Rolf Dobelli wrote an essay in 2010 titled “Avoid News” with some 15 reasons why news is bad.
The number one reason is the most important. I quote a part of it:
News misleads us systematically
News reports do not represent the real world.
Our brains are wired to pay attention to visible, large, scandalous, sensational, shocking, people- related, story-formatted, fast changing, loud, graphic onslaughts of stimuli. Our brains have limited attention to spend on more subtle pieces of intelligence that are small, abstract, ambivalent, complex, slow to develop and quiet, much less silent. News organizations systematically exploit this bias.
News media outlets, by and large, focus on the highly visible. They display whatever information they can convey with gripping stories and lurid pictures, and they systematically ignore the subtle and insidious, even if that material is more important. News grabs our attention; that’s how its business model works. Even if the advertising model didn’t exist, we would still soak up news pieces because they are easy to digest and superficially quite tasty.
The highly visible misleads us.
By any estimate, at least 100 children die of tuberculosis in India every day. That is only tuberculosis.
These 100 children are victims of violence. Violence of kinds we don’t even call violence.
On October 10, at least 100 children died due to violence.
On October 11 too.
On October 12 too.
Every day in the past many years and in the coming many years these deaths will continue.
Our brains are wired to get emotionally provoked when we see violence plays out in very physical ways — like someone hitting someone. The more gore it is, the more violent it is, for our brains.
Most news outlets and algorithms are designed to amplify what our brains are wired to see — immediate emotion-evoking events.
But a lot of the violence in our society is not so visible to the untrained eye — caste, gender, capitalism, elitism.
This violence take the shape of physical assault, sexual assault, verbal assault, forced homelessness, forced landlessness, forced hunger, forced drinking of contaminated water, forced eating of unsafe food and nutrition-less food, forced breathing of polluted air, exclusion from schemes, exclusion from employment, underpayment, discrimination, exclusion from urban design, exclusion from public transport, hostility from healthcare system, hostility from education system, hostility from police, hostility from judiciary, hostility from bureaucracy, forced exposure to unsafe working conditions, forced exposure to unsafe work, forced work, forced lack of rest, forced choices, forced relationships, forced co-existence with unsafe people, parental neglect, social neglect, intergenerational trauma, exclusion from friendships, exclusion from opportunities, exclusion from desires, exclusion from dreams, and so on….
These rarely become news.
Even when these do, these rarely get noticed.
Even when these get noticed, these rarely get inside public consciousness.
Even if these are inside public consciousness, these rarely get addressed collectively or even individually.
In Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky apparently describe how media “carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion”. They speak about factors like profit orientation that indirectly (or directly) make mass media automatically create an environment where certain ideas become truths.
I am making a more fundamental allegation against our society. I’m saying that content-creation of any form (including the so-called “independent media”, individual content creators, podcasters, bloggers, whoever they are) is influenced by similar incentives to cater to the biases of our social brain.
Even when advertisers and money are not in play, content creation is influenced by engagement. Content that receives less likes and shares are systematically discouraged. At least unconsciously, there’s encouragement to create content that gets more reach.
And as a rule, content that showcases high levels of drama will get more engagement.
This seems fundamental to how human brain works.
As long as some people are willing to game that, they will get more engagement. And engagement is limited. There are only so many viral videos that can be there in a day. So, whoever doesn’t play the game will be left behind. They’ll lose engagement, they’ll lose audience, and eventually they’ll lose motivation.
This means, that there is an underlying tendency in our society that corrupts all content creators.
How to fight this corruption?
Content creators need to pledge to themselves that they won’t fall prey to chasing the hype. They need to have a vision and they need to work towards that.
Content consumers need to pledge to themselves to introspect on their consumption habits. They need to actively question their biases. They should pause in the middle of scrolling sessions and see what they’re consuming. They need to be intentional about what they consume. They should compensate for their biases by actively seeking out less engaging, more important content.
All of us need to promise each other that we won’t encourage gaming our psychology. We should promise ourselves that we won’t fall into the trap of letting everyone else change before we change ourselves.
It is not going to be easy. But it is necessary if we want a fairer world.
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