When I was a teenager in Halifax — or shortly before — Halifax cable stations stopped taking their signal from Maine, and started taking the Detroit affiliates of ABC, NBC and CBS.
Over a couple years, a whole bunch of things changed: slang, clothes, attitudes. It was a textbook case of “you are what you eat.” When you’re being fed Detroit, you copy Detroit.
I think about that as the internet brings everything and everyone in through the same door.
The long and short of it is that there are plenty of people clamouring for your attention.
When I was a daily newspaper’s managing editor, one part of the job was giving stories — especially contentious stories — a rigorous going-over before they went in the paper. Even if you were an experienced reporter, you were expected to be able to defend your piece and back it up using your research and your interviews. Even if you were dealing with sources who would be anonymous in the article (for a variety of reasons) I’d have to know who they were, and where they fit — in other words, if they were actually in a position to know what they were talking about.
That’s not true on the internet, where clickbait is constant, untested and torqued.
Obviously, as a columnist, I want people to read the stories and opinion pieces we put in the paper and post online — but not by simply clicking on a link.
And if the people who sneer “that’s just clickbait” took a moment to, well, do the most basic bit of research, they’d know that clicks aren’t valuable to a newspaper or local advertisers.
Not in the way that “engaged time” is, the time you actually spend reading something thoroughly.
The long and short of it is that there are plenty of people clamouring for your attention. Some do their homework, and others specifically pander to your existing opinions, because they know they can find a profitable middle line between investing nothing in actually doing the work needed to write accurate stories, while also telling you exactly what you want to hear.
There is money, right now, in confirming people’s existing opinions, even if you’re confirming them with completely false information. Why? Because those who already believe what you’re saying won’t bother to check anything — even better, they’ll simply post or link what you write on their social media platforms as “proof” to bolster their own position. (That’s certainly a fact — not a week goes by that someone doesn’t send me “proof” that turns out to be easily demonstrable as bogus.)
At this point, there’s rafts of material out there to back up pretty much any position you want to take. As I said years ago, the biggest danger with the ability to gain widespread cheap and easy reach — the internet — is that the breadth of sources may be wider and wider every year, but shallower, as well.
A column by Peter Donolo in the Globe and Mail on the weekend argued that the wild world of wacky Trump supporters and the cult-like conspiracy theory world of Q-Anon can’t happen in Canada because the population is too small and the economic rewards too paltry to make it worthwhile to pander to the credulous.
In some ways, he’s right — we’re probably not going to build the superstar freak shows of the Sean Hannitys of the world.
But if you’ve spent years listening to the tone that surrounds public discourse — as I’ve been doing for more than three decades — you’d know that the public square has rarely been as rude, charged, offensive and downright unhinged as it is now.
I don’t know what fixes that.
All I know is that it’s dangerous.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.