| This can’t be true, even theoretically. There’s a certain amount of information the world creates, and some fraction of that gets written up in the news. The first would seem to be vastly larger today, just because the human population has grown significantly and the reduction of poverty has brought far more people to a level where they work on “information-producing” endeavors. What fraction of that will be covered in the news media, in some form or another? The top segment, such as “who is the new prime minister of France” gets covered today as it did in the past. Similar news from smaller places probably gets covered more, because networks of correspondents have increased, communication has become easier, and the wire service model has had huge effects for efficiency. The same is likely true for the “long end” of domestic news. We should probably look at not just production, but also distribution: how much information is transmitted. While subscriptions have dropped off a cliff, distribution has vastly increased. I’m in Europe, but regularly read the NYT and dozens of other US outlets. That just wasn’t possible even in the recent past. They are defining information as “surprise”, but mixing the technological meaning with its common meaning at will. Am I surprised by the name of the next US Secretary of State? Sure, in the way that I had never heard the name before. I’d be more surprised by Whoopi Goldberg, but that doesn’t make the latter more “information-dense”. Newspapers today include all the scores of twelve different sports leagues from all over the world, which alone would likely dominate any actual measure of information. Then again, they dropped their listings of stock prices, which probably reduced that measure by 9x%. To recover, they should print some random number generators output, which is nothing but information according to the theory the article is (ab)using. Which just shows that “information” is ill-defined and probably useless to measure news quality. This blog post is really just the old complaint about a “liberal bias”, cargo-culting with sciency phrases. No surprise there. |