Musings and a bit of back-story about notfox.com and
a change that I want to make there:
Several years ago, probably around 2009, I was frustrated
with the clear bias that was found in all news reporting,
and even in just human discussion online in any form. The
thought occurred to me that perhaps a site could be built
that helped people identify those biases. At the time, I
envisioned a site where you could rate any URL based on
if it leaned left or right (that is how I saw things at
the time.) It was called "tiltish" in alpha testing, a
play on "lean" or "tilt" I suppose.
Mechanically, the site worked well, but another problem
arose. As I was working on it I began to follow all of
the major media outlets more closely. My frustration
morphed as I realized that bias wasn't, perhaps, the
real issue.
What I saw was that all of the media outlets, while
purposefully orchestrating what looked like an
idealogical bar-fight, in actuality were all in lock-
step in the things they reported. How could these news
organization, which on the surface pretended to hate one
another, be so in sync?
I began to look into some of the research on agenda
setting theory, cognitive accessibility, etc. The answer
was not only simple and clear, but it was essentially
publicly admitted: news media has, over the years,
carefully researched methods to control though and public
opinion, and consistently puts that research into practice.
More recently, born out of a new frustration, I created a
website called notfox.com. I won't bother with the back
story there, but the site was essentially a programmatic
approach to monitoring agenda setting and cognitive
accessibility in mass media. It's a simple site (nydel has
seen the source, it's very simple) that watches RSS
headlines for the top 6 news outlets, and looks for
keyword "confluence" or "convergance" across multiple
outlets. It lets you quickly see what the media is talking
about, or what they want you to think about.
The site has weekly and monthly tally reports, which let
you see, over time, what the main subjects have been. If
you follow the news at all, you perhaps already know that
"Trump" is quite the media darling. But what you might not
realize is that every outlet has been consistently hyper-
focused on "Trump" since before he was the "R" nominee.
I'll add here that the person my wife calls "Conspiracy
Joey" believes that Trump was bolstered by the media to
become the nominee/candidate for the "R's", and was then
shoehorned into office by the same media, and has been
a money-and-distraction-generating circus act ever since.
He is the #1 headline at all times, distracting in the
most ludicrous ways when necessary so that people don't
think about things that they ought to think about.
Whether you like him or not, I think Trump is primarily
a skilled actor that keeps the public looking in one
direction while whatever needs to happen happens.
Having subdued "Conspiracy Joey" for the time being,
back to notfox.com: I use it mainly to see if anything
real is going on in the world that the media is going
to bother to report on. If I hop on there and see
"Trump" at the top of the list, I know that nothing is
really going on (again, that the media is going to
bother with.) It's a way for me to make sure I am not
missing any "current events" without having to dig
through all the mess.
The problem now is that 99/100 days, it seems, Trump
is right up there on the top. And so, even going to
notfox.com feels like it has become futile. I already
dig around in obscure places to get more real info,
so why bother at all with the media? It's the current
events thing- I just can't shake it. On 9/11/2001 I
drove into work and had no idea what was going on in
the world. After that, I never wanted to feel so out
of the loop again.
So, I'm thinking that notfox.com needs another page.
This new page would simply identify, in the database,
what the main subject of the media's interest has been
over the last n months, and if that subject (keyword)
is the topic-du-jour at that moment, the page would
basically tell you that there's nothing to see. Maybe
the page could notify me (or anyone else) via email
if the top subject deviates from that main subject,
then I wouldn't even need to visit the site.
Maybe the page could just have a large header that reads
"Just TRUMP again" (replacing "Trump" with the new keyword
of the year, when it changes.) And if the mass media
decided something else was more important for a moment,
an email could be sent saying "<keyword> has dethroned
TRUMP for the moment!"
I know I'm ranting at this point. My hope is that I can
channel my years-long frustration with the news media
into some kind of useful tool, even if I'm the only one
that uses that tool. I'm particularly sensitive to being
manipulated by words, and so the media sets me on edge.
But maybe with this new page I'm contemplating, I can
distance myself from the mess even further. Learned
behaviors take a lot of effort to overcome.
----
Consequently, notfox.com does also have a gopher side[1]
over at SDF (where PHP is constantly broken.) Oddly, I
tend to use the HTTP version, I'm not sure why. I should
probably add the mechanism described above to the gopher
side as well.
[1]
gopher://sdf.org:70/1/users/tfurrows/politics/notfox/
