11 reasons to use your own judgement instead of believing media narratives blindly

(This post isnt about any particular story, but general; and it not only applies to Uber but generally to any hot topic )

One thing I have learned from this February onwards is that it's dangerous believing the media narratives blindly, esp any stories about "uber-is-bad", as these stories sell like hotcakes, so there's a strong conflict of interest between selling and perfectness.

Some people argue media isn't lying. That's partly true. However, here are 10 areas I believe where it tends to make mistakes, esp for stories around Uber: (and I have not seen so many problems in media narratives other than stories related to Uber)

1. Factual: they may not get facts fully correctly, often making small mistakes, mostly unintentional and due to a lack of concern for details, sometimes intentional.

2. Presentation: they may portray information in such a different way that the readers perception or interpretation is far from reality, sometimes even opposite. Same information can be presented in hugely different ways.

3. Emotion: emotions or brand perception drives narrative. Instead of being objective, media narrative is often driven by emotions - how they "feel" about the brand. If they feel anger towards Uber, they will tend to convey everything in a negative way.

4. Partial information: often important facts are excluded. For Uber, usually the positive portion of the facts is either not present in the article or mentioned only briefly in an unimportant area of the article or presented such fleetingly that 99% of users will miss it or think it isn't that relevant.

5. Full information may not be public: Often there are lots of aspects and nuances of any story which are not even known to the media.

6. Lack of context: often media will exclude or misstate how important or severe the problem or fact is. They may not know enough, not be enough of an expert in the area, be unwilling to do enough research/talk to experts, or simply not be thorough enough to do so. This is another factor in readers wrong perceptions.

7. Lack of comparables: Usually comparative information is absent. They may not provide information about prevalence of the bad actions or problems in the industry or in other companies, or similar things that may have happened in the past.

8. Unfair/bias: they will not report similar things about other companies, or report them in a much more favorable way. Bias is inherent in the industry and there are no checks and balances.

9. Motivation to sell: the primary motivation for the media is to get eyeballs, create sensation, thus attract more readers and profit. If a news is not sensational it will be made sensational. Negative news about Uber sell a lot.

10. Lack of proof-checking, no checks and balances: there's nobody who checks the news articles for correctness of facts, or for context, or for comprehensiveness, or for bias. After all its not a peer reviewed research paper. They could publish anything and if it sells, it sells. This has become a big problem in other areas like election but mostly due to fake news websites, but the fact is nobody even checks the primary news websites especially when the facts are somewhat correct. If the news will sell if re-echoed, other media outlets will simply re-echo instead of verifying full details.

And finally,

11. Inability to project a contrarian view to perceived shared worldview (flow): Most media journalists don't have the courage to go against a perceived shared worldview among journalists. They feel if they write something which is not in agreement with everyone, they will be mocked or loose reputation among other journalists. And reputation among journalists is important for them since they frequently jump from one news outlet to another. There are only a few journalists who have the courage and stature to go against the flow.

DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH:

So take most media articles, esp about Uber, with a heavy pinch of salt. They may have not done their research so you need to when interpreting it. You have to ask questions, lot of questions when you read any article, esp sensational ones. Sensational stuff, while good for media, does not actually happen in real life as often the media would like you to believe.