If pornography teaches us anything, it’s that intensity drives attention. The wildest, messiest, most depraved acts are amplified because arousal equals engagement. Modern news media operates on a strikingly similar principle: if it bleeds, it leads. Stories of outrage, disaster, and conflict dominate the headlines because attention equals profit. But unlike pornography, which primarily affects private consumers, news shapes public perception, civic engagement, and social cohesion. When the primary driver is shareholder value rather than truth, society pays the price.

Publicly traded media companies are built on a structural paradox. On one hand, journalists are trained to inform, investigate, and illuminate. On the other, the companies that employ them are legally obligated to maximize profits for shareholders. This creates an inevitable misalignment: nuanced, context-heavy reporting is expensive, slow, and often fails to generate clicks. Sensationalism, repetition, and fear are cheap, fast, and algorithmically optimized to drive engagement. The result is a system that rewards extremity over accuracy, outrage over understanding, and spectacle over substance.

This is observable in every facet of the modern media landscape. Look at coverage of artificial intelligence, pandemics, political scandal, or natural disasters. Minor events are elevated into crises because they will trend on social media, sell display ads, and boost quarterly revenue. Major issues that lack drama often receive only cursory attention. Stories about systemic injustice, climate policy, or the slow erosion of public services rarely generate the clicks necessary to justify their coverage under a profit-driven model.

In other words, the audience becomes a bystander to its own misinformed perception of reality, while the company’s bottom line grows. The psychological mechanics are clear. Humans are wired to notice threat, novelty, and conflict. These circuits are ancient, shaped by survival imperatives. Media corporations exploit that wiring because it maximizes attention and engagement. We can see this in the language of headlines: every tragedy is amplified, every conflict is framed in moral absolutes, and every fear is sensationalized. Our cognitive systems are hijacked, not for our benefit, but for the benefit of investors who never read the articles they profit from.

Comparing this to pornography is more than metaphorical. Pornography magnifies extremes because extreme arousal translates directly into clicks, views, and subscriptions. News magnifies extremes because extreme emotions like fear, anger, and shock translate directly into clicks, views, and quarterly revenue. Both exploit natural human impulses, but the consequences differ drastically.

Pornography primarily affects private experience; news affects collective reality, shaping civic understanding, political behaviour, and societal trust. The stakes are existential. Historically, public ownership has exacerbated this problem. The corporate form legally privileges profit maximization over public service. Investors demand growth, which means each newsroom is pressured to produce more extreme content more quickly. When reporters push back, they are constrained by budgets, metrics, and performance reviews tied directly to engagement. Even the most ethically minded journalists are forced to navigate a system that is structurally hostile to nuance, careful investigation, and long-term accountability.

Alternative ownership models exist and provide instructive contrasts. Non-profit newsrooms, cooperatively owned outlets, and foundation-funded investigative centres operate without the same profit imperative. Their survival depends on donations, memberships, or grants rather than stock performance. This structural difference enables them to prioritize accuracy, context, and public service over virality.

They are free to report slowly, deeply, and deliberately, rather than amplifying whatever will spike attention in the next 24 hours. It is not a perfect solution and the onslaught of private ownership can introduce its own distortions but public markets are uniquely toxic to the ideals journalism professes. Shareholder mandates inherently reward manipulation of attention, not illumination of truth. Newsrooms cannot thrive under a system that treats depth and subtlety as a liability. The “if it bleeds, it leads” ethos is not an accident; it is baked into the corporate DNA.

Some might argue that public ownership imposes accountability. Shareholders can, theoretically, discipline mismanagement. But shareholders are rarely invested in public welfare. They are invested in returns. Accountability is framed in dollars, not civic literacy. Ethical compromises, biased framing, and sensationalist strategies are rewarded if they increase engagement metrics and stock price.

From a systemic perspective, the societal consequences are profound. A public increasingly exposed to sensationalism develops skewed perceptions of risk, morality, and importance. Trust in institutions erodes. Civic discourse becomes performative and polarized. People believe the world is more extreme, dangerous, and conflicted than it actually is. Public opinion is manipulated not by deception alone, but by the structure of the system itself: extreme stories rise to the top because they are economically superior, not because they are necessarily true.

Ask yourself: should media companies be allowed to publicly trade if their success structurally incentivizes distortion, fear, and outrage? Should we continue to outsource the formation of collective perception to entities whose legal obligation is to maximize profit rather than truth?

The parallels to pornography are instructive: in both cases, extreme content is amplified for attention and profit, but the social stakes differ drastically. While individual consumption of porn is private, public consumption of distorted news shapes the very foundation of democracy. The argument is simple, if uncomfortable: public markets are incompatible with responsible journalism.

Removing the profit imperative from media companies… Or at least severely limiting its dominance, which could allow newsrooms to pursue accuracy, depth, and social benefit without bending every story to the whims of engagement metrics. It would be messy, difficult, and politically contentious. But it is the only structural change capable of aligning news production with the public interest rather than quarterly profits.

If pornography demonstrates the human appetite for extremes, modern news demonstrates our susceptibility to manipulation under profit incentives. Both thrive by exploiting natural tendencies. But unlike pornography, which is contained and private, public news media shapes shared reality. If society values truth over profit, the conclusion is inescapable: news companies should not be publicly traded. Anything less is a compromise of civic responsibility in the service of shareholder gain.