Part 1 of a post I will finish tomorrow. The first part basically outlines the problem and the second part will outline what we will see in the future.

There was an interesting article posted recently in the New York Times and forwarded to me by Christa that takes a look at what might be happening with the recent closing of several newspaper publishing houses. You can find the full article here but I’ll try and summarize it, pulling out a couple key sections. Then I’ll give you my take on it. Author Nicholas Kristof is lamenting the fact that several newspapers have closed up shop and that we may be heading in to a new territory, one in which we decide for ourselves what news we see on a daily basis. One reason to worry is illustrated in the following section from the full article

That’s because there’s pretty good evidence that we generally don’t truly want good information — but rather information that confirms our prejudices. We may believe intellectually in the clash of opinions, but in practice we like to embed ourselves in the reassuring womb of an echo chamber.

One classic study sent mailings to Republicans and Democrats, offering them various kinds of political research, ostensibly from a neutral source. Both groups were most eager to receive intelligent arguments that strongly corroborated their pre-existing views.

So it looks like people only want to hear about what they already believe in? I certainly can believe this. I’ve said this before and this is one of the main reasons why I believe tactics like those which Al Gore uses are not helpful. Who wants their views challenged on a regular basis? I think there are a lot of us that would raise our hands if this question was asked of us (myself included), but in real life, it seems to work out differently. Also worrisome is the following section from the full story

There was also modest interest in receiving manifestly silly arguments for the other party’s views (we feel good when we can caricature the other guys as dunces). But there was little interest in encountering solid arguments that might undermine one’s own position.

So we like to not only strengthen our own ideas but we also like to belittle the opposing side? Check, this sounds real enough as well.

Kristof feels that this sort of behavior is only going to increase with the decline of the traditional media as more and more people turn to getting their news online. And this is where I differ from his analysis. I think that this is a trend that’s been going on for some time and we’ve seen the polarizing effects of it in most aspects of our daily lives, most especially in politics. According to the article, 50% of Americans now live in areas that have landslide political victories as opposed to only 33% 40 years ago. Americans are physically moving to align themselves with people of similar beliefs. I don’t believe this is due to the crumbling of traditional media. There is a good book that covers a lot of these ideas called True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. I haven’t actually read it yet, but it has come highly recommended to me.

The traditional media itself is heavily biased. Both political sides have their newspapers, TV shows and radio programs. Viewers know this and accept it when watching a program. So I guess I would argue that many news programs already suffer from this problem of presenting a biased story for the viewer and so getting rid of these stories isn’t going to exacerbate the problem. By choosing which network to watch (or not watch), consumers are already choosing which stories to take interest in.

People only hear what they want to hear, this is old news. But is this going to get worse with the collapsing of traditional media? I don’t believe so. I think we’re already at the worst of it. And I see the model for news delivery in the future changing. This model isn’t going to help the situation but I don’t know that it’s going to harm it either. The real solution is fairly simple in abstract terms. People need to be more interested in the truth. As a general rule, if you are comfortable with something a news anchor is telling you, it’s probably not the whole truth! Tomorrow I’ll take a look at the way in which I think we’ll be getting our news in the future.

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