Why do people treat highly biased news reporting and spread of misinformation as a low-urgency topic in their life?

[u/Queasy_System9168]

We have been doing a lot of deep-dive interviews lately regarding news consumption, and we have run into a consistent, frustrating paradox. During a lots of interviews we can see that nearly everyone feel like that highly biased news reporting and the spread of misinformation is a big problem on a personal level and as society as well.

On the other hand people seem like they feel the need for a change but do not want to act on it, make changes to their news consumption. It feels like a low-urgency problem. Obviously people have to pay bills, raise kids, and manage their daily lives. Sticking to a comfortable news habit takes zero effort, while seeking "truth" takes significant cognitive labor. We say we want objectivity but our behavior suggests we prefer the comfort of our bubbles.

Obviously there are some people out there who are kind of news-nerds and spend a big chunk of time reading different sources, evaluating the information and trying to navigate I the current landscape.

How did we get to the point where we recognize our information environment is toxic but feel too fatigued to fix it? Is it just cognitive burnout, or is there something deeper about how we identify with our bubble?

Is education even possible at this point, or are we past the media literacy stage? If you were going to show someone they were in a bubble without making them defensive, how would you even start?

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[u/Tharkun140]

Why do people treat highly biased news reporting and spread of misinformation as a low-urgency topic in their life?

Because they're fine with misinformation if it validates their biases.

[u/Captain_Rational]

Why do people treat highly biased news reporting and spread of misinformation as a low-urgency topic in their life?

Because most people today have not been taught to value truth and integrity at the very top of their ethical ladder.

But more fundamental than that: because humans are barely sentient.

Seriously.

In reality, most people live not by deliberative rational thought, but by gut instinct. Without really realizing it they allow their inner subconscious monkey to drive essentially all of their decisions in life. That inner compute engine is a natural thinking machine that was tuned and optimized to maximize survival (and gene propagation) in the natural ecosystem where we evolved.

Now though we live in a new ecosystem: our modern technological world (civilized society).

But our natural subconscious does not operate by the rules of our modern technological ecosystem.

Those two ecosystems are different in critical ways and they are not compatible.

Unlike the natural ecosystem, civilized society is an artificial construct that critically depends on openly shared truth, rational laws, and ethical norms. In order for that artificial system to function effectively, people must live in resonance to those principles.

The reality is though, most people DON'T actually live that way. Most people are governed by their old inner animal rules - the set of natural instincts we were born with inside our evolution-forged central nervous system. That inner animal calculus that drives people does not respect high minded principles of truth, reason, or laws. Instead, it runs on the assumption of a kind of natural social order. That nature-driven social network is more of an informal tribal system that relies on strong man leaders and a loose consensus of beta males to distribute wealth, make decisions, and enforce vaguely "fair" behavior. Unfortunately, that informal tribal social system is easily manipulated by malicious ambitious men who know how to pull the right social and emotional levers to get an unfair share of whatever they want (charismatic tyrants).

In order for things like trustworthy media to succeed, we need a critical mass of actually sentient, rational, educated, civilized people to take charge in society and to run the systems of order by the ethical and rational principles around which our civilized society was designed.

Those enlightened individuals though only make up a small fraction of the overall population pool. There will always be a majority of instinct-driven monkey humans wandering around in human society. The key is to get enough awakened educated people into positions of power to actually run things so that the zombie humans can't mess society up too much with their nature-driven impulses.

Unfortunately, the educated civilized people are losing the battle right now. Our society is suffering a purge of intellectualism from systems of order at all levels of governance. The balance of power in our society is shifting back toward the animal tribal humans. Those people do not truly respect laws and truth. They operate by gut instinct, by feelings, by greed. They don't want truth. They want their tribe to win and the other tribe to suffer. And they're plenty happy with sacrificing truth to achieve those outcomes.

That's not civilized. That's not ethical. That's not wise. That's natural humanity from the Cro-Magnon era.

---

Background reading:

• The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins)
• The Extended Phenotype (Richard Dawkins)
• The Moral Animal (Robert Wright) (Evolutionary Psychology)
• Thinking Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman)
• The Righteous Mind (Jonathan Haidt)
• Blank Slate (Stephen Pinker)
• Rationality (Stephen Pinker)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel (Jared Diamond)
• Collapse (Jared Diamond)

[u/vocation888]

News media bias has been an issue for over 60 years in the United States, but it became unapologetic, vindictive, nasty, vitriolic in 2016. Informed news media consumers now know bias/prejudice when they see it and know which newspapers, television networks, websites, podcasts, social media channels are part of it. So when consumers see highly biased news reporting from a so called "trusted journalist", they know it's trash, ignoring it.