Why Everyone Hates the Mainstream Media
14th June 2020
News is about providing readers with information. The opinion section is about providing readers with arguments. Readers use the information to become more informed, and better able to understand, respond to, disagree with, or otherwise digest the arguments. This process makes them better citizens. Journalism thus plays a very important civic function.
Unfortunately, only the last line in that paragraph is true.
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In a recent blog post, the economist Tyler Cowen got it exactly right when he wrote “the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status… The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close.”
These implicit status rankings are baked into almost every aspect of how journalism, from how a lede is written to who to quote and in what order, photo selection, headlines, font size, you name it. Print media is particularly prone to this, since the geography of a newspaper is essentially one big status playground. (I’ll never forget the time I got an angry call from a reader for burying a story above the fold on the front page. The sin was that the story he thought deserved more play was lined down the rightmost column of the page, while another (lesser) story ran across the top three columns.)