Understanding media motivations

What do they want?

One of the things that Squirt and I talk about are motivations and understanding what is driving a person or an organization or even a nation. I think it’s an important piece of information that gets to the root of understanding actions. Taxes suck but they exist for a reason. A school switching their book sale vendor to avoid a kerfuffle didn’t necessarily agree with the whining parents. A troll on the internet or anywhere else is just desperate for attention and leads a sad little life no matter how much money or power they’ve accumulated.

This has been coming up a lot in my reading recently so I wanted to explore it. I’m currently reading a book by Ezra Klein called Abundance which prompted a conversation with Spouse about a podcast Klein did with Ta-Nehisi Coats that discussed Klein’s commentary on the Charlie Kirk murder. And, at the heart of it, I think they both showed up with different motivations and see their roles as very different from each other on the Left. It was a fascinating conversation between two very intelligent dudes that just didn’t seem to be on the same page.

And then yesterday I was reminded that Neal Stephenson has a substack so I stumbled upon a piece of his about geoengineering and the absurdity of trying to talk about it with the media. Stephenson is frequently sought out for these discussions because of his very in depth fiction treatment of exactly that with Termination Shock - which was a solid book and taught me a lot through a narrative lens. And, here again, was a conversation about motivations.

What is being said is always colored by what is motivating the speaker. Why are they speaking? What are they hoping to accomplish?

My favorite paid news organization is The Dispatch. If you had told me ten years ago that I would pay for my news I would have called you insane. And yet now I couldn’t imagine going without my daily newspaper email from them.

Fox News and its ilk are not interested in the news. They are interested in entertainment and keeping attention and stoking rage. Fantastic money in it, which is why they’ve been preeminent for decades, but it’s so devoid of anything but moneymaking it’s like walking past a rotting garbage can when I’m exposed to it.

The “mainstream media” of CNN/AP/Reuters are closer to a news organization rather than entertainment but they desperately need your attention and advertising dollars just like Fox. So they naturally become a lightweight, and somewhat more honest, version of something like Fox while plying clickbait constantly. I can hold my nose and watch it but invariably I’ll complain about their framing.

Here’s an interesting example that came out this week:

The timing of this article is important as it was within hours of the fire that this was posted. It was posted before there was any investigation into what has happened. But this is news, right? There’s nothing inherently wrong with reporting the judge’s house burned down. There’s nothing even wrong with making sure that she had ruled against Trump the month earlier. And yet…was the primary motivation to inform or to monetize? The Independent article is covered in advertisements and those are only valuable if someone comes to the link.

We all understand this, it’s why we have terms like “clickbait” and there are truisms like “if it bleeds, it leads” - because it’s all about the traffic. But it’s poisonous in ways that I think are subtle. Because the article above, while entirely true, is directing your mind to a particular place. It’s directing your mind to a place of “is this political violence?” It’s got you asking “is this a Trump follower?”

And there we have another motivation: Trump. Trump is the single best thing to have ever happened to the attention-driven media in America. Ever. And it’s not even close. Just adding that one word to your title probably has a quantitative impact to the amount of money the article makes. Attention is dollar signs and while the mainstream media hates him they adore the money he makes them.

It’s now Thursday as I write this. It’s been 72 hours since that article and, according to The Dispatch today (paywalled), there is no evidence of arson or foul play or that this has anything to do with Trump. The thing is, the only reason The Dispatch is mentioning this at all is because of something they’ve started called “Behind the Scenes” where they talk about their methodologies for the decisions that they make. Someone asked them “hey, why didn’t you report on this?” and they decided to publicly answer. Here’s a portion of that answer from behind the paywall:

If law enforcement later attributed the fire to arson and identified a suspect with a political motive, we likely would have included the news as part of a broader look at rising political violence. But by Monday afternoon, Mark Keel, the chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, had said that investigators had found “no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set” and “no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.”

Sometimes the nature of a given story will require that we do cover it before we have all the relevant details, and the limited information that we have in the moment can paint an incomplete or inaccurate picture. In those cases, we always try to caveat our coverage and provide as much context as possible. At the end of the day, though, these are judgment calls and we won’t always get them right. But in this case, waiting for all the facts to come out before including the news in TMD paid off.

This is, in my opinion, the type of thing that sets a paid-for news organization apart. The motivation is different. They still need to get paid, of course, but they don’t get paid by clickbait. They get paid because they are respected and have earned trust from individuals like me.

And here, again, is a question of motivations. Not only do I want to be informed but I want to lower my own cognitive load by not needing to translate attention-driven news into something more akin to respect-driven news. My motivation is to be able to trust the news sources and that is valuable enough to me that I spend money to read it.

money burning

Squirt Says…

I would say the biggest motivation for anything and everything is money. They will tweak the slightest detail just to make more money. In some occasions they will make something you pay for smaller and call it inflation even though it’s just making them more money not even because of inflation.

Dad Responds…

Why yes I have discussed with my child the concept, advantages, and flaws of Capitalism once or twice…