Junk news and clickbait may be free, but most reliable and credible news is not. Fake news exacts its own costs.
Access to real journalism is not free. There is a need to budget for being a reasonably informed citizen of the United States. While libraries and occasional internet sites allow free access to good information about politics, medical research and important trends, a person has to work more to track it down. A decent library is the exception, but the desire for convenience means that we tend to curate our own collections of resources, unwittingly settling on sources that monetize their existence by using “news” as bait. “Paid” stories appearing on the fringes of news websites are the most obvious cases of pseudo journalism. The first “sponsored” listings on a Google search are an obvious example. Some who have paid to have top billing may offer credible information. But their content is usually selling their own products or services. Ideally, journalism serves the public interest with the best versions of the truth; junk news serves some private interest.
Information has value. Especially in these times we need to consider paying the researchers, authentic journalists and news aggregators who must make a living for their efforts. The last election suggests the cost to the republic when voting is effected by of a ton of paid advertising and misinformation. Elon Musk alone supported the GOP to the tune of nearly $300 million in the last election. That included a brazen public offer to pay for votes for Donald Trump. We know he contributed to a mountain of false claims delivered to people who apparently never bothered to check their veracity.
We pay an electricity provider for light. We should be willing to budget some money to pay for information that will bring hard truths out of the shade.
We need to budget for high-quality news.
A reasonable budget for high quality news and information probably starts at about $200 a month, or $2400 a year. That’s the cost of access to several reliable sources within the information society. Everyone’s interests and resources will vary. The list below is one suggestion of a good mix: not unreasonable for some family budgets, but not all. To be sure, “information” is not a typical item to fold into family expenses. And yet most of us can not function without expensive smart phones, cable access, and an internet platform. It is useful to remember that a chunk of family money goes to costly travel and entertainment, money that may be spent in a shortsighted exchange of the pleasant for the essential.
Here’s one reasonable breakdown of some useful expenses, which will vary somewhat based on a family’s interests.
-Free and worthwhile: Library sources, and digital forms of Wikipedia, The Associated Press, and opinion websites like Vox or Politico. Scholastic for children offers a host of age-graded magazines on a range of national and international topics. Many are available in school libraries.
– A good newspaper, about $35 a week for hard copies . There is a good reason to have physical a copy of a newspaper sitting on the family breakfast table. A parent can do no better than make “the daily miracle” of a newspaper ready available to their word-thirsty children. Children naturally like the variety of a newspaper. Scrolling a mashup of headlines on their digital devices does not cut it.
–A quality newsmagazine. A hard copy of the weekly The Atlantic is about $80 per year
-Cable access (40 Basic Channels, including some good news sources) about $50 per month.
$2400 a year may seem like an expendable budget item. But not paying to be as informed as you can be comes at a price, including the current rueful state of American national politics.
We have evidence that internet users are less interested in tracking the provenance of a story than consumers of straight print media.
It comes as no surprise to any thoughtful consumer that most media make money by attracting eyeballs for the ads they have strung around their content. In print media this is the role of display advertising. In conventional television the clusters of ads that interrupt program content have the same function. Even so, in the large scale public migration to internet sites many consumers of “new” media seem not to have noticed the close proximity of genuine news to the qualitatively different “sponsored content” nearby. Sometimes these “stories” at the end of a section feature an interesting picture, the promise of a shocking revelation, and always another new set of pages that will pull us in to see even more ads. These “news” items are sometimes labeled “Promoted Stories” or content “From Our Partners.”
On one particular day the popular website The Daily Beast had sponsored articles at the end of real journalistic pieces from a range of self-interested groups. One “article” entitled “Do This Every Time You Turn on Your PC” was really selling “Scanguard,” which is supposed to speed up balky computers. Another “article,” “How to Fix Your Fatigue” was click bait from a food supplement “doctor.” And an ancestry research service was embedded in a third “news story” entitled “What did People Eat in the 1800s?”
Sometimes this clutter of “advertorial” content has no appeal. But we may find it irresistible to take a time-wasting detour baited by headlines like “You won’t believe how the actors in ‘Gilmore Girls’ have changed.” At the risk of giving away my Calvinist/Methodist roots, all this spontaneous grazing pulls us away from more purposeful tasks. As if we needed it, a writing course at the University of Pennsylvania is actually called “Wasting Time on the Internet.”
As things go, advertising masquerading as news probably doesn’t qualify as a crime against humanity. And there can be little question that news sites of all sorts need the revenue stream of advertising that allowed print media to prosper for well over a century. But a problem remains: paid web content is now melded so seamlessly into the mix of stories offered on many sites that we may fail to notice that we have passed from the hands of editors and journalists into a strategic marketing world dominated by advertisers and copywriters.
In greater numbers Americans don’t consider the self-serving nature of much online content.
This doesn’t pose a serious problem to a savvy reader. But we have more evidence that internet users are less interested in tracking the provenance of a story than consumers of straight print media. In greater numbers Americans don’t consider the self-serving nature of online content, even when solid expertise and neutrality should weigh heavily on what we “know,” especially if we are researching subjects as consequential as health information. This lack of critical insight makes Americans a bit less intelligent, turning us into better consumers than citizens..
Add in another factor that makes the problem of accepting low-credibility sources even more unsettling. Traditionally our memory for content outlasts our memory for where it came from. This so-called “sleeper effect” means there is a time in our cognitive life when we are more likely to remember a stray fact or assertion than the source that it came from. You know the effect if you have ever heard yourself say “I don’t remember where I saw it, but I do remember seeing . . .” It’s at this point that the paid flacking of click bait creates the greatest opportunity for cognitive mischief. It’s content outlasts what should be reasonable suspicions about its fictions and limitations.
– A good newspaper, about $35 a week for hard copies . There is a good reason to have physical a copy of a newspaper sitting on the family breakfast table. A parent can do no better than make “the daily miracle” of a newspaper ready available to their word-thirsty children. Children naturally like the variety of a newspaper. Scrolling a mashup of headlines on their digital devices does not cut it.
–A quality newsmagazine. A hard copy of the weekly The Atlantic is about $80 per year
$2400 a year may seem like an expendable budget item. But not paying to be as informed as you can be comes at a price, including the current rueful state of American national politics.
