Now suppose that their "customers" only pay attention to the news in short bursts: maybe 2 minutes here and there. In that random 2 minute interval the producers want to update the viewer on the top stories.
In particular, if story A (e.g. the Boston massacre) is really big they'll worry that if the viewer doesn't hear about story A first, he'll flip channels. So if they want to maximize the probability that the viewer will hear information about story A, they saturate programming with virtually nothing else.
Suppose the situation isn't so dire, and they expect the viewer to be interested in any of A, B, or C. Now in the same way, to maximize the probability that the viewer will hear information about the stories A, B, and C, they can loop stories A, B, and C and virtually nothing else.
It goes without saying that there are plenty of important news stories that don't make the short list. And the Big Events don't always look like reportable news. Even so, if the viewers aren't expected to be systematic in collecting information, the producers are going to provide shallow and repetitious content.
The result is hard to distinguish from deliberate distortion.
I'm not a typical news "consumer", nor would I expect any who read blogs to be. But in the homes of acquaintances I've seen TVs on as background with nobody paying much attention.
1 comment:
The strength and weakness of journalists is their sense of what is socially appealing in the news. If they weren't good at it, they wouldn't have a job.
But their skill in this area also means that they are most comfortable with others who are like them, and sense the same things. The feedback loop is thus a bit bent in its data. It can wind into tighter and tighter circles until it is no longer accurate. Rather like chained probabilities of subjects that are 90% likely to be popular. The self-reinforcing opinions of a newsroom can bring the probability that a story will meet with approval below 50% pretty quickly - though there seems no obviously wrong point along the way.
In fact, something like this feedback loop of too-similar journalists is likely what has in fact created a legacy media which has different opinions than the population as a whole, yet cannot see where they might be missing the point.
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