In the New York Times today, Julia Angwin talks about the various problems created by social media algorithms deciding what you see. She lists several:
Yet not one of those problems is as damaging as the problem of who controls the algorithms. Never has the power to control public discourse been so completely in the hands of a few profit-seeking corporations with no requirements to serve the public good. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which he renamed X, has shown what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a social media company.
How is it that our memories have become so busted? Not so long ago there were a grand total of three (3) TV networks that provided us with whatever news they felt like giving us. That was it. Maybe you also read a daily newspaper. In Los Angeles that would have been the conservative LA Times until the late '60s, when it became the liberal LA Times whether you liked it or not. Later, Fox News showed precisely what can happen when an individual pushes a political agenda by controlling a (regular old) media company. Elon Musk is a pipsqueak next to Rupert Murdoch.
I agree that algorithmic curation of our social media feeds poses a problem—though the problem is typically one of prioritizing addictive clickbait, not choosing political sides. But in the end there are multiple, competitive social media platforms available to all of us. Their popularity changes rapidly, and that's at least partly due to how they manage what you see. The market really does provide a fair amount of discipline here, even for social media companies.
The reality is that we have way more choice in media consumption today than we had 50 years ago. The network news shows are still around but are now supplemented by cable news. Daily newspapers have declined, but our effective access to them has grown. In practice, most of us were limited to one newspaper back in the so-called "Golden Age," while today it's simple to browse a dozen if you feel like it. (Some are behind paywalls, but in the print era they were all behind paywalls.) And of course there's also social media.
Put all this together—plus radio, podcasts, magazines, curation sites, and even blogs—and our real problem isn't that we're limited in what we can see. The problem is choosing among the literal tsunami of news sources available to us.
Honestly, if you're not happy about what Facebook shows you, then switch to—or add—something else. If you're too lazy to bother doing this, maybe you don't really mind the algorithm very much after all. And if you demand to have your precise desires handed to you on a custom-curated platter instead of broadening your appetite for browsing a few different media outlets to find ones you like, maybe you never really cared that much about the news in the first place.
"Not so long ago there were a grand total of three (3) TV networks that provided us with whatever news they felt like giving us. That was it."
We never watched TV news growing up, but even as a kid we read the Star Ledger and New York Times every morning, and the Courier News every afternoon (it's now a morning paper, too). We had NPR or WCBS on the radio and in the car. We didn't watch TV news because we ate family dinner at 6:00ish every night due to parents' work and kids' sports.
The vast majority of the folks I new were also paper and radio consumers, and didn't pay much attention to TV news.
"The reality is that we have way more choice in media consumption today than we had 50 years ago."
This is true in the aggregate, but this may not be a good thing. Also, while many folks pick and choose their outlets (like jabberwocking) they are also on Twitter and Facebook if they're over 40, and Twitter and Instagram/Tik Tok if they're under. Social media rules the day.
In a weird way, what we have is too much choice. You can go find the media source that espouses the reality you want to follow, whether it has any basis in fact or not.
There were always crackpot conspiracy newsletters, but in the old days, it was all fringe-y enough that most people didn't really stumble into it. Then came Fox News. And then social media. Crackpots mainstreamed.
Not that news outlets in the past were perfect. Far from it. But now it's really easy to surround yourself with pure nonsense.
I fear folks are too lazy to try all of the news at the buffet. They simply go to what ever they had before, in most cases for "faux", it is faux. When I lived in Kansas, every where I went folks were tuned into faux. It made me crazy.
Personally, I prefer my buffet of browsing and have actually dropped some of my "old chestnuts" as they are into "equal" time for either side. If I want to read what the other side spews, I'd visit their site.
Never mind. I am actually reading less and less news as they all say the same thing.
Browsing front pages is fun and very educational.
Doesn't sound as if you were spending time in Douglas County.
Up in Brown county. 4 years too long.
I grew up in LA, and it was the LA Times and the Daily Breeze and the Christian Science Monitor in my house. You could also get the uber conservative Herald Examiner if you wanted to get a good fish wrap.
The LAT for national and international news.
The Breeze, a South Bay regional paper for local news.
The Monitor for good analysis.
In those days there were lots of regional papers covering a section of the LA metro area. Apparently, the Breeze has survived.
Most public libraries had several major newspapers and newsweeklies available to read for free. Many larger libraries have foreign papers and magazines.
My first job out of uni was in the St. Louis Central Library, a beautiful Cass Gilbert building.
For whatever bias problems you might ascribe them, I think the three big networks and most prominent newspapers of record had some level of journalistic integrity that a lot of modern social media and "news" sources don't feel the need adhere to.
I think the thornier problem with social media algorithms like on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, et.al. is that a lot of people don't REALIZE that an algorithm is shaping their reading habits. I don't think a large swath of boomers particularly planned for Facebook to radicalize them into screaming that Ivermectin cures COVID and space lasers caused the Lahaina fire, yet here we are.
Then again, what would you rather have, news that supports your own beliefs, names and then bashes your enemies, and makes you feel good? How much incentive is there to search through 500 cable channels and a zillion podcasts, just to find a news source that you hate? That you believe is wrong, biased, fake? So you can force yourself to view it every day?
Ice cream and birthday cake? Or calves liver?
Back in the days of the Big Three Networks there was this thing called the "Fairness Doctrine". One can argue about just who it was most fair too, but it and other policies meant that news wasn't designed to maximize profitability or to massage the egos of power-drunk billionaire media moguls.
Social media's algorithms are 100% engineered to maximize profitability via "engagement" and thus mindless controversy. Feedback is instantaneous and infinitely granular. There really is no way to compare this to the days when print media made its revenue from advertising (and small papers could support almost entirely via their classified ads).
We're in a different world.
The Fairness Doctrine didn't apply to the networks; it applied to broadcast licensees. It wasn't enforced for the most part (c.f. Red Lion). And since it never applied to cable channels or newspapers, by the time it was axed it didn't really have much of an impact. The rise of right wing radio is more of a story of media consolidation than FCC content policy. The equal time rule lives on though.
True enough if you limit the discussion to national news. Local news is a different story. A whole lot of meetings of school boards, city councils and zoning commissions are left uncovered today when a few years ago at least one set of disinterested eyes was watching their every move. They used to say all news is local. These days, regrettably, all news is becoming national.
"Honestly, if you're not happy about what Facebook shows you, then switch to—or add—something else. If you're too lazy to bother doing this, maybe you don't really mind the algorithm very much after all."
This is the core of the problem, Kevin. Many or most people are too lazy and don't mind the algorithm curating their news. And political interest groups, politicians and the partisan news sources themselves manipulate use the social media platforms and the innate desire of many people to have their biases reinforced to manipulate and mislead them.
The curation of the big 3 baselines what we saw in good and bad ways. Today we can get to anything but most people don’t read anything but one-side of the web page, if the page they’re on even has a second side.
But the core problem is the algorithm’s that guide you. The YouTube app is almost useless to me because it’s pointed me at such specific niches that I almost can’t get out. Other places do it too. They aren’t necessarily trying to politicize you one way or the other, they just want to keep you on-site, so you always see the narrow view of what they think you want to see.
Sucks massively.
It's not quite as simple as you're making it out to be.
Back when we had only 3 national TV networks, those networks were subject to a law requiring that they operate "in the public service." They were subject to a Fairness Doctrine that required them to present opinions from several (albeit far from all) viewpoints. Most importantly, network news programs were, for a long time, not expected to turn a profit. They did not have the same incentive as today's media to draw clicks by based on the reflexes of individual consumers.
TV news was also supplemented by robust local newspapers and radio stations. These were gatekeepers of local news, to be sure, but at least they presented local news. Consumers' worldviews weren't based entirely on stories about places they had never actually seen. In theory, the Internet lets me access more local papers than before. In practice, though, these papers have been hollowed out, and their websites are typically an impenetrable disaster.
It's not the Internet per se that has made news media worse, but the ways in which news is distributed on it.
The public interest requirement, and the Fairness doctrine, along with all of the FCC's content-aware policies never applied to the three networks - they applied to the local broadcast licensee. And the FCC hardly ever utilized the FD, even in the face of local activists raising complaints (there are a few exceptions). Did it have a moderating effect on the networks? Perhaps, but that's more a function of market optimization and journalism culture that was dominant at the time (and there are loads of books from the pre-1990s era critiquing the US media's coverage or lack thereof, and books more recently that analyze how damaging US media coverage was to marginalized communities during the supposed Golden Era).
But I do fully agree with your point about distribution: in today's era, there's simply so much more content to spend time with, that it is harder for good journalism, particularly local journalism, to spread the way it used to (which was (and for local actually still is) word of mouth.
The Fairness Doctrine most certainly did apply to the networks — both radio and television. They could lose their license to broadcast over the publicly owned airwaves for no cost if they didn’t comply. The big three all had locally own stations that broadcast their programming, It was through their local stations and their broadcasting licenses that the national networks reached their viewers.
The Fairness Doctrine never applied to cable because cable stations don’t use the publicly owned airwaves.
If my memory is correct, it seemed the old network news were pretty clear on what was news and what was opinion. With Fox leading the way, the opinion spart began drowning out the "news" sections to the point of blurring the two. Plus folks are junkies for juicy stuff and gravitate to the talk show parts.
“…with no requirements to serve the public good…”
I understand Kevin just glossed over this phrase, going out of his way to exclude it from his bolding, but… it’s the difference between having 3 networks dictating the news back then and a handful of individuals/corporations dictating the news today. Back then, the 3 networks had lots of FCC rules regarding fairness and truth, and had hundreds of independent newspapers in every single urbanized area of more than like 10,000 people as a counterbalance. Today, none of that exists.
I think the biggest change has been that the networks are now owned by corporations that are not primarily about broadcasting. CBS, ABC and NBC were standalone broadcasting companies, not just divisions of a larger corporation with diverse businesses. That is a far cry from IBM owning NBC. Those broadcast companies viewed their news divisions as their crown jewels and as a way to meet their legal obligations to serve the public interest. The news divisions were not required to be profit-generators..
"The public good" v "MORE MONEY!!"
And the winner is determined by ... who makes the most money. Capitalism isn't going to get us out of this situation.
Thought experiment for Kevin (and everyone else):
There are 2 companies of 1,000 employees each producing the exact same widget.
One is organized so that only 3 people have daily contact with the CEO. Everybody else has to go through 1 of those 3 underlings to send a message to the CEO.
The other is organized so that every single employee is guaranteed to have daily contact with the CEO. The CEO cannot stop any of the employees from telling him/her anything they want. He/she doesn’t have to actually believe any of the employees, but he/she cannot turn off the nonstop cacophony.
Which do you predict is going to be the better run company?
Given human nature and our inclination to tune out *everything* when even just 10 people are talking at us at the same time, I’m gonna guess the first company with its 3 message curators will survive longer than the second one.
And so it will be with the US as a whole too. When everyone gets to speak, nobody can listen to it all. And when everyone can create the news with no gatekeeping whatsoever, nobody has enough time to sort through it all to find the Real Truth. So everyone just gives up and goes with their priors, leading to situations like we’re in today, where half the nation lives in a completely different reality than the rest of us.
Came here to say something like what @Austin did above, yes today we have an infinitude of outlets, but they are more or less all controlled by the same kind of profit-driven management in a way that was not true back in the 3-networks days.
Back then, in particular, network news was a cost center, not a profit making enterprise. It was something the networks provided bandwidth and staffing and support for, as part of their obligation in return for being allowed to broadcast. There was a resulting ethos that is absent from today's media.
Think back to the outbreak of the George Floyd protests in 2020. The first day, the protests spread spontaneously all over the country, and so did the news coverage. It was wall-to-wall on all the networks and major cable outlets, and it did not make the protesters look bad, and the journalists' talk was pretty obviously sympathetic. Night came, people went home, and when the protests started up again the next day the journalists had obviously received instructions. There was effectively no coverage in the legacy media.
The owners of the media, in other words, decided to suppress the reporting of one of the biggest stories of the year or decade maybe, and within a day it happened how they wanted. There was no power to do that, or interest in doing so, 50 or even 30 years ago. 20 years ago, more or less, something similar happened with the anti-war protests over Iraq, which basically didn't happen, even though they were the largest street protests ever in NYC, supposedly.
“Some (newspapers) are behind paywalls, but in the print era they were all behind paywalls.”
Not exactly true. Most places with more than, say, 10,000 people had libraries that had subscriptions to at least the local paper and often multiple other newspapers, and you could read them for free every single day if you wanted.
…with no requirements to serve the public good…
Corporations exist only because they can provide a public good that otherwise cannot be provided.
I think Congress should pass an act completely eliminating the concept of corporate personhood and the idea that corporations have rights that are in any way analogous to human or civil rights, and outlining exactly the responsibilities and duties of corporations for acting in the public good in all matters, and responsibilities to shareholders and their bottom line defined expressly as of no public interest, because whether one person or one company fails or not is of no consequence compared to the harm one company or a consortium of them can inflict on everyone.
Not so long ago? Are you serious? That was like the damn bronze age ago. Blogs exploded when I turned 18 in 2001.
"Not so long ago there were a grand total of three (3) TV networks that provided us with whatever news they felt like giving us. That was it."
Kevin considers that a bad thing. They were the guardrails back then. Now it's a free-for-all.
The Establishment had a lot of demerits, but if it still held power as before, we would never have had Trump, wide circulation of conspiracy theories, strident vaccination resistance, and deep political divisions that threaten the stability and unity of the United States.
"in the end there are multiple, competitive social media platforms available to all of us"
Not much competition. People are desperate to flee TwiX (Twitter+X) but no one has produced a similar product. I've got accounts on Threads, counter.social, mastodon (several subspecies), substack, spoutable, discord, post.news, (bsky is pending), and you know what?
They are all poor substitutes. Trump's social media platform is better in terms of functionality. (!)
Why somebody didn't get VC money and spin up a Twitter clone is a mystery.
Re: "demand[ing] to have your precise desires handed to you on a custom-curated platter "
That is NOT the issue. The issue is functionality and "egregious troll" exclusion.
I have never looked to social media as a source of news. I don't understand why anybody would. I have a Feedly account which aggregates feeds from the 'New York Times', BBC, Reuters, numerous other overseas news organisations, plus several Australian ones. Add in Memeorandum which picks up lots of others, and I've never had access to so much straight news. On top of this, Feedly collects this excellent blog's every post along with dozens of others covering everything from politics to IT to whisky.
The total cost is $4 a month, a special offer subscription to the 'NYT'.
To augment: in the old days, many people didn't source-check their news and had a single source (often TV or a local newspaper). But every source was an organization in itself. True, someone like William Randolph Hurst could build a news empire, but that was eventually control of 28 newspapers (focused on big cities). Compare to today, where Gannett owns over 1100 newspapers (100 daily, 1000 weekly) and operates them centrally (tiny local staffs and centralized editorial control), or Sinclair Broadcasting owns 294 local stations in 89 markets. That last piece is also important: it is now not uncommon for most or all of the local stations to be owned by a single corporation. If you're trying to figure which local station is most trustworthy, how can you do that when owns multiple stations, many of which are network stations? If you think the local news on ABC is owned by ABC, are you massively ignorant, or just making a false assumption? How about if you think social media only allows news from credible sources?
Couple with that the ease with which bad actors can propagate false news. In the 50s, if the Soviets wanted to influence US press coverage, they couldn't do so by starting their own local press in Denver, Colorado and publishing a daily newspaper. But now, almost anyone can set up a site online, get the domain DenverInquirer.com, and voila! You have your own "newspaper" to publish whatever stories you want without vetting or regulation.
It is reasonable to expect someone to consult 2 or 3 different sources of news to try to correct for bias. On a monthly basis, 5 or 6 seems easy enough even for busy working folks. When there were only a handful of news sources available, you could watch or read enough of them to cross-check, and because they competed, they would watch each other. Now, your sources may all actually be owned by the same two companies, or half of them may not be news sources at all. Expecting someone to track thousands or tens of thousands of "news" sources today is just not fair; expecting someone to check 20 and go with the story that 8 of them agree on, while tracking who owns all 20, is even more unfair. What if all 8 agreeing sources agree because Sinclair made them agree, and not because the story is accurate?
Kevin, you may have time and interest enough to spend the day researching and comparing news sources. But recognize that most people do not, and the people least informed and educated on checking sources independently often have the least time and resources to do so anyway.
Let me fix this.
" In practice, most of us were limited to one LOCAL newspaper back in the so-called "Golden Age," while today it's simple to browse a dozen NONLOCAL if you feel like it. "
I fear this inevitably portends a rise in LOCAL corruption. But I guess we'll never know.