Cured Amnesia?

So Joe Rogan apparently has 13.41x the amount of viewers that CNN has on average in prime time, according to Nielsen & Spotify. How insane is that stat?

Meanwhile, according to Andreessen Horowitz’s research, the media is currently increasingly seen as both incompetent and unethical. Probably one of the explanations for the declining viewership. A notable paradigm shift away from the once highly reputable investigative journalism conducted by those that were the unquestionable ‘keepers of the truth’, firmly in place on their pedestal as the watchdog of the establishment. Maybe they simply became a part of it? Deep down, it seems that the vast majority of people feel this or act upon it, as is reflected in the legacy media's dwindling audience numbers, in combination with how much time we spend on other media services. It used to feel different. A larger shared reality.

For the sake of argument, I’m not saying Spotify, Nielsen and Andreesen Horowitz are the best or the only sources in the world, but I am saying that there aren’t many graphs & stats that indicate the contrary, that legacy media would be gaining market share or a better reputation.

This decay of market share and credibility fascinates me. When did this start? Was it always like this? When did it accelerate? What are the consequences? Can it be solved? How? Should it be solved? Is this legacy media’s own fault? What is Big Tech’s role? I absolutely do not know, but I do have a few thoughts.

Gell-Mann Amnesia

In 2007, the end of the beginning of my online poker career, there was an article in the newspaper about the ongoing Poker Boom. The journalist writing it had a noticeable lack of understanding of both poker itself and the 'biotope' that is the gambling community. The story lacked nuance and some of the information was factually incorrect. Cause and effect were occasionally reversed. I figured that this was normal because poker is a niche topic.

I turned the page to the next article. Economics maybe, or Politics, or Foreign Affairs. My natural reflex was to assume that the rest of the newspaper would be more accurate and trustworthy about these other topics, even though experts in these areas would have the same general findings about the accuracy of the information, as I did about poker. Maybe a little more, maybe a little less. This psychological phenomenon is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. You turn the page, and you forget what you just observed. In essence, if the newspaper was wrong about poker, why would it be 100% right about the other topics?

An Unintended Devil's Advocate (UDA) might say 'But, they are not always wrong'. Ah yes, and as the Oxford dictionary would call a source of information that is only sporadically completely reliable: unreliable. A branding nightmare. 'We don't want to fool the consumer; we are sometimes correct.'

And, snark aside, it's quite odd, no? In social settings, if someone would often lie, omit, or exaggerate, we'd at least keep it in the back of our minds for the next time they tell us something. In legal doctrine the same is true: 'untruthful in one part, untruthful in all'. When it comes to the media, we are, or perhaps I should say ‘used to be’, more forgiving. Against the evidence, we believe other articles will be of better quality and it's worth it to read them and treat them as a high-ranking source of information. Gell-Man amnesia. Has this amnesia worn of because we have easier access to information?

Aware vs. Informed

Strangely, to be accurately informed is increasingly scarce nowadays, but only if measured against the total amount of information. We know so much more, but it likely costs a little bit of time and energy to wade through the noise. Networking sites like Twitter, where one can create self-curated lists of, for example, subject matter experts, public figures and official press releases that are later picked up by news outlets, have been gobbling up a larger piece of market share for many years now. It's almost like we need to develop our own expertise & network about a topic to have a high degree of confidence in the quality of the information. In my opinion, we mostly follow the mainstream news to be broadly aware, and no longer to be precisely informed.

Imagine how dangerous it would be if a doctor regularly got it that wrong, missing a crucial diagnosis or treatment. That obviously faulty comparison of mine between journalism and science paves the way for me to underline that it is precisely because one is more subjective than the other that it should be treated with extreme caution when it is being viewed, or rather, sold, as fact. Science is measurable and scientists are generally held accountable to what is measured. Are there perhaps ways we can make journalism more measurable to increase quality and accountability in the hopes to restore credibility? To rebuild our shared reality through competence?

And what about the unethical part of the graph? Is there perhaps a role that Web3 can play? I’ll save my theories about that for the next post:)