Please Bias My News?
People are starting to complain about how bias the news is nowadays and how the social web has taken away objective news reporting.
Could that be a good thing?
I think back to my lessons in stock portfolio theory from business school. In the olden days with less efficient capital markets, we use to value and invest in massive conglomerates that were in lots of different businesses. We left it to the conglomerates to decide on a portfolio of diverse assets to own to mitigate risk.Now that capital markets are efficient, we no longer value this because we can create our own portfolio of assets based on our risk profile. We prefer stocks that are pure plays with clearly evident risk profiles. We can then mix and match these profiles to create whatever risk profile we want. We don’t need to rely on the conglomerates to do the work.
I feel the same about news reporting. In the olden days, when I got my news from two TV channels and one newspaper, I valued completely unbiased reporting.
Now, that I can consume thousands of content sources on the social web filtered by people I trust, I prefer opinionated content with clear positions, that I can weigh against each other to form my own opinion. The key is that I know the biases and that the source is not lying about fact vs. opinion. I know this is hard but the social filtering should help.
Am I getting too theoretical here? Thoughts?
