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Comment by psychphysic | Hacker News Reader

What I don't know is, I see mainstream media become increasingly curated and clearly agenda driven.

Is this a function of reality or me getting better at spotting it?

I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source. Early 21centuey VICE was legitimately good.

Today there is next to nothing given anything other than a heavily biased view.

I think the internet has made things worse, there's a new kind of bias. What do you set the headline to for the breaking alert? Because that's what people will see. Follow that up with a more subtle article and boom you've got a basically iron glad propaganda machine.

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I think it is a function of game theory akin to Prisoner's Dilemma.

If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.

I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.

There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.

This makes a lot of sense. Here is a classic paper that tests a model like this on US data:

https://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/biasmeas.pdf

  We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms’ actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Since it is a like minded result, I obviously have a significant preference for it. (Unlike the sibling to your comment, which was obviously produced by someone from the other team)

I think that would make sense if these were new smaller news media but I see it mostly the bigger players.

Even the BBC which is state funded. Okay, that might be a bad example as they are a state broadcaster and so propaganda is really their remit.

> niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication.

We could just call them specialized audiences with particular interests, instead of equating the neoliberal centrism of a bunch of collaborating oligarchic publications to lack of bias.

edit: e.g. if all of the publications collaborate to not discuss issues concerning Mexican-Americans, a defector who peels off a large audience by being the only publication that attends to Mexican-American issues would not be an example of "bias" except under extremely normative definitions of "bias."

I’m not sure. Herman and Chomsky wrote Manufacturing Consent - a book describing the manipulation of public sentiment in the service of corporate and political goals - in 1988, and they were talking about wars from the 60s. The term itself comes from the 1920s. And 1984 was published in 1949.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

> I felt as though in the 90s CNN legitimately was a good news source.

Nope. They were the original cheerleaders of modern militarism, from the first Persian Gulf War, which they turned into an infotainment spectacle devoid of any serious critical analysis, to their promotion of NAFTA and neo-liberalism. This idea that things were better in the past is a form of rosy retrospection and nostalgia. Things weren’t better, they just hid the bullshit under thicker layers of opaqueness. And I say this as a progressive liberal who has always hated CNN and despises Fox.

It goes back into at least the 80s as well. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

What's wrong with supporting the first Gulf War, NAFTA or neoliberalism? These are all popular and reasonable positions.

This has always been the case, it's just that the dial has been turned from industrial dystopia to nightmare.

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