“When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.”

—Steve Jobs

Until the late 1990s, there was effectively an oligopoly of news sources, with massive barriers to entry. You had 3-4 TV networks, a couple cable news networks, a couple newspapers in your town, and a couple wire services that provided all the national news for those papers (there were also local TV stations, but the meat of their news content came from either the national networks or the local papers). All of the above were owned by the same few national corporations, except some of the local papers which were owned by local elites.

This oligopoly had good, bad, and ambiguous effects.

The bad was that there was basically no room for voices outside of the corporate consensus of the day.

The ambiguous was that trust in media was high, but that this trust wasn’t necessarily earned, because there weren’t many sources outside the oligopoly to call out any untrustworthiness.

The good was that the media could be boring a lot of the time (because reality and the topics that matter are often boring, to most people at least) without losing eyeballs and going out of business.

When the Internet took off, the oligopoly died (although legacy media only grew more concentrated), and all of these effects went away.

Suddenly there was a cacophony of diverse views available everywhere. Sometimes good (criticizing a stale consensus and forcing people to question the status quo), sometimes bad (extremism and even incitement to violence), sometimes ambiguous or debatable.

Suddenly it was possible to read sharp criticism of legacy media, fair or not, and maybe decide that they’d never been so great.

And suddenly legacy media found itself fighting for its life with online blogs and social media personalities who had no qualms about twisting or ignoring “boring” reality to capitalize on visceral emotions and compete for eyeballs.

It is not that legacy media CEOs ever had more qualms about the sober truth, but they were in a stable oligopoly with high barriers to entry. Everyone could eat, there was not much in the way of Darwinian selection pressure. There was sensationalism and stupidity (that Steve Jobs quote is referring to the media before the Internet), but the incentives for sensationalism were bounded by the lack of other options for news consumers.

But when the Internet dropped barriers to entry down to zero, no one had the luxury of being boring, ever. If you didn’t relentlessly chase market share to keep your advertisers, someone new would, and you’d be dead.

Institutional media had to join the clickbait upstarts or be killed by them. Why? Because clickbait is what we chose. We didn’t mean to, of course—no one then or now would say that they’d like to trade high-impact investigative journalism for red-meat infotainment. But the attention economy is all about using our psychology against us. We are viscerally attracted to shock, sensationalism, and in-group/out-group conflict, even if we know that what we’re clicking on is misleading or doesn’t matter. This has played out in the evolution of legacy media, as many outlets have died while most survivors have pivoted (at least in part) to low-value clickbait. Good luck staying in business if you’re spending a year paying two experienced journalists to put together a six-part investigation on corruption in some agency that 90% of citizens have never heard of. See how your traffic compares to your competitor who paid a 22-year-old minimum wage for a half-hour’s work on a listicle of the top 10 most outrageous moments from the Johnny Depp trial. Who’s getting more ad money?

Of course human psychology is not new, and legacy media always engaged in its share of sensationalism (Hearst vs. Pulitzer, O.J. Simpson, take your pick). But there were always limits to the incentives pulling the media in that direction, because what were you going to do, just not read or watch anything? Now you have unlimited options to get all sensationalism, all the time, and if legacy media doesn’t give it to you then they’re just going to die.

We all know this is happening and we don’t like it, which is presumably part of the reason for the decline in trust in media (in addition to simply having more dissenting voices of all kinds available). But we don’t seem willing or able to change the fact that we are the proximate cause of it. Ultimately our clicks and subscriptions determine which kinds of content succeed or fail. But what can we do when our own psychology is being used against us?