blinkered and happy, but still hopeful

article in The Economist the other day looking at the interrelating effects of competition and bias in the media.

I'm sometimes left pondering the fact that I love The Guardian so much even though in the main it only reinforces my views and opinions - this comfort pleasant, but is this the reason we read the news?
well... if you replace 'follow the news' with 'consume the news media' then it's a lot easier agree that pretty much so, yeah.

anyways, so the study this was looking at is particularly notable for its relatively simple but kinda innovative use of natural language processing to extract information (first processing transcripts of Congress to identify partisan phrases, then measuring their occurrence in newspaper dialog - the innovation being that even relatively subtle differences can be objectively, effectively, used in this way to identify rhetoric)

the conclusion drawn - that it is exactly the slant that each media has that leads to its profitability - is not astounding, but it is interesting that apparently even small deviations from this optimal slant have observable effects on circulation. also new to me is the finding that there doesn't seem to be much of a correlation between the slant and the newspaper's ownership - being totally market-targeted does make sense, but it's still at least a little surprising.
ok, so this kind of capitalist democracy of information is naturally blinkered in each individual instance, but as they say better than I do in pointing out the advantages:

None of this is particularly helpful to seekers of the unvarnished truth. These conscientious sorts still have to find the time to read lots of newspapers to get an unbiased picture of the world. But by serving demand from a variety of political niches, competition does allow for different points of view to be represented.

(we knew most of this already, right? but it's nice that someone's done some stats on it)