What You See Depends on Where You Look – And How
Thanks to my good friend, and fellow high school debate team member, David for sharing the term he uses to describe his news gathering process. I instantly adopted it myself. Now I say that “I graze on a range of sources.” Put another way, I’ve got a lotta news apps on my phone.
But sometimes I feel like Evelyn Wang in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once. Different apps show me wildly different headlines, pictures, and slants on the very same event I’m interested in. Am I hopscotching through multiple realities?
Then it hit me when I opened the Fox News app a few days ago. The splash page came up, emblazoned with the words “The World According to Fox.” That’s a long way from their inaugural slogan, “Fair & Balanced.” Or their more recent slogans “We Report, You Decide,” and “Most Watched, Most Trusted.” Or even “Standing Up For What’s Right,” which I speculate is a purposeful double-entendre.
If there is a world according to Fox, should we ask how it differs from the world presented by any other news outlet? Of course we should. Should we ask if other news outlets are presenting the world according to their own perspectives and biases? Of course they are.
News media have always had a point of view, there’s nothing new there. Mad Magazine satirized the New York Times’ slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” as “All the News That Fits, We Print.” And when Fox News hit the airwaves with “We Report, You Decide,” I mentally rewrote it as “we decide what to report, you decide what to believe.”
Alas, there’s the rub – how do we decide what to believe?
There is a universe of sources out there of varying quality and honesty, all of them assembled and presented by human beings. We enter that universe with our own viewpoints that have been shaped by all the experiences we have with family, schooling, religion, community, personal preferences, and so forth.
We apply our own judgment, as well as our perception of what others think, and accordingly accept or reject a given source. But we also tend to seek out sources that reinforce our personal preferences. We like to be told what we like to hear.
That process is complicated enough. Then around 2008, it got a lot more complicated. The internet moved off our desktops, out of our homes and offices, and into our pockets. The word “google” became first a proper noun and then an active verb. More time spent online meant less time spent with newspapers, radio, and television. Advertisers took notice.
Search engine and website designers all figured out how to sell the online behavior of their users to companies who in turn would target advertising to the people the data suggested would most likely be interested in their stuff. They figured out how to keep users online longer, by automatically giving them more of what their online behavior suggested they already wanted.
And proportionately less of anything else.
If you’ve been wondering why your Facebook doesn’t work like it used to; or why an ad for stuff you’ve only talked out loud about magically appears on your screen; or why the word “enshittification” has entered the lexicon; or why I chant “Love One Another, Fear The Algorithm” -- now you know.
But remember – Life is its own purpose.
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Thank you! I really enjoyed reading!