# News ⊂ Advertising

For-profit news outlets are financial incentivized to write about things that are easy to write about. The easiest articles to write are the subsidized ones. Public relations firms subsidize news by writing press releases. Then news outlets republish the press releases as news. That's why so much news is corporate and political advertising.

Here are the top stories on _Ars Technica_ at the time of writing[^1].

1.  ["NordVPN users’ passwords exposed in mass credential-stuffing attacks"](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/11/nordvpn-users-passwords-exposed-in-mass-credential-stuffing-attacks/)
2.  ["AT&T’s priciest “unlimited” plan now allows 100GB+ of un-throttled data"](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/atts-priciest-unlimited-plan-now-allows-100gb-of-un-throttled-data/)
3.  ["Researchers unearth malware that siphoned SMS texts out of telco’s network"](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/researchers-unearth-malware-that-siphoned-sms-texts-out-of-telcos-network/)
4.  ["The count of managed service providers getting hit with ransomware mounts"](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/the-count-of-managed-service-providers-getting-hit-with-ransomware-mounts/)
5.  ["Facebook deletes the accounts of NSO Group workers"](https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/facebook-permanently-deletes-the-accounts-of-nso-workers/)

Having only skimmed the articles, I suspect they were put there by the following companies.

1. Have I Been Pwned (breach notification service)  
2. AT&T  
3. FireEye (security firm)  
4. Armor (global cloud security provider)  
5. Facebook

The first article lets slip who wrote it in the following line.

> Readers who are NordVPN users should visit [Have I Been Pwned](https://haveibeenpwned.com/)[^2] and check to see if their email address is contained in any of the lists.

Can you spot how this sentence attempts to influence reader behavior?

Different organizations write articles for different news outlets. _Ars Technica_ is unusual in its disproportionate publishing of articles written by cybersecurity firms and its relatively low density of political propaganda compared to more traditional news outlets like _The Economist_. _The Art of Manliness Podcast_ interviewees usually discuss the books they're selling.[^3]

News is advertising. Ad-supported news is ad-supported advertising. Subscription-supported news is subscription-supported advertising. Advertising can't directly control what you believe. Advertisers can control what you think about. The more advertising I expose myself to, the more I think about the things advertisers want me to.

Here is what advertisers want me to think about.

*   Products I haven't bought
*   National politics[^4]
*   More ad-supported media, such as celebrities and free-to-play videogames

Here is what I want to think about.

*   Things I can make and do myself
*   My local community
*   My friends, my family and me

My personal happiness is inversely related to how much news I expose myself to. It's not just a subjective feeling. I behave more healthily. I'm even more interesting to talk to.

Amateur blogs make me think about what the author thinks is important. That's a step in the right direction because amateur bloggers' interests align better with mine than do the corporate and political machines behind news outlet press releases. But they're still not me. And some of them are motivated by vanity.

I solve all of these issues by writing a blog myself. That way the author's interests align perfectly with my own.

If you liked this post, click [here](https://www.lesswrong.com/newPost).

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Edit: jballoch points out that Have I Been Pwned is a noncommercial donation-supported service. 

[^1]: November 3, 2019 at 1:43 am
[^2]:  The hyperlink is in the original article. It's the article's second link to Have I been Pwned.
[^3]:  I pick these specific news outlets because I visit them the most. Aggregators like Facebook and Reddit are different beasts deserving of a separate post.
[^4]:  I don't deny that national politics is important. I mean that the proportion of attention it gets on the news is greater than the proportion of my attention I wish to passively devote to it.