the tragedy of fox

audience management in the age of AI

The great dilemma of the news media industry is that people want to be told that they’re right, but they want to be told they’re right by an organisation that’s credible.  If people think that a news source just tells them what they want to hear, it’s not as satisfying; it’s like getting a valentines card from your sister.

So a lot of the art of editing a newspaper or tv station is that of giving the impression that if your viewers were wrong in their political beliefs and worldview, you’d give it to them straight, while of course never actually giving it to them straight. 

The nature of the art is very different depending on how dumb the people are that you’re practicing it on.  There are plenty of people out there in the world who are happy to receive the cognitive equivalent of a valentines card from their sister; there are even economically viable audiences who are prepared to believe that the stripper really liked them.

Media outlets which have to sell themselves to an intelligent, educated and self-aware audience spend a lot of their time on the project of convincing the audience they would give it to them straight.  Famously, the Financial Times is one of the only places you’ll read left-Keynesian economics, and the Guardian is absolutely famous for castigating its middle class progressive audience for various largely aesthetic awfulnesses of their lifestyle.  The New York Times usually has two or three opinion columnists whose sole and entire job is to annoy and disgust the readers. The name of the game here is to throw a load of bracing but peripheral criticism, to reinforce the credibility of the central message of agreement.

At the other end of the scale, well, Fox and the Daily Mail. 

I am not, of course, suggesting that there’s ever an editorial meeting where any of this is put in such crude and transactional terms. (Although the persistent belief in many media organisations that “if everyone thinks you’re biased, you’re not” comes close).  It’s more a feature of the system and its evolution. Like any other system, a media organisation will do things which bring it closer to long-term viability; those which develop practices that promote long term viability will survive. 

Also , media businesses shape the preferences of their audience.  A large part of the reason why people support all sorts of harmful media industry practices is that they’ve been educated as consumers to understand that these are the things that quality media does.  This one isn’t even particularly harmful, but it’s a learned behaviour on the part of the audience to want to feel like they’re watching a fair fight rather than a pro wrestling match.  They want to be periodically outraged in the short term, the better to be reassured in the long term.

What we’re talking about here, of course, the skill of all kinds of salespeople; there are whole books about how to sell to someone without making them think they’re being sold to.  The key trick, as far as I can tell, (well, the key trick is to find a customer who is really dumb and believes everything they’re told, but how many are so lucky?).

Failing that, the key trick from the selling-without-selling books is that you first have to convince yourself.  Which makes me think that artificial intelligence, in the form of large language models, might be very good at selling things, and correspondingly very good at politics and editing – the defining characteristic of the output of an LLM, as far as I can tell, is that it’s always fooling itself, it’s doing the same thing when it’s telling the truth as when it’s making things up.