“But the front-page articles really shouldn’t be about the controversy, the buzz, the second-order perceptions and spin and perceptions-of-spin.”
I totally agree, but this seems like a business optimization problem. Considering all the different news sources that compete against each other for their consumers very limited time, they have to make it click-baity and scandalous if they want people to pick them over a competitor. I think sometimes when we get really close to an election that the election basically does become a tv show or a sports game. Its the talk of the town, the real consequences of what is happening usually get ignored, and people are just sports fanning it up. So assuming the average person probably likes to get their opinions fed back to them, and that political drama and scandal’s becomes the stand in for entertainment. It becomes very hard for the news not to optimize towards overdramatic, not objective level cost / benefit analysis.
To be fair, regular cost/benefit analysis of a politician is pretty boring by all accounts. Find the policies of each, see what ones you agree / don’t agree with. Find what the perceived costs and benefits of having that individual in office would be, then vote for them. You know what’s not boring? Making conspiracies that your opponent is apart of an elite pedophile cabal trying to keep you down, or that your opponent is secret a puppet for foreign opposition sent to destroy America. That’s much much more entertaining, and the lack of news about could even support your claims! I worry about how much people’s need for escapism and bias for their side in politics fuels the rise of heavy skewed meta news as well.
Considering I agree with your post, and that there is a real chicken or the egg problem to current political reporting, a good next step now for people politically inclined would probably be to think about the ways to better change election reporting news on the margin so that it eventually becomes more objective.
There’s a certain perception of what “respectable journalism” looks like, and this perception is what causes the New York Times and CNN to not immediately rush down the slope to tabloid journalism in pursuit of short-term clicks.
I think this “respectable journalism” image affects newspapers’ behavior because the public has this concept in mind, and many people will consume news less if it seems too far from respectable journalism. Separately, this image also affects newspapers’ behavior because the journalists care about “respectable journalism” to some degree. Monetary incentives are a thing, but “how much do my peers respect me?” is also a thing, and the micro-hedonics of “how much do I respect myself?” are a thing as well.
So what I really want to do is change journalists’ and newspaper-buyers’ conception of what “respectable journalism” is, to have higher standards that are more robust to weird failure modes. That wince of pain people feel when they stray from what feels virtuous (whether for reputational or internal reasons) is exactly the thing society uses to not have everything fall to Moloch as soon as it possibly could.
(Note that I don’t think I’ve provided a satisfactory battle plan here, and I think a good battle plan could well involve finding ways to better align journalists’ economic interests with what’s virtuous, rather than just trying to market virtue to them.)
“But the front-page articles really shouldn’t be about the controversy, the buzz, the second-order perceptions and spin and perceptions-of-spin.”
I totally agree, but this seems like a business optimization problem. Considering all the different news sources that compete against each other for their consumers very limited time, they have to make it click-baity and scandalous if they want people to pick them over a competitor. I think sometimes when we get really close to an election that the election basically does become a tv show or a sports game. Its the talk of the town, the real consequences of what is happening usually get ignored, and people are just sports fanning it up. So assuming the average person probably likes to get their opinions fed back to them, and that political drama and scandal’s becomes the stand in for entertainment. It becomes very hard for the news not to optimize towards overdramatic, not objective level cost / benefit analysis.
To be fair, regular cost/benefit analysis of a politician is pretty boring by all accounts. Find the policies of each, see what ones you agree / don’t agree with. Find what the perceived costs and benefits of having that individual in office would be, then vote for them. You know what’s not boring? Making conspiracies that your opponent is apart of an elite pedophile cabal trying to keep you down, or that your opponent is secret a puppet for foreign opposition sent to destroy America. That’s much much more entertaining, and the lack of news about could even support your claims! I worry about how much people’s need for escapism and bias for their side in politics fuels the rise of heavy skewed meta news as well.
Considering I agree with your post, and that there is a real chicken or the egg problem to current political reporting, a good next step now for people politically inclined would probably be to think about the ways to better change election reporting news on the margin so that it eventually becomes more objective.
There’s a certain perception of what “respectable journalism” looks like, and this perception is what causes the New York Times and CNN to not immediately rush down the slope to tabloid journalism in pursuit of short-term clicks.
I think this “respectable journalism” image affects newspapers’ behavior because the public has this concept in mind, and many people will consume news less if it seems too far from respectable journalism. Separately, this image also affects newspapers’ behavior because the journalists care about “respectable journalism” to some degree. Monetary incentives are a thing, but “how much do my peers respect me?” is also a thing, and the micro-hedonics of “how much do I respect myself?” are a thing as well.
So what I really want to do is change journalists’ and newspaper-buyers’ conception of what “respectable journalism” is, to have higher standards that are more robust to weird failure modes. That wince of pain people feel when they stray from what feels virtuous (whether for reputational or internal reasons) is exactly the thing society uses to not have everything fall to Moloch as soon as it possibly could.
(Note that I don’t think I’ve provided a satisfactory battle plan here, and I think a good battle plan could well involve finding ways to better align journalists’ economic interests with what’s virtuous, rather than just trying to market virtue to them.)