Too much of the media has become about pleasing and growing an audience by telling us what we want to hear. The more our chosen media outlet agrees with us, confirms our opinions, and appears on our side (as opposed to challenging our assumptions or asking us to consider different facts or facets of a story), the easier it becomes to watch or read. Information drifts into entertainment; the easier it is, the more we watch or read. Media is a business, incentivized to fatten the bottom line. Talking heads are incentivized to keep us coming back. Too many of us live in our cozy, political corners, only hearing what we want to hear. When we hear something that challenges our beliefs, we are easily offended and too often assume we are being maliciously misled.
All this is a perfect tool for politicians, who are eager to use the media as a straw man to attack, generating support and anger from their base. Both Republicans and Democrats use this tool to obscure the difficult issues they simply don’t want, or don’t know how, to deal with.
A majority of Americans no longer trust the media. We all know, as did our Founders, that an independent, free, and often-adversarial press is vital to the functioning of a democracy. However, like so many other institutions, the media has lost credibility by failing to admit the obvious.
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