The Misinformation Society

[Thaddeus]

Misinformation Society
http://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-misinformation-society/
by @VWPickard

Trump’s election laid bare structural flaws in our news and information systems. As mainstream news media sensationalized and trivialized what was at stake in the elections, social media amplified misinformation and propaganda. These media pathologies paved the way for the triumph of a demagogue. While criticism of such problems has escalated since the election, the underlying policies that enabled them have largely escaped scrutiny.

Policy decisions and indecisions have degraded our media environment over time and created what might be termed a“misinformation society.” Some of the more pronounced features of the misinformation society are a lack of financial support for accountability journalism, the dominance of infrastructures of misinformation (i.e., the “Facebook problem”), and regulatory capture—whereby agencies harmonize their actions to serve the commercial interests of the very businesses they purportedly regulate—at the Federal Communications Commission, which is facilitating the concentration of media ownership by a handful of corporations and is set to repeal the crucial internet protection of net neutrality.

How Did We Get Here?
These media failures weren’t inevitable. Explicit policies favoring commercial interests over democratic concerns created this system. Unlike its counterparts around the world, the United States never developed a strong public media sector, and it remains unique among democracies in its underfunding of public broadcasting—the United States today spends only about the price of a latte per capita per year on public media institutions. By comparison, Canada spends over $30 per person and northern European countries spend over $100 per person.1

Long under the sway of a corporate libertarian paradigm, the United States lacks a policy discourse that’s sufficiently responsive to what I call “systemic market failure” in commercial media systems. This failure is characterized by the underproduction of public goods, such as quality news and information, which typically are not supported by the market.2

American media reformers have long fought for social democratic alternatives that don’t rely entirely on markets. But these efforts have often been derailed by a combination of Red-baiting, technocratic policy-making, First Amendment absolutism, and, most of all, a commitment to market fundamentalism. The United States has therefore never developed a media regulatory apparatus that could effectively counteract corporate power and commercial excesses.

Today, symptoms of extreme—and largely unregulated—commercialism in our media system include the ubiquity of clickbait, sponsored content, behavioral advertising, and corporate surveillance in our digital news media, along with a tendency toward media monopolies, a lack of public access to high-quality information, a loss of diverse voices and viewpoints, and the evisceration of public service journalism.

Read the rest here: http://www.publicbooks.org/the-big-picture-misinformation-society/