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We’ll continue our exploration of areas in which the absence of skin in the game causes problems with a discussion of the journalism industry.
Taleb argues that because journalists lack skin in the game, news institutions become dominated by a single point of view, causing political polarization and biased misrepresentation of the facts.
First, we’ll describe the flaws caused by a lack of skin in the game that Taleb has identified in the news media. Next, we’ll explain what a healthy news medium looks like by distinguishing between two ways that news spreads. Lastly, we’ll outline the ethical way news outlets—and all of us—should argue against opposing perspectives.
Since the effect the news has on society is so difficult to observe, journalists have been able to avoid putting skin in the game. Their salaries don’t depend on how much useful and accurate information they convey to the public—rather, they depend on how well they fulfill their employers’ expectations.
In theory, journalistic institutions encourage their employees to convey an accurate representation of the facts. In reality, though, they often misrepresent the facts in pursuit of their own interests because there is no penalty for doing so.
Internet News Takes Skin Out of the Game
In Trust Me, I’m Lying, the Daily Stoic’s Ryan Holiday recounts his experience as a marketing director exploiting flaws in the Internet-based news media. Holiday explains that advertising-driven blogs—which comprise the majority of online news sources—earn income based solely on pageviews, and as a result, they put greater emphasis on sensational, attention-grabbing news and less on balanced perspective and reliable fact-checking. As Taleb points out, journalists’ skin is not in the public’s game. We’ll cover this in more detail a little later.
Here, Taleb establishes the principle that skin in the game rewards diversity while the absence of skin in the game rewards conformity.
Recall that, in the absence of skin in the game, rewards are given out based on the appearance of value instead of true value. For this reason, you won’t be rewarded for good ideas that contradict the general consensus. They won’t look like good ideas on the surface.
In Taleb’s view, the field of journalism operates in a very similar way to academia in the sense that one point of view comes to dominate entire organizations. Ideas are judged by editors or other higher-ups in the institution, who reject anything they don’t see value in. This incentivizes conformity, especially in a field as competitive as journalism. Given the choice between two journalists of equal skill, an editor will hire the one who shares her point of view. This contributes to the political polarization we see in our news media.
In contrast, the skin in the game of the business world rewards diverse ideas. If entrepreneurs are able to make money by challenging public opinion, they’ll make even more profit than if they had conformed—because it’s an untapped market.
Dangers of a Disappearing Middle Ground
Conformity of thought and political polarization are real problems with very real consequences, and journalism without skin in the game exacerbates these problems. This article provides some shocking statistics that show just how serious political polarization is—a study conducted before the 2020 US presidential election showed that, 13.8% of Republicans and 18.3% of Democrats agreed that “violence would be justified” if their party lost the election, and 16% of Republicans and 20% of Democrats have thought that “we’d be better off as a country” if “large numbers'' of the opposing party “just died.”
Recent incidents of political violence spring to mind, and statistics show that support for violence is on the rise, even compared to the relatively recent 2017. The American Civil War was preceded by similar incidents of violence—for example, John Brown’s attempted 1859 slave rebellion sparked an intense overreaction from the South, as extremists became convinced that government-supported Northern abolitionists intended to infiltrate their land and start a full-on rebellion. Violence disproportionately escalates polarization. This may be the most direct way that a lack of skin in the game is currently doing harm to society.