When I was a child, the media’s role was mostly about spreading information and making it accessible to large numbers of people. This allowed for information of real world events to spread and for people to be informed about what was happening. This is what we call the news today.
This was followed by media companies spreading less news and more opinions. This meant integrating reflections and thoughts about the news into points of view. Opinions turned out to be useful for people because they allowed them to skip the processing and synthesising of information part. Opinions were ready to be served and points of view easy to adopt. It was a shortcut for thinking and making sense of what was happening.
Today, the large media companies and publishers are still sharing news and opinions. However, the world has evolved and their role is increasingly becoming one of purely sharing opinions. These might have an implicit bias towards certain points of view. Often, this is seen as something bad because people believe that the sole role of the media is to report the news, free from opinions, unless mentioned otherwise. But this is the past.
Factual news, as well as fake news, is now being reported on the internet, meaning by people using the internet. And what’s left for media companies are the opinions.
There is another driving force behind this transition, namely the realisation that the world is not about passively reporting what’s happening but about creating the change that we want to see in the world. This is what I call the engineering world.
For media companies it is therefore a logical step to not only shift more and more towards sharing opinions and leave the objective and factual reporting of the news to the internet itself, but also to take a clear position in what change —what cause— they are aiming for in sharing their opinions.
A concrete example is The Bougnat, which is an opinion-driven media project that has a clearly defined mission and that communicates the change it wants to see in the world: progress, peace and beauty. This has been the case since its beginning and will remain so in the future. Another example is the Washington Post, which publishes content on a lot of different topics but which a few days ago announced how it wants to influence the world through its opinions.
Jeff Bezos announced that “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
This shift in the media’s role is significant and important. We won’t have to wonder what a publisher’s bias or hidden agenda is. Instead it is transparently shared and serves as the media’s mission. At the same time it’s very important that the internet remains a place where all kinds of different media companies and publishers can share their opinions and where people can discuss them. The last thing we want is to end up in a world where some opinions can be shared while others can’t, or in which some opinions are interpreted as facts.