Skepticism and the Attention Economy
We founded Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society in 1992, partially in response to a market demand from consumers and the media for a scientific and rational response to increasingly tantalizing claims of the paranormal and supernatural, ESP and Psi, telepathy and telekinesis, NDEs and OBEs, ghosts and poltergeists, astrology and psychics, cryptozoology and strange creatures, haunted houses and mysterious places, UFOs and aliens, conspiracy theories and cults, and a litany of anomalous psychological experiences people reported.
What, wondered general readers and editors at media outlets, is going on here? Joining the burgeoning skeptical movement that began in the 1970s in response to such claims (including and especially the irrepressibly entertaining psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller, debunked by James “The Amazing” Randi), we were promptly inundated with media requests for interviews with experts in these various claims and fields, and it was taken for granted by virtually everyone in what is today called (sometimes pejoratively) the Mainstream Media (MSM), that if you feature someone making an extraordinary claim you need to balance the report with someone with a prosaic explanation, presumably someone from the scientific or academic community, or those closely aligned in adjacent fields.
By the mid 1990s we had film crews in our office every week, and it was a rare day when I didn’t have a radio interview by phone or a television interview at a local station or studio. For a Fox Family Channel television series I co-hosted (with X-Files’ Mitch Pileggi) called Exploring the Unknown, we included believers in the phenomena and let them make their best case for the reality of what they claimed was true, and then we provided a skeptical perspective on what scientists and other experts thought was really going on.
When my first book was published in 1997, Why People Believe Weird Things, my publisher sent me on a book tour around the country in which each day was filled with multiple media interviews, radio and television shows, and a book signing at a local bookstore. For this and subsequent books, I was on Oprah (ABC), Donahue (ABC), Nightline (ABC), Dateline (NBC), 20/20 (ABC), Larry King Live (CNN), Charlie Rose (PBS), The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), The View (NBC), Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (ABC), Unsolved Mysteries (History Channel), along with hundreds (thousands?) of radio and print media.
Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows.
I had a few complaints along the way about imbalance. For example, Larry King Live would typically have a table full of UFO believers and me as the token skeptic, and Oprah edited out of a show my comment that the psychic for which I was there to offer a rational explanation of her apparently paranormal phenomena, had actually already done a reading the day before on the woman in the studio audience that day that made it look like she was “telepathically” receiving the information she had already gotten. I was often edited to shorten my explanation, or sometimes even to make it look like I was befuddled even though I wasn’t.
Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows. And while many of today’s MSM outlets still mouth their support of “fair and balanced” reporting, in my experience most do not practice it, at least in those areas about which I know a fair amount. On UFOs, for example, where I was a regular commentator on these mysterious sightings in the sky (or abductions in peoples’ bedrooms), today there are weekly reports, segments, and shows about UFOs (now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), that almost never feature any scientist or scholar to offer a prosaic explanation.
Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.
Think about that. As I’ve been reporting for years, even hardcore UFOlogists admit that at least 95 percent of all sightings have natural terrestrial explanations, such as (to quote UFO advocate Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record):
weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window.
And yet…nearly every report you will ever see on MSM, cable shows, podcasts, and social media posts completely ignore the 95 percent and focus instead on the 5 percent unexplained, which does not even mean that they’re alien spaceships or Russian or Chinese super-craft! Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.
I know well the media mantra “if it bleeds it leads,” along with the “man bites dog” meme, but where are the media editors who tell their reporters “be sure to interview someone with a different perspective” or “let’s talk to someone who knows all about this topic but doesn’t believe what our main guest thinks is real”? Yes, there are still a few around, but the imbalance is glaringly obvious to anyone who pays attention.
For example, I am a member of the Galileo Project as their token skeptic, thanks to the foresight of the director Avi Loeb, the highly accomplished astronomer at Harvard University (and with whom I have a $1000 bet that we will not have disclosure of alien contact by December 31, 2030). But as Avi reports and posts about in his daily Medium blog, he has television and podcast interviews every day in his office, often several a day, whereas his equally accomplished and reputable colleagues who know as much as he knows about, say, 3I/Atlas (the interstellar object that swung through our solar system in 2025), go under the media radar when they say it is most likely a comet; whereas Avi, who admits it probably is a comet, is willing to say that it could be an alien mothership coming into our solar system, and could even release baby ships to invade Earth! Wait, what did that Harvard astronomer just say? Get the camera crew!
I don’t begrudge Avi’s newfound fame (after toiling for decades as a black-hole expert grinding out hundreds of scientific papers that almost no one reads and zero media people care about), and who wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled to discover that we are not alone in the universe, and not only that, a disclosure that these aliens know we’re here and have even visited Earth? I certainly would, and most scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the general public (according to surveys) would be equally ecstatic. But so far, we not only have no definitive evidence of alien contact, this extraordinary claim doesn’t even have ordinary evidence for it, so why does the media focus on the 5 percent and largely ignore the 95 percent?
I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades.
It didn’t use to be that way. It is now. Why? Because of the rapidly changing media landscape largely driven by what is called the attention economy. I have done the best I can to keep up, which is no small feat for a Baby Boomer raised and come of age in the era of Walter Cronkite and three television networks, but I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades.
For example, for Scientific American I penned 214 consecutive monthly essays over the span of 18 years. For most of that time I and the magazine were inundated with reader mail for weeks after each issue, and when the internet really took off and the magazine opened up readers’ comments online, chatter there and on social media carried on for weeks after each issue. That is not what happens with published articles, essays, and opinion editorials today. Discussions about this or that commentary last, at most, a few days, but usually just a few hours or minutes, before it is bumped down the page by countless other content, which is now being generated by countless content producers.
When my Scientific American column ended in 2019 I was recruited by the online platform Substack to relaunch it. But this time I started posting my commentaries every week instead of every month, and even that made me feel like I was a slacker compared to other content producers, independent journalists, and the like, who were cranking out material every day. And then I noticed that instead of a couple of us at Scientific American, there were hundreds of regular columnists at Substack, and given their business model of taking pennies-on-the-dollar per creator, that number has now ballooned to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 (!), drowning out any expert in a cacophony of voices.
The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.
And then there is podcasting. I appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular show seven times over the years, and when it was clear that this was going to become another popular means of content production for skepticism I started my own podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. I am proud of the show and love doing it, inasmuch as I speak to authors of new nonfiction books that I would be reading anyway, and here I get to have a one-on-one conversation with the author, which I never had before. But I’m a nobody compared to the tens of millions of people reached by Rogan and many other popular podcasts, and according to Spotify there are between six and seven million podcast titles in 2026 (while Apple Podcasts reports having 2.6–2.9 million shows). Even when filters are used to skim off the inactive podcasts, there are still over 400,000 active shows, together reaching around 600 million monthly or regular listeners for 2026. The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.
Even more overwhelming is what is primarily driving today’s media: the attention economy. Most of these content producers, companies, and organizations derive their budgets from subscribers and advertisers, which are driven by numbers of followers, which in turn are in search of something—anything—that grabs their attention. You think 3I/Atlas is a comet? Boring! You think 3I/Atlas could be an invading alien spaceship coming into our solar system to colonize Earthlings and turn us into slaves? Take my money!
And who do podcasters wish to get on their shows? Some seek out real experts, but a lot of the most popular podcasters seek out the most famous people they can get, and these days those are the people with the most followers, who might then follow the podcast, which will drive up their listenership numbers, which will generate more revenue, which … and there is our attention economy at work.