It looked like an average day at Bonnaroo. People dancing in brightly-colored, tribal-feeling dress to electronic music. A packed crowd, wide smiles, colorful lights and tents. The small puffs of smoke in the distance might have been the ghosts of previously ignited fireworks.
An intensely dark dramatic irony sets in as we watch that footage because we know precisely what the festival-goers didn’t in that moment.
It’s easy to forget that this relationship to tragedy is entirely new. No other humans in our 300,000 years of existence on this planet have had horror delivered in such a depersonalized way. Through the same rectangle that calls Grandma and orders Grubhub.
As media continue to “personalize” themselves to our individual tastes, news is no exception. But what happens to news when “truth” isn’t a popular flavor?
Tragedy isn’t new. Our relationship to tragedy is.
Throughout history, our accomplishments and progress are regularly punctuated with cruelty, war, subjugation, violence. What’s new is our relationship to tragedy, and it’s being shaped by forces that live beneath our conscious awareness.
We are at a moment feared and predicted by technologists of the past. The video footage we take on our phones is almost indistinguishable from high-end video games and movies’ special effects. The screen flattens Netflix trailers and genuine tragedy into the same, consumable format. In fact, they often sit next to one another in our feeds.
Called “Our 9/11” by an Israeli senior military official, watching the news on October 7th was a markedly different experience for the world watching from afar. For all of the differences in our stories of learning about the 9/11 attack in 2001, the vast majority of us have one consistent memory—we were all looking at the same screen.
Processing tragedy requires community.
Before we dove deep into political posturing and activism, the initial 9/11 broadcasts sought to answer a straight-forward question—What happened?
We’ve lost this shared experience.
The majority of us learned of the October 7th attack like we do most news—through personalized feeds. Perhaps the first headline you read was The New York Times’ Hamas Leaves Trail of Terror in Israel. Or it might have been Fox News’ Ilhan Omar condemns Israel’s military response to Hamas. Maybe you saw MSNBC’s The children of Gaza cannot escape Israel’s siege.
It’s an impossible situation for the average person. The narratives told by one side aren’t just different angles on the same problem—they’re completely oppositional accounts.
The news we saw was a reflection of what the algorithms believed we’d spend time consuming.
Your news represents you. It’s part of your ego.
There’s a subtle mistake often made in critique about modern news. We accuse it of being “clickbait”—as if the problem is that news headlines are the most likely to get us to click. It’s almost true, but that’s not quite right.
Consciously or not, as we use social media and recognize the potential for everything we do to be seen by our network, we change our behavior.
Today’s news headlines aren’t just designed to get clicks. They’re designed to represent us to our respective tribes. The news sources we engage with publicly have come to stand for different values, and the stories we choose to “like” and “retweet” are those that align with our representational selves
News today is competing on more levels of truth.
Consuming a newspaper was a private affair for our grandparents. Whether or not they agreed on the facts or the angle, a person read and reacted to it in (relative) private. Their reaction didn’t shape the next day’s content. It didn’t signal allegiance to their tribe.
Today, we may quietly read oppositional news, but quiet readers aren’t shaping our feeds.
Truth comes in layers. At one level, truth in news means accurate portrayal of what’s happening. But that’s not the level at which news today is competing.
Today’s news competes on a level of moral and social truth.
Even if someone on my side of the aisle did something corrupt, the opposing candidate is worse. Then isn’t the greater truth of moral good more important than the specific truth of that corrupt incident?
Separation of literal and moral truths is necessary for independent thought.
A core ethic of the last generation of journalistic integrity was objectivity. Here’s how a journalist from The Economist described news in 1986:
“The demonstrably correct information is their stock-in-trade… They avoid making judgments and steer clear of doubt and ambiguity. Though their founders did not use the word, objectivity is the philosophical basis for their enterprises – or failing that, widely acceptable neutrality.” —Jonathan Fenby, 1986
While its execution was far from perfect, the ethic of journalistic objectivity feels starkly missing from news today.
Truth will never be our favorite flavor.
Social feeds are excellent ways for us to discover new interests, deepen our hobbies, entertain ourselves, connect with different communities, and so on. But they’re not the right tool to use when sorting for truth.
Today’s news media is incentivized by the same algorithm as a dancer on TikTok or a home chef. Only the most and least likable survive.
As social feeds cater to our specific tastes, we need to recognize that truth will never be the most popular flavor. Brussel sprouts won’t win a taste test against french fries. But that doesn’t mean we should start deep frying our vegetables.
“Social” news is deep fried truth. With powdered sugar and a pad of butter. How much are we going to consume before we realize it’s making us sick?
Excellent piece, Joe. You hit the nail on the head with your thoughts on tribalism and the separation of truths. It also made think of how much further we are abstracted from the facts when we’re only learning of news from someone else’s post of a news article, or by listening to a podcaster read us the news. Thanks for tackling another tricky subject!