The Media: Friend or Foe?

 Most of us feel much more comfortable chatting & discussing things with those who entirely or largely agree with us. It’s much more relaxing, very easy and makes us feel good about ourselves.

Who enjoys conflict? Very few.

We recognise this on social media because, either fed by their algorithms, or by making it easy to block anyone who doesn’t agree with us, it is obvious that we get bound into bubbles of confirmation bias. These partly imposed, partly self-created opinion bubbles mean that many people, even those who spend a lot of time on numerous social media platforms, often end up never hearing any alternative view.

This can easily lead to thinking either that alternative views don’t exist or that an alternative view does exist but is so obviously wrong, it can be legitimately ignored.

There are two psychological consequences from this immersion in confirmation bias which are desperately bad for our society:

One seems to be the number of people who feel threatened by alternative views, i.e. they develop a fragility that sees alternative views as a form of violence against them.
Here, the psychological safety response is either to close their minds and refuse to engage with any possibility that those with an alternative view may have perfectly valid points worth considering OR to adopt a war footing and launch vituperative personal attacks on anyone disagreeing with them.
Hence the sort of polarisation of views witnessed in the USA where social media was born and has most effect.

The other consequence, which is becoming more common all the time, is the development of an authoritarian response akin to a fundamentalist religion, wherein anyone who doesn’t affirm the ‘righteous’ view, (embodied by what I think of course), should be treated as a heretic or evil-doer to the extent that it’s not just acceptable, but morally correct to do all that’s possible to silence them, coerce them into obedience, or even seek to ruin their lives by for example, contacting their employer and demanding they be sacked.

While these traits are obvious within social media, they are perhaps less so in the traditional media; possibly because this behaviour has become the norm over many decades and thus, not being new, it goes unnoticed.
However, many newspapers and TV news stations have seen their regular audience fall in recent years which is causing concern to their owners.

Whether newspapers or TV news, as your regular audience declines, you have two choices. Make changes that widen your appeal by expanding the range of views on offer, or become more insular by narrowing the range of views down and simply reflecting what you believe your core audience wants to hear, and hoping that this will stabilise your audience numbers at an acceptable level.

In newspapers, the tabloids, both Left & Right, have been doing the insular & myopic ‘just feed them what they want’ model for a long time, but it has become the case that the broadsheets, or what some choose to call the ‘quality’ press, are also doing this now.
TV news channels also now present far from balanced news coverage (but of course you have realise this!)

While wrong, this should not come as a surprise. Media tycoons & TV executives aren’t known for their humility after all.

So, we now have a situation where across all forms of mainstream media, whether social or traditional, we have very little cross-fertilisation of ideas; very little calm and reasonable discussion of the moral & ethical issues of the day; and no genuine good-faith searching for the truth as opposed to striving for the victory of our existing views.

We are fed a dangerous and untruthful diet consisting of confirmation of our own righteousness with a large side-dish of condemnation of the evil ones who dare to disagree.

The only people who will stop this is us, the consumers of this poisonous diet, refusing to eat it anymore.

Of course, it takes time, effort, and courage to break out of unthreatening environments; to do your own research; to deliberately listen to the views of those who disagree; to take one foot out of safe order and place it into uncomfortable chaos.

Do we have the wisdom to recognise the need and the courage to actually do it? 

If not, I fear it will lead either to violent revolution or a supposedly benevolent but suffocating dictatorship.