Selling The News

Journalism was once a job that involved research, investigation, and the ability to communicate complex information in an easy to read way.  The breadth and depth of the vocabulary, and the articulation employed by the journalist was determined by their target audience.  Newspapers were divided into tiers, their physical form factor was an indication of the intended audience with tabloid sized newspapers intended for the widest audience and broadsheet newspapers intended for a more specific audience; it is quite ironic that this inverse relationship existed given the state of journalism as it exists today.

I would argue ever since the birth of 24 hour news channels the purpose of televised news shifted away from being a source of information provided as a public service to being a product in itself that began to focus on ratings.  When this shift occurred, news sources essentially went from being a source of information to being a source of entertainment.  That assertion at first glance reads as an incredibly perverse idea, however when you realise that entertainment in the broadest sense throughout history has always encompassed both comedy and tragedy perhaps best epitomised by the sock and buskin of ancient times, symbols which even today still serve as icons that represent theatre in the broadest sense which at its heart is about entertainment.

The growth of the internet as a means of accessing information accelerated this shift rather than reversing it.  With instant access to information whenever you wanted it, these sources of news had to provide something more for the consumer to choose them over the swell of sources that were provided by the internet.  As mass media grew as a concept, providing a plenitude of choice, so too did competition and the pursuit of ratings as a means of determining success.  The lack of profitability from websites as services that were provided to consumers for free forced the providers of these services to turn to advertising as a means of revenue generation. 

The online advertising industry exploded.  Established brands with reputations that drew in visitors made the most money from online advertising in the early days with independent content creators struggling to make any income from their endeavours at all.  This changed as the internet grew but we have now reached a point where a bell curve has emerged and we have returned once more to this division of revenue.  Perhaps the best example of this curve in practise can be seen in YouTube, a website that was initially only profitable to established brands, which then expanded and proved lucrative for creators in a much wider sense but has now returned once more to being only viable to those established brands and those creators who have been successful at employing marketing strategies to achieve market penetration.

Despite this shift back towards the restoration of dominance by these established brands, the psyche of the consumer has not changed.  As advertising grew and became evermore pervasive, consumers reached a point where they became desensitised to dishonesty.  Seeing advertisements so often that made ostentatious claims that never held up to scrutiny caused consumers to come to expect a modicum of delusion, a complacency if you will.  Consumers developed a mentality where they would buy into the claim yet embrace the cognitive dissonance of knowing the products they bought would not deliver on those promises.

There was a time when news programmes and websites provided the viewer with information about events and incidents after they had occurred in a reactive manner, as opposed to being proactive making predictions about what might happen.  The latter was known specifically as speculative journalism and was primarily the focus of non-mainstream sources of news as they ultimately dealt with opinion and interpretation rather than fact.  In this regard mainstream news sources could be interpreted as in essence supplying the viewer or reader with pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.  Over time you would collect the pieces and place them together in an attempt to form a more complete picture of the world.  This is no longer the case, instead what we have is an industry that manufactures pieces of the puzzle and competes to sell those pieces to what has become a consumer.

The consumer in this regard still collects the pieces but rather than being encouraged to look at the picture that they create when put together, we are encouraged to buy the piece that is being offered to us.  There are still those who focus on facts and reality who supply the pieces that you need to put together to create the picture that the puzzle actually depicts.  However, we have reached a point now where rather than looking for the piece we actually need, we decide whether we like the piece that is being offered.  Do we like the colour, does it appeal to us, do we like the person selling it to us, all of these questions now play a part in whether we buy the piece that we are being offered.  There was a time when we understood that we didn't have to like the news for it to be true, if anything there was the expectation that we wouldn't like what we heard but that was the point.  CNN, MSNBC, BBC, ABC, Fox News, Sky News, and have transformed into QVC and HSN.

I would argue that the USA is further gone than the UK in this regard as you can clearly see the sexualisation of news anchors on US networks as further attempts to sell the news to consumers as one of the cornerstones of modern marketing is the mantra that sex sells.  The UK hasn't quite reached that level yet, but the same behaviour exists and the same relationship between the viewer and the newsreader as a question of likeability exists.  As for those companies and organisations that provide news to the masses, they have recognised that their content is a product, information is a commodity.  They also recognise that the consumer now sits with an incomplete puzzle and as they continue to reject the pieces that they don't like, there is a market to present alternative pieces that they do like.  The result is a market where the consumer no longer cares about the picture they are assembling and only cares about two things, the first is that the pieces fit, and the second is that they like those pieces.  What you end up with is a society filled with people whose puzzles now sit as a mash of pieces depicting many different images.

In the extreme, when you have a consumer that likes the pieces being offered to them by one source in particular you end up with someone whose puzzle depicts an entirely different image to the one it was meant to depict in the first place.  As for the question of which picture is the right one, the answer is quite simply the truth.  If all news sources reported the truth and nothing more then it wouldn't matter which source you used, the picture would be close enough to make out.  In reality we don't get the luxury of being given the box showing the right image, and we don't get all of the pieces at once - at least not when it comes to things that are happening now.  History books on the other hand are written and revised as new information comes to light and piece together everything with the benefit of hindsight to create a more complete picture of the world.  This too is open to exploitation by those who want to push a narrative in that they provide the whole picture with all the pieces at once so it is much easier to manipulate the picture to include bits you want and exclude the bits you don't which only reinforces the point I made above, when all sources report the truth then the images are consistent when put side by side for comparison.

Without the benefit of hindsight, how then can you be sure that the information you rely on is accurate?  How can you trust the news sources that you turn to so often?  With addiction to this information and the fervent belief that we cannot function without knowing what is happening in the world, how can we protect ourselves from being manipulated?  Again this comes back to the idea of consistency, you need to have multiple sources and they need to convey information that is broadly aligned.  The trouble with trying to achieve this goal is that we live in a world of conglomerates, there is an illusion of choice when in reality those brands which at first appear distinct are in reality linked. 

The best example I can give of this concept can be seen by a well known image in the UK which you can find here which depicts the illusion of choice in respect of consumer brands - there are essentially 10 companies that produce almost every thing we eat and drink despite there being hundreds of brands to "choose" from.  This image dates back several years and went viral at the time of its publication.  This illusion is common amongst many different industries and the publishing industries and broadcast industries in this regard are no different.  To ensure that the narrative you are following is not biased then you need to ensure your sources of information are widespread and not simply sources of "churnalism" whereby the same story is rewritten many times and reposted with little or no verification of the claims made.

The most astute readers and those who are the most critical will already have realised there are still a number of flaws with this strategy, namely that it is easy to use this against the consumer by continuing to lie but ensuring the lie is consistent.  Therein lies the biggest problem, we have reached a point where we doubt everything, whether we have good reason to or not, and have no motivation to put any effort into checking what we are told is actually true.  Perhaps then the best advice is to accept reality and acknowledge that news as a source of information is a concept that has died and news as a form of entertainment is the world we now live in.  If that is what you want to use as a foundation then there must be a recognition that you can't let news influence how you live your life, you wouldn't make life decisions based on the events of a soap opera as you know it's not real, why then would you make life decisions based on something you've come to accept isn't reliable and therefore cannot be trusted to be real either?