with an iron fist... I would start by telling all of the people all the "news" they wanted to hear.... In-Depth reviews of the latest "Mycountryian Idol", all the sports news they wanted, how wonderful the newest movie blockbuster is (and who the stars are sleeping with!)
Then the populace would be too busy thinking about those silly topics to even notice or care that I had just imposed mandatory impalement sentences for jaywalkers.
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.
Clearly it's true that if you're interested in sport you're going to watch that part of the news more than if you aren't. That's not the problem.
The problem is that if you believe that socialized medicine == death panels, you're going to exclusively read news sources that tell you that[1]. Likewise the moon hoax brigade and the ones who see the illuminati everywhere. No matter how much of a nutter you are, there's other nutters out there you can link up with. Mutual bias confirmation. There's no balance. Nobody uis ever exposed to a different viewpoint.
[1] I believe the name is "Fox News".
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Mostly, the folk expressing this sentiment don't know each other, and only a couple know me (e.g. friends, friends of friends, strangers to each other).
This isn't merely based on blatant falsehood, it's a very peculiar notion, one that stands out from the daily din. I've seen it raised, independently, three or four times this week. Where did this notion come from? Why do they uniformly cite both of those examples, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina? Coincidence, or did they get this from the same source? Perhaps it's merely because these are the two largest disasters to strike the U.S. in the past ten years, but why cite both, and not merely one, or the other, particularly when one is a man-made "disaster", not really parallel to the hurricane and the earthquake. I wonder if maybe they are parroting the same original source. Did someone like Sarah Palin tweet or MyBookFaceSpace it, as with the "death panels" thing?
Uniformly, these folk have chosen to ignore simple evidence that the claims, that other countries didn't offer assistance to the U.S. after 9/11 nor after Katrina, are false. (In fact, many nations assisted the U.S. following both incidents, offering even the lives of their sons and daughters in the case of those allies fighting in Afghanistan, and serious assistance of various kinds during the International Response to Hurricane Katrina).
This is just one example, but it's a curious one, based not only on ignorance of a few specific facts, which ought to be common knowledge, but apparently on a militant desire to remain ignorant. (Offering the link above leads them to resort immediately to changing the subject, occasionally to what they consider to be my own personal failings, particularly in people I've never met. The sudden and fairly extreme hostility offered up by both acquaintances and strangers when simple evidence is presented reminded me of the term "splitting.)
I wonder if the insulating bubble effect of modern segmented news and opinion delivery is building a society which is incapable of or at least resistant to the synthesis of new ideas, which itself is a rational response to the cognitive dissonance which results from inconvenient facts.
I still think facts matter, but if they only matter to a handful of people, can democracy survive?
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.