Affirmation; Not Information

In November, the Alliance for Women in Media (AWM) honored Katie Couric with the Gracies Icon Award during the 2025 Leadership Awards. Couric is so very deserving of the recognition. She is a pioneering woman in broadcasting, and her role in journalism has been groundbreaking in many ways, including The Today Show, solo anchoring a network evening newscast, and as Founder of Katie Couric Media.

During the Fireside Chat that followed her award from the AWM, she said that “Americans are looking for affirmation and not information.” That’s a comment from her that I’d read before. She first made the statement in 2017 during a discussion on Fake News and the Fragmented Media Environment. What she added in this setting was, “We’re being fed algorithmically certain content that is giving us affirmation instead of information.”

Couric’s assertions are concerning on several fronts. None of which are of her making. Her observations are shared by many, including me.

I’ve referred to the phenomena as “Choose Your News.” Listeners want to hear things that support their opinions. This idea is related to the psychological concept of confirmation bias, which is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s pre-existing beliefs, while giving disproportionately less consideration to alternative possibilities.

The blurring of the lines between commentary and news content exacerbates the situation. To the best of my knowledge there’s only one nationally syndicated program on a major network that acknowledges at the start of every show that their opinions are exactly that. The opening of The Glenn Beck Program indicates that the show is categorized as “News Commentary.”

This classification reflects its nature as a program offering storytelling, insight, and opinionated perspectives on both American culture and politics, rather than presenting itself as a news report.

Couric’s comment points out that the type of content delivered using algorithms is impacted by ones searches and as such provides affirmation. That is if you want to learn about a candidate, a news story, current events, and so on, your previous searches may provide content that gives you a partial or biased picture. The supposition that research is accurate is no longer assured. Think about your use of ChatGPT, Google, or perhaps another search engine. It’s not unusual to see a variance in the information one seeks in response to their query. Which further clouds what’s news and what isn’t.

We cannot control more than what we’re responsible for, but we can do that. We can identify that political Talk Shows are Commentary, and that General Talk Shows are Entertainment and Opinion.

We can promote and image our News as being news without opinion. We can focus on service elements presented credibly so that an audience can depend on them. We can endeavor to be truthful, factual, detailed, and source material when using others’ content. That we can and should shout from the rooftops. What we cannot do is manage algorithms.

Let’s not leave the truth up to AI.