How to cope with the media bias in the news market?

In the new age of information, the common wisdom dictates that people acquire and validate cues that endorse their prejudices. Nonetheless, it is likely that information providers were aware of such behavior even from the times when the print press was invented, taking advance to maximize the probability of inflicting influence in the society.

In an Economic theory on demand for news assumes that individuals read, watch and listen to information according to a function that maximizes the utility for given better decision-making function. The competition will stem among the news providers to create content as precise as possible in order to motivate the readers, consume and profit from that market transaction. On the other side, non-economic describes a more subtle relationship between accuracy and interest, that is, quality is not the only driver of demand, instead, the reader has to be entertained with the product as well. We can call this component as distraction utility (DU).

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So what? What is the problem? Two words, media bias. The issue stems when information providers do not compete for accuracy, rather captivate the eye of the individuals, which at the same time have group specific and idiosyncratic preferences, attitudes and biases that create extreme ideological positions. Historically, we have seen several events in which political extremism has provoked catastrophic outcomes to the society. Incidentally, slant in media is likely associated with media owners profit-maximizing behavior, since it is expected that the more a given covered event attracts “clicks”, the higher the revenue from ads.

Under this scenario, a natural action is to ask for more transparency from media providers, however, coordination cross-action within the society rarely has an impact on the content. Instead, we as readers are certainly affected by our own views of the world, nonetheless, we should push to a diversification of our sources. On this matter, @Mullainathan05[] proved what the non-so-common common sense:

“Competition forces newspapers to cater to the prejudices of their readers, and greater competition typically results in more aggressive catering to such prejudices as competitors strive to divide the market. On the other hand, we found that reader diversity is a powerful force toward accuracy, as long as accuracy is interpreted as some aggregate measure of the revelation of information to a reader who takes in all the news. Greater partisanship and bias of individual media outlets may result in a more accurate picture being presented to a conscientious reader.”

Some people might say, “hey, you do not need to create a complex model to find such as evident answer”. Well, that might be true, partly, because we can represent and track with are the component and find a logical starting course of action to improve social welfare.

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