More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
THE MEDIA HAS ITS OWN STORIES IN MIND
But some of it stemmed from the fact that the moderators from MSNBC were far more interested in generating airtime for certain candidates and narratives they were pushing than they were for the new random interloper.
If you invest in personalities, strong points of view, criticism, and caricaturing of the other side, the occasional inflammatory or controversial statement, and a clear partisan or ideological bent, then your engagement numbers, ratings, advertising sales, and bargaining power all go up.
Every major news organization makes hundreds of decisions a day around maximizing ratings, which drives their news coverage in specific directions. Many of those directions, in my view, have the effect of eroding information, details, and objectivity. I’m far from alone in this observation.
Ariana Pekary, who publicly quit MSNBC in August 2020. When I spoke to her about the network’s decision making when it came to coverage, she told me that in her experience the network would gloss over more benign news events. “When there were peaceful protests for George Floyd, we would cut to something else,” Pekary told me. “If there were some fire or conflict, we would cut to that and show the footage over and over again.”
The cable news networks are being rewarded via billions of dollars a year in revenue to separate us into ideological camps hungering for news and opinion designed to stimulate our sense of outrage and alarm.
Police brutality is incredibly expensive, not just in human life and public trust, but in monetary costs that drain public money that could go to schools, health care, or infrastructure. Total payouts to plaintiffs cost communities more than a billion dollars a year, and that doesn’t include litigation costs and insurance premiums, which cost hundreds of millions more.
Unfortunately, many officers right now are trained to speed up and escalate rather than slow down and de-escalate.
I’ve run several organizations, and one of the lessons I learned is “you make what you measure.” If you don’t measure the right things, you won’t solve the right problems.
Consider that 66.5 percent of all personal bankruptcies are related to medical costs.
Our media organizations relentlessly push us into tribes with our own applause lines and sources of outrage.
Imagine the head of a business walking in to update his or her people without any numbers or baselines to measure improvements or declines.
“Toxic systems compromise good individuals with ease.”
It’s not left or right; it’s Forward.
