Choose Your Own Reality
How the fragmentation and democratization of our media ecosystem has erased any sense of a collective reality.
If you often wonder why certain stories don’t get more media coverage or ever said the words “why isn’t anyone talking about this,” you are not alone.
You are wrong, though. The “media” is normally talking about it, just not your media. There are so many media silos out there today that we are finding it hard to make sense of the world collectively. We all exist in different realities shaped by the media we consume, some of which we choose and some of which are chosen for us algorithmically.
Charlie Warzel’s recent article in The Atlantic discusses why we as a nation are seemingly unable to ascribe to a single shared reality and why so many are ascribed to a patently false one. The article came off the heels of the FEMA disinformation and conspiracy theories following the two hurricanes that hit the southeast this month. In it, he says the following:
This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity. This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world.
Charlie is correct. While individuals who want to spread misinformation and division are causing the problem, the digital information ecosystem gives them the capability to do so at scale. What Charlie doesn’t dissect here is how this new information ecosystem has impacted good-faith actors, or at least neutral ones, from maintaining a coherent shared reality.
The answer lies in how the digital information ecosystem has changed two vital powers of the media: the ability to set agendas and frame issues. Those powers have been democratized across the media ecosystem, and their limitations–both norm-based and legal–have been removed entirely. What we are left with is a confusing, noisy, and unimaginably fast news cycle that leaves all of us disoriented and in perpetual search of “the truth,” no matter how many articles we read.
Agenda-Setting
Agenda-setting refers to the media’s ability to determine what is or is not important in public mindsets. In short, if the media spends time reporting on something, we tend to consider it important. If they don’t, we either live in blissful ignorance or, if we hear about it elsewhere, we assume it isn’t important. Many things happen worldwide every day and we depend on our media ecosystem to show us the important events and establish, through context, where events rank in terms of significance. Some stories are obviously significant, like a natural disaster or a war, but there’s complexity and nuance in most world events. If the media spends time reporting on an issue, the public will not only know more about it but consider it meaningful and worthy of their attention.
The mainstream media of old, the Fourth Estate, was excellent at agenda-setting. There were only a handful of mass media platforms and they alone could often select what issues or problems the public should be concerned about. They also served as powerful gatekeepers of the agenda, able to bury a story by ignoring it even if it was able to make it into the public zeitgeist through other means like alternative media sources or word of mouth. The public all watched or read the same several news outlets and smaller outlets were responsive to the agendas the big ones set, giving us all some level of a shared reality with similar agendas and focus placed in similar areas.
There are obvious problems with that paradigm and it’s right to squirm at the consolidated and unopposed power the mainstream media had in those days. Nevertheless, here we are today. The media ecosystem has fragmented and its power has decentralized. Rather than dozens of media outlets setting our agendas, we have millions. Social media gives anyone a platform to persuade the public and exploiting the engagement-focused algorithms can give you a wider reach than the mainstream media ever had. It’s no longer up to a handful of broadcast companies and newspapers to tell the public what they should care about. Instead, millions of social media accounts compete for your attention and you can, with some level of agency, choose which ones to listen to.
The fragmentation and democratization of agenda-setting carry massive consequences. It’s harmed our ability to stay tuned in to what’s important and know, collectively, the underlying facts that form our perception of reality. There are countless opinion leaders and influencers online who are allowed, both legally and socially, to say whatever they want, make it as engaging and entertaining as they can, and be handsomely rewarded for it.
Yes, the mainstream media still retains some power to set agendas through their audience size and perceived (yet shrinking) legitimacy. But the point is that they have much less influence than they used to and there are now countless opinion leaders competing to form people’s realities in a public mindset arena that prioritizes attention in ways that didn’t exist before. While it’s probably good that the unelected elites of the mainstream media carry less influence over us, it turns out that being on the same page about what's happening in the world is a pretty vital component of a functional democracy.
Framing
Framing refers to how mass media rhetorically packages and describes concepts and events. As a negative example, clickbait headlines are the ultimate showcase of disingenuous framing where every mundane story is a BOMBSHELL, or SHOCKING. Those clickbait sites frame things as JAW-DROPPING through how they write the headlines and the tone of their rhetoric. It’s rarely accurate.
Genuine and “accurate” framing is difficult. It’s subjective at some level and no matter how close a journalist gets to the “right” framing, readers will nitpick it to death. There’s no perfect formula out there to nail objective and truthful framing every time and I think some folks are overly harsh on newsrooms for it. With that said, let’s get harsh for a moment.
The NBC headline above is my favorite recent example of framing. This was back in July of this year when a “soft landing” became the most likely outcome of our inflationary troubles and the US dollar was (and still is) extraordinarily strong overseas. The Fed was signaling a rate cut as inflation rates fell which is, by nearly all measures, a positive sign of a healthy and recovered economy. In a baffling dedication to conflict reporting and negativity to generate clicks, NBC decided to frame a potential rate cut as…bad for your next overseas vacation.
How does this headline frame the idea of a rate cut to a reader who isn’t well-versed in the intricacies of macroeconomics? If you don’t know much about what interest rates do, how would you feel about them if you scanned this headline while scrolling on Facebook? I’m not saying there aren’t valid critiques of a rate cut at this moment and that the headline isn’t technically true. I’m saying there’s power in how you frame an issue and the deference that modern media gives to conflict and negativity tends to produce a fairly gloomy picture of the world.
In the old media environment, with fewer outlets setting agendas and a more comprehensively shared reality, there were limitations to how disingenuous or extreme one could frame an issue. Sure, there were tabloids and yellow journalism but at the core of our information environment were media outlets with institutional trust. That gave us a point of reference to judge reports that framed an issue far outside what the mainstream media was saying.
Today, trust in mainstream media institutions has bottomed out. Almost 70% of Americans have either no or almost no trust in mass media writ large. The mainstream media’s authority over the bounds of acceptable issue framing has deteriorated. As a reader, there’s now a much wider choice of narratives to choose from and agendas to subscribe to without any trusted reference point to judge one influencer’s framing against another. It comes down to what you believe the right framing is, which pushes us towards media that reinforces our worldview and away from media that challenges it.
We Choose Our Reality
With the power of agenda-setting democratized and fragmented out to thousands of influencers rather than a handful of trusted journalists, the outer bounds of acceptable framing have expanded to almost limitless possibilities. Over time, we’ve sorted into media silos that feed us the stories we want to read with the framing we believe to be accurate. Or, if we’re all honest with ourselves, sometimes the framing just needs to feel cathartic.
No matter what you believe or how your partisan identity makes you yearn for something to be true, there is someone out there who will speak to your heart. They will tell you that the things you suspect are important are indeed important. They will tell you that the things you want to be true, either consciously or subconsciously, are indeed true. The algorithms will measure your engagement with these people as you scroll through the infinite and slowly steep you in the agenda you desire and the reality you want to live in.
That is how people end up believing that armed FEMA soldiers have occupied North Carolina, and it’s why misinformation is so powerful today. The guardrails are off and anything can be true.