The media makes its money on fear. We tune in to hear about the crisis; we don’t tune in to hear about the city counsel meeting. The media – from the local newsletter all the way to the multinational conglomerates – knows that.
Advertisers pay for views – they always have. When the only media was a single sheet of paper hung on the church door, some enterprising merchant somewhere paid to have his business’ name written in on the bottom. Advertisers need your attention to tell you about their businesses and products – they pay newspapers, magazines, radio, TV stations, broadcasters, billboards, sign makers, arenas, any flat surface that people will see and of course, the mighty Internet billions and billions just to put their message in front of your face.
But advertisers are no different from any other business – they have bottom lines and need to get the most for their money. Your kid’s yearbook is mostly a goodwill purchase since few people will see it. Google Adsense is a business decision because Google can get their message in front of you, your friends and people who you will never even meet and do so in the billions of people.
Televised media needs ad revenue – all their business models are built on selling ad space. It’s not their only revenue stream but it is by far the most important. This is fine when they are airing a hit show. Tens of millions will tune in to find out if John and Marsha will ever get together after John’s trip to Jupiter (hit shows aren’t known for realism); a few million might tune in to see if the House actually passed anything today.
Let’s be clear – the boring news has never been a money making proposition. Headlines scream at us – they don’t merely inform – to get attention. The media then sells that attention to advertisers. News rarely as well viewed as a soap opera because you can only land on the moon for the first time once.
What’s a poor news media to do? Offer what sells – fear. The boogeyman of the week will destroy democracy as we know it if we let them. We see this from the very beginnings of journalism – it got so bad that we have a name for it ‘yellow journalism’. And it’s alive and kicking despite all claims of ‘professionalism’. Without the Cold War the media lost its nuclear holocaust – because the Soviet Union was gone and China was our new best bud. But never fear, within a decade we had a new enemy ‘global warming’. Now we have a whole pandemic for the media to play with! FEAR SELLS.
For a while. I think the media is relearning an old lesson: you can’t lie to all of the people all of the time1. Suppression of information is done because we fear that information – or someone does. This is arguably okay when we keep secrets about military hardware and intelligence efforts from foreign nations; it’s not okay when we keep information about public health and climate policy, most especially contrary information, from the American people who will make their political decisions based on those policies. Not even when the information is wrong.
Eggs are good. Eggs are bad. Eggs are good. Eggs are bad. It’s a decades long ping pong match between American dairy2 producers and the American Heart Association. Amazingly, despite years of crappy research on both sides, we don’t have a huge number of people dying from either eating or not eating eggs. Maybe because people and doctors are smart enough to figure out what works for them – or maybe because eggs aren’t that big a deal. Probably both.
It’s rare that the screaming headlines are justified. The only way to find out is to look at both sides – all the information. Because experts are just people who read more books on a subject than you have. They have a higher probability of being right about a given statement – usually. Problem is, experts put on pants one leg at a time like the rest of us. They have bills and job pressures like everyone else. Sometimes they are just plain wrong – and the more removed a thing is from history or actuality, the more likely they are to be wrong.
We the people are in charge of the greatest nation on Earth – it’s simply ridiculous to assume we can’t sort good information from bad. We’ve been doing it for nearly 250 years often with less information to work with and most of us less well educated. Didn’t always do great – but we did always succeed. The only misinformation we need to fear is the misinformation that we cannot handle false information.
Information is nothing to fear – it’s one of the tools we use to make life better for everyone. The current vogue in media is to sell us on the idea that ‘misinformation’ can hurt us. The information the media actually fears is the information that can hurt them – information that pulls back the curtain on all the hype and hoopla to reveal a tired old man trying to convince us he’s a wizard.
Fear sells only when we buy it. Fear is great for horror movies; bad for politics; and disastrous for a free people.
1 Commonly attributed to Abraham Lincoln
2 Eggs are dairy. Eggs are not dairy. Don’t shoot the messenger.
