Media Has Its Own Motives
1. Media companies are corporations.
2. Their interests are not always aligned with yours.
3. Act accordingly.
The one type of corporation a journalist will always defend is a media corporation. The one form of equality a journalist will always resist is the idea that everyone is now a journalist. A direct competitor is not a neutral arbiter.
Giving free content to media corporations in the form of quotes and interviews no longer makes sense. You must build your own distribution to avoid distortion. This is already happening. Elon, Zuckerberg, and all the smartest founders are building their own media arms, going direct and routing around legacy media corporations. Doing so is now a core competency. A CEO or a founder who does not build direct distribution is not doing it right. It’s like a company not building a website.
The relationship between journalist and subject is hierarchical. There’s a journalist (an employee of a media corporation) and the journalist’s “subject.” As in, “the subject under the microscope” or “a king and his subject” or “one who is subjected to.” That word “subject” is such a revealing word. It gives away so much.
Highly negative stories dominate headlines (if it bleeds, it leads), while highly positive outcomes determine returns (the power law).
Pageview-driven clickbait-headline media companies have put a lot of people out of business. They attack a lot of people. Their basic business model is to try to destroy somebody's reputation to earn $5 in clicks. That person’s reputation is much more valuable to the person than $5.
Journos have perhaps even convinced themselves that publishing a disgruntled employee’s story is a public service. But actually, doing so turns an internal personnel matter into a conflagration that reduces the company's stock price, making all employees poorer but gaining clicks for the media company who attacks. Journalists don't actually believe this is the proper way to handle personnel disputes because they sure aren't publishing their own disgruntled employee’s takes!
With a clickbait business model, the goal is to maximally distort what somebody said so the headline is almost unbelievable, yet it has a very, very narrow connection to the truth. It's a massive distortion of what actually happened, but with enough truth that, in some interpretation, these media outlets can say it's not a flat-out lie. But they go to the absolute boundary of a flat-out lie.
They need readers to think, “Oh my God, that's unbelievable.” Because what seems unbelievable gets retweeted. Media outlets have absolutely no incentive to tell the truth. They have incentive to play this game with the truth. They have incentive for getting clicks.
If you want to do one thing for your information diet on Twitter, do blocknyt.com. Block all establishment journalists. Right? It makes you less vulnerable to a crime of opportunity; you are out of sight, out of mind for them, and vice versa. You will see only peer-to-peer information, much less of their establishment’s information. What we really want is entire boardrooms, entire companies, and entire countries who have totally blocked establishment journalists and shut them out.
One thing to keep in mind is that typically—but not always—people getting positive coverage in mainstream media are those that leak information to the press. They get rewarded later on with a profile or puff piece. It's not a monetary trade, but it's a trade worth dollars to both parties at some point.
If you realize the folks who get good coverage are the ones who leak, and the folks who are attacked are the ones who typically do not leak or cooperate with the press, then you realize reality may be an inversion of what you initially perceive.
The term “story” indicates the importance of narrative in modern media. It’s so easy to repeat a narrative.
The New York Times Company is worth $6.35B. It makes more than a billion dollars a year in revenue. It directly competes with tech for advertisers and influence. Not everything it publishes is “fake,” but it’s not a neutral arbiter. Neither are other media corporations. Everyone should act accordingly.
If you aren’t running a corporation based on hereditary nepotism where the current guy running the show inherited the company from his father’s father’s father’s father, you’re more diverse and democratic than the owners of The New York Times Company. You don’t need to take lectures from them, anyone they employ, or anyone under their social influence. You have the moral authority to hire who you need to hire, within the confines of the law.
