A Kitchen Sink of Quinine Water, Or, Why the Free Press Is Both Necessary and Dangerous (Part 2, in which the dangers inherent in free market journalism are discussed and illustrated)

You may want to read PART 1 of this entry first, click the link.

News agencies generate revenue through traffic.  Subscription charges and advertising services are the two main revenue streams for any news agency.  Both are a function of readership/viewership.  The more readers or viewers (readers, hereafter) a news agency has, the more they make in subscription charges and the more they are able to charge for advertising space.  One way to gain more readers is to present the news more accurately and more coherently than your competitors.  This is the good side of free market journalism.  Market competition should drive the quality of reporting higher and higher.  But there is another way to gain readers.  Rather than attempting to outcompete your rivals across all demographics, you can simply corner a niche in the market.  Democrats might not like your presentation of the news, but as long as Republicans prefer it to the alternative presentation, your business will be fine.  This is generally known as “narrowcasting”, as opposed to “broadcasting”.  The danger of narrowcasting is that the reader will naturally be drawn to those news sources that present the news in a way that reinforces their pre-existing beliefs, regardless of whether that presentation is entirely accurate.  Much of the work studying narrowcasting focuses on its effects on domestic politics.  The concern there is that narrowcasting may be leading to an increasingly radicalized electorate and making compromise increasingly difficult.  But what about the way narrowcasting affects the reporting of international news and the way we understand broad historical or societal trends? 

The unseasonably warm February weather today in Northern Virginia reminded me that it has only been a year since the “Arab Spring” of 2011.  Yet this story feels like old news.  The dominant narrative in the media is that the people in dictatorships across the Arab world were upset  by the limited freedom they enjoyed under their repressive regimes, and when that unrest reached critical mass early last year, an civil uprising in Tunisia sparked a series of protests and uprisings across the region, which struggled to replace their dictatorships with free societies, and ultimately, inevitably, succeeded.  The continued struggle in Syria is treated almost like an epilogue, and the media consensus is that it is only a matter of time until Syria falls to the wave of democratization.  It’s a nice story.  It provides a clear overarching narrative that helps us explain and understand an incredibly tumultuous time.  Even better, it does so with a narrative with which we are all familiar; people thirst for freedom, chafe under immoral authoritarian rule, realize that democracy is the best option, and rise up to demand their rights in a democratic system.  Unfortunately, it is also a gross oversimplification of the facts, and is not accurate.   Egypt is not now reveling in the sweet sun of democratic freedom, they have only replaced their authoritarian military dictator with an authoritarian military junta.  In Libya, Gaddafi is dead, but things are far from stable, and a successful transition to democracy is increasingly uncertain.  The upcoming elections have once again divided the tribal leaders, moderate nationalist Islamists, and radical Islamists who were united against Gaddafi.  The causes of the uprisings varied from country to country, town to town, person to person.  The fact that a drought in 2010 caused Russia to ban grain exports, on which the region is hugely reliant, is lost in the narrative of a people yearning for freedom. 

Complexity is challenging.  Complexity reminds us how small we are, and how limited our understanding is.  Nobody wants to hear about complexity.  So we don’t.  We go to the news sources that confirm our understanding of the world, and the news sources, knowing this, cater their presentation of the news to conform to that understanding.  But the world isn’t simple.  The world is usually pretty complex.  It is especially complex during times of revolution or unrest.  If we try to oversimplify the world, we will invariably discover that our predictions were inaccurate, and find ourselves committing time and effort to fruitless, misguided acts, convinced of their “inevitable” success.