Society has changed dramatically in the USA in the 50 years of my life. There is more disunity, mistrust and strange beliefs, as if people were members of cults. I believe the changed market for news has changed society. I think a useful perspective is that news sources have created cults.
I define a cult as a group where members don’t trust people outside the group. When cultists hear information from people outside the group, they don't believe it.
When a group doesn't trust others, their beliefs can drift away from reality. Most of the information we receive is not from our direct observation; we get it from others. And when a cult's members don't trust information coming from people with a better place to observe, they have a looser connection to reality. A cult's members are not getting the feedback necessary to keep their information grounded. This leads to the common definition that cults are groups that believe strange things.
Reality is a great mechanism for keeping beliefs unified. If the USA was full of cults, you would expect mistrust, disunity, and many people with strange beliefs. I think that's an accurate view of America now.
I believe news sources are the cause. More than when I was young, we have a lot of news sources saying that we should not trust other news sources. I often hear statements like “that other news source lied once, so you should never trust them.”
The Internet helped foster this. It made it cheaper and easier to create a new news source. It made it cheaper and easier to fund a news source through ads or direct payments from customers. The result was a market with lots of news sources and lots of competition for customers. And one way to keep customers is to denigrate the competition.
What is the best way to denigrate the competition? First, you want to denigrate the biggest competition so that you get the biggest effect. Second, if you can denigrate a group rather than an individual, it is easier. There are many reasons for this. A group contains more competitors. Moreover, you can use bad behavior of any member of the group to smear the whole group. And, lastly, for someone to disprove your accusation about a group, they must disprove it about all members of the group, not just one. That makes it harder to catch you in a lie.
Thus, with the rise of news source competition, we should expect the rise of a label for a group of the biggest news sources which smaller news sources will use to insult it. Below is a graph of the use of the word "Internet", which represents how prevalent the internet is in society. And a graph of the use of the phrase "mainstream media", which represents a term for the biggest news sources.
I believe these plots are evidence that news sources are denigrating other news sources. They are telling their customers not to trust other news sources. They are creating groups who have mistrust for outsiders. They are creating cults.
And that leads to strange false beliefs and a disunited United States of America.
We need to redesign the market for news sources, to disincentivize the creation of cults. We need to disincentivize news sources to denigrate other news sources, especially groups of news sources. (I hope it is obvious that it could be healthy to identify specific news sources that spread false information.)
But I'm not sure how to fix the problem.
Over time, the largest news sources may shrink and, without a significant target, the denigration may lessen. But that doesn't eliminate the incentive to group news sources together and denigrate the group.
Forcing smaller organizations to merge into a large organizations might help. But that would wreck the power of the internet, where small news sources can each produce unique information for a their own small set of interested customers.
Government regulation of the content from each news source is repugnant in America and restricted by the First Amendment.
Social approbation might help. A website might identify news sources that do these harmful actions. Or a voluntary association of news sources might self-enforce and use the association to promote themselves. This would be like "Underwriters Laboratories", which home-appliance makers use to generate trust.
The last potential solution is changing the market. The cult-creating behavior is a result of incentives and, if we change the incentives, we can change the behavior. The incentives are created because the income from a news source is based on income from repeat customers, either subscribers or people who return to watch ads. This is incentive is magnified in startup news sources where decision makers are rewarded with stock options and stock valuations depend more on customer growth than revenue.
It is difficult to change incentives because reputation matters in news sources. Customers need to trust news sources. And even if we cut the connection of income from repeat customers, the news source will be still want to build a good reputation. And that provides an implicit incentive for repeat consumers, and denigrating other news sources.
The news sources of my youth --- newspaper monopolies and a TV tri-opoly --- did not compete much. Without that incentive, there was less denigration. There was probably fierce competition inside the news room, where editors who were judging reporters were isolated from financial incentives. Competing reporters probably denigrated each other to the editor, but did not denigrate other news sources. But it is hard to imagine re-imposing that competition-constrained market.
So I don't know how to solve this. Return to other blogs