Journalism does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are a topic which it can use to sell advertising. To maximize the revenue from advertising, the story must follow a certain pattern. It does not matter much which journalist writes the story; as long as the journalists are selected for their ability to maximize the advertising revenue, the space of possible stories is quite limited.
What is the force that shapes the Narrative? It emerges as an eigenvalue of the matrix of public opinion. The Narrative is the eigen-opinion—the opinion of those whose opinions matter according to that opinion. Currently, the set of “those whose opinions matter” centers around public officials, journalists, teachers; mostly left-wing, but in a quite specific way (e.g. Fredrik deBoer is not included).
The narrative has no person behind the driving wheel; it is what it is as a result of history, and it sustains itself by the power of self-interest. People who are important according to the Narrative, must support the Narrative, otherwise the Narrative would declare them unimportant, and everyone who cares about remaining important would avoid them. People who want to become important, and have sufficient social skills, understand that their best chance is by joining the Narrative—both verbally, and by choosing the right kind of profession.
But then… how is it possible that Jacob can talk publicly against the Narrative in Quillette? (Or in Less Wrong?) Isn’t Quillette also a news medium? Shouldn’t the same rules apply to them? (And us?) If we accept the possibility of going against the flow, why not extend the same charity to New York Times?
To continue the metaphor, a matrix can have more than one eigenvector. There is the dominant Narrative, and there are smaller alternative narratives. The dominant Narrative has greater audience, but also greater competition. The alternative narratives have smaller rewards, but also more slack. Jacob’s story is somewhat compatible with Quillette’s (and Less Wrong’s) narrative, and these media tolerate a larger range of stories.
I guess the lesson here is that greater audience imposes greater constraints on writing, through greater competition for greater rewards. When the entire country is your audience, then in some sense, the country has already decided which words you must write, and you better obey, or someone else will get your job.
Scholar’s Stage would agree with the “does not hate you, nor does it love you” bit, but has a somewhat different take on it; the space of possible narratives would be limited even in the case that the writer didn’t care about advertising revenue at all
[The] need to reduce reality to a simple mental model is an inherent feature of human cognition. For the most part it is done automatically without much thought. We cannot avoid simplification—we speak of London doing this or China doing that not because such simplifications are true (there is no unitary agent named “London” or “China” doing anything) but because it is impossible to act in a complex world without such short cuts.
The problems of journalism are the problems of cognition on steroids. For the journalist, historian, or social scientist, the drive to reduce is acute and explicit. On top of the normal simplification we all do unconsciously, nonfiction writers must reduce twice more: The first round of reduction comes with investigation. Any subject is too large to be understood in toto.
The investigator must decide where to focus her efforts, how to spend limited time, what sources to consult, what questions to ask, and what sort of evidence to be on the lookout for. Many of these things are not explicitly decided, but are forced upon the investigator by the nature of her tools and sources or by her preconceived sense of what is notable and what is not.
The second round of simplification, just as inherent to the journalistic enterprise as the first, is built into act of writing. The investigator has collected in her brain more that can ever be put on a page. Journalists in particular must condense what they have learned onto a very small space. This double reduction process is often described as “framing” a story. Reducing an entire movement—the histories, controversies, disagreements, defeats, glories, and quirks of thousands of unique individuals—to one comprehensible frame will always cut important things out. It is inevitable that some members of the covered group will be dissatisfied with the frame they have been forced into.
This process, far more than any explicit ideological agenda, is the source of most bias in journalism. This source of bias cannot be escaped. Stories without a frame are just an incoherent collection of facts too long and too varied to fit on a page. The bias imposed by framing is necessary—and sometimes even a good thing. [...]
The trouble comes when attachment to a given frame leads journalists into misperceiving their subjects, forcing them into a framework that does not really fit them. If you are primed to think of internet subcultures through the gamergate frame, gamergate is all you will ever find. In the terminology of the rationalists, it is a problem of “priors.” All that was required for a mess like this was a writer with wildly different priors and tight time demands to come into contact with a community they only had a superficial understanding of. No active malice is necessary.
And while he does note that the NYT explicitly wants particular narratives, he also mentions that the incentives involved are a bit more complicated than just going after advertising revenue:
This idea that the New York Times published things for “the clicks” is common but inaccurate. Vox publishes things for the clicks. The New York Times, like other top tier publications such as The New Yorker or the Washington Post, make their money from subscriptions and side services—like that high school trip to Peru that got a certain Times reporter fired. The New York Times is rolling in dough, and that dough has nothing to do with the virality of any given article. In fact, there is a good chance that uber-viral articles cost them more readers than they gain from them. No one subscribed because of 1619 or the Cotton op-ed, but a lot of people did unsubscribed because of them!
Likewise most writers, regardless of publication, care very little about their hit count. At most publications individual writers are not even told site traffic stats for individual pieces. Only in rare cases is payment tied to popularity. What motivates writers and journalists is not clicks but prestige. They measure their self worth through the esteem of their fellow writers, and write to that end. For more on this see my post “Why Writers (And Think Tankers) Feud So Viciously.”
I agree that advertising revenue is not an immediate driving force, something like “justifying the use of power by those in power” is much closer to it and advertising revenue flows downstream from that (because those who are attracted to power read the Times).
I loved the rest of Viliam’s comment though, it’s very well written and the idea of the eigen-opinion and being constrained by the size of your audience is very interesting.
Ah, no thanks. It’s just a rewording of (my understaning of) Jacob’s article, plus an attempt to preempt the obvious question: “why does outgroup ‘follow the narrative’, but ingroup ‘speaks their mind freely’, ain’t that a bit too convenient?”.
Also, as Kaj’s link suggests, my idea of “eigen-opinion” may be mathematically elegant, but it’s not how things actually happened. Unless we take it one level above and say that NYT was constrained in their choice of narrative. Maybe, dunno. But the proximate cause of NYT reporters writing as they do is “being ordered to do so by their boss”, which is quite boring explanation, so perhaps the real lesson here is not to skip boring explanations in favor of looking for mathematically elegant ones.
And… although I am not sure whether this is a good lesson… but maybe also not to try too hard to be charitable to assholes. (Of course, it is difficult to find the right amount of charity in situations where I already take sides.) I mean, in some sense my explanation was an attempt to partially excuse the NYT as being victims or maybe collaborators of a stronger force, as opposed to being an uncaused cause of bad things. But they had more agency that I attributed to them, and they knowingly used it for evil.
Journalism does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are a topic which it can use to sell advertising. To maximize the revenue from advertising, the story must follow a certain pattern. It does not matter much which journalist writes the story; as long as the journalists are selected for their ability to maximize the advertising revenue, the space of possible stories is quite limited.
What is the force that shapes the Narrative? It emerges as an eigenvalue of the matrix of public opinion. The Narrative is the eigen-opinion—the opinion of those whose opinions matter according to that opinion. Currently, the set of “those whose opinions matter” centers around public officials, journalists, teachers; mostly left-wing, but in a quite specific way (e.g. Fredrik deBoer is not included).
The narrative has no person behind the driving wheel; it is what it is as a result of history, and it sustains itself by the power of self-interest. People who are important according to the Narrative, must support the Narrative, otherwise the Narrative would declare them unimportant, and everyone who cares about remaining important would avoid them. People who want to become important, and have sufficient social skills, understand that their best chance is by joining the Narrative—both verbally, and by choosing the right kind of profession.
But then… how is it possible that Jacob can talk publicly against the Narrative in Quillette? (Or in Less Wrong?) Isn’t Quillette also a news medium? Shouldn’t the same rules apply to them? (And us?) If we accept the possibility of going against the flow, why not extend the same charity to New York Times?
To continue the metaphor, a matrix can have more than one eigenvector. There is the dominant Narrative, and there are smaller alternative narratives. The dominant Narrative has greater audience, but also greater competition. The alternative narratives have smaller rewards, but also more slack. Jacob’s story is somewhat compatible with Quillette’s (and Less Wrong’s) narrative, and these media tolerate a larger range of stories.
I guess the lesson here is that greater audience imposes greater constraints on writing, through greater competition for greater rewards. When the entire country is your audience, then in some sense, the country has already decided which words you must write, and you better obey, or someone else will get your job.
Scholar’s Stage would agree with the “does not hate you, nor does it love you” bit, but has a somewhat different take on it; the space of possible narratives would be limited even in the case that the writer didn’t care about advertising revenue at all
And while he does note that the NYT explicitly wants particular narratives, he also mentions that the incentives involved are a bit more complicated than just going after advertising revenue:
I agree that advertising revenue is not an immediate driving force, something like “justifying the use of power by those in power” is much closer to it and advertising revenue flows downstream from that (because those who are attracted to power read the Times).
I loved the rest of Viliam’s comment though, it’s very well written and the idea of the eigen-opinion and being constrained by the size of your audience is very interesting.
Consider adapting this into a top-level post? I anticipate wanting to link to it (specifically for the “smaller audiences offer more slack” moral).
Ah, no thanks. It’s just a rewording of (my understaning of) Jacob’s article, plus an attempt to preempt the obvious question: “why does outgroup ‘follow the narrative’, but ingroup ‘speaks their mind freely’, ain’t that a bit too convenient?”.
Also, as Kaj’s link suggests, my idea of “eigen-opinion” may be mathematically elegant, but it’s not how things actually happened. Unless we take it one level above and say that NYT was constrained in their choice of narrative. Maybe, dunno. But the proximate cause of NYT reporters writing as they do is “being ordered to do so by their boss”, which is quite boring explanation, so perhaps the real lesson here is not to skip boring explanations in favor of looking for mathematically elegant ones.
And… although I am not sure whether this is a good lesson… but maybe also not to try too hard to be charitable to assholes. (Of course, it is difficult to find the right amount of charity in situations where I already take sides.) I mean, in some sense my explanation was an attempt to partially excuse the NYT as being victims or maybe collaborators of a stronger force, as opposed to being an uncaused cause of bad things. But they had more agency that I attributed to them, and they knowingly used it for evil.