In recent years, much scrutiny has been paid to the workings of social media algorithms. Driven by escalating competition for human attention, social media sites became filled with negative or controversial posts, because these attract more protracted engagement than anything else. Since reader attention attracts revenues, any profit-seeking algorithm will learn to highlight divisive content at the expense of more important topics. So a story about Hawaiian pizza might be more lucrative than one about human trafficking, since the idea of pineapple on pizzas polarises opinion more than a story about something universally agreed to be bad.
But this problem is not confined to digital media. What sells newspapers, or elevates the status of journalists, is scarcely matched to the importance of a story. (One reason there are few bankers in jail is that they commit crimes which, in journalistic terms, are boring.)
The relative prominence given to news stories matters a lot. Contrary to what we think, media bias mostly works not by changing people’s opinions, but by giving greater prominence to one topic at the expense of another. Although we think we pay attention to what’s important, the process works largely in reverse: we think things important because we pay attention to them. To quote Charles Foster Kane: ‘If the headline is big enough, it makes the news big enough.’ Certain issues dominate our thoughts more through the prominence given to them by editors (or algorithms) than from any real significance.
While our broadcast media are supposedly regulated for political bias in content, they are not regulated in the relative emphasis devoted to different topics. It’s why Donald Trump may be partly right in calling out ‘fake news’. What he may mean by fake news is not news that is untrue, but news which has been artificially manufactured or inflated: ‘synthetic news’ might be a better phrase.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in