[Cookingboy]

The cynical side of me: accurate reporting isn’t profitable because there is very little demand for accurate reporting from the general public.

People want to read/watch news they want to believe or agree with, and instinctively they shun away from facts that causes cognitive dissonance with them. What they want is to believe their preferred news sources are objective, but they will do everything they can to avoid doing actual due diligence to verify that objectivity.

That’s why if we leave it to purely market economy, completely objective, facts based journalism will never be as profitable as sensationalism based stuff you see these days.

[qznc]

Even more meta, but one of the really big questions is: How to give people what they need instead of what they want?

I think it was pg who said "make something people want". If the plan is to get rich that is the way to go. If you want to improve the world, you should build something people need. Unfortunately, they often don't want it or don't want it enough to pay for it which makes the endeavor unsustainable.

[perl4ever]

But does it make sense to frame this as a statement about human beings, rather than a statement about what is logically required by the evolutionary-style process of information multiplying? Regardless of where society's starting point was, when it's really easy to transmit information, the information that gets transmitted the most is the kind that doesn't demand analysis first.