It is a delusory mental illness of the American democrat to act as though the media has an obligation to grant the public unbiased and impartial reporting. The truth of the matter is that in a capitalist country we have winners and losers, and one of our cultural values is that any entity that relies on the Almighty Dollar owes the consumer a product or service that is pleasing, regardless of whether or not “being pleased” is a good criterion for measuring the value of the service provided.
In terms of factual reporting, “being pleased” is probably the single worst expectation unless you are perfectly satisfied with a boring day on the planet and forty minutes of news anchors tap dancing on the set to fill the time between “Today, nothing happened in the world”, “Now for local news: do people still like breathing? Our reporters spoke to residents of Banallion today…” and “Ham: is it for real?” That’s how it’s going to be if you want the truth 24/7 at your fingertips on a smart phone, and while the newspaper format could handle it very well with a single great headline, the internet is populated with dozens of news sites all scrambling for your attention like a city of whores with no male residents. And why? Because no news agency can pay its bills in the current system without advertisers, advertisers pay for exposure, and if the content of your site is boring—true or not—the human animal will look elsewhere for a snack.
Originally, the newspaper/advertising model was fairly impervious to the reality of living in a universe that is slowly dying of heat death. If you didn't get the paper, you had to rely on an annoying coworker. Furthermore, the newspaper is in many ways an ideal instrument for news in capitalist societies, because the citizenry has very little ability to filter and customize distasteful reality (not getting into Manufacturing Consent here...). Whether you like a set of facts or not, your paper boy isn’t going to sit around clipping out everything you don’t want to hear. At the very least, you have to acknowledge it as you’re petulantly flipping the page. This gave publishers and editors a breakwater from a fickle public, so they had much more liberty to present facts.
Television changed everything, but the media/advertising model still functioned well enough to allow for fairly objective reporting. The problem of a slow news day was somewhat mitigated by routine and limited access through other—forgive the pun—channels. The six o’clock news would run for an hour, people would tune into their station of choice, and even if it wasn’t a fascinating day of alien landings and nuclear exchanges a media outlet had the luxury of knowing that nobody would know it was a slow news day until it was all over. Advertisers knew where you would be and when, the media go their money and Elton John could be heard singing Circle of Life in the background while everyone swayed in time.
The internet offers no such compartmentalization. Learning about our world is purely opportunistic, and the amount of time we spend on a website is directly proportional to how much we enjoy the content. Fast food is a perfect analogy, because what McDonald’s has done with salt, sugar, grease and speed, the media has done with voyeurism, outrage, drama and new content generation, but absolutely not because they wanted to—they had to. The public is comprised of humans, and human nature determined their business model and how it interacted with technological and social evolution. Advertisers want to see website hits, and the media had to shift to a model that produced the result. Ironically, almost nobody in the media actually likes the new model any more than an aspiring chef who graduates from culinary school wants to run a Panda Express.
This is where the great paradigm shift in media took place that embroils our information landscape today: the unbridled permissiveness of narrative. Narrative is the idea that daily news is most interesting to consumers when it is part of an ongoing serial drama. Is Donald Trump sexually assaulting women? No. Donald Trump is the central figure in the brilliant CNN drama called “Donald Trump is a Sexual Predator”, but in truth that’s only season four of the 472-episode ongoing serial drama called “Donald Trump is a Categorical Piece of Shit”. That’s what we’re really reading, and the great part about establishing a narrative is that no matter what pops up in the world on any given day, you can rest assured that your readership has watched all the other episodes online about a dozen times and will fill in any gaps the brutally pointless daily facts can’t be made to daub.
The cue came from reality TV. If you video tape unscripted human behavior, careful editing and presentation of circumstances can be used to invent stories and create characters for us to follow. The news is no different. The great capitulation of the press was the sad acknowledgement that the best way to keep people coming back in the information age—perhaps “in formation age” is a better term—is to report very selectively and offer commentary so that characters and storylines hang together. The new ethical standard of this model is as follows:
"It is not the charge of the media to decide what is true, only to ensure that what they publish is not untrue and let the readers decide if they are 'being pleased' by that assessment of reality."
That’s it. Full stop. Therefore, on the same day during the campaign, CNN could feed their narrative that Donald Trump is a piece of shit by reporting that he groped women. FoxNews could feed their narrative that the Clintons are evil by reporting that Bill Clinton did it first. Nothing about those two statements is false…
…but members of the public who follow one narrative or the other are much more likely to view those particulars as “consistent” with the truth, or biased and misleading. It’s not a question of ignorance, so much as a rational reaction to the perception of reality, and it's hard to find another good working definition of "truth". Perhaps one could say that science gives us truth, but in practice scientists just have extremely high standards. What the average person might be willing to accept as proof could be so flawed that a scientist could lose their job for being careless. Nonetheless, people and organizations have made hay off of the fact that we can never be scientifically 100% sure of anything. The classic example of this is James Randi describing how to test if reindeer can fly. You throw them off the Empire State Building one at a time and record the data. In the end, have you proven reindeer can’t fly? Nope.
“All you know is that these specific reindeer, under these temperature and air pressure conditions, either can’t fly…or chose not to.”
Of course, common sense and experience tells us that the odds that there is a flying reindeer somewhere is absurdly small, so it’s easy to forgive the last little bit of statistical uncertainty and concede that the intrinsic non-aerodynamic quality of the Rangifer tarandus is “the truth”. This is where narrative sinks its teeth in. Dismissing flying reindeer creates almost no cognitive dissonance with our understanding of reality. However, what about the two narratives surrounding Trump and Clinton groping women? If CNN all of a sudden started reporting the FoxNews stories and vice-versa, the thread would feel very out of place in the narrative tapestry we’ve been weaving to use as our go-to baseline of “the truth”. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and in the context of the narratives, the other news agency’s reports read as highly improbable. Perhaps even intentionally biased or manipulative. In practice, it's gotten so bad that news agencies are spinning the narrative cloth that other news agencies might be liars.
The obvious trick here is that nothing being reported is categorically untrue. A codeword for "lying" that passes the test of being "not untrue" is "bias". Bias is a way of saying you question the motives of reporters despite the fact that what they are publishing is "not untrue". In other words, they may not be entirely wrong, but they are definitely hate-worthy pieces of shit for saying what they said.
The ultimate form of this is commentary programming. In order to insure the health of their narrative, media agencies provide several hours of opinion shows every day with people like Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity, to fill your heads with all kinds of logic techniques, partisan rhetoric and lawyerly bullshit to defend the "not untruthiness" of their narrative. Obviously a lot of this comes in the form of exploiting concepts like the reindeer example. Commentary is nothing more than a little continuing education seminar for a news agency’s viewership so they can develop a more solid foundation for believing their version of “the truth”, and this is where we find ourselves today.
Nobody likes this state of affairs, including reporters. Unfortunately, in a capitalist economy, the only way to express that in the internet age is to stop going to their website. Fine. The media organization needs money from advertisers, so they start reporting bland reality. This is boring, and in the meantime, a lot of other places are reporting that something is happening in the world or just offer exciting fake news to reel us in. It’s the internet age and something is always happening, so we check it out, but even if we look at it and realize it’s bullshit, we still gave them “not untrue” traffic statistics to report to advertisers indicating that people prefer their site. The money starts diffusing, and now our honest news agency is facing a two-pronged problem. First, there is more competition for money generally, and second, they have to compete somehow. Now we’re back to the practical reality that narrative is what gets the job done at the end of the day.
Except they’ve lost control of the narrative. Fake news forces legitimate news agencies to deal with the calculus of narrative in the context of real lies that are designed to appeal to a particular narrative’s plausibility window. Worse, if the legitimate agency reports that a pro-narrative piece of fiction is false…
…their public may not believe them, and why the fuck should they? The narrative is the standard against which people gauge whether or not something is true. A given story may be false, but if we don’t have the time to go to, say, Somalia to do some on-site investigation, ultimately we are forced to make a judgement against our understanding of “the truth”.
Sssssshhhhit…
What do we do?
If you take a cynical view of all this, you’re just going to play into the creation of a new narrative called “Fuck the Media”. That one’s selling gangbusters these days and it’s fantastic because it meshes perfectly with things like “Trump is a Piece of Shit”, but how do you navigate the waters?
1. Understand the narrative
Once you have a particular narrative clearly defined in your head, it’s absurdly easy to spot when it’s being advanced. It’s amazing how quickly the news on any given site reads differently when you know the code words and themes, and if you get into the habit of asking questions like “what could they have run instead?” and “what parts of this piece seem off topic?” it becomes relatively easy to tease things apart.
2. If it doesn’t fit the narrative or directly contradicts it, it’s very likely to be true.
Bart Ehrman talks about this technique for determining which of a bunch of old texts contains the more correct version of a particular Bible verse. Oddly enough, the one that makes the least sense is probably correct, because well-intentioned scribes tended to “correct” things that didn’t make sense to them or might seem like transcription errors based on their understanding of Christian theology. I’m not picking on Jesus here, everyone does it.
3. Let the facts come out the way they are.
The great physicist Richard Feynman said in one of his many lectures that he was not searching for a Grand Unification Theory in physics. While he said it would be lovely and satisfying if everything turned out to be one big theory, it may just as easily be like an onion with a billion layers and nothing in the middle. All he wanted was to gain a better understanding of the universe, and part of that was accepting that it was going to turn out the way it really is whether we approved of it or not.
4. Structure the context and time of your news gathering.
Portion control and regimentation of your media consumption will assist things dramatically. If you get your news online, dedicate 30 minutes to sitting down with a cup of coffee on whatever collection of sites you’re going to go with and just read the paper even if it’s a slow day. Pick three and only read them for a week. If you’re sick of them, pick three more and read them for a week. At the very least, you will get a lot of context for how various sites report, what their narratives are and crucially, how objective they appear.
People bitch that the New York Times is biased. Is it? Also, we’re all adults and, generally speaking, we know when a reporter’s personal opinion is leaning in. If it is biased, how biased is it compared to other news agencies? Maybe it’s really bad, but maybe it’s really, really good. A perfectly objective media can only be identified by a perfectly objective human, and neither one of them exists. So again, get some context and negotiate from there.
5. Finally, make sure you incorporate a newspaper publisher into your online reading.
Realize that the major news outlets online are all TV-based. CNN, FoxNews and MSNBC are not newspapers. They are the second tier of journalism that is already steeped in the hot water of sensationalist television news. Make sure you incorporate the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times or some other paper into your rotation if you don’t already, so you are reading stories that are written by the actual reporters and journalists who got the information. The tradition of the printed page fits the media/advertising model the best when it comes to reporting facts, and it’s where you are most likely to find content from people who operate with that in mind.