#058: Nothing is average, everything is sensational
Whenever I look at news today, it all seems very similar. Sure, the color scheme is different with each website or channel, and the reporters are different, but in the grad scheme of things, they all report about same things, from the same sources, using the same intermediary news agencies. Whenever anything happens, you can count on live streams, live tweets, and live broadcasts, along with live (of course) commentary from any expert that could be reached on short notice, each and every one trying to surpass each other with sensationalism.
Seriously, imagine you had been away for a few weeks, with no access to any news whatsoever, and then opened any news website, tv channel, or social media feed, and you’d think the world is about to be destroyed.
Everything is treated as if it were the most extraordinary thing happening at this moment. Take a look at the absurd Oscar Pistorius trial coverage. Any detail, regardless of how significant, is treated as if it were world changing — even if, as in this case, there’s nothing to really show you except a few tweets with emotional language, leading to further absurdities in the coverage.
All of this is on purpose. Media companies exists not to inform you, but to make money. They make money by showing you advertisements, and to keep you watching those ads, they need to keep you “engaged”.
Before TV, you mostly got your news from other people, and newspapers, which were published at certain times of the day. Anything that reached you had to be filtered and condensed down, and put into words, possibly accompanied by a picture. Since there were relatively few sources of news, ads had to be placed there and only there, giving newspapers a strong incentive to keep their readers not only well informed, but also curating what to print. After all, you read the newspaper because you trusted them to decide on what’s important, and for the publishers, printing more pages meant higher costs.
Once TV became commonplace, news basically kept a similar format: You got your news at a certain time of the day, with occasional breaking news reports, if the circumstances warranted it. Ads were shown in between segments, but since there were only a handful of TV channels, there was still enough money made from them to keep the incentive on providing good coverage, since you needed your viewers to come back to you the next day.
With the birth of 24 hours news stations, news consumption, and therefore news production, changed radically. Before, you had a deadline to submit any reporting, and then all the news was packaged up into a bundle and distributed. Now, there were no deadlines. News could, and would, be put in front of viewers as fast as they could be produced. Live coverage went from special events to commonplace. Instead of editorial editions about what to publish, it became a race to be the first to publish, regardless of what it was. Whoever published first, got the most viewers, and could therefore demand the highest ad rates.
In order to keep you engaged as a viewer, they need to constantly excite you, get you emotionally involved, and keep the tension up — anything could happen at any moment, don’t go away, otherwise you might miss it! This also gave rise to the commentator on TV, filling the holes in any news programme, in between new tidbits about whatever topic was on screen right now. They fulfill a different need: Since you’re too busy taking in what’s happening, you can’t really process it in any critical way. The commentator’s analysis fills this in for you: They provide you a ready-made analysis and opinion of what just happened, without having to do any thinking yourself.
This misalignment between the news producers, and their consumers, and the resulting lack of critical processing, is a problem. If everything is a sensational rollercoaster of emotions all the time, then you lose your ability to judge events, instead becoming an unthinking consumer of whatever’s put in front of you. Fews events in the world really need to be watched live. Most of what’s happening won’t have an immediate impact on your live, and you would lose nothing if you learned about it the next day from a newspaper. Or, as put in issue #48: “Get news. Not too quickly. Avoid social.”
Other interesting links from around the web:
- Yes, Europa really is sending plumes of water into space (Jupiter’s moon Europa, not the continent, if you were wondering)
- Why It Seems as if Everyone Is Always Angry With You
- Life is too messy for absolute certainty. And that’s a fact.
📖 Weekly Longread 📚
One Test Could Exonerate Him. Why Won’t California Do It? — Kevin Cooper is on death row for murdering 4 people, while exonerating evidence was ignored, and police officers stand accused of false testimony against him.