Category Archives: Media

A recent paper by researchers at Cornell and Stanford confirmed what media watchers have observed over the last few years: the blogosphere tends to pick up topics covered in the mainstream media and keep them in circulation. And the reverse is occasionally true: sometimes topics acquire momentum in blogs before becoming important in mainstream media. The publication of the paper was reported today in the New york Times.

As the paper acknowledges, this general description of the interaction between blogs and mainstream media is nothing new. The authors have brought some rigor to the study of this media phenomenon, though, by building analytical tools that can quantify some characteristics of the news cycle. The researchers found, for example, that the usage of a given phrase tends to peak in mainstream online media some 2.5 hours before it peaks in blogs.

It’s a good study, and it’s backed up by some pretty cool tools that the researchers developed to identify common phrases and their variants, like “lipstick on a pig,” that serve as “signatures” for certain stories, and track and timestamp them as they appear across an giant set of online media. They can even identify which media outlets tend to lead the pack in picking up on stories before they become popular elsewhere. (Top two: hotair.com and talkingpointsmemo.com.)

The study even found a simple formula to describe and predict editorial judgement. The researchers found that “news sources imitate each other’s decisions about what to cover, but subject to recency effects penalizing older content.”

Nice. But I have a problem with all of this. First off, I don’t think that news organizations and blogs can harness the insights that flow from such a tool for any sustained benefit. It’s not obvious that publications that lead the news cycle can aggregate a larger audience or generate more advertising revenue than other sites.

Worse, I fear that a fine-grained understanding the news cycle will do more harm than good. Such tools have always been embraced by spinmeisters seeking to influence the news cycle. As these tools get better they become part of an influence arms race in which no one wins. All sides compete to control the news cycle, and achieve little more than the destruction of news, yielding no benefit to the public or the the civic function the news media is intended to serve.

This reminds me of a recent article by Cornell economist Robert H. Frank. Frank challenges the conventional wisdom, flowing from Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand,” that greed and competition end up producing the greatest good for all. On the contrary, competition can be wasteful and destructive, in economic systems and in the natural world. Frank suggests that the natural selection described by Darwin is a better framework for describing economic behavior than the invisible hand.

The central theme of Darwin’s narrative was that competition favors traits and behavior according to how they affect the success of individuals, not species or other groups. As in Smith’s account, traits that enhance individual fitness sometimes promote group interests. For example, a mutation for keener eyesight in hawks benefits not only any individual hawk that bears it, but also makes hawks more likely to prosper as a species.

In other cases, however, traits that help individuals are harmful to larger groups. For instance, a mutation for larger antlers served the reproductive interests of an individual male elk, because it helped him prevail in battles with other males for access to mates. But as this mutation spread, it started an arms race that made life more hazardous for male elk over all. The antlers of male elk can now span five feet or more. And despite their utility in battle, they often become a fatal handicap when predators pursue males into dense woods.

Frank notes that elk would be better off if they could agree to limit the size of their antlers. They can’t. But humans sometimes can come to such agreements, and would be better off if they did. “Individual and group interests are almost always in conflict when rewards to individuals depend on relative performance, as in the antlers arms race,” Frank writes.

So I see advances such as the study by the folks at Cornell and Stanford in a negative light. If only we could just not go there, I think we’d all be better off.

What do you think?