I don’t know how you learned about how media worked, but when I was taught about it in elementary school in Italy, I clearly remember my teacher explaining the concept of Agenda and News Cycle. Maybe I just had an amazing teacher (she is, indeed).
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet.
As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case.
By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night.
The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.
"Balanced"? There's far more to the world than politically exciting topics. News media is entertainment, it's optimizing for engagement, not producing accurate impressions in the viewer's mind. Following multiple sources of news just means you are being focused on lots of things of questionable relevance and importance.
An example that comes to mind is the various investigative interviews being conducted in the UK about the covid response last year. The news media focuses on gossip rather than the structural issues, institutional biases and lessons. Though even covid itself is probably not the most important issue today, it'll probably be something obscure like the reverse Flynn effect in Europe.
The British media's coverage of the Covid-19 crisis was and still is really blatant. For example, there have been a lot of decisions which involved tradeoffs, with each option having both upsides and downsides, and the press has pretty consistently focused on the downsides - you could pretty much pinpoint the moment the government decided to put off the latest loosening of restrictions based just on when the BBC switched from pushing the reasons to delay it to focusing heavily on the downsides of doing so.
That said, this is not a new development. Mainstream media today are doing this in subtler ways because they are forced to transparency by the rise of the Internet. As long as media organization need to turn a profit, this will always be the case. By having a rich media landscape, with different point of views, we were always able to keep a general balance despite the singular imbalances. The radicalization of opinions and the outrage economy, along with the Internet, have disrupted that general balance, with mostly right-wing leaning medias seizing that unethical advantage, and liberal left-leaning media trying to decry it, while having a hard time swiping their own conflicts of interest under the rug.
Surprisingly enough, this is mostly true for generalist media, though. I’m lucky enough to be a tech journalist, and despite having to deal with a lot of companies and a lot of products that they want to ultimately sell, I feel that our conflicts of interest are way easier to navigate, and easier to address.
Picking your news from carefully selected sector-specific publications, and putting together your own media diet, is the equivalent of eating organic and cooking your own meals vs eating out at McDonald’s every night. The equivalence, sadly, is true also for the level of education and income (and time) you need to have to do that, though.