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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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The value to the average news consumer is that the news is accurate.

Even before you consider the fact that the "average news consumer" is the product, not the customer (legacy media always made more money from advertising than subscriptions), this unfortunately doesn't appear to be true outside the business/financial media niche where FT/WSJ/BBG/Reuters operate.

The first requirement for is that the news is new and exciting. "Exciting" causes most of the common media biases - crime is always out of control because crime stories are lurid and easy to report, particularly if the victim is a moderately attractive woman. (The Guardian does the same thing, but they call it "violence against women" rather than "crime".) Political scandals are almost always over-egged. School shootings get more coverage than gun suicides. "New" causes stories to be rushed out with inadequate fact-checking - none of the New York journalists who broke the story that the Titanic had been crippled by an iceberg strike and was being towed into New York Harbor suffered professional consequences for getting it wrong.

The second requirement is that at least on the big partisan questions, people want media that flatters their preconceptions. The easiest recent example to pick over because it got exposed in a defamation lawsuit was the Fox News coverage of the 2020 election - senior figures at Fox (including Tucker Carlson) knew that they were pushing specific sensational fraud allegations that were not supported by the facts, but also understood that if they stopped they would lose MAGA-aligned viewers to places like OANN who were willing to keep going. The left-wing "mainstream" media are, of course, just as bad, but aren't stupid enough to make discoverable tapes saying how awful they are.

News being accessed by social media filter makes this much worse, because it makes the incentives stronger. And it means that even if you want to read news from writers with a reputation for trustworthiness, what the algorithm shows you is what people like you click "like" on, which in practice is going to be the stuff that makes them feel good.

The replacement of professional journalism and legacy media business models with social media "citizen journalism" makes things even worse by removing all incentives other than social virality. Elon Musk doesn't give a damn whether the right-wing "citizen journalism" he is signal boosting on X is true or not because he knows his target audience don't either.

Have you looked at e.g. datahazard's graphs, which are the most widely seen example of citizen journalism (no scare quotes) that musk has re-xeeted?
Do you see any inaccuracies? Has anyone pointed any inaccuracies out to you? Are you just going with a framing of "musk tweets malinformation" because it's convenient?