How the media destroyed America
As the internet democratized content creation, cable companies started seeing massive financial losses due to people switching from cable to internet-based media.
Pew found the share of Americans saying they watch TV via cable/satellite fell from 76% (2015) to 56% (2021), and major reasons were “I can get what I want online” and cost.
Popular three to four-letter news organizations were among those hardest hit.
Rather than fading into irrelevance, the media companies created intense partisan narratives that painted everyone on the "opposite side” of the political fence as…
On the right: Fascists, racists and religious extremists.
On the left: Deranged communists with decayed moral values who seek to unpatriotically undermine American sovereignty and freedom.
The 2024 paper "Selling Anger" analyzed 2012–2024 captions to show cable networks increasingly focused negative rhetoric on opposing parties.
Incentive problem
The problem stems from perverse incentives, as media companies must legally prioritize investor returns through dividends and stock growth. CEOs that don't deliver are removed in favor of CEOs that do.
On the other hand, what people would benefit from most is fair and balanced reporting. These two forces are utterly opposed, creating a difficult-to-solve conundrum.
The blind spot
The greatest barrier to resisting manipulation is not a lack of intelligence, but the defenses people build to convince themselves they are already safe. This false security rests on four specific cognitive baises:
Introspection illusion: Since we have no conscious access to the neural processes that construct our reality (biases, heuristics, framing). When we look inward to check if we are being manipulated, we see only our own "logic" and "sensible thoughts," creating a false confirmation of objectivity.
Third-person effect: The specific belief that mass media messages have a powerful effect on others (the "sheep"), but little to no effect on oneself.
Naive realism: When we believe that we are immune to influence we actively walk into situations in which we find ourselves influenced unpurposedly.
Bias blind spot: We judge others by their actions but ourselves by our intentions. We condemn rumors as "gossip," yet view our own sharing of sensitive information as "harmless information sharing or venting."
The unfortunate reality is that believing one is invulnerable to the effects of media is precisely what renders them susceptible.
A people that leaves no quarter to biased media, either turning it off or doing their own research, or actively pursuing information channels that are unpoisoned, are the only ones unaffected.
The solution
Although more likely solutions are probably available within Cyber Sovereignty, the most robust solution is an informed populace that actively turns off media that misinforms them for the purpose of maintaining their viewership.
Agora and the media
With respect to Agora, the media have largely created the problem that Agora is seeking to mop up. Agorans should not be caught unawares by a potentially hostile media, seeing that the media's incentive structure depends and relies on conflict to succeed and Agora’s push is for peace.
The modern media is now hooked, like a drug addict, on a perverse incentive structure. For decades now they have replaced reporting on issues to stoking division for engagement.
This article is a call to all those within Agora to discover a means of creating an incentive structure which would allow media to fund itself without being subject to the perverse incentive structures of purely profit-driven media.