A Simple System to Drive Balance and Civility

David Fridley
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

In business school they teach that you can’t market to everyone, so you have to segment your market and target the segments that will bring you the most success - meaning profit.

For civic discourse, you need to have as broad a representation of views as possible, otherwise you will get an echo chamber and polarization.

Journalism, especially when it comes to news that’s pertinent to the democratic process, is an essential component of civic discourse. But as Media businesses work to make journalism profitable, they are contributing to the polarization we are experiencing by targeting the market segment that brings them the most success (profit). Often this means targeting liberals or conservatives.

This research from Pew really shows how different news sources are targeting different segments of the population.

I have one idea, to build trust and reduce the polarization in our country.

We could reward Journalists and Media Business for having balanced readership that believes they have civil content. Online it’s easy, registered readers could identify what party the belong to. When reading articles, users could click on an “uncivil” button if they feel the article is too biased, or uncivil, and say why. If a journalist is unbalanced, hopefully she can learn and adapt, or the business can move that person to some other topic.

Media businesses that have ‘balanced’ readership and low incivility over a period of time, could call themselves “Trusted News Sources” (or some better term that a marketing person comes up with), and get a tax break (see below).

Media businesses that are not balanced, could not call themselves news sources at all — they are entertainment sources (or worse). They would not get press passes for the White House, and other things. Paid political ads on entertainment sources, would have to pay a tax.

Further (and I really like this), Political Ads run on “Trusted News Sources” would have to include the“uncivil” button. If an article gets tagged as “uncivil” by a relevant sample size of users , from multiple parties— it has to be taken down. And political ad teams are encouraged to test their ad’s using this mechanism before going to full scale advertising. We could further require them to test their broadcast media (Television) ads this way first.

What I love about this kind of approach is that it’s a simple feedback loop. Journalists and business are producing content, and they are getting feedback that helps them adjust the content they create. And we don’t have to come up with big legal descriptions of what’s balanced, and what’s civil. The people are indicating their party — which can change over time, and new parties can come and go, and the people are deciding on what is and isn’t civil themselves — and this will adapt over time. And no one person, or even a few are making the decision, and it’s random — so it’s hard to corrupt. We don’t have to have special tests for what kinds of organizations, or individuals, can be trusted news sources — they just have to setup the system for collecting the information, and publishing it, and updating it daily. (I’d be happy to help build it, we could make an open source version)

As media businesses move toward balance and civility, trust in media will return (because they won’t be driven by political target segmentation), and it will be harder for fake news to proliferate (because it’s not coming from a trusted news source). Politically advertising, at least, would help bring profit back to trusted news sources.

Update:

To put this in terms of the 4 themes:

Reinvention: While there is more to do in fixing the revenue model for local news, this feedback loop introduces a model that encourages political advertising in organizations that are doing the public service of uniting rather than dividing communities. We need to be cautious of the unintended consequences of transfer taxes, but the tax levied on political advertisement to non Trusted News Sources could be funneled back into Trusted News Sources — or maybe just not for profit Trusted News Sources. Other tax breaks and benefits for Trusted News Sources could also be devised. [Could Non Profit, Trusted News Sources be allowed to run lotteries, and would that be an interesting offer for subscribers??]

Responsibility: To be a Trusted News Source has several responsibilities, you must engage subscribers from all sides of the political spectrum, and you need to generate civil content. The result will be that subscribers will be exposed to broader opinions and information as the source seeks to appeal to the whole spectrum. And consumers will have a responsibility to — to click on that uncivil button when they see that kind of content.

[BTW civil content does not mean its not about difficult or emotional content, it means that it’s written in a way that doesn’t enrage one side or the other, and yes it is possible to do that even on things like abortion, and gun control, etc. How, will have to be another article — but I refer to the art of deliberative discussion. And we must be accepting of Trusted News Sources that try to cover these topics and don’t get it right the first (few) times. Everyone is going to have some learning to do here, coming from where we are now.]

Transparency: All the information collected, the subscriber party membership statistics, the uncivil vote statistics, must be visible online, in real-time. Even better of the software is open source and/or the systems are externally audited. And the only algorithms involved here are averaging. There is no algorithm that is looking at an article and deciding if it’s civil, it’s the crowd that is giving the feedback, and the journalists that are figuring out how to respond to it.

Accountability: At the high level, the accountability comes when a Journalism organization does not maintain the requirements of being a Trusted News Sources — the transparency above will make it apparent, and if they don’t correct it within a reasonable period of time (a month?) then they loose the benefits that are part of the innovation, as well as the ability to call themselves a Trusted News Source. And, at the lower level, on a daily basis, the journalists are accountable to the readers and they will get constant feedback about it.

David Fridley

Written by

Creator of CivilPursuit.com, on a mission to find the solutions to what divides us so we can make the world awesome.

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