on that video of Richard Spencer getting punched. Politicians may
seem extreme. But they are just responding to the public—and the
anger we are working up daily in our news feeds, our march to one
extreme.
Clicks vs. Responsibility
Forty-four percent of Americans, and much of the world, turns to
Facebook for its news.^33 Yet Facebook doesn’t want to be seen as a
media company. Neither does Google. The traditional thinking in the
market is that they resist this label because of their stock valuations.
Why? Because media companies only get a mildly insane valuation,
and the Four are addicted to iconospheric valuations—hundreds of
billions. That way everyone in their small and select work forces can be
not just comfortable, or prosperous, but filthy rich. And that’s a
retention strategy that is always en vogue.
Another reason they don’t want to be positioned as media
companies is more perverse. Respectable companies in the news
business recognize their responsibility to the public and try to come to
grips with their role in shaping the worldview of their customers. You
know: editorial objectivity, fact-checking, journalistic ethics, civil
discourse—all that kind of stuff. That’s a lot of work, and it dents
profits.
In the case I’m most familiar with, the New York Times, I saw that
editors not only wanted to get the news right; they tried to achieve a
balance in the stories they edited. If there was a bunch of news that
seemed to appeal to the left—say, Dreamers being deported or big
chunks of Antarctica breaking off and melting—they’d try to get some
conservative balance, maybe a David Brooks column attacking
Obamacare.
Now people can argue forever about whether the shrinking ranks
of responsible media actually achieve balance and get it “right.” Still,
they try. When the editors are debating which stories to feature, they
at least consider their mission to inform. Not everything is clicks and
dollars.