Thursday, January 8, 2009

The New York Times and the Information Theory of the Leisure Class

Kenneth Anderson has put a long essay up on his website - Law of War and Just War Theory Blog- which is a must read for anyone interested in facts vs. opinion.

As a blogger, his point about "confirmation bias" is well taken and always worth protecting yourself against it. But the meat of his essay is the holding up of the New York Times' failure to distinguish between facts and opinions. This action is tantamount to a betrayal of everything we rely on newspapers for. A sample of this magnificent essay follows....

As a business model – not politics – I’m skeptical this can work on a daily basis. There are reasons why magazines appear weekly or monthly, not daily. As politics – well, the Times’s relentless cramdown of skewed, confirmation bias opinions-as-facts this election cycle represents one of two things. The cramdown might so annoy that segment of its readership that still cares about facts on the traditional basis of them being, well, true that it recalculates price in relation to facticity and drops the paper subscription, crippling the business model even further. In that case, I sincerely hope that the Times’s and its employees think the political self-satisfaction was worth it. Or, alternatively, the cramdown might handsomely pay off in cementing the emotional bond ever more closely with the core subscribing, offline readership and allow it to raise the price, directly and indirectly, to a smaller, wealthier, more devoted leisure class audience. But is there really room for a daily New Yorker?

No comments:

Post a Comment