Today media outlets are private companies that are arguably in between filling their role as the fourth estate and entertainment. They do not offer much public space, they just are the traditional proxies for citizens to reach public officials.
To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there was mutual dependency.
Today fewer and fewer people pay for journalism.
I don't think many people see them as creating public discourse and more about creating controversies to get attention. To be fair, they need it to stay economically viable. The trust in media outlets is pretty low and I believe that is not completely unfounded.
The Guardian is certainly not the worst offender by a long shot but general distrust in media isn't that hard to understand.
I think only more pluralism can help rectify this issue. And public officials need to think about channels to reach the public. Preferably not Twitter or Facebook. Attention is a precious resource and you have youtube make-up tutorials that have more views in a week than the Guardian in a quarter of a year.
A lot of frustration I have is that these advertising methods are only called out if the other political camp is the offender. Obama for example spent a lot of money on targeted advertising on social media. Granted, he told us and said that money in politics is a great problem on multiple occasions. So there is still a difference.
I think I agree with you on most points here, but no matter how corrupt/reputable/new/old a media outlet is, it is still beeing part of public discourse as in: Everybody can go and buy e.g. The Guardian regardless of their political views, everybody can watch Fox News, everybody can go to the theintercept.com and read their latest article.
This isn't true for targeted (mis-)information campaigns on social media. If you e.g. were leaning to the political right, you wouldn't be able to discuss the ridiculous information someone on the political left might be exposed to, because you are very unlikely to see them in time (or at all). At the same time nothing would stop you to go to the Guardian website and read the article as anybody else.
That very aspect is the the key difference between public discourse and targeted ads. It doesn't really matter whether the media is biased or whether targeted manipulation works: one is doing it public (and can be subjected to scrutiny) and the other isn't.
Where traditional media necessarily always has to be selective about what they present us, targeted ads are not only selective in what they present us, they are also basing it on who we are. And because they can target people who are likely to share that view anyways there will be very little friction and public scrutiny. This naturally doesn't help with the quality of the information when it comes to truthfulness and divides people up: they no longer inhabit the same planet anymore in terms of truth and information.
To a time when people bought more news papers, you could have argued that the customers were voting citizens, although even then the real ones were advertisers. At least there was mutual dependency.
Today fewer and fewer people pay for journalism.
I don't think many people see them as creating public discourse and more about creating controversies to get attention. To be fair, they need it to stay economically viable. The trust in media outlets is pretty low and I believe that is not completely unfounded.
The Guardian is certainly not the worst offender by a long shot but general distrust in media isn't that hard to understand.
I think only more pluralism can help rectify this issue. And public officials need to think about channels to reach the public. Preferably not Twitter or Facebook. Attention is a precious resource and you have youtube make-up tutorials that have more views in a week than the Guardian in a quarter of a year.
A lot of frustration I have is that these advertising methods are only called out if the other political camp is the offender. Obama for example spent a lot of money on targeted advertising on social media. Granted, he told us and said that money in politics is a great problem on multiple occasions. So there is still a difference.