For days now, I’ve been reading sections of an American court battle — the details of the defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News — and in the process, I’ve been feeling a shuddering slide in the business I’m in. A tremor in the news force, if you will.
Part of the details that have come out in the case — from sworn statements by Fox News executives — is that those executives were concerned that if they did not present information that they knew to be false about the last American presidential election being “stolen”, they would lose viewers. (Fox News had, after all, already seen a precipitous drop in viewership after being the first network to accurately predict Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s win in Arizona.)
Now, all of that is far from Canada.
Or is it?
I raise that concern while considering the fragmentation of the media landscape not just in the United States, but everywhere — and the relative ease, compared to past years, of creating small, stand-alone niche media outlets, both in broadcast news and online.
Bear with me here.
I’ve been in the media long enough to remember what it was like for major players to have near-complete control of their respective markets: the up-front costs of launching alternative news outlets was prohibitive — leaving many markets littered with failed attempts at competition — and, while that admittedly made entrenched media outlets lazy, smug and entitled, it allowed something else to happen, too.
Their size and heft gave news outlets the power to put in place and maintain basic standards — like walls between the advertising and editorial departments, for example, meaning that advertisers couldn’t simply buy positive news coverage.
But what if the shoe was on the other foot?
What if, as is the case now, more and more of the power of suasion comes from below, rather than above? What if it is the reader-and-viewer tail that ends up wagging the media dog?
If the equation becomes that media outlets either feed the biases and beliefs of their readers and viewers or else they fail, we’ll all be the poorer for it.
I have, in the past, lamented the fact that there seems to be a lack of basic media literacy in the internet age. Reading broadly, I’ve come across plenty of blatantly false information — things that can be easily disproven with just a little work — and I’ve asked the question why readers or viewers weren’t diligent enough to see the obvious problems with what they were being told.
But I now wonder if I might not have been wrong in how I was looking at the whole equation.
Maybe it’s not that readers can’t see that something doesn’t hold water, but instead, that they just don’t want to see it.
Maybe the Fox News experience simply says that, in a market replete with quick and easy start-ups and a broad range of competing viewpoints, it’s not about finding an accurate source for news, but only about finding an outlet that reinforces your existing beliefs.
It gives rise to the concept of a bespoke media, one that cuts and stitches facts and opinions to deliver a unique jacket that exactly fits what you already want to believe. (Social media algorithms are already blatantly and obviously doing exactly that, but I’ll leave that for another day.)
Tailoring news to existing beliefs means media outlets will have no power to enforce basic journalistic standards about accuracy and professionalism.
There have always been hucksters willing to sell you whatever you want to believe. From swampland in Florida to snake oil cures, they make a very good living for themselves, apparently inured to the personal and financial wreckage they leave behind in their wakes.
They are also quite willing, apparently, to sell you conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods.
If news is simply going to become an untrammeled commodity, where stories are covered and information is manipulated solely to massage the existing beliefs of readers and viewers, news is essentially dead.
Truth and accuracy isn’t a popularity contest.
Thanks for reading!
Such a sad state of affairs. But a great article. Thanks.