Recently, Skip started a post with this charming thought: ‘The job of a journalist is to report facts, add context where necessary, and leave it to the consumer to decide what he thinks.’
I would have agreed with that before I read Neil Postman’s excellent book How to Watch TV News. But Postman helped me understand that it’s a fairy tale version of the actual job.
The job of a journalist — what journalists are hired to do — is to get people’s eyeballs pointed in a particular direction (or their ears tuned in to a particular source of sound), so that advertisers can try to sell them things. Once you understand that, a lot of otherwise incomprehensible things about journalism start to make sense.
So that’s their vocation. Their avocation is to promote particular narratives by selectively presenting some facts (while withholding others), pretending that some opinions are facts, and pretending that some facts are just opinions.
The basic ideas of public choice theory apply as well to journalists as they do to politicians, bureaucrats, and judges. Thinking that journalists are neutrally and selflessly engaged in providing some important public benefit (i.e., that there can ever be a ‘press we can trust’) makes as much sense as thinking the same thing about government officials. But this myth serves both journalists and government officials, which is why considerable PR efforts are directed at reinforcing it.
But that’s just the supply side of the situation. To understand what’s happening, we have to consider the demand side as well.
The inconvenient truth is that most people don’t actually want journalists to provide them with facts. What they want journalists to do is confirm their biases.
Which is to say, ‘fake news’ isn’t actually a problem, but rather a solution to a problem. Some people seek out fake news for exactly the same reason that other people seek out recreational drugs — to displace uncomfortable aspects of reality from their minds, so they don’t have to be confronted or dealt with, at least until later.
From this perspective, there are really only two important differences between media outlets and drug cartels.
- Media outlets help their customers change their brain chemistry using concepts instead of chemicals.
- Media outlets use the space on their packaging to sell ads.
Otherwise, they’re basically in the same business, meeting the same demand. Which means we can expect any ‘war on fake news’ to work out as well as the ‘war on drugs’ has.
