Unhappy Customers are Good Customers-Polarization and the Media
In a recent Axios article entitled Boring news cycle deals blow to partisan media, Neal Rothschild and Sara Fischer explain that news outlets that relied on “partisan, ideological warfare” had seen a sharp drop in readership since former US President Trump left office. If far-right media have suffered the most, what the charts show is that all media publications have been affected. The authors mention a change to the media landscape, with a shift towards conservative podcasts, but I would also personally see this as confirmation that all the media rely more or less, not only on breaking news, but also on polarization to attract readers, feeding them with a sense of outrage and insatisfaction.
It is therefore not surprising to see that news agencies such as UPI, AP or Reuters whose purpose is to report with few comments are ranked as not only most reliable but also less susceptible to bias by Ad Fontes Media in their latest Media Bias Chart.
As a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and as peace loving citizen, I find polarization disturbing and try as much as possible to maintain sanity in a chaotic world where unhappy customers are good customers. The Media Bias Chart might help the reader in finding publishers less biased and focused on reporting facts. Fortunately I do not watch TV, which certainly helps me escape from cognitive decline.
