The Media Marches Us: An original piano composition

Reinventing the Media

The media may be our most powerful societal entity: It affects who we elect, the laws that get passed, what we buy.

And today's media has tools to do an ever better job. For example, using just a Twitter question, journalists can crowd-source interviews. With their cell phones, citizens can instantly transmit video of news events to major media outlets worldwide.

But today's media has become less helpful to the public because it has largely abandoned what I believe is its near-sacred responsibility to provide the full-range of benevolently derived perspectives on the issues of the day. Instead, their reporting tends to reflect their a priori biases.

The core cause: journalism schools' change in philosophy. In previous generations, J schools taught aspiring journalists to make all efforts to be fair and balanced. Now, the message more often is , "You have the opportunity to change the world."

Alas, most journalists and their bosses have spent little time in the real world. Their world view reflects what they learned in college, from their fellow journalists, and from their friends. Those influences tend to be overwhelmingly liberal: Academia is left-leaning, most people who enter journalism do so in part to change their world in that leftward direction, and they choose friends with similar views. Indeed surveys invariably find that most journalists are Democrats, Socialists, or Greens.

Combine journalists' leftist bias with the aforementioned okay from journalism schools to let your values rip, and the media we're exposed to has a decidedly left-of-center bias. Fox News, the only major conservative outlet, is so ridiculed by the other media that it now gets only a small mindshare of the public, especially among the intelligentsia, those most likely to vote and to influence policy.

Yes, much wisdom comes from left of center, but not all. But you wouldn't know that from the media. Not only do article topics and approaches to those topics tend to be left-biased, freelance articles and op-eds with right-of-center perspectives are generally rejected, censored, as are right-of-center books and movies submitted for review. When such items get reviewed, they generally get judged more on their ideology than the quality of the work.

It's time for a new core principle of journalism: That journalists indeed have a near-sacred responsibility to present the full range of benevolently derived ideas, to be the grist for full-dimensioned citizen conversations about the issues of our time.

For example, there are solid arguments for and against wealth redistribution, for and against Keynesianism, for and against undertaking massive efforts to cool the planet, for and against America's continuing as the world's policeman. Consumers of the media should not have to make far greater efforts to find right-of-center thought than to find left-of-center thought.

In my view, few things could improve America more than a media that opens rather than closes minds.

How the Mainstream Media Could Thrive

The demise of the traditional media outlets (newspapers, TV, magazines) has long been predicted, and indeed revenue has plummeted. The mainstream media has largely failed to figure out how to remain relevant in an era of nearly infinite free content: blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter streams, etc.

I think I've come up with the answer.

It has now become cost-effective for a major media outlet to create a rich, multi-faceted presentation of each story it covers. That is a level of sophistication and cost beyond the capability of most bloggers. I call it rich reporting.

So for example, while a blogger could certainly write a good article on whether Obama has been good for business, that piece would be grossly inferior to this week's Economist feature on that topic. That consists of a text-based debate between two world-class opponents on the issue. It's moderated by another world-class person. Readers can vote during the debate and change their votes as the debate proceeds. The up-to-the-minute pro/con voting is published in real time as are reader comments. After the debate, there's a post-mortem in which readers can participate. Now imagine that when the topic was appropriate, the debaters could introduce video evidence. Even without video, such content is much more appealing than nearly all citizen journalism.

Let's take another example. Many news stories start with an anecdote about a person. Imagine that the reader could elect to see that person's story in a one-minute, high-quality video. Or in the case of a science story, the viewer could see a vivid video presentation of the core complicated scientific process, for example, the mechanism via which global warming could be the result of sunspot explosions. Such high-quality user experiences would be infeasible for solo content providers to provide.

Rich reporting could even extend to the Web's most trafficked sites: porn. Sure, YouPorn and PornHub feature thousands of free porn videos, but most, I'm (ahem) told, are story-light, script-idiotic, visually grainy and/or poorly lighted. I believe there's a market for porn in which users would subscribe to a site with high-quality porn of varying lengths. Nick Bolton, New York Times writer and author of I Live in the Future says that porn industry has always led the way in the use of technology and predicts, "The next generation of porn and storytelling will be hyperpersonalized, placing you almost directly in the scene. That will give you control over what you see--almost like you're standing on a holodeck, a room that uses holographs to simulate reality."

The mainstream media has the advantage of money. If the MSM exercised the restraint to cover fewer stories but with rich reporting, I believe the mainstream media would not only thrive but provide a better product for all of us.