The Era Of Like And Subscribe

Conventional media is no match for the numbers and impact of social media

Pop star Nicki Minaj told her 22.6 million Twitter followers and the 157 million on Instagram that a friend of a cousin in Trinidad got the COVID shot and then his testes swelled to enormous proportions leaving him impotent. The major news networks and public health officials quickly mounted a fact-based retort, but to no avail, because they haven’t got her media reach. That is 179.6 million fans who “liked” and shared with countless others, versus about 9 million viewers in aggregate (mostly 50+ years of age) for the networks.

We are now well past the era of mass media where we all sang from the same hymnal. Time was—and in the course of human history, it was a relatively short time from the introduction of radio to the rise of the internet, sixty years or so—we had agreed upon facts.

Three centuries ago, Founding Father John Adams said, “Facts are stubborn things.” He had not met Roger Ailes.

Here’s the conservative columnist, Bret Stephens: “I blame Roger Ailes, the brains behind Fox News. He’s the guy most responsible for jettisoning old news values of objectivity, sobriety and balance for new news values of perfervid partisanship. Other networks then mirror-imaged the same destructive formula. I also blame Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, for reducing the art of thinking into the act of grunting. And I blame the algorithm people at Facebook, for accelerating our national descent into a collection of self-contained, self-reinforcing, mutually loathing echo chambers.”

But since you have to play the hand you’re dealt, in the face of the fragmentation of media, we all have to be our own editors. If you care enough to be informed, make sure that you visit more than one news source, and be certain that one of them isn’t playing to your personal bias. You’re liberal and read Slate and The Washington Post? Balance them with The Wall Street Journal. You’re conservative and swear by Fox News and Breitbart? Get out of your silo and check out the Post and Slate. By being aware of your personal biases, and by seeking information from multiple sources, you can be objectively informed enough to have your own opinions.

Beating your own “confirmation bias” is work. A lot more work than it was thirty years ago. Mass media is no longer very massive, and its fragmentation is increasingly driving us into those silos and driving us away from everyone who is not in our tribe.

And we continue to distract ourselves from the reality of our tribal divisions by keeping our heads buried in Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and video games.

At first, I thought it was just my age, now I see that it’s the age. The Facebook whistleblower didn’t really tell us anything we didn’t know, our news feeds don’t seek to inform, they seek to keep us engaged, for the longer we stay on-site, the more ads they can show us, and that’s just the beginning since they plant trackers on our devices, and sell our activities to data brokers who in turn sell us to advertisers.

This represents a sea change in our relationship with advertisers: Media today doesn’t deliver viewers to advertisers as in the past; it delivers advertisers to viewers; more efficient for them, more intrusive for us. Facebook says it’ll reform, but they’ve said that for years now, and it just doesn’t ring true anymore.

We are the big losers here. For a while we thought that at least our local news was intact, but from the Washington Post Magazine we learn that, “About 2,200 local print newspapers have closed since 2005, and the number of newspaper journalists fell by more than half between 2008 and 2020.” Hedge funds have been buying local newspapers and TV stations only to cut costs by firing reporters, editors, and everything that isn’t nailed down, replacing meaningful content with cheap, generic syndicated fare.

As the giant tree-slaughter that was the newspaper industry gave way to electronic versions of our newspapers, and because the barriers to entry in the news business had been lowered (no need for giant printing presses, huge rolls of newsprint, or fleets of trucks to deliver papers), many hoped the new landscape would provide more in-depth coverage of local news, but that didn’t happen. In fact, most smaller communities are completely unserved by a local news purveyor. The South and the West are the hardest hit. Sixty-percent of Texas counties now have zero or one local outlet.

Nicki Minaj is not the new Walter Cronkite. A world where a pop star’s erroneous musings reach multitudes and pass for fact is one where we all need to be better armed against fictions dressed as facts.

As they say, like and subscribe!

©2022 Jon Sinton