Is it the responsibility of the media to help guide national priorities? It's a great question.
Some would argue that yes, the media is responsible for using its editorial judgment to determine what stories are worth discussing within bandwidth constrained by both distribution methods and the attention span of the readership. This school of thought believes that those editorial choices should be made based on the expert opinion of editors who can determine what are true information priorities for the public and what are less important. In other words, the national priorities are set by editors of influential publications based on what THEY believe the national priorities are. Experts provide context for the lay public in this model.
On the one hand, some would argue that the media is simply responsible for reacting to the market by providing the information that sells. The ultimate editorial decisions are set by the information consuming public. What information is relevant, entertaining, and of great national import is determined by the purchasing and viewing decisions of an information consuming public that makes millions of individual information consuming decisions each day. These decisions in turn drive what content news sources provide in order to get even more consumers.
The second model has prevailed. We are entering an age when information consumers themselves are making editorial decisions. The democratizing effect of the Internet has hastened the shift from a the first school of thought to the second. The first approach depended on an economic model where certain constraints were in place: production was limited based on the need to have huge fixed assets to produce media content (whether it be print, radio, or tv) and distribution was limited based on the need to have equally vast resources to access a significant viewership/readership.
The low marginal cost to serve that the Internet provided has allowed anyone to extend news content to the information consuming public. This economic change through technological disruption has allowed small bloggers to compete on almost equal footing to large media outlets.
As a result, media outlets are now part of a fragmented versus consolidated industry. In a consolidated space a few larger players complete for market share in large swaths or on a mass market basis. They try to appeal generically to as many people as possible. But, fragmentation has forced "news vendors" to segment the market to attract enough readership to sustain themselves. They have to differentiate themselves to compete. FoxNews recognized and has executed against this shift by attracting the conservative consumer segment.
This shift is where the danger emerges.
Each of these consumer segments has a specific expected narrative they want to see the news affirm about their world view. These segments will choose the information sources that perform this affirming role. In the previous consolidated environment the large "main stream media" players had to "play it down the middle" because they were essentially mass market players that had to accommodate many consumer segments as they were trying to get as much market share from their few close competitors as possible. As such, they had to subscribe to the fairness doctrine. Get the facts first and report them in the most credible manner possible was the way to differentiate yourself.
Those days are over. Now, it's take a news event and either inoculate your affiliated segments from the potential negative blow back to their world view or seize upon the event to support that world view.
So, there is no economic incentive to be objective. It doesn't pay. The information you get will always be part of some narrative...some thesis statement that is predetermined. The news is not about discovery but about affirmation no matter how convoluted that affirmation might be.
Thankfully, understanding this process is possible as a result of the very forces that have led to the current narrative-based news model. The Internet allows us to understand the bias of the news just as it allows a greater number of news sources to more easily come into being. That's the whole point of skewz.com. That's why brought it into existence.
There are still people out their who want news to be part of a process of discovering and discerning objective reality versus reinforcing a preexisting perspective. For those people, we've created this site to understand where and why different narratives may exist in the news and how those narratives shape the debate. With that knowledge, consumers of the news can better understand the news and as a result better understand the events taking place in the world today.
Welcome to skewz.com.
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