Why readers hate the media [Media Notes 36]

Andrew Porter, Issue 45: Why everyone hates the mainstream media. Policy for Pandemics.

When I became managing editor of the Ottawa Citizen in 2011, I started to have a lot of contact with readers — emails, phone calls, and a surprising number of handwritten letters. It was through this contact that I began to get a sense of what our readers really cared about, and what they valued in their subscription. Two things surprised me.

The first was how deeply readers cared about things like comics and puzzles, the daily weather map, horoscopes, and the TV listings. Somedays it seemed like we could have put a picture on A1 of the prime minister consorting with alien space prostitutes, but if we also printed the Sudoku upside down or got the “On this date in weather history” wrong, that is all I would hear about.

The second was that readers would often call, angry, because we had downplayed (or ignored, or missed) a story they knew all about from another media outlet. This baffled me at first. If you already know the story, why are you angry at us for not covering it? But I soon realized they weren’t angry because they had been left uninformed, they were angry because we had, in one way or another, let them down.

The lesson I took from this is that for a great many readers, consuming the news is not about gaining information. Instead, it is about routine (hence the calls about the messed up horoscopes and crosswords) and identity (hence the anger about missing stories they knew about). People don’t pick up a daily newspaper to learn new things. They do it to have their habits, lifestyles, values, and identities validated and reinforced.

If there is one thing the current media maelstrom has emphasized yet again, it’s that hatred for the mainstream media is something you find across the partisan spectrum. Understanding the role of identity in news consumption is the key to understanding why this is the case.

H/t Tyler Cowen.