Freakonomics Radio - 215. Why Do We Really Follow the News?

Episode Date: August 6, 2015

There are all kinds of civics-class answers to that question. But how true are they? Could it be that we like to read about war, politics, and miscellaneous heartbreak simply because it's (gasp) entertaining?

Checkity, check, check, check. Okay, we're talking to Maya, Anya, and Logan. So first thing I want you to do is I want you to each introduce yourself. Just say your name. Hello, I am Anya, and I am 13 years old. Anya's my kid. Hi, I'm Logan, I'm 13 years old. Maya and Logan are two of her friends.

At school, in history class, they have a current events unit. Once a week, the teacher assigns them a news article to read, or the kids pick their own from the New York Times, the BBC, CNN. The Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal. Okay. And then the students write an essay about the article. So when the teacher asks you to do this current events reading,

what is, like like the point? Do you ever discuss that? Like what does the teacher say that you're trying to accomplish by reading a current event article and relating it to the history? So I think that it's really important to read current events because we're in this little bubble at our school. And so it's important to see outside of the bubble so we can improve what's not in our school and what's not as protected. So that's really interesting. So that's like reading the news in order to be kind of like a better person. Logan, would you think, is that kind of what, how you see it too? Just so our generation can make better decisions than the past generations have maybe. Interesting. So let me ask you this. Do you keep up with stuff because you feel it's the quote

right thing to do or because you like it? I think it's just because it's a part of the world that we live in and we want to know about it. And especially as we get older, we want to become a part of it, too, even more. So we want to know our surroundings. Also, I think that reading about the news may make people smarter. It helps you just think about everything and you really... Like it gives you perspective, it sounds like you're saying. Perspective, which I think is really important.

Their explanations for following the news sound believable, don't they? Even a little bit noble. And their explanations may explain why you follow the news to the extent that you do follow it. But what if we're all deceiving ourselves? What if we really follow the news to the extent that you do follow it. But what if we're all deceiving ourselves? What if we really follow the news just to entertain ourselves? This is CNN Breaking News. First, our breaking news. Going right now to some breaking news. We've got some breaking news out of Miami.

Stand by if you will. That story and more coming up after this short break. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dupner. Today's question, why do we really follow the news? Now, if you think of why you go home at night and watch the 6 o'clock news, you don't want to see the news in order to make better decisions in your life. You're probably there in order to be entertained.

And that's the aspect we're trying to bring in. That's the economist Alex Frankel. In our previous episode, we talked to him and two of his colleagues, Jeff Ely and Amir Kamenitsa, about a paper they've written called Suspense and Surprise. Here's Ely. We view the construction and the development of suspense and surprise and other aspects of entertainment as basically optimally economizing on a scarce resource, which is the ability to change someone's beliefs.

In other words, our ability to be surprised or to experience suspense is limited. So if you are making suspenseful movies or writing mystery novels, you need to dish out these components very strategically. That's what we mostly talked about in the last episode, movies, novels, also sports. But then the conversation turned to suspense and surprise in the context of the news. I think the way that economists have tended to think about the news is that surprise and suspense aren't a part of it at all. There's no entertainment value. There's a value of information because it tells you what to do.

But that's not the way these economists see the news. Or maybe I should say how these economists see how we see the news. Just think about how a TV news show works. You know, when you go to a commercial, they'll typically tell you a little bit about the story that's about to come, enough to sort of generate suspense about what they're going to tell you after the commercial break. But, you know, without fully revealing it so that, you know, you have something to anticipate and a reason to stay tuned through the commercial break. You know, that would probably not be so relevant if you were just trying to be informed. I find it very kind of liberating to hear you say this because I guess because it jives with my view of a lot of what news is and why people consume news. You know, we sort of tell ourselves we consume news to make ourselves more informed citizens

and so we can keep up with things for reasons I don't know why. I don't know why it's important that I keep up with Yemen, for instance. I have no idea why that's actually important, unless we think about it in terms of what you just said, which is that it might entertain me. Maybe Yemen doesn't entertain me, but other things do, and therefore that gives me reason. But that statement is a little bit heretical in circles of civic duty and news consumption, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. There's a view that certain transformation of news into entertainment has been a great kind of downfall of civic society. But, you know, that kind of blames the news as opposed to the lack of interest in news when it's not entertaining. And I feel like it would be great to collect some data of the kind that I think hasn't been collected before. To what extent does entertainment lead to a more informed populace?

I would love to know whether having a character like Herman Cain run in the Republican primaries makes the voters better informed as to what the true, the final candidates policies are. I don't think there's any data, I've never heard of any study that actually tries to pin down the way in which this sort of drama and entertainment element of primaries is a contributor to a more informed public. But how can it be that this realm around which there are so many truisms, or maybe just one big truism, which is that, you know, the news is so important for our fulfillment of civic duty, and it makes us, quote, better voters and more informed voters. I mean, however true or not that truism may be, what does it say about what we don't know about how people actually consume news and become informed and maybe vote on it? And what does it say about the incentives to follow along the news and the incentives to vote?

So economics poses this something of a paradox that we say that people should never vote. It's never worth your time to learn about candidate positions. It's never worth your time to even walk to the polling booth because your vote isn't going to determine the election. There are millions of other votes. Why even bother? Now, I personally do vote. I don't agree with that. But why do I vote? Why do I care? Well, for me, I care about the policies a lot. But there's an aspect that feels a lot like watching a sports game to me. I have a team I'm rooting for. I feel like I can, you know, help my team when I go out to vote for them.

When I'm watching the news, you know, I'm an economist, I do listen to the policies. But I'm also really engaged with the horse race aspect of it. That's, I'm an economist. I do listen to the policies, but I'm also really engaged with the horse race aspect of it. That's kind of the fun part. And then the policy part is the more eating your vegetables part. And so I think that, you know, the treatment of news as entertainment and bringing this horse race aspect in, I think it can make people better informed. It can get them involved. And that's probably a good thing.

It has what we'd call positive externalities that when people are more informed, they'll make better voting decisions, even if they aren't voting for the reasons we think they should be voting. Aaron Powell So if that's the case, that you are viewing a certain kind of news as large part entertainment, if not primarily entertainment, can I, can, you know, a person like me or anyone listening to this program just sort of acknowledge that politics is essentially a sport or at least some phases of politics?

And that if I consider it less interesting than another sport, that I'd rather watch a football match, for instance, I can just do that and not feel guilty about it rather than feel, you know, like I have to follow the thing that people say is virtuous? No, that doesn't follow at all. The entertainment value of politics is one of the reasons why people pay attention to politics. It's entirely independent from the ethical, moral, civic duty question of whether it is wrong not to try and know about the candidates you're going to vote or whether it's wrong not to vote. It very well could be the case that entertainment component of politics is what drives a lot of people to pay attention to it and still be the case that it's absolutely, you know, wrong for you not to try and be more informed about policies. I think you can boil the difference down to the externalities. You do not benefit the world by knowing that LeBron James hit a buzzer beater yesterday to tie up the series against the externalities. You do not benefit the world by knowing that LeBron James hit a

buzzer beater yesterday to tie up the series against the Bulls. But even though you watch politics for the same reason, you do benefit the rest of the world by finding out the consequences of your vote. What's the proof for that, that I do benefit the world. Well, okay, so that's perhaps a deep question. But for sure, if voting is about choosing the right policy, and the right policy means finding out the consequences of different policies under consideration and then making a choice based on that, then the more informed you are, the more likely your vote is going to lead in the direction of a good policy as opposed to a bad one. And so everyone is going to benefit from the good policy that results from your vote.

But if voting is about just deciding how to divide up the spoils between your class and the other social class, then maybe it's a little bit more debatable about whether you're making the world a better place by finding out what's the best way to tilt things in your group's advantage and voting in that way. needs to a more informed populace. But a couple of other economists, Matt Jensko and Jesse Shapiro, have found evidence of a link between news consumption and voter turnout. The evidence is pretty strong, pretty overwhelming by this point, that overall, the more people consume news, especially news about politics, the more likely they are to vote. That's Jensko. He's at Stanford University. You know, why people vote is sort of a mystery in some sense that people have wrestled with for a long time. But a lot of our intuitions about that would say,

I'm more likely to vote if I care about which way the outcome goes. If I think I really want this guy to win and it's going to be a disaster if this other guy wins. In that kind of situation, I'm more likely to vote and more likely to be engaged. And in order to feel that way, I have to know something about who those people are. So we see that if you go back in time and look at places where new newspapers open up in a town where people hadn't had a newspaper before, people become more likely to vote. If you look at the introduction of radio, you see that where radio first opened up, that increased the number of people voting. But the introduction of TV, interestingly, did not have the same effect.

Jensko could measure this because different parts of the country got TV at different times. What you see is places that got TV actually saw declines in voter turnout and political participation. And so you might think that's sort of at odds with the general rule that more media seems to be associated with more turnout or more information seems to be associated with more turnout. What you see if you dig a little deeper is I think the reason that TV had a different effect was what TV replaced was a lot of time that people were spending with other media. And in particular, newspapers and radio in the 1940s and 50s and 60s had much more coverage of politics than TV did. In the first years, TV newscasts were just 15 minutes long. Mostly people were watching Westerns and entertainment programs. So although it was a new medium, it actually had the effect of reducing the amount of political

information people were getting. And so consistent with all the other evidence, if you crowd out a lot of political information and people have less news, less information about the political process, then they vote less and are less engaged. These days, of course, there's plenty of political information on TV with a flock of cable channels, especially devoted to politics, or should we say devoted to political entertainment? What's the story on this Trump thing? Is this a campaign or a comic book? Let's try hardball. On the Inside Politics Table, get you out ahead of the big political news just ahead. Neal Blinken-Henderson, what do you got?

So we've been talking about Hillary Clinton and how liberal she is. I think a lot of people would say there's entertainment value to news, but I think that by itself kind of misses something important. The important part, Jensko says, comes more from psychology than economics. He argues that we follow news events, a war, a drought, a celebration, whatever, in large part to make sense of our own lives. There's a lot of research in psychology about the importance of telling stories and building narratives for people. People like to look at their own lives as a story. They like to see kind of the arc of the challenges that they overcame and define themselves as a character in that story. And to me, that makes a lot of sense of why we care so much about news. Because

if what I'm thinking about all of the time is my own life story and my own role in it, then what's happening in the world around me is the context that that story is happening in. Okay. So where does that craving come from to place ourselves in the story? We'll get to that right after the break. We'll also hear from one more economist, Steve Levitt, about his media diet. So I don't read newspapers anymore unless they just appear in front of me. And we'll hear from Jill Abramson, the former top editor of The New York Times. For some reason, I have always had to read The New York Post in print every day.

And like one of the first things that I look at is my horoscope. I'm Pisces, if you're curious. Is it pretty accurate generally, you find? It's uncanny. From WNYC, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. Jesse Shapiro is an economist at Brown. He frequently collaborates with Matt Jensko, whom we heard from earlier. They often study the media. To Shapiro, the news as entertainment idea is completely plausible. I think we benefit from the news being entertaining and interesting because that also causes us to become more informed than we would be if it were blind and uninteresting. Fair enough. Let's also shake off our

modern myopia and look back in time to see where this craving came from. I think we come from a long line of people who had an intense itch to learn what was happening around them. Mitchell Stevens is a professor of journalism at NYU. He's written extensively on the history of news and news consumption. Well, there's a lot of anthropological research which demonstrates that if you have a society, they have a way of finding news. So it seems to be basic to being human. And my explanation for that is that the hominids who were not news-hungry were less likely to survive. And the two things that probably were most significant in this news for survival were sex and violence. So I think we're genetically disposed to pursue news and also, in some sense, to pursue forms of sensational news.

Whether it's genetic or not, personally, I'm always a little skeptical of evolutionary arguments like these. Our demand, Stephen says, has hardly abated. I think very little of the news actually today is of practical value. For one thing, we don't live in a society that has all that many threats encroaching upon us. Most of us live pretty safe lives and most of us know where to find food in the supermarket. Most of us know where to look for romance, where to live our social lives. So I think a lot of the functions that news used to perform way back when in hunter-gatherer times and preliterate societies, it's no longer performing regularly. Yet our itch to be aware, to know what's going on around us

remains. And that itch expresses itself in tabloid newspapers and, you know, silly television shows and in lists on BuzzFeed. One of the things journalism has always been is a form of entertainment, of diversion, of taking your mind off other things. Okay, so we consume news for entertainment value. We consume news in order to place ourselves in the story, see how we stack up. We consume news in order to make sense of the world around us, perhaps even for pro-social reasons, as my daughter and her friends argue. But let's not discount another reason why we consume the news, pure personal utility. So, Levitt, describe for me your daily media diet. Which of the world's leading newspapers do you read and which magazines and which TV news shows do you watch, etc.? So, I don't read newspapers anymore unless they just appear in front of me.

That's Steve Levitt. He's my Freakonomics friend and co-author. And indeed, my total consumption of news more or less boils down to whenever I'm incredibly bored and I can't think of anything else to do, I go to CNN.com and I just see what the headlines are. And then after I finish that, I go to Golfchannel.com and I see what's going on in the world of golf. And that's my news. And why don't you consume more news? Is it because you don't think it's worthwhile? Is it because it's not fun? Is it because you've got other things that are more important to do? So I'm not interested in politics. And that's one reason I don't consume a lot of news. And I don't have a political bent,

so I don't get excited about knowing what the right or the left thinks about some issue. And I don't care about controversies in that way. So in the sense that CNN kind of reports everything, I don't feel a whole lot of need to go out and get the different takes. So in essence, I think I want to know if anything important happened so I can figure out if I should do something about it. Give me an example of something important happening and whether you should do something about it. So for instance, if I read in the news that there was a global pandemic that was about to put all life in jeopardy, then I would know to lock my doors and shut my windows and cancel my classes and try to stay inside, something like that. I'm still waiting for that one to happen. Let me ask you this a little bit. For people who do feel compelled to really follow the news in a way that you don't, in a way that I less and less do, what do you think is the upside? What's in it for them? Do they feel like they're becoming better voters and citizens? Is it kind of to have

a moral superiority over people like maybe you or me who don't know everything that's going on everywhere? I certainly think that reading newspapers makes you seem smart. That people who read the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Economist magazine and Time magazine, when you talk to them, they're never short on, oh, God, I just read this amazing article in the Times magazine. And I think that's a very valuable thing. I mean, I think that's the best argument, or I think that's a really good argument for why someone should invest time in reading newspapers. So it's got personal utility, yeah? Yeah, it's personal. I mean, I can't think of any other reason, really, any great reason other than personal utility for reading newspapers.

I mean, people can talk about the need to be informed and whatnot. But it's very tricky to motivate being a news junk someone who produces news, not just consumes it. I think it's perfectly okay to think of it as fun. Jill Abramson is a former executive editor of The New York Times. She was fired last year, and she has no hesitation using that word. There are a lot of people who prefer to use euphemisms of various types, but I spent my whole career telling the truth. So it doesn't bother me to say I was fired, and it doesn't bother me to be asked about it. Abramson is still in the profession.

I'm a journalist. I teach a journalism class at Harvard, and I'm writing a book about the future of news. And what's her media diet? For some reason, I have always had to read the New York Post in print every day. And like one of the first things that I look at is my horoscope. I'm Pisces, if you're curious. Is it pretty accurate generally, you find? It's uncanny. But, you know, obviously, I read the New York Times like all day long, mainly on my iPad app. You know, I luxuriate in the Saturday and Sunday print paper sections.

I look at the journal every day, the Wall Street Journal. I read Politico. I read Mike Allen's column every day. I read a lot of magazines. What kind of magazines? The New Yorker, the Atlantic. I have some women's fashion magazines in there. Allure. Do you watch any Fox News? I do. I watch a little Fox News every day. And

it's kind of a funny reason. But the gym where I work out, they have CNN and Fox. And for some reason, the sound on CNN has been broken for like almost two years. So it's a it's a kind of quasi voluntary. It's a force. But I've come to value it. Abramson believes a big part of why we consume the news is simply our appetite for a narrative, for a story. She, along with a lot of other people, got hooked on the podcast Serial last year, which reexamined an old murder case. You know, I was just reminded of, you know, the days when Charles Dickens used to publish his novels in serial form. And there'd be people standing, Londoners standing on the docks, waiting for the latest chapters of the old Curiosity Shop to be delivered

because they were dying to know, like, is little Nell going to be all right? You know, that's part of the way we humans are wired. We love stories. But journalism also serves a much larger function. All right, I'm going to get all heavy on you now. I'm going for the heavy. It tracks back to the founders. And, you know, the First Amendment is first for a reason.

They, you know, felt so passionately about the importance of the press and freedom of the press because they saw the press as the main tool in fighting unbridled, overly centralized tyrannical power, which they felt Britain had represented. So it's been the importance of the press informing the people and holding power accountable is enshrined in the First Amendment and was seen as a way of making sure that this country stayed free. Abramson argues this importance has in fact grown over time. Especially in today's society where you look at the corporate power and influence that's been accrued, especially here in the United States, but globally too. And the resources you need as a journalist to really dig behind this armada

of PR people and various screens of secrecy, it's really the toughest kind of reporting there is. And after the financial meltdown in 2008, the Times, and I was very involved in this series, did a series called The Reckoning, where we really did try to hold specific individuals and institutions very specifically accountable for very specific wrongdoing in those cases. And, you know, it's discouraging now, these years later, to see that the actual prosecution for what seemed to me like egregious criminal acts in many cases were either settled away or most people walked away. But I still think even if the political system fails and there aren't immediate results, that there is value in raising people's awareness and that that is the job of journalism.

I mean, I guess that is the central question here that I want to, that we're talking about, which is, is the belief that you plainly have held for a long time and still plainly hold that the role of journalism is to... Hold power accountable. Yeah, exactly. And perhaps facilitate reform at the very least, create public awareness and so on. And yet, you know, one might argue when it comes to campaign finance that all the journalism in the world doesn't equal one Supreme Court vote in a way, if you look at the reality of it. It's absolutely true. Yeah. I guess what I worry or what I think maybe is that the idea that it's righteous to stay informed about the news and therefore the reason that a lot of people do keep up with the news is to kind of morally assuage ourselves, to persuade ourselves maybe that we're, you know, doing the right thing by being informed so that we can, you know, as readers, we can kind of tsk tsk the corruption in Chinese politics, even though it probably doesn't affect my life at all. Or we can gnash our teeth and wring our hands every us, you know, sound informed, perhaps, and that I wonder what the real value is to us, the users, consumers, readers. Well, I mean, some of the value is utilitarian. I mean, people

value the idea of at least seeming informed, even if they're not very informed. They don't want to go out to lunch and a conversation starts and not know what people are talking about. That is one practical reason. Right. But I mean, that's almost a status. I mean, if you wanted to be reductive and maybe a little pejorative. Well, I think that is one of the motivators. And then what about the notion of, you know, an informed me weakening, because I think right now, like, the news landscape is so siloed, and people are getting so much of their news and information from places that they agree with, that I'm not sure, you know, that many consumers get exposed to a full, rich palette of different takes on different issues that would really help them.

I think a lot of news just confirms people's prejudices. Indeed, there is evidence to back this up, that the news landscape is siloed, and that many of us only visit the silos that give us the news we like. We talked about this a few years back with Dan Kahan. I'm a professor of law at Yale Law School. Kahan is also a member of the Cultural Cognition Project. It uses empirical research methods to study how people's values, their ideological predispositions, affect their perceptions of risk and how they factor in scientific evidence. Consider the notion of climate change.

Some people consider the risks grave and others are skeptical. Kahan says you might think the difference is explained by how scientifically literate a person is. If you thought that the problem was people don't know as much as scientists know, then you'd predict that as people know more about science, they're going to become more concerned about climate change risks, and that doesn't happen. In fact, we found the opposite. So as people become more science literate, cultural polarization increases. If you have the kind of cultural predisposition that makes you skeptical of environmental risks, then as you become more science literate, you're even more skeptical. If you have the kind of

cultural predisposition that makes you concerned about environmental risk. If you have the kind of cultural re-establishment that makes you concerned about environmental risk, as you become more science literate, you become even more concerned. And the reason is, as Jill Abramson said, that we've all gotten pretty good at seeking out news, or maybe I should put it in quotes, news, that confirms our underlying beliefs. And the smarter you are, the better you are at finding news that confirms your biases. This is particularly interesting if you're the one making the news and thinking about it as a product that you're selling. If you are trying to make the news more appealing,

more entertaining to whatever audience you're selling to with all their built-in biases, wouldn't that inevitably make the news you produce more predictable? Which means that even though we began this conversation talking about the news as a vehicle of surprise and suspense, it may be that a lot of us don't really want any surprise or suspense. We want to be told a story that matches the story we are already telling ourselves about ourselves. Coming up on the next Freakonomics Radio, we go way, way back into the Wayback Machine and play you the first episode we ever made. It's called The Dangers of Safety. We talk about the modern football helmet,

which is so safe that it's become a weapon. The first thing you get is everything starts to vibrate. It's like, whoo, like if you laid your head on your cell phone and put it on vibrate and someone called you, that's what it felt like for me. And we ride in a so-called death-proof Mercedes with none other than Glenn Beck. What? So I didn't stop at the stoplight and I'm going 190.

What? I can flip it? I'll survive? It's the death-proof car. What a dope. Freakonomics Radio, 2010 vintage. That's next time. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Greg Rosalski, Caroline English, Susie Lechtenberg, Merritt Jacob, and Christopher Wirth. We had help this week from Rick Kwan, Andrew Dunn,

Gaines Laguerre, and Kasia Mihailovic. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more. Thank you.