The biggest problem in media is the audience

www.slowboring.com

The biggest problem in media is the audience

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 14 minutes

As part of a thread about trends he thinks deserve more attention, George Mack posted a chart from the Financial Times showing the alarming increase in drug overdoses in the United States, a topic he alleged has been ignored by the media.

The Financial Times, of course, is part of the media. Often when people claim the media isn’t covering something, it turns out they’ve learned about that particular issue from the media.

Still, I do think it’s true that the rise in drug overdoses does not receive the volume of coverage that it deserves. I’m writing this article in a hotel lobby where a nearby television is playing CNN’s non-stop coverage of the school shooting in Tennessee. That doesn’t surprise me; school shootings are always huge national news stories, even though they account for a relatively small share of America’s overall homicide rate. And homicides in general attract a lot more coverage than drug overdoses, even though many more people now die of drug overdoses than homicides.

So why do school shootings get more coverage than drug overdoses? The gap is driven by a number of specific differences between the two topics, but they all essentially amount to audience interest. CNN is in wall-to-wall coverage mode for the Nashville shooting because their past experience covering school shootings has shown that there is a lot of audience interest in this subject.

“The problem with journalism is the audience” is, in my view, one of the most under-discussed features of modern society, largely because going negative on the audience is not something the audience enjoys.

But this particular opioids take set me off because I think that if you follow journalism closely and talk to journalists, it’s really clear that many of them have been trying quite hard to drum up more public interest in this issue. CNN at one point had an America’s Opioid Epidemic landing page on their website. It looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2018, even though the epidemic has gotten dramatically worse since then. I think it’s pretty obvious that if those stories had been doing numbers, CNN would have kept the feature going — they put in the work, they ran the experiment, and it just wasn’t delivering.

Which, again, doesn’t mean that they don’t cover the story. Here are some March 2023 headlines:

    Chronic pain patients struggle to get opioid prescriptions filled, even as CDC eases guidelines

    US sues Rite Aid for missing opioid red flags

    What makes fentanyl so dangerous and how can people prevent overdoses? Our expert explains

    Young children are increasingly victims of opioid epidemic, study finds

    Naloxone nasal spray may soon be in your pharmacy. Our medical analyst explains what it is and who can use it

    DEA issues alert about widespread threat of xylazine

    Tranq has become a bigger part of Philly's street fentanyl supply. The wounds left behind are killing people

Journalists are aware that opioid addiction and drug abuse are a big deal — working professionals in this field keep seeing the numbers and the charts and thinking “this is a huge story, I should find a way to get a piece of it.” The problem is that even though people keep taking runs at the opioid story, it’s challenging to find a huge audience for it. And in defense of the audience, I think a big part of the reason for that is it’s hard to find any plausible remedies for the problem that would attract interest. It’s not that there isn’t a proposed solution that everyone agrees with (though that would be nice) — there isn’t even a proposed solution that a large and vocal minority of the population is enthusiastic about. You can always get a good YIMBY/NIMBY fight going because whether you agree with us are not, it’s factually true that there is a fired-up YIMBY faction that strongly believes we can solve the housing crisis in America.

By the same token, some people are really passionate about banning assault rifles and others are really passionate about saying they’re wrong.

With opioids, the only reliable way to gain traction is to rhetorically link the problem to something else entirely — J.D. Vance got attention for saying the opioid epidemic has something to do with investor-owned single-family homes. If you can make the opioid epidemic about NAFTA, or immigration, or anything that people are emotionally invested in fighting about, you have a winner on your hands. But the issue mostly doesn’t link up well with our ongoing domestic disputes, so it’s hard to get people invested.

By the same token, I was talking yesterday to a right-of-center person who’s very interested in foreign policy and who’s bothered by the lack of coverage of what he sees as AMLO’s attacks on independent electoral institutions in Mexico.

He pitched this as an ideological bias story, where journalists who would find similar actions from Bibi Netanyahu or Jair Bolsonaro newsworthy and upsetting are willing to give AMLO a pass because he’s on the left. I think that’s only half-right. It’s absolutely true that if AMLO were a Trump-aligned rightist like Bolsonaro, he’d get a different kind of coverage. But I think AMLO would also be getting more attention if he were a Trump-critical leftist. The problem with getting attention for any kind of Mexico-related news is that as far as audiences are concerned, there’s only one story in global politics right now — the Trump-aligned populist right versus its enemies.

The issue with covering Mexican politics is that AMLO has stubbornly insisted on pursuing a style of politics that has an autonomous, Mexico-specific logic.

He’s not a Trumpian right-populist, but he’s not an anti-Trump leftist either. He actually seemed to have a decent relationship with Trump and arguably has a more tense one with Joe Biden. You can’t easily slot him into the Trump/Bolsonaro mode or paint him as an ideological comrade of Biden and Justin Trudeau. To understand his politics or the politics of his opponents in Mexico, you’d need to actually know and care a lot about Mexico. And while there certainly are journalists working in the United States of America who are capable of giving you an informed take on Mexican affairs (not me), there is not much of an audience for this.

A very smart woman I worked with at Vox once explained to us editors something fundamental about social media virality: sharing an article isn’t about what the article says, it’s about what sharing the article says about you. Sharing an article about Netanyahu, whether it’s positive or negative, would say a lot about you, if you’re an American discourse participant. An article about Israeli politics connects to larger American identities and American debates, and the Mexican political situation just doesn’t. So even though on a practical level, the situation in Mexico is much more important to Americans and Mexico is a dramatically larger country than Israel, the coverage doesn’t sell.

I like to follow Wesley Yang’s cranky anti-leftist Twitter account because he frequently shares stories I otherwise wouldn’t see. But the other day he offered a pointer to a story I was already quite familiar with, Kelsey Piper’s excellent June 2022 article “Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world.” Yang characterized it as an antidote to the climate doomerism that he says is being spread by “the Vertically Integrated Messaging Apparatus,” which is his slang term for media he doesn’t like.

But of course Kelsey writes for Vox, which is surely part of the VIMA if anything is. And she’s been spreading the anti-doom gospel over there for years. Here’s a great story she did back in 2019, and just last week Vox ran an anti-doomer story by Hannah Ritchie. I think you could say this is actually an institutional commitment of Vox’s. Ex-Voxer Ezra Klein is now at the New York Times, the very tentpole on which the whole VIMA is constructed, and he wrote a piece last year called “Your Kids Are Not Doomed.” Last fall, the Times ran a big climate feature titled “Beyond Catastrophe.”

Kyle Paoletta recently published a big Harper’s feature on climate complaining about the volume of anti-doomer content that’s recently come out. His argument, roughly, is that the case for doom was always overstated, but now climate optimists are being excessively rosy in their forecasts. I’m not sure I agree with his overall assessment, but one thing he gets right is that if anything, the concerted institutional push is currently against doomerism and in favor of positivity and solutions.

The reason the doomer stuff is so widespread anyway is that, as a recent study shows, “Negativity drives online news consumption.” Because people are paranoid, they tend to read negativity bias as partisan or ideological bias, but studies that look at it rigorously find that’s not the case — the bias really is toward negativity.

Eco-doomer messages are so prominent because they perform well, even when people in charge of messaging try to put forward something that’s more feel-good and more accurate. And the non-doomer climate message that does best is to flip all the way in the other direction and say the whole climate movement is a scam and a fraud perpetrated by power-mad leftists. Trying to tell people that fossil fuels are extremely useful but also have unpriced climate externalities that lead to overconsumption, that this is bad, and that we should try to take cost-effective steps to reduce emissions does terribly. Not because nobody thinks it and not because nobody says it, but because it’s just not that snappy. The real dynamic is close to the opposite of vertical integration. We have an extremely chaotic, extremely competitive information space in which demagogic takes tend to outperform sane ones.

The fix for all of this, of course, is to subscribe to Slow Boring, the only news outlet that offers a cure for what ails the media.

Just kidding. But I will say that as a writer, it’s a great pleasure to be able to write for a relatively small audience of paying customers. Given the very low price of web display ads, a piece needs to obtain a simply staggering quantity of clicks to be deemed successful out there on the free web. And that puts you at the mercy of these perverse distribution dynamics. People sometimes get in a bad mood and accuse journalists of only caring about traffic or writing for clicks, but honestly, nobody in the business wants to work that way. It’s just that, by definition, stuff that generates a lot of eyeballs ends up proliferating.

I don’t know that there’s necessarily any solution to this.

But I do think you’ll be a happier, better-informed, and less-aggrieved person if you accept that most of the flaws of journalism are flaws of the business model that have a lot to do with the audience. There is a specific and important exception, namely that the labor pool of journalists is younger, better-educated, and more urban than the general population. Given the current partisan alignment, that means it’s also to the left of the general population. Even so, you’ll be much more enlightened if you see this as an economic phenomenon rather than giving in to the standard conspiratorial reading. There is plenty of conservative media content and it’s very popular and financially successful, and conservative journalists are in-demand and well-remunerated. But if you’re just out there hiring some generic content producers to do recaps of popular television shows, you’re going to end up with a very progressive bunch.

To get something different, you’d have to overbid the market to deliberately seek out a more ideologically balanced pool of talent. And if you as a reader want something different than whatever is most viral, you also need to seek that out and pay what it costs.