this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2024
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MOTHERFUCKER - JOURNALISM IS THE FOURTH PILLAR OF DEMOCRACY. ITS YOUR LITERAL ONE JOB - TO DEFEND IT.
Ah, that’s your problem right there. And this is going to be the major issue for generations to come. The algorithms are determining what’s popular and will generate content to maintain engagement. What used to happen is news rooms would find important stories and report on them then the people would read those stories to determine what actually matters in their lives.
I subscribe to my local paper. The mobile app is essentially ‘what the people want’. Meanwhile, the newspaper itself (print or digital) has almost entirely different content and it’s certainly organized differently. When I want to learn about things in my community and the world - the reason I subscribe to a newspaper in the first place - I read the paper, not the app. The app is just like a blog.
It’s incredibly frustrating how far our fourth pillar of democracy has fallen.
That's exactly the problem. Kahn and his crew determine what's a "top issue" the same way the rest of us do, through algorithm-driven engagement. There's a reason all the major outlets placed a "trending" chyron at the top of their homepages years ago, and that's because they're specifically tailoring their coverage to whatever generates traffic on their and other's websites. Each editor is, after all, a human whose understanding of the world is driven by the content that shows up on their phone, their computer screen, and their television. The fact that media is curated through a narrowing window of social media platforms means that the things that pop onto their radar will be algorithm-influenced. Even if they stepped back and only accepted what polls highly, they'd have to either perform their own real-time polling (yeah right) or point to other polls for emphasis, the results of which have been filtered and amplified according to algorithmic engagement. This is only going to get worse as AI starts to influence the algorithm in real time and we become more and more susceptible to hive-mind coverage where the tail wags the dog.
This is part of the reason 21st century media has skewed so heavily toward sensationalism since 9/11, because for some ungodly reason they've decided that their job is to react to the news, rather than create it. Fuck them. Their spineless "neutrality" is a tool Trump & Co. learned how to play like a fiddle from day one, and by refusing to even entertain the possibility of assisting the left, they've obsequiously and unconsciously become the right's most potent weapon. They are the harbingers of fascism in America, and they're still too fucking dense to see what's coming.
Fantastic 👏👏👏
To add to that, all I keep seeing in the news is about Biden's poor performance. Yeah, we knoooow. Can we maybe get some coverage of the report of Trump raping a child or how many mentions he has on Epstein's list? Is there anything else going on in the world we should know about? All the news is doing is grabbing hold of the most sensational topic that every other outlet is ~~reporting on~~ speculating about so they don't lose ratings / clicks.
The world we live in is not about genuine creativity or challenging perspectives or journalistic responsibility. All we have going forward is what generates ad revenue. What's "engaging". And our dumbass brains only care about dopamine. So anything that challenges us to think outside the box is too difficult for us to engage with. The corporations and special interest groups have won. I wouldn't be too worried about climate change at this point, kids. I doubt you'll be aware of your surrounds enough to realize what's going on around you.
I'm just hoping for a new Age of Enlightenment. Maybe people will realize that having everyone else do the thinking for us isn't such a great idea.
That sounds wonderful. However I'm not expecting it anytime soon.