I think it is a function of game theory akin to Prisoner's Dilemma.
If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.
I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.
There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.
We estimate a model of newspaper demand that incorporates slant explicitly, estimate the slant that would be chosen if newspapers independently maximized their own profits, and compare these profit-maximizing points with firms’ actual choices. We find that readers have an economically significant preference for like-minded news. Firms respond strongly to consumer preferences, which account for roughly 20 percent of the variation in measured slant in our sample.
Very cool. Thanks for sharing. Since it is a like minded result, I obviously have a significant preference for it. (Unlike the sibling to your comment, which was obviously produced by someone from the other team)
> niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication.
We could just call them specialized audiences with particular interests, instead of equating the neoliberal centrism of a bunch of collaborating oligarchic publications to lack of bias.
edit: e.g. if all of the publications collaborate to not discuss issues concerning Mexican-Americans, a defector who peels off a large audience by being the only publication that attends to Mexican-American issues would not be an example of "bias" except under extremely normative definitions of "bias."
If all the news sources are rather centrist (i.e., they all "cooperate"), then no one gains or loses audiences because of bias. This is a good strategy when publishing is expensive. However, as the costs of publishing drop, it becomes profitable to shave off niche (smaller) audiences, with biased publication. This begins the defection phase of the PD game series. As defections accelerate, anyone who doesn't defect eventually suffers by continuing to not defect, leading to a new optimal state of all defections--i.e., publishers have to defect to maintain audience.
I dunno, I just came up with that as I was writing it.
There are also things to be said about the ability now to track engagement, which allowed humans to quantify (i.e., put a cost/value/ROI on) the extent to which bias/outrage drive engagement. But, this function would still play into the greater theoretical framework I proposed.