Lately, there’s been lots of debate about bias in media.

This week there was a spike in that debate, which seemed to be driven by these 2 events:

  1. Big technology companies banning InfoWars.
  2. Candace Owens being harassed by protesters in and the news coverage afterward (which came just a day or two after she was temporarily banned from Twitter).

Predictably, outrage ensued. Every partisan claimed the other side was trying to push the media dynamic in their favor.

That’s what modern media has become: a tug-of-war between 2 miserable camps. You’re either a lying wretch or a moral hero. You’re either on the side of level-headed discourse or you hurl hateful insults. You’re either on the right side or the wrong side. And believe it or not, people on both sides constantly claim they’re on the “right side” for the exact same reasons.

It’s madness.

Every media outlet is engaged in this battle to some degree. Why? Three major reasons:

  • Unrelenting focus on the current: news outlets report the news, and whatever is new is news. But because news (by definition) hasn’t been around very long, there often aren’t very many facts available at reporting time.
  • Partisan analysis fills the void: haste to report results in hollow stories, and unfortunately, it’s not enough to publish an article stating the occurrence & result of an event. So reporters fill the void with context and color from their own worldviews. Disregarding the enormous role of public relations (4 people working in PR for every journalist in the USA!), that wouldn’t be such a terrible thing if it wasn’t so sensationalized.
  • Analysis is sensationalized & fit to a narrative: because most big media outlets don’t charge directly for their services, they must maximize “engagement” to increase advertisement revenue. How do they do that? Well they make every item they publish seem as dramatic as possible. That’s why everything is “breaking news” and so-and-so just experienced a “meltdown” and she “slammed” him with a “scathing” response.

These are inescapable dynamics of modern media. But these are precisely the reasons we run 100 Million Books. We counter them head-on:

  • Unrelenting ignorance of the present: why comment on something you barely know about? As time goes by, we learn more, and can compose smarter analysis and saner perspectives. That’s what the best books do. And that’s why we only feature books and have never (and will never) make any exceptions.
  • No analysis: books go through much editing and consideration before they are published, much more than any other popular written medium. That doesn’t make everything they say guaranteed to be true, but it makes books (together, as a medium) the best source for meaningful ideas. That’s we never include any analysis of the book snippets we feature. Nothing we could possibly say would increase the value of writing that’s already so carefully considered.
  • No narrative: we’re not incentivized by “engagement.” Catering to a particular worldview will not make us any more money. In fact, given our mission, if people detected one, it would probably hurt us. We’ve tried to be as transparent about our content as possible, we’re super-careful about adding new content in a balanced way.

When you follow The New York Times, turn on MSNBC, or watch any of the late-night comedy shows, you have some idea of what you’ll be seeing. Likewise with Fox, National Review, and The Drudge Report.

But on 100 Million Books…you don’t know what you’re going to get. It could be anything. Anything reasonably well-considered & well-researched, that is, from across the innumerable spectrums of thought across every conceivable discipline.

So if you’re a 100 Million Books user, know that the mission goes way beyond the romantic notion of exploring every book ever written. Know that you’re helping grow a medium unlike any other: one that eschews the deepest and most damaging dynamics of every other medium out there. We want to help people avoid the frenzy of the bickering masses and immerse themselves in meaningful ideas that encourage thoughtful, measured discourse.

As Marshal McLuhan famously said, the medium is the message. That’s the big idea here. And that’s why we’re working hard to make this the best damn medium out there, based on the concepts we outlined above, to make it incapable of going the way of other media.