The “Fourth Estate” is an appellation Americans give to the media for its role in shedding light on government and informing voters. But we tend to forget that the press is a profit-driven industry, no different than the steel, pharmaceutical or petroleum industries. As with all industries, the media has a profit incentive to deliver what customers want. And what our behavior demonstrates is that we want bad news.
Plenty of legitimate news sites show only good news, yet we don’t spend much time there. Good News Network is the 10,194th most popular site in the United States; Good Good Good is 45,996th. Instead, we spend our time on sites that bring us “bad” news, like MSN (22nd most popular) and CNN (33rd). The media reacts by showing us the part of the news that our behavior demonstrates we want to hear.
In consequence, we have developed a warped sense of the world. We believe the world is going to hell when, in fact, life is improving for almost everyone, almost everywhere. A good example was in January with an unusual round of tech layoffs. Throughout the month, the media trumpeted layoffs at all the well-known tech companies: 18,000 at Amazon, 12,000 at Alphabet (Google), 11,000 at Meta (Facebook), 10,000 at Microsoft, 7,500 at Twitter, 6,600 at Dell, 3,900 at IBM, 2,000 at Paypal. The media was happy to continue its litany of the dead until even worse news came along (the Chinese spy balloon appears to have fit the bill).
The tech layoffs weren’t lies but only part of the story. Some media didn’t tell us the good news that the number of jobs created in January far exceeded the number of layoffs. Even including the tech layoffs, there were more than 155,000 more jobs in the United States in January than in December. That’s the highest monthly job growth since last July and the second highest since February 2022. But the media isn’t going to serve up that good news because it doesn’t attract our attention. Good news is boring.
None of this would be a problem except that we misunderstand the media. We know that fast food is bad for us, but we eat it anyway because it’s convenient and tastes good. What we don’t do is mistake it for healthy food. We know the lottery is a waste of money, but we play it anyway because it’s exciting and gives us a chance to dream. What we don’t do is consider it an investment. We do many things that aren’t good for us, but importantly, we do so knowing what we’re doing.
That’s not the case with our consumption of news because we forget that the media is a profit-driven industry, not a publicly-minded institution seeking to better democracy by informing voters. So long as we keep in mind that the media is a business, not a watchdog, we’ll be OK. To the extent that we take what they serve up as balanced reporting of the world, we’ll fear things that are unlikely to harm us (sharks bite fewer Americans annually than do New Yorkers), support policies that don’t make the best use of our resources (15 times as many Americans are killed in knifings as in mass shootings), and call for solutions to problems that don’t exist (the rich pay far higher tax rates than the non-rich).
Unfortunately, what is true for politics and politicians applies also to the press. In the end, we get the media we deserve.
