A Brief History of the Polarization of Media

Andrey Mir wrote this interesting article on how and why American media has become so polarized. He starts from the very beginning. Once upon a time:

“Since the revenue from copy sales was not sufficient to maintain news production, news outlets needed to attract advertising.”

The dependence on ads for revenue had a side-effect – ads only made sense only when aimed at those who had money to buy! And so, the media’s market became the “buying audience—the affluent middle class”. It also led to another trend (most of the time, anyway):

“If the audience was supposed to be affluent, mature, and capable, so, too, were journalists expected to avoid judgment when reporting.”

The audience could be trusted to draw its own conclusions. And this lack of judgment by the media had an interesting side-effect:

“All of this cooled the political activity of the public.”

 

And then the Internet came along. And suddenly the classified ads moved online (eBay, Craigslist) – the media outlets had lost a major revenue stream. It only got worse – first Google, and then Facebook, took all the other types of ads. After all:

“It became obvious to advertisers that old media had offered them a costly and inefficient method of carpet-bombing their targeted audiences. By contrast, Google and Facebook knew the preferences of billions of individuals and provided personally customized delivery of ads to each of them.”

 

“Old” media turned to digital subscriptions as the new revenue stream:

“Who was the digital audience by the early 2010s? Social media had already spread around the world, beginning with young, urban, educated, and usually progressive people.”

And so, old media began to cater the views of such folks predominantly. In the age of social media, old media learnt that “selecting, refining, and delivering socially relevant content, optimized for virality” was key. Catchy over substance.

 

This transformation had another effect:

“The viral editor agitated the digitized, urban, educated, and progressive youth to the point of political indignation.”

In the age of Twitter:

“The intensity of self-expression in the pursuit of response—tended to convert private talks into public activism and thus empowered activism as a mind-set, not just an activity.”

 

Now came the next change. As social media became ubiquitous:

“The user demographic grew older, more rural, less educated, and more conservative.”

These new users now found the media seemed to cater only to the views of urban, educated, liberal folks, not people like them:

“The power of social media lies not so much in exposing mainstream bias but in revealing that so many other people see these biases, too.”

 

And then Trump entered the election cycle. And won:

“The mainstream media understood the signal, upgraded Trump from amusement to existential danger, and started selling the Trump scare as a new commodity.”

Liberal media began to pitch subscriptions as a “noble cause”, to save democracy from this madman. The conservative media went the opposite way – see how the liberals won’t accept an electoral verdict, they said. As both sides garnered larger and larger number of followers, both types of media outlets repeated the “terrifying thing” that “fully half the electorate” subscribed to the opposing view.

 

Scaring the hell out of subscribers was good for (media) business:

“By no means were the media interested in mitigating this divide. They needed to maintain frustration and instigate polarization to keep donors scared, outraged, and engaged.”

And so:

“The mainstream media switched from news supply to news validation.”

All of which is why Mir ends on a depressing note, the transformation to a “post-journalism” world:

“The biggest loss, however, is the mutation of journalism into post-journalism... Journalism wanted its picture to fit the world. Post-journalism wants the world to fit its picture, which is a definition of propaganda.”