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Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
The negative and polarizing nature of modern media is economically based. Over the past generation, media switched from an advertiser-based economic model to a subscriber one. This has a natural if unstated influence on the character of coverage. Advertisers want their ads to be placed in outlets that are on balance positive in some way. At minimum, they don't want people to be so angry and deflated that they stop wanting to spend money on products. That's why newspapers used to be more positive in tone than current media, and also aimed to speak to a unifying national audience rather than warring tribes. Subscriber media is different because you need to keep people motivated enough to keep giving, which often means keeping them angry, alarmed, and polarized towards another group. Tribalism in that sense just becomes a natural form of market segmentation. I wrote about this based on the work of McCluhan scholar Andrey Mir: https://theintercept.com/2021/02/13/news-rage-economy-postjournalism-andrey-mir/
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Mike | Abundance 🌟
@abundance
This is actually one of the reasons that brought me to crypto. Looking for an alternative economic structure that could fund journalism (and sense-making in general) while aligning the interest of sense-makers with the common good (dedicated a whole chapter in my book to this). I think the polarization is a natural product of greater competition in the Attention Economy, and you can't really go back to a time where there was less competition (unless you arbitrarily restrict people from monetizing content so "legitimate journalists" can get paid more). I also don't think govt regulations can address the problem because part of what we're dealing w is a crisis of trust in institutions, so why would people trust govt to be impartial instead of just promoting journalists that serve power? I am a strong proponent of developing decentralized mechanisms where funding sense-making is aligned with the common good and think this can be done sustainability (I quit my job this Jan to build something like that..)
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