Introduction
“Fake news” can’t be fake because it’s not real to begin with. The business model for the typical media company (regardless of ideological disposition) is this:
- Media companies make words and pictures
- Those words and pictures are used to draw a crowd
- That crowd is rented to advertisers in exchange for money
- The words and pictures are the raw materials.
- The crowd is the product.
- The advertisers are the customers
The purpose of a media company is to aggregate and segment audiences in the service of enhancing transactions for sellers. Even a cursory glance at any media company’s sources and uses analysis shows that the majority of revenue comes from advertisers. Those advertisers are paying for aggregated and data rich audiences. In the vernacular, media companies exist to acquire “eyeballs”. Whether the words and pictures are called news, entertainment, sports, public service or something else is of minimal concern to the advertiser. They are paying for a barker. Ultimately, Senior management at media companies get their bonuses based on eyeballs not accuracy.
That leaves us with a fundamental question:
How does a responsible citizen stay informed in an intellectually honest, evidence based way?
The answer begins in the Sixth Grade.
Contextualization
Fake News, What is the genesis of this ubiquitous, disingenuous, vapid term? Until about 20 years ago, fact checking described a benign activity whereby staff at a newspaper or magazine would proactively confirm that certain background information cited in a story was accurate. As long as information was disseminated through a credible, established mainstream media company the consumer assumed it was accurate. Thus, accuracy was not a “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP) for any particular outlet.
For decades, there was a limited and static competitive environment. Newspapers were generally local duopolies, mass circulation magazines were not competing for readers. Even TV was a duopoly until ABC and much later Fox started making inroads by chipping away at niche demographics.
In the 1960’s two seeds were planted that would have profound effects on the current, and future, media market structure. The first was the little known development of the tools necessary to build what would become the internet. Nobody ,even those inside DARPA and NSF, understood how this research would impact modern civilization. The second seed was the opposite in terms of visibility. Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America publicly called out the US government, for lying about Vietnam. The public reaction was immediate, tumultuous and measurable. Support for the war began its inexorable trip to the vanishing point. This event more than any other laid a foundation of cynicism among the population that had not existed before. It marked the first time in US history that a vast swath of the population realized that lying was the default, not the exception.
Fast forward to the nineties. At this point success was still primarily measured by audience size, as it always had been. As is the case with an oligopoly, the key performance metrics were largely a function of exogenous factors like market size, geography, distribution constraints and regulatory collusion. As long as the product met some minimum perceived quality level there was little incentive to enhance or even differentiate the product. At this exact moment the seeds from the 60’s burst to life. On the supply side, the technology tools had developed to the point where previous characteristics and constraints would become artifacts. On the demand side the cynicism that had been fermenting for decades infused the public with a visceral distrust of our most trusted institutions.
One last fast forward to the present day’s media landscape. Digital distribution has largely replaced physical distribution leaving a theoretically frictionless channel in place of legacy constraints such as the printing press, ink, trucks, trees etc. Basic economics tells us that without barriers to entry supply will naturally increase resulting in a price decrease in the face of static and/or growing demand.
An omnipresent human factor also impacted the supply portion of the industry’s economic model. As the author Tom Wolfe said: “I think every living moment of a human being’s life, unless the person is starving or in immediate danger of death in some other way, is controlled by a concern for status.”
On April 9, 1976 the film All the President’s Men was released. Based on the stylized story of two Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein using the Watergate break in to expose the epic chicanery of the Nixon administration. The reporters were played by Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman. For you youngsters out there it would be hard to overstate the cachet associated with these two actors. Overnight, the social “status” of journalists went from: ‘picked last for dodgeball’ to ‘prom king’.
The confluence of all these factors lead us to the current situation where the supply of “news” content is virtually infinite and essentially free to the end user. Returning to the demand side of the equation; as the price approached zero, the quantity of content demanded naturally increased dramatically. While journalists ,like everyone else on the planet, believe they are underpaid. Ultimately, one must adapt to the remorseless strictures of supply and demand.
Marketing 101 tells us that the most effective way to combat commoditized pricing is via differentiation. Since it’s much easier to rebrand than to truly innovate, the media industry simply rebranded editorials as ‘fact checking’ and voila an exotic new product that can be differentiated with gimmicks like “Pinoccios” and “Check Marks”.
Sixth Grade Rules
For many somewhere around grade 6 students are assigned their first major term paper. There was a list of strictly enforced rules relating to what constituted an acceptable submission the list encompassed the following general areas:
- Sources/Citations
- Paraphrasing
- Ellipses
- Clearly labeling: Data, Facts,Opinions,Conclusions, Recommendations and Malarkey
- Transparency
If the output passed muster on these and other criteria the teacher would assign the student a grade for the paper as a whole.
We have the twin advantages of current technology and free will. This means that for any story we see we have the tools to assess the inputs objectively and the freedom to assign our own grades to the output.
A detailed description of how this would work as a practical matter can be seen here.