Matt Taibbi gets it. What do you call people who don’t believe anything unless it’s published in the New York Times? Democrats. What do you call people who believe everything broadcast on Fox News? Republicans.
We don’t do that now. The story is no longer the boss. Instead, we sell narrative, as part of a new business model that’s increasingly indifferent to fact.
When there were only a few channels, the commercial strategy of news companies was to aim for the whole audience. A TV news broadcast aired at dinnertime and was designed to be consumed by the whole family, from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulking lefty teenager. This system had its flaws. However, making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits, too. For one, it inspired more trust. Gallup polls twice showed Walter Cronkite of CBS to be the most trusted person in America. That would never happen today.
After the Internet arrived and flooded the market with new voices, some outlets found that instead of going after the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic and dominate it. How? That’s easy. You feed the audience news you know they will like. When Fox had success targeting suburban and rural, mostly white, mostly older conservatives – the late Fox News chief Roger Ailes infamously described his audience as “55 to dead†– other companies soon followed suit.
Now everyone does it. Whether it’s Fox, or MSNBC, or CNN, or the Washington Post, nearly all Western media outlets are in the demographic-hunting business. This may be less true in Canada, where there’s a stronger public media tradition, but in the U.S., it’s standard.
The problem with that, of course, is that the truth isn’t necessarily what you like or what your preferred outlets publish. And the truth is important. Policies founded on false assumptions and phony facts can’t work.
Eternal verities remain. People engage in purposeful action. They respond to incentives. They don’t always do so instantaneously and their responses sometimes are not effective but the incentives do matter. People have different preferences and act to further those preferences in different ways.
It’s more important than ever to read widely and treat most everything skeptically.