Robot Journalists, Democracy, and the Paradox of Entertainment News
I had the pleasure of attending the 2009 WBUR Public Radio Gala at the Intercontinental Boston on the 19th. While the event itself was fantastic, and raised over $350,000 for WBUR, the real honor was in hearing Ted Koppel and Jeff Greenfield discuss the relationship between journalism and democracy, and explore the implications of the current upheaval in the field. (David Carr has a thoughtful — and, perhaps surprisingly, hopeful — piece in the New York Times exploring this turmoil, entitled “The Fall and Rise of Media.”)
The most salient point of the evening came from Koppel, who was asked by moderator Tom Ashbrook to identify the current biggest threat to democracy with regard to the present state of journalism. His reply was something to the effect of, “increasingly, we get the news we want to hear, and not the news we need to hear.”
I thought of this as I read Kit Eaton’s post on the Fast Company blog describing AOL CEO Tim Armstrong’s plan to automate the production of news content for AOL’s web properties. (Interestingly, Eaton cites the same Carr piece mentioned earlier.) This comes on the heels of an announced 2,500 layoffs in preparation for AOL’s re-independence from Time Warner. As part of this downsizing, Armstrong plans to replace a significant portion of his writing and content-producing staff with an automated content generation system, supplemented by freelancers.
There are two significant implications of Armstrong’s strategy. These come down to how the work is produced. The writing previously done by salaried journalists, based on topics chosen by experienced, salaried editors, will now largely be produced by freelancers and a specially-designed web crawler, respectively.
I actually don’t have much to say about the first point. This is in large part due to the fact that it’s not clear to me how the freelance work will be commissioned. Is every article basically a contest, with prospective writers vying to be picked on spec? Certainly there are plenty of people who take issue with this model, and I grant that there is validity to their case. For me, there isn’t a clear answer to the question of when an open assignment is crowdsourcing and when it becomes something more like creative exploitation. But I can’t yet take a side in this instance.
The editorial side of things is far more interesting to me. Yes, there will clearly still be human beings identifying the topics to be covered, and ultimately editing the work produced by the freelance writers. But they’ll be presumably choosing topics based on the output of this algorithm, which is just a popularity filter for whatever it is we deem to be news these days.
Play this out further, and suddenly we’re only getting “news” coverage of things we’re already talking about. Even in the best case, if this algorithm is somehow able to stay ahead of the news cycle, we may never get the news we need to hear unless it’s also the news we want to hear. To paraphrase a colleague, we’d end up with four thousand articles about Black Friday and not one about the war in Afghanistan.
Where does that leave us, when enjoyment and not education is the criterion for what qualifies as news? Neil Postman famously explored this subject in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. Despite now being almost 25 years old, many of his arguments are as relevant today when applied to “new media” as they were in 1985 when he railed against the medium of television. I remember the first time I read the foreword, and how it stopped me in my tracks.
We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.
But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.
Are we condemned if the institutions of journalism give us only what we want to hear? There is no doubt that we are a society prone to gluttony — McDonald’s wouldn’t offer supersize value meals if we didn’t keep ordering supersize value meals. Over at Examiner.com, 54% of people (as of this writing) claim to believe that there has been too much coverage of Tiger Woods’ recent shenanigans; yet clearly, the public clamors for more. Before we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Tiger, we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Sarah Palin; and before Sarah Palin, we supposedly wanted to stop hearing about Paris Hilton… and so on and so on.
What Ted Koppel was saying, in one sense, is that the business of news has to in some ways be independent of supply and demand. It seems we can no longer be trusted to inform ourselves. Postman would even argue that what little news we do still consume is so broken down into headlines and sound bites that ultimately the distinction between the intellectual merit of CNN versus MTV is a false one.
Somewhere along the way, the field of journalism became subject to the laws of economics in a way that it hadn’t before. Howard Gossage, famed San Francisco copywriter and agency chief, pointed to the day that newspapers became more dependent on advertising revenue than subscription revenue as the beginning of the end. He was not the only one to make this observation. Jordan Seiler over at Public Ad Campaign discusses Walter Lippmann‘s assessment of “the tenuous relationship between advertisers, newspapers, and the buying public:”
[Lippmann writes,] “It would be regarded as an outrage to have to pay openly the price of a good ice cream soda for all the news of the world, though the public will pay that and more when it buys the advertised commodities. The public pays for the press, but only when the payment is concealed [by advertising].”
Unlike those commodities we are willing to pay for, the news is expected to be open, fair, truthful and above all free, in many ways a right in democratic society. It is in the end how we shape our understanding of the world we live in and then function as informed citizens.
[Lippmann continues,] ”The real problem is that the readers of a newspaper, unaccustomed to paying the cost of news-gathering, can be capitalized only by turning them into circulation that can be sold to manufacturers and merchants.”
Our inability to accept the cost of running what we want to be a democratic and transparent endeavor, the news, results in the sale of this institution to advertising and inevitably corporate interests.
Simple. In order to produce news in a world where consumers do not bear the cost of its production, media outlets need to recruit advertisers to cover the difference. In order to sell enough advertising, publishers are forced to keep pushing towards the lowest common denominator in search of more and more eyeballs. Thus we get four hours of live CNN dedicated to Balloon Boy.
Some might say that the news, in its purest sense, is not just a privilege in a democratic society, but an institution which we have an obligation to defend as a pillar of that very democracy.
Even if that is believed to be true, I don’t know how we slow the erosion of the fourth estate. I can think of a good place to start, though: don’t wait for the next gala to support your local public radio station.
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