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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.'"
Boring news is called boring because it is indeed boring. If people were interested in boring news then it wouldn't be boring, it would be interesting. Technically anything that is newsworthy shouldn't be boring, because it would be interesting to someone.
Ok now I'm boring myself with this.
I tried to think of a good sig, and this wasn't it.
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.
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.
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 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.
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);
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?
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