Thinking democratically

Why we need to use more of our social brain

Donald Trump’s recent comments about Australia’s Ambassador to the US, former PM Kevin Rudd, generated hundreds of repetitious articles about a story contrived to achieve precisely that sort of response. It is a perfect example of how the media wastes the time of its audience with “news” that is largely irrelevant to their well-being and thus helps explain why so many people actively avoid the news in the first place.

This sort of bombardment degrades the average reader’s experience of news in general, and if a newspaper or news website or radio station or television broadcast is half-full of content people have almost no interest in then they will not just avoid that content, they will avoid the news all together.

If that is the case, why would media professionals allow themselves to cover the story in a manner that drives away their audience? The answer points to a structural problem within the industry, where the interests of the audience and the people producing the news are out of …