It has been well remarked, that in pre-packaging the
selection of articles they show you, based on your personal browsing history
and what their metrics predict you’ll want to see, news outlets and news
aggregators are swaddling their readers in solipsism, so that what you ever get
to see is a foregone conclusion.
That, superadded to the bias problems of outlets with an agenda to push.
I try to fight this, in part by sampling a wide variety of
outlets in various languages and countries (the taboos in America differ from
those in Europe, for example, so that a story suppressed in one venue might be reported in another). But access to these (apart from
those I regularly check into as a matter of course, like nzz.ch and figaro.fr
and heise.de/tp and derstandard.at, usw.) is generally, again, via aggregators -- news.google.*…. Naturally, the Google staff may have
their own slant, but hopefully that differs from country to country.
Recently, however, something quite disturbing happened, on
the British version --news.google.co.uk [not a typo:
.co, not .com]: They suddenly started adding entire sections grouped
by special-interest material.
(This happened only on this Mac, not on our tablet running Android.)
The only previous one, “Suggested for You”, is unobjectionable, being clearly so labeled, and moreover
they offer a “Still interested?
Yes/No” opt-out option.
For example, they flag articles about
the TV show
Blindspot, a holdover from when I nursed hopes (since
dashed)
that it might prove any good.
But now additionally, all of a sudden, from nowhere, there
are sections, titled with the same font as the standard ones that everybody
sees (unless you specifically opt out), like “World” or “Business”, clearly
culled (though very spottily) from my search history:
“Physics” [this, in addition to the
“Sci/Tech” section that is standard]
“Computer Security” [ditto]
“topological” [sic, this one
lower-case; the relic of once search on the math topic; but results were flooded
with engineering senses like “topological insulators”]
“yemen” [again lower-case --
bizarre]
That is marginally more concerning, since I didn’t ask for
it, and since the selection is odd (I haven't searched on "topological" for well over a year). But what is really hair-raising is that, here on
news.google.co.uk, the section that I mostly log in for, namely “U.K.”, has been entirely suppressed, and replaced
by the same “U.S.” section (today’s top story on this supposedly U.K.-focussed
site: “Headless body found in Texas Pick-up”).
Why they did that is baffling. Certainly it bears no relation to my own clicking history (since that is the one and only section I ever click on at that site), let alone to common sense (suppress the U.K. section for someone specifically asking for .co.uk).
So now there are two countries whose press I cannot access via news.google -- the other being Spain, which Google stopped indexing a while back, in (justified, IMO) protest against an overreaching law passed by the Spanish parliament.
[The Label for this piece
La société du spectacle, a notion popularized by the
situationistes half a century ago, and
in the U.S. by Boorstin’s
The Image and subsequent works..
All that has changed since then is
that, increasingly, the spectacle we watched is an individualized
peep-show booth.]
~
The decline in quality -- in sheer competence -- at the news
outlets (television especially, but newspapers as well) over the past couple of
decades, is noticeable.
An interesting perspective from the White House messaging
guy:
“40 percent of newspaper-industry
professionals have lost their jobs over the past decade … The average reporter
we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of
being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know
nothing.”
~
Facebook (which I never go near -- or anyhow, not knowingly)
likewise pushes certain news stories over others, and has lately been embroiled
in controversy over their slant.
To
be fair, though, the company has been under intense pressure from the Rot-Grün-
Merkel
faction
to censor
not only news recommendations, but
individual Facebook pages, cleansing them of opinions that dissent from the
Willkommenseuphorie route to the
destruction of Germany.
(We here at WDJ
suffer, as you see, from
no such bias.)
At another level -- more fundamental -- than that of
issue-specific bias, is the general self-generated self-reflecting
echo-of(echo-of(echo-of…)) incestuous nature of “trending” stories -- trending
because they’re trending, like celebrities famous for being famous.
-- Well, so long as we’re beating up on Facebook, we hereby
huffily object to their far-from-adequate plugging of this blogspot, the “World
of Dr Justice”,
pourtant the most
respected source of worldly and otherworldly insight apart from
The Onion
(
en revanche, we’re much funnier than they are).
~
In an interview the other day, an economist called the
market position of entities like Amazon and Google, monopolies on a scale not
seen since the days of the robber barons -- of Standard Oil and the
railroads. But while those
behemoths primarily impacted our pocketbooks, the current cyber-masters are in
a position to mess with our minds.
The comparison is obvious enough, once made; but it is hard to wrap your heads
around it, since monopolists (we are brought up knowing) are men in suits, with
smokestack hats and villain whiskers -- not cheeky dudes in chinos.
All the economist could come up with, by way of remedy, was
to somehow nationalize all that stuff, “Like the Post Office” -- a comparison
less than reassuring.
The segment struck me since, just the day before, none other
than Donald Trump had brought up much the same point, in the process
pointing out that the agenda-drenched
billionaire Bezos, the king of the
Amazon, bought up (the bedraggled remains of)
the
Washington Post -- his new toy.
For this Trump was sniffily dismissed by the knowing, as
naïve and ill-informed. (Much as
Hillary and her minions dismissed candidate Obama as “naïve”.)
(Hey, just sayin'; credit where credit is due.)
[TBC]
