Modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate

http://thenextweb.com/video/2013/05/11/american-apparels-ryan-holiday-rails-against-the-media-says-its-broken-and-about-page-views/?fromcat=all

by xssbitch • 13 years ago

70 33 13 years ago

thenextweb.com

UVB-76• 13 years ago

It's all about incentives. Most major news organisations are private, for-profit entities. Profit is the primary incentive.

What turns a profit? High-brow commentary written by proper journalists, that only a small subset of your readership will fully understand and appreciate, or photos of the latest Hollywood B-list celebrity doing something embarrassing, churned out en masse by pseudo-journalists whose only qualification is being able to plagiarise content without being detected, generating far more page views and ad revenue?

mixmax• 13 years ago

In Denmark we have "denmarks Radio" which is basically a state owned tv, web and radio media outlet whose purpose it is to educate the populace. This changes the incentives, because the income is from the state whose goal is to have educated and smart voters, not to make money on headlines. I believe the BBC works in a similar fashion, and it shows in their news coverage.

silvestrov• 13 years ago

BBC has standards. Denmarks Radio doesn't. DR's content is of surprisingly low quality in spite of being forbidden from running advertising. Educating the populace was something they did in the 70'ies. Today the managements uses "number of viewers" as their only compass.

dsego• 13 years ago

In Croatia we have national tv and radio. If you own a TV set or radio you are obliged by law to pay a monthly fee. This in theory means that they should be objective and impartial. However, the top heads there are appointed through political connections. So they're mostly a propaganda machine for the political parties in power. Since the politicians here are only puppets in the service of big money and foreign power, their agenda is mostly to serve their interests. Except for some small independent web sites (such as advance.hr), all other private newspapers and sites sell cheap infotainment, often poorly translated articles from english and american yellow-press.

ryanholiday4• 13 years ago

The incentive problem goes lower and more granular than that. How are most bloggers paid (or at least judged on performance)? Pageviews.

What metric has about the lowest correlation to quality, accuracy or significance? Pageviews.

calibraxis3• 13 years ago

Modern media? This is at least as old as 1928. Take Edward Bernays (the "father of modern PR" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ed_Bernays), whose book "Propaganda" said things like: "There are invisible rulers who control the destinies of millions. It is not generally realized to what extent the words and actions of our most influential public men are dictated by shrewd persons operating behind the scenes. Nor, what is still more important, the extent to which our thoughts and habits are modified by authorities."

And: "For this reason there is an increasing tendency to concentrate the functions of propaganda in the hands of the propaganda specialist. This specialist is more and more assuming a distinct place and function in our national life."

Does awareness immunize you? "Undoubtedly the public is becoming aware of the methods which are being used to mold its opinions and habits. If the public is better informed about the processes of its own life, it will be so much the more receptive to reasonable appeals to its own interests. No matter how sophisticated, how cynical the public may become about publicity methods, it must respond to the basic appeals, because it will always need food, crave amusement, long for beauty, respond to leadership.

"If the public becomes more intelligent in its commercial demands, commercial firms will meet the new standards. If it becomes weary of the old methods used to persuade it to accept a given idea or commodity, its leaders will present their appeals more intelligently."

A terribly amusing read, from a pre-computing programmer of people. (http://www.whale.to/b/bernays.pdf) When guys like Ryan Holiday talk about the "modern media", they're stirring nostalgia for lost days of yore — which didn't exist. At least not in the timeframe they seem to imply.

[Disclaimer: I'm only halfway through the video before writing this. I'll be embarrassed if he delves into the 20th century history in the latter half. And keep in mind that "Propaganda" had a more neutral connotation then. Later, it got associated with the Nazis, who were actually inspired by the success of US propaganda.]

ryanholiday4• 13 years ago

Actually, in the book I go much earlier. Upton Sinclair wrote a book of media criticism in 1912 that was the genesis for my theories. Yellow journalism predates Bernays by more than a few decades.

calibraxis3• 13 years ago

Thanks, I'll get a copy of your book. BTW, you might be interested in the work of media historian Bob McChesney (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._McChesney), if you haven't checked it out already.

One thing he argued is that before professional journalism, the media was much like today's blogs; everyone knew their content reflected the owner's biases. Then with the consolidation of newspapers (due to economic reasons), to the point where a city might have only a couple dailies, overt bias "stank like old fish", so professional journalism arose. (And journalism schools along with it.) With it came a neutral-sounding objective tone, which hid a number of biases (like what's covered — and what's not, reliance on "official sources" who are elites, and so on). But of course, the content reflects the owners and advertisers' general interests, as we'd expect from media corporations which like staying in business.

Given that, I'd wonder if good, carefully-researched professional journalism is more insidous than yellow journalism. I'll look more closely at your (and Sinclair's) work.

salimmadjd• 13 years ago

From the Wikipedia link you provided:

1913 Bernays was hired by the actor Richard Bennett to protect a play that supported sex education against police interference. Bernays set up a front group called the "Medical Review of Reviews Sociological Fund" (officially concerned with fighting venereal disease) for the purpose of endorsing the play.[21]

Which reminds me of Tom Lantos ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lantos )working with the PR firm to stage the testimonies on capital hill to get US into the first Iraq War, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_Nayirah

In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Ṣabaḥ (Arabic: نيره الصباح‎) and that she was the daughter of Saud bin Nasir Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has largely come to be regarded as wartime propaganda.

alanthonyc• 13 years ago

Don’t be embarrased. Premature pontification is a common problem, with a high incidence on the hn reply threads.

walshemj• 13 years ago

Its probably older than printing, blackening your opponents name goes back thousands of years. For example back during the Peloponnesian War did Acibedies realy go on a drunken bender with his drinking buddies and paint statues penises blue?

Or was it a black propaganda exercise by his political enemies Swift Boating Athenian style if you will.

onemorepassword• 13 years ago

The main problem is not that it's easy to dupe an individual journalist. This can never be completely avoided, and making it less easy is a solvable problem.

The big red warning sign is the lack of corrections. This shows how little the media actually cares.

It's like a web service being hacked and having their plain-text passwords exposed, and openly and blatantly refusing to improve their security practices.

And unlike most other industries, there's no force to correct them. Democracies are understandably reluctant to regulate media strongly, and exposing this problem is traditionally the role of... the media.

Other than the business model falling apart because people are no longer willing to pay for media, they are untouchable.

Fargren• 13 years ago

What's more, should any power try to correct this, it's in the hand of the media to demonize this power in the public eye. We are currently living such a situation in Argentina, where the greatest agglutinant of the opposition to the current government is Clarin, the greatest media group of the country.

sea6ear• 13 years ago

Related (?) http://xkcd.com/250/

georgemcbay• 13 years ago

PR gaming aside, I'm always a bit horrified when I read a general media story about something that I know a lot about (like, say, computer programming) because the articles are often a very superficial treatment of the subject while trying to not seem so superficial, and in a lot of cases they are either so simplified that the information they present is misleading or in some cases they are just spouting completely incorrect nonsense in a soothingly authoritative tone.

The reason I am horrified is not because I'm offended that they don't understand computers, but because I realize that the articles that they write in fields I'm not intimately familiar with are almost certainly equally stupid sounding to people who are, and thus I'm likely woefully misinformed on a great many things.

thoughtcriminal• 13 years ago

Nicely articulated. I feel exactly the same way. Now I question everything I read, and will reference a variety of sources on important issues.

hga• 13 years ago

From http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gel..., a quote by Michael Crichton:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Nowadays I only follow the conventional media to know what they think is important, since that drives a lot of important things.

caseysoftware• 13 years ago

I spent almost a decade in DC and knew many political, legal, and technology reporters. For the most part, they often don't know what they're talking about. They have no background in the subject, no training or study in the subject, and rarely do any research on their own.

The worst/laziest literally copy and paste from their "trusted sources" instead of writing it on their own.. which is even worse when that source is a press release or otherwise manicured statement.

ExpiredLink• 13 years ago

Ok, you can spoof media. But the real manipulation happens in the selection of topics that become newsworthy. Only the - for the target audience - most sensational happenings are 'reported'. This sensational funnel is inherent to the system and much more manipulative than any individual and deliberate forgery. BTW, Hacker News also works this way. By giving readers the ability to immediately respond it creates at least some counter balance to the sensational funnel.

rbzn999• 13 years ago

Extremely interesting, thanks!

ilamont• 13 years ago

This trend has a significant impact on Wikipedia, which relies on press coverage to determine what articles are suitable for inclusion, and what "facts" can be used for Wikipedia articles.

Press coverage tends toward the sensational, visual, beautiful, controversial, current, language-specific, and easily explained. If a topic doesn't meet those criteria, it probably won't be covered by the press -- unless the topic in question has some well-connected PR firm or publicist pushing for it.

ryanholiday4• 13 years ago

It goes the other way around too. Most reporters and bloggers get their basic facts from Wikipedia. So it's a feedback loop. Wikipedia frames reporting which can then be used to "support" or cite that very same framing.

Almost every public figure has seen some inaccuracy from their Wikipedia page come up in a news story or an interview at one time or another.

FreezerburnV• 13 years ago

XKCD explains this effect quite nicely, I think: http://xkcd.com/978/

zecho• 13 years ago

Relevant: http://www.deceptology.com/2013/03/how-deception-gave-ball-p...

mariuolo• 13 years ago

These days there's also less time to verify facts.

jstalin• 13 years ago

My own experience shows this on both sides of the issue. I have been involved in some local government issues and it's easy to get coverage in local media by just sending a press release out to a few dozen contacts. They rarely (if ever) do any fact checking. That's not to say that I make things up. In fact, that's the other side of the issue. I pride myself in researching local government issues through the use of the Freedom of Information Act, and then compiling that information into something the media would be interested in.

The flip side of the coin is that if I release some FOIA data and then the reporter goes to the government entity for a comment, the government representative will often times make things up or just lie about the facts. The local reporter just takes that person at his or her word, despite the fact that I have produced documentation directly from that government agency which contradicts its talking head.

It's become clear that local reporters (for the most part) don't do any independent research. They regurgitate AP reports or whatever they're told. Most reporters have no expertise or clue about what they're reporting on.

One sign of this degradation in local (and national) media quality to watch out for: online articles that are composed entirely of paragraphs that are one or two sentences each. Here's one randomly chosen example: http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/11/justice/texas-explosion-probe/...

tsotha• 13 years ago

Part of the problem is the internet has taken a lot of the money out of local news. They don't check things because they don't have time. Where I live all the local papers, which were going bankrupt, were bought by a conglomerate and 90% of the staff was laid off. They're more like stenographers than reporters, and it's not their fault, either. They simply do not have the time to do anything buy bounce from one story to the next, getting the facts mostly right. Nothing that's the slightest bit complex or subtle gets the treatment it would have a decade ago.

mcdigman• 13 years ago

Does anyone else find it strange that the page containing this video also has a "send anonymous tip" link, which claims "we don't track anything, not even your ip address."

And of course the headline "modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate" is a little more sensational (and click generating) than, say, "Ryan Holiday claims some media outlets have biased incentives"

Which leads me to the amusing possibility that Ryan Holiday did not actually do those things, but is manipulating the media into thinking he did, which of course would prove his point.

Modern media is often wrong, vapid, and easy to manipulate

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