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The One Problem That Trumps All Other Problems
We won’t fix anything until we fix this first, and we have do it now.
I recently visited my father. Now that he’s vaccinated (and so are my wife and I), we brought the kids to see him for the first time in two years. My father, as you might expect from a baby boomer aged 72, is on the lower-tech end of the spectrum. He still watches cable TV, his cellphone flips open, and he subscribes to The Week magazine.
A few months ago, I wrote that we’d be seeing more uncovering of a major issue in modern society not getting the attention it should. That issue is how media conglomerates profit from cultural division and polarized politics, leading to the general “footballification” of public discourse. Picking up the latest copy of The Week in my father’s living room, I was pleased to read the editor’s letter, which comments on the post-Trump audience slump for news outlets (mostly liberal-leaning ones). Trump, while arguably a terrible president, was hugely profitable for anyone trafficking in news, especially the big conglomerates.
Pondering where news organizations might go from here, The Week’s managing editor Mark Gimein wrote, “One option is the tried-and-true strategy of polarization. This is the path that Fox News has pursued, with success. It is also the approach that in Facebook’s research proved to consistently…
