The forces that drove this election's media failure are likely to get worse

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: November 11, 2016 at 8:00:22 AM EST
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] The forces that drove this election's media failure are likely to get worse
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> The forces that drove this election’s media failure are likely to get worse
> Segregated social universes, an industry moving from red states to the coasts, and mass media’s revenue decline: The 
> disconnect between two realities shows no sign of abating.
> By JOSHUA BENTON
> Nov 9 2016
> <http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/11/the-forces-that-drove-this-elections-media-failure-are-likely-to-get-worse/>
>
> One way to think of the job journalism does is telling a community about itself, and on those terms the American 
> media failed spectacularly this election cycle. That Donald Trump’s victory came as such a surprise — a systemic 
> shock, really — to both journalists and so many who read or watch them is a marker of just how bad a job we did. 
> American political discourse in 2016 seemed to be running on two self-contained, never-overlapping sets of 
> information. It took the Venn diagram finally meeting at the ballot box to make it clear how separate the two 
> solitudes really are.
>
> The troubling morning-after realization is that the structures of today’s media ecosystem encourage that separation, 
> and do so a little bit more each day. The decline of the mass media’s business models; the continued rise of 
> personalized social feeds and the content that spreads easily within them; the hollowing-out of reporting jobs away 
> from the coasts: These are, like the expansion of the universe, pushing us farther apart in all directions. 
>
> There’s plenty of blame to go around, but the list of actors has to start with Facebook. And for all its wonders — 
> reaching nearly 2 billion people each month, driving more traffic and attention to news than anything else on earth — 
> it’s also become a single point of failure for civic information. Our democracy has a lot of problems, but there are 
> few things that could impact it for the better more than Facebook starting to care — really care — about the 
> truthfulness of the news that its users share and take in. 
>
> As BuzzFeed’s Craig Silverman has documented repeatedly — and as anyone who has spent much time on their relatives’ 
> profile pages can probably attest — Facebook has become a sewer of misinformation. Some of it is driven by ideology, 
> but a lot is driven purely by the economic incentive structure Facebook has created: The fake stuff, when it connects 
> with a Facebook user’s preconceived notions or sense of identity, spreads like wildfire. (And it’s a lot cheaper to 
> make than real news.)
>
> One example: I’m from a small town in south Louisiana. The day before the election, I looked at the Facebook page of 
> the current mayor. Among the items he posted there in the final 48 hours of the campaign: Hillary Clinton Calling for 
> Civil War If Trump Is Elected. Pope Francis Shocks World, Endorses Donald Trump for President. Barack Obama Admits He 
> Was Born in Kenya. FBI Agent Who Was Suspected Of Leaking Hillary’s Corruption Is Dead.
>
> These are not legit anti-Hillary stories. (There were plenty of those, to be sure, both on his page and in this 
> election cycle.) These are imaginary, made up, frauds. And yet Facebook has built a platform for the active dispersal 
> of these lies — in part because these lies travel really, really well. (The pope’s “endorsement” has over 868,000 
> Facebook shares. The Snopes piece noting the story is fake has but 33,000.)
>
> In a column just before the election, The New York Times’ Jim Rutenberg argued that “the cure for fake journalism is 
> an overwhelming dose of good journalism.” I wish that were true, but I think the evidence shows that it’s not. There 
> was an enormous amount of good journalism done on Trump and this entire election cycle, from both old-line giants 
> like the Times and The Washington Post and digital natives like BuzzFeed and The Daily Beast. (There were plenty of 
> good broadcast reporters on the beat as well, though what appeared on air left a lot to be desired.) For anyone who 
> wanted to take it in, the pickings were rich.
>
> The problem is that not enough people sought it out. And of those who did, not enough of them trusted it to inform 
> their political decisions. And even for many of those, the good journalism was crowded out by the fragmentary 
> glimpses of nonsense.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>



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