The True Nature of Legacy Media

If it enrages, it engages.

Emotionally aligning people against something appears easier than economically aligning people for something. Many writers and TV producers these days are like boxing promoters. They get two people to fight and make money from the spectacle.

Two people argue and fight over a stupid, intentionally polarizing idea. They might agree on 90 percent of other ideas. They might live in the same community, they might know each other from work or church, but they fight over a news article about a subject neither of them would have even thought to bring up—a topic the media optimized for being polarizing, creating these conflicts. The fighters both lose, but the publication makes money. It is a negative sum at the system level.

A “scissor statement” is something that is obviously true to one party and obviously false to the other. Media and social media companies are constantly searching for and selecting scissor statements because they're enraging, and therefore engaging.

Media has an incentive to create conflict. Since legacy media corporations interrogate everybody else's incentives, it's worth asking what their incentives are. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Well, that means there's an incentive to make it bleed.

Take war reporting—is it causing wars? Is it inflaming them? Prolonging them? That happened with the Spanish American War. The yellow journalist William Randolph Hearst said, “You furnish the pictures, and I'll furnish the war.”

We know there's at least one guy who basically started a war to sell papers, and we know war reporting juices profits; conflict juices profits. If the media makes more money in situations of conflict, they have a very bad incentive structure.

In 2013, the New York Times in particular started including a lot of “woke” keywords. With the right analytics, we can see they began juicing the “sugar content” of their articles by suddenly adding enraging words. At that time, the business was going badly. The Washington Post had just gotten bought by Bezos, legacy media was declining, and Google and Facebook were growing.

Editorial judgment is more obvious in what is absent than what is present.

We hear so much about Zuckerberg, Kalanick, and Andreessen—all founders in tech—but most people cannot name the owners of media companies. It's not because owners of media companies get positive coverage; it's because they get no coverage.

We are being cautioned about Zuckerberg exerting editorial control over Facebook. We're not really focused on Sulzberger, who has indirect editorial control of the New York Times by appointing the editor-in-chief and the CEO.

Scrutiny is good. These media corporations should be scrutinized just as much as tech companies are for their editorial decisions, for their personnel, for their conflicts of interest, for their incentive structure.

The main things tech companies are attacked for, media companies also do. For example, a while back, an article by Kara Swisher in the New York Times attacked Zuckerberg for having dual-class shares. A few years before, an article by Joe Nocera celebrated the Sulzbergers for having dual-class shares. It's wildly inconsistent. Reporters will attack tech for having ad trackers while covering their own sites in ad trackers.

Individually, these arguments can work, but once you see them side by side, you're like, “Wait a second.” This is not a universal argument; it's a tribal argument. It is arguing that media tribes should have power. That's really what it is. Media tribes should have power, and tech tribes should not. Media tribes can have dual-class stock; tech tribes cannot. These arguments have nothing to do with corporate governance. They have nothing to do with free speech.

This is how hierarchy is embedded. This is an implicit hierarchy, where someone can do something to you and you cannot do it to them, but it's not acknowledged explicitly. Once you look for this, you'll see it a lot. You “harass,” but they “hold you accountable.” You are “doxxing,” but they are “investigating.” These are the same actions described differently: “documents were obtained” versus “hacked documents were put on the internet illegally.”

These are all linguistic tricks to embed a hierarchy in the conversation.

Old: Trust one source to hear all sides.

New: Hear all sides before trusting one source.

Here's a story: tech journalism is less diverse than tech. The technology industry is more diverse than the media outlets, who constantly challenge tech about their diversity. Oo Nwoye, executive director at TechCircle, tried to submit this story as an op-ed to a bunch of tech journalism outlets and couldn’t get it published.

Another story: ownership of many of these media corporations is inherited. The owners are pure nepotists who received the family businesses from their fathers’ fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Another aspect is they're mostly American, as opposed to the mostly immigrant nature of tech. Tech is very global and has a more international purview.

Narratives from media corporations conflict with their actions in many ways. Media corporations run billboards to market themselves as truth, democracy, and fairness. That is corporate propaganda, literally. It’s propaganda from legacy media corporations to try to define themselves as truth. The brains of those working there have been melted by corporate propaganda to such an extent they really believe this.

Journalists, in general, are actually trusted about as little as politicians these days because they've been pushing themselves as the high priests of determining truth rather than showing their proof and process. Stories that favor their agendas are magnified 100x, while those that conflict are diminished 100x or silenced entirely. The net distortion of reality could be 10,000x or more.

The story behind the story is usually more interesting than the story. Why this journalist? These sources? This tone? That omission?

Stephen Hawking tried to communicate nuance through the media. His point was completely lost because news is sold as entertainment. His interview was turned into hysterical headlines: "Stephen Hawking Is Terrified of AI," "Stephen Hawking Freaks Out," etc. (Here’s a little-appreciated fact: many journalists lack control over their own headlines until they strike out on their own.)

Perhaps this is the first step in enlightenment: when someone asks, “Why don’t you unconditionally trust media corporations?”, you should ask how many articles they have personally independently replicated. Scientists know better than to blindly trust every paper.