This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?
A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. How’s the country doing, overall? Is the economy booming or busting? Is crime climbing or dropping?
Anyone can, of course, reach their own conclusions on those questions, independent of the news they consume. But their views will necessarily be influenced by their own individual circumstances. Did they just get a promotion — or laid off? Do they feel safe sleeping with their front door unlocked — or did they just get mugged? Their own personal data points might align with a larger trend — or they might not. And news stories have traditionally been a big part of how people figured out which was which.
But we’ve just concluded an election cycle that suggests something important has broken in that feedback loop. How people perceive the economy and crime are major factors in whether they reward or punish incumbents with their vote. And decades-old patterns in that process seem to have gone a little haywire.
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You think media either wants to fix, has any incentive to fix what they broke on purpose? Independent outlets maybe, if people can afford to access the reporting.
Many independent outlets are not hard paywalled, e.g. 404 Media. Yes, you have to provide your burner email, but that’s really not a big ask in the era of mass government and corporate surveillance.
@Maeve @Powderhorn
Many independent outlets don’t even require email. You can read them for free (what I don’t understand is why so many of them are using Cloudflare if I may say so). We shouldn’t forget to donate if we can, but principally it’s free.
That’s a very good point. I was more trying to point out that many independent outlets put the level of transaction in a reasonable spot that includes minimal info and no money. When news judgment drives production, detailed demographics are just extra data to sift through with no ROI.