That’s exactly the problem. Kahn and his crew determine what’s a “top issue” the same way the rest of us do, through algorithm-driven engagement. There’s a reason all the major outlets placed a “trending” chyron at the top of their homepages years ago, and that’s because they’re specifically tailoring their coverage to whatever generates traffic on their and other’s websites. Each editor is, after all, a human whose understanding of the world is driven by the content that shows up on their phone, their computer screen, and their television. The fact that media is curated through a narrowing window of social media platforms means that the things that pop onto their radar will be algorithm-influenced. Even if they stepped back and only accepted what polls highly, they’d have to either perform their own real-time polling (yeah right) or point to other polls for emphasis, the results of which have been filtered and amplified according to algorithmic engagement. This is only going to get worse as AI starts to influence the algorithm in real time and we become more and more susceptible to hive-mind coverage where the tail wags the dog.
This is part of the reason 21st century media has skewed so heavily toward sensationalism since 9/11, because for some ungodly reason they’ve decided that their job is to react to the news, rather than create it. Fuck them. Their spineless “neutrality” is a tool Trump & Co. learned how to play like a fiddle from day one, and by refusing to even entertain the possibility of assisting the left, they’ve obsequiously and unconsciously become the right’s most potent weapon. They are the harbingers of fascism in America, and they’re still too fucking dense to see what’s coming.