There was a time when the front page was curated by a room full of opinionated, fallible, occasionally brilliant human beings who made judgements about what the public needed to know. They got it wrong often enough. But they were accountable — to readers, to proprietors, to the law, and eventually to history.
That room no longer exists in the same form. It has been replaced, in large part, by an algorithm optimised not for civic importance or truth, but for engagement — a metric that rewards outrage, novelty, and tribal confirmation over substance, nuance, and inconvenience.
The Engagement Trap
The research is consistent and damning. Stories that provoke strong emotional reactions — particularly anger and fear — receive dramatically more clicks, shares, and comments than calm, measured reporting. Platforms that monetise attention have therefore built systems that structurally advantage inflammatory content, regardless of accuracy.
This is not a conspiracy. It is an emergent property of an economic model. No one at any major platform woke up one morning and decided to corrode democratic discourse. They built a machine to maximise a number, and the machine did exactly that.
The question now is whether we can build something different — or whether we still want to. The audience that complains about polarisation often fuels it. The readers who lament sensationalism click on the sensational headlines. We are not passive victims of the algorithm. We are, in ways we prefer not to examine, its collaborators.
That is the uncomfortable conversation we are not yet having — and the one the press, above all, has an obligation to start.