Your Media Diet is Immoral

Moral determinations require context. Modern journalism, which faces a powerful tension between the context that is morally relevant and the context which makes a good narrative, has to cope with difficult ethical problems. However, journalism is not really serving two masters, the ethics of journalists on the one hand and the craft of storytelling on the other. No, journalism serves but one master—its audience. If a particular outlet is morally deficient, its audience must bear at least some culpability, for no outlet can continue without its audience.

Every hour of every day an unfathomable quantity of stories are pushed out into the world. The number of stories published in the 20th century can credibly be said to dwarf the sum of stories published for the whole of human history up to that point. Now, it would not surprise me if we publish more stories in a single day than we did for the entirety of the 20th century. It’s hard to quantify such things, but I’m less interested in specific estimates than with a point we can all agree on—professionally produced content alone is going out in a quantity and at a speed unprecedented in the prior existence of the human animal.

And animals is what we are—biological creatures with physical limits. There are two important and related limits that I would like to focus on: the limits of our truth-seeking capabilities, as best documented in the biases literature, and the limits of what Daniel Kahneman calls our “slow thinking” capabilities. In the first case, I refer to the fact that we are not some ideal Bayesian-updating computer, but in fact rely primarily on a ton of mental shortcuts that are usually useful but can and do often lead us systematically awry. In the second case, I refer to the fact that deliberation and making choices consume energy, just as surely as physical exercise does.

What this adds up to is the simple fact that there’s a finite amount of things we can devote careful thought to on a given day, and the more we burn our energy doing other things the smaller that limit becomes. As Kahneman and Haidt and others point out, even when you’re deliberating carefully there are shortcuts going on in the background. Nevertheless, for something like a math problem, “slow thinking” is much more likely to perform well when we are rested and our blood sugar is high, relative to where we are by the end of a full day of mental or physical activity. Effective deliberation is bounded by these conditions.

When a news story blows up, just how much of this precious resource do you think people are willing to use to really question the context in which it is presented? Even our more telescopic friends do not have the stamina or the time to carefully investigate the relevant moral context of all of the stories that they consume. The feast is far too great, and the eating feels far too good, to examine all of the parts and bother to ask how all of it was made. And even if we were all so telescopic, the fact that these stories take place with people we do not know in places we do not live—in short, the fact that the circumstances of these stories are no part of our lives, handicap our ability to examine the particulars very thoroughly.

And most people are not so telescopic, or only take on the posture of being it. Nearly all of us prioritize deliberation about near things; what to wear today, how to best finish a task at our job, or what to say to comfort a friend going through something. And that’s how we should be. After all, the things that are in our lives are what we have the most context for.

Given the limited nature of careful deliberation, and given how our biases are likely to respond to out of context stories we carelessly consume, we are not likely judge most news stories accurately. This is a moral question in part because how people respond to a given event have practical, often negative implications for the people involved in the event. People lose their jobs, or have their reputation tarnished for the rest of their lives, because of the reckless media diets of the general public.

The only ethical path is to be more selective. Storytelling in the public sphere, in its best form, is like an ongoing conversation that has no end in sight. Ask yourself: what conversations matter to you? Which are relevant to your life, and which are relevant to your interests? After figuring that out, be stricter about excluding stories that fall outside of those conversations. Be selective about the publications you read regularly, and seek to go deeper rather than broader in the conversations you follow. There’s only so much you can do while still remaining online—being on social media means getting a lot of stuff outside the bounds of what you want to pay attention to. But improvement in this area is possible. Clay Johnson has a lot of great thoughts on this in his book The Information Diet.

Most importantly, let go of any pretense of telescopic morality. It will only hold you back from the things that really matter, the things on which you can make a difference and for which you have the most context on which to deliberate.