Making Media Great Again
How independent journalism can build trust and resurrect a shared search for the Truth.
Trust in mass media has never been lower than the levels we’ve seen since 2016, and for good reason. But as we lose our old organs of sense-making, we face a crisis of identity. Where can we turn if our old sources have outed themselves as liars and propagandists? How do we figure out what is going on in the world and how do we know what is true?
This is where we are today. Or, well, most of us. Those who still believe the media a “great deal” are blind to this collapse. Diagnosing or resolving this is beyond the purview of this piece. It’s a topic for another day, to be sure, but our focus is on answering the question: given that our mass media is completely untrustworthy, what do we do next?
First off, it’s worth noting that the answer is not to turn to a Fox News or an OAN. These networks largely follow the mass media playbook but for the other side of the aisle. Specifically: they share “clickbait” designed to rile up emotion in their target audience.
The internet is both the problem, and the solution. The internet largely created the crisis of the media by using ads to monetize attention, thus creating an arms race for that attention, and thus setting off an era of more and more misleading headlines and outrage. Despite that, the internet also holds the solution, or at least a part of it. As the media has collapsed, we’ve seen the rise of individual and independent voices who can fund their work without relying on a compromised entity to back them.
This class of independent journalist or sense-maker is still rare. Internet economics have an inherent bias toward winner-takes-all, so we are left with relatively few sense-makers who can fund their own independence. These independent journalists who have made it represent our best bet for escaping the chaos of a world without trusted sources.
Who is it we are talking about? Let’s name a few to make this more concrete:
And our list goes on, but hopefully you’ve heard of at least one of these people who are carving their own way. If not, I highly suggest that you take a look - most of them are on Substack as well!
Taken together, these individuals represent nodes of a distributed, decentralized media network. Taking down any one voice, or even a few of them will not destroy the system. But for now, just think of this as a network of unaffiliated individuals who are providing information to the public.
An important callout here is that these sources all have varying opinions as they are functionally unaffiliated with each other. There is not really a “consensus view” or “consensus narrative” between them. That’s a good thing. While this may make it harder for you to figure out what to believe, it is a sign that the system is relatively healthy insofar as it reflects the complexity and nuance of the world we live in.
But how can a distributed network of unaffiliated people turn into a systemic solution to a systemic problem? This, after all, is what we’re really here to solve. Once everyone realizes that mass media has been compromised beyond repair, what replaces it and helps build toward Truth?
An aside: I use Truth with a capital "T" when referring to the underlying and absolute true nature of reality, similar to statistics where we let X equal the underlying distribution and x̄ represent the observed distribution. Truth is hard, maybe impossible to find in some cases, but it still exists and is what we should be attempting to find!
The honest answer is: we don’t quite know yet what will evolve to replace the mass media. BUT, it is very likely that it will evolve from the early system of independent journalists that we have spinning up today.
What is important for us to know now is how the system can align incentives of all participants to enforce accuracy and seek the Truth.
Aligning Incentives & Seeking Truth
Right now, these journalists make profit directly from their readers. So right off the bat we have an issue. These journalists may be geared toward telling the truth now because their audience desires that nuance, but there is no mechanism to enforce that aside from the will of the people. So as soon as audiences broaden, the incentives quickly go back to where we are today: you build an audience and make money by telling people what they want to hear.
So the system needs an incentive to guide it toward the Truth, and it is here that we will need to invoke our good friends: blockchains and cryptocurrencies!
*The audience groans.*
Hear me out - we’ll keep this simple! Blockchains serve as an indisputable ledger of record. So if I write “I will run a marathon by December 31st, 2022.” on the blockchain, it will be there. I cannot edit it, I cannot delete it. No one else can either. It’s there. Maybe you see where this is going.
Cryptocurrencies are then simply a mechanism to align incentives via monetary value. So let’s say I put said statement about the marathon on a site that settled bets between friends. I could write that statement, my friend and I could each stake 5 dollars, candy bars, or any store of value. The site could then monitor race results and once I run a marathon or December 31st hits, it could settle the bet automatically.
This anecdote is instructive because the monetary result also reflects credibility. If I run a marathon and win the bet, I am credible because I do what I said I’d do. If I don’t, I’m less credible and my friend is more credible because they accurately predicted that I wouldn’t run!
As you probably have guessed, this concept can be applied to a broad swath of questions and people can be evaluated on how closely their answers reflect reality. So instead of asking about whether I run a marathon (kind of meaningless) you could ask “how many Covid deaths will there be?” or “will Russia invade Ukraine by the end of 2023?”
Sites like Metaculus and other prediction markets are already playing around with these kinds of systems. In the case of Metaculus, it rewards accurate predictions, but critically, it rewards accurate predictions more when they are farther from the current consensus view. This is critical, as it prevents herding and incentivizes independent thought.
Once you have this type of market or structure setup, journalist credibility can be tracked and reported to readers/viewers. While the realm covered by this would mainly be facts rather than opinions, that’s a critical step. Even if we can just ensure that all opinions are working off the same underlying facts, we’re doing much better than where we are today!
Still though, all of this will work best when the audience has a desire for accuracy and finding Truth. Without that, there will always be alternatives out there - cable news or otherwise - that can grab and monetize attention via less-than-truthful shock-and-awe headlines.
Perhaps I’m too much of a Pollyanna, but I do believe that if people have information about the veracity of their sources, then they will choose trustworthy sources. The issue right now is that the data isn’t available, so we fall back to (poor) heuristics of trust established news or trust entertaining news that confirms our biases.
Diving into this ecosystem of distributed sources is a great way to explore and start to understand what alternatives you have to the old world establishments that have found themselves in decay. While you will have to do some critical thinking for yourself, it will be worthwhile for the more holistic and realistic picture of the world that you will start to form.
Did I miss anyone on this list? Leave a comment below! I’ll be writing a piece in the new year on the best sources within this ecosystem.