It has been revised for 9 times, which is self explanatory of its value: NEWS The Politics of Illusion (10th Edition). Before summarize the highlights of the book, I have to mention that throughout the time of reading I feel the content could be several fold compressed. The limited historic evidence is repeated in different chapter with different way, while there's various recap of similar ideas across the book. A few short articles might be more than enough to cover the same ideas. Nevertheless, the mundane of the narrative won't shadow the value of the book.
The book is trying to reveal the detrimental news quality's impact to democracy and the reasoning behind. In a nutshell, it's a negative feedback system consisting of total free marketing of news industry, fundamental flaw of impartiality reporting, growing sophistication of political news spun and deteriorating popular addiction to social media.
The recent decades see a few key legislations changes to lift the regulation on the scale of private ownership of media. The full free marketing of the news industry, in other words, by economy of scale, encourage the lowering of the cost by all means, which inevitably reduces the quantity and quality of investigative journalism. On the other hand, news media relies on the coming-without-cost feed of politician to fill the content gap.
Here comes the flaw of impartiality, which was meant to be a foundation of news neutralisation, to be abused by partisan, or non intellectual opinions. Journalists are turned away from putting their own opinions into reporting, but have to rely on different sides to provide opinions. That allows even the most ridiculous nonsense appears to be at same weight as intellectual words. This is a contradictory situation which could be argued as a triumph of freedom of speech by the less accepted non-main stream.
However, not only the conspiracists abuse the impartiality, so called spin expert is the real expert, who are hired by politicians to feed the news media and manipulated the popular thoughts with long time study of the popular psychology and news system. All together lead to the current shape of news, full of biases:
Four information biases in digital era's news
- Personalization
- Dramatization
- Fragmentation
- Politics as a game
Last but not least, even the author is trying to stay neutral about social media and sees that as a new way of reporting, I sense the inevitable scepticism of popularism. People choose what they'd like to hear, not the complex non binary answer of real world. Social media amplifies the bipolar tendency and information bubble.
There are some other curious facts mentioned in the book, which don't fit in the argument directly while I found interesting
- The more interest into a topic, the more aligned with official view. Regardless of education.
- Depending on the topics, significant part of survey participants won't get upset if their choice didn't turn out to be final policy.
For later: comparative study of US and China news system
How different are the ultimate goal of the politics news in China and America? Probably now that much, even the style and content varies dramatically. With the joining of social media as source of news on both sides, ironically the style are becoming assimilated as well.