It seems to me that much of the media is still unwilling to confront the information landscape in which we find ourselves. A lot of people seem to get their “news” and general understanding of the world just from their podcaster / youtube channel of choice, and social media. Plus even legacy media is dominated by the likes of FOX news and Sinclair.
And unfortunately, the rubes includes the president and most of the current administration.
Example 1
At the time of starting this thread, Trump has sided with Putin over the Ukraine war while posting a lot of (false) Kremlin talking points about the war and Zelensky personally.
A lot of the media that I am seeing though is talking about a “strategy” of Trump “distancing himself from Europe” and trying to get a “swift end to the war”.
The more obvious explanation to me is that Trump just believes a whole pile of bullshit – the stuff he has actually been saying and posting – and is acting on the basis of that information.
We know that Russia has captured much of conservative media with the likes of Tucker Carlson and Tenet media, but we’re just ignoring the effect of all that.
Example 2
I saw an analysis, ostensibly a positive message, that MAGA will fail because it will fail in its promise to make people better off. That, despite growing the economy, Biden “failed the working and middle class” and that Trump will suffer the same election defeat that Biden did.
For the sake of not relitigating the economy debate, let’s just agree that people’s perception of how America was doing overall was far below what virtually every metric was saying (I still think the data on lower-income earners themselves being better off is also clear, but I know that’s a can of worms so let’s not go into it again).
And it was because of a constant drumbeat of an economy “in crisis”.
But now the propaganda winds have changed direction. I think it’s pretty naive to assume that if people are worse off, or even the same, they’ll turn on MAGA. I think people would need to be hungry and homeless and even then they’ll likely blame the “enemy within”.
This is just a couple of examples from this morning, but it seems to apply to almost everything I see on the news.
Why is there this reluctance to talk about the fact that people believe nonsense? Is it because old media doesn’t want to talk about their own irrelevance? Or that gaming out old school politicking is all they know how to do?
Another option is it’s just seen as a dead end: that if you criticize disinformation it sounds like you’re anti- free speech.
I dunno…it seemed like a worthwhile debate to me, though I’ve put it in P&E because of the Trump mention.
News is largely a for-profit endeavor these days. I’m not sure that constantly (because, if not constantly, how do you pick and choose which nonsense to call out?) demeaning both your competition and their consumers is good business.
There’s also an element of Biden’s debate against Trump. Biden did poorly by many measures, but one of the biggest knocks against him was his ‘failure’ to call Trump on his abject BS in real-time.
But again: if you try to tackle the “flood the zone with bullshit” and “muzzle velocity” strategy of the Trump camp – what else can you do? How do you get your message across?
The RW machinery is carpet bombing. The audience that knows it’s all bullshit … knows it’s all bullshit. The audience that laps it up unquestioningly and with gusto … already thinks everything left of Fox News is FAKE NEWS.
[See also: cult]
For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who don’t believe, none is possible.
It’s just surreal to me that to avoid that we need to do this sanewashing of Trump, and still talking about policy as the critical factor in how the electorate are judging candidates.
This is one of my ‘canned’ blurbs, meaning: I’ve posted it before.
But it fits here, too:
By definition, there’s bias in the media. Even such fundamental issues as what stories you do and do not cover and how you cover them constitute ‘bias.’
But that’s how things were for much of the last generation.
What the Dominion lawsuit revealed about Fox News is what many of us have long suspected: it’s not limited to bias and lies of omission (what they don’t tell their viewers). Their willingness to outright lie … about The Most Consequential Issues In Recent Memory … is inarguable.
From the top down, they have decided that their viewers are too fragile and too intellectually insecure to be accurately informed, that the truth might put them off, and have instead decided that this new dishonesty model is perfectly fine with the company, too: revenue first, last, and only.
It is a disaster on far too many levels to count. It has arguably caused more insidious and deleterious harm to the US than the opioid crisis.
[It’s also a hugely refractory and intractable problem w/no signs of abating]
I’ve been too overwhelmed at the scope of things to engage much in the discussions about our current state, but I agree that this is a core issue.
I also think there is nothing to be done. We developed the technology to allow for constant communication and access.
Combine the fact that we are all (even the smart ones) easily influenced with the fact that there will always be people who use that communication to enrich themselves, it’s clear that disinformation as a global crisis is a predictable and inevitable result of the technologies we created. There was obviously a tipping/inflection point with the spreading of smart phones/social media, but we were marching down this path for decades before.
Why is it the elephant in the room? Because incremental regulation won’t solve, or even help the issue. The genie is out of the bottle, and we just have to live or die with the consequences.
I’ve been seeing plenty about disinformation in the “mainstream” media. Falsehoods by Trump and his minions are noted and corrected routinely.
Whether there’s “enough” coverage and the lack of give-a-shit by MAGAns are separate issues.
Meanwhile, a lot of people (including some here at the Dope) pride themselves on not subscribing to newspapers/news sites* while bemoaning the increasing dearth of investigative journalism.
*Disclaimer: I’ve posted about unwillingness to pay a subscription fee to CNN, but do subscribe to three newspapers, one of which is local.
I think it’s time to admit that large portions of the voting populace (perhaps even a majority) don’t care about truth or falsehood at all. It simply doesn’t cross their minds. “Facts,” true or otherwise, are just weapons to beat your enemies with, and the truth or falsity of the thing doesn’t matter, as long as the weapon is sharp, and causes damage to the opposing team.
Point out misinformation to them all you want, it’s irrelevant. Some old folks who remember when journalism was a respectable profession, some academics and a few nerds… besides them, everyone else doesn’t care about misinformation (or disinformation), because they prefer to simply pick and choose what they want to hear, and not let pesky “reality” get in the way of the fantasy worldview they’ve already chosen.
I’d say the complete dismantling of public education over the last few generations is a big cause of this widespread informational apathy. And of course the internet, which, like the 24-hour news cycle which slightly predated it, amplifies “interesting” and “attention-getting” over “truth” and “honesty”.
I think I agree @DavidNRockies, but want to clarify on a couple of points.
I think an issue is people often see bias as a single dimension thing, but it’s more complex than that.
Yes, a news outlet can have an editorial stance that is more left- or right- leaning.
Yes, pretty much all news has a novelty or sensational bias; a news agency that reports on a high number of heart disease deaths every day is not going to last long.
But bias in the sense of knowingly lying, or other forms of bad faith journalism is a whole different issue and a much bigger problem now that in the past, as you say. Let alone being paid off by foreign governments to foster contempt and disinformation…this should not be protected speech IMO, though I accept at the edges it requires a judgement to tell the difference between a foreign owned legitimate outfit and propaganda pamphlet-dropping.
Agreed, I was just trying to sum up the situation in the US as I see it.
I don’t think knowingly lying should be protected speech. But I know there’s no prospect of any change on that. (Also, even countries that prohibit deliberate lying on traditional media have struggled to maintain the same standard in the internet era).
We have, for perhaps the past 2 decades or so, been enjoying the benefits of the information age - if we wanted to know something, we could google it and almost invariably find someone who would tell us the truth about it, openly and often for free. We got into the habit of accepting what we learned online because there was a lot of good, useful information being shared in good faith by good people.
We are now departing the information age, into the torrent of bullshit age. What I suppose we should be really surprised about is that it took as long as 2 decades for the worse elements of humanity to realise that lies are more economical, in terms of effort, than truth; it is exponentially harder to disprove a lie, or dispel a fiction or debunk an untruth or expose a scam, than it is to create any of those things. All you have to do is tweet it out, apparently.
Maybe it was there all along, but took 20 years to build to critical mass, but that’s what the immediate future probably looks like. If you care about facts and truth, you will be expending more effort talking about it, than the voices that possibly outnumber you and probably get to speak as loud as you, that are spouting bullshit at a greater rate than your truth.
“People don’t trust the media” (nobody has sown more distrust in the media than Trump and his cabal.
“People don’t trust our elections” (ibid)
Another one that I’ve posted before:
Politically, Trump is the textbook definition of an iconoclast – a person who attacks cherished beliefs or institutions. But I think it was ‘journalist’ Megyn Kelly who said, “some of those things probably needed to be broken, but some of those things are very precious to us.”
Trump is the ultimate blunt instrument. He’s a grenade tossed into a crowded market.
He then offers himself up as The One And Only Savior (“I alone can fix it”) – firefighter as arsonist. Bomber as paramedic.
Many of our fellow Americans turned him loose on the rest of us and on the world. It’s difficult to imagine how, if, when, and at what cost his damage might be undone.
I agree with this to some extent, but I’m not sure criminalizing certain speech is the way to go. The cure for bad information is to drown it out with good information. That’s difficult to do when half the voting public trusts Russian bots over their own government and respected journalists. But I still think it’s the better path forward.
I think cybersecurity efforts could focus a lot more on eliminating foreign disinformation at the source. Not sure how, but it would be a good start. (Does anyone even try to do this at all? Besides China and Russia with their “great firewalls”?) And there should be a major push for the government, or maybe better, a government-funded independent organization, to develop public trust as a source of reliable information. Easier said than done, I know. But as a red-blooded American, I’d much rather correct bad information than outright ban it.
And as I said in my other comment, public education is in dire straits, and should be completely overhauled and drastically improved, even at great public expense. And a lot more effort should be spent teaching critical thinking and distinguishing truth from fiction, than on just a bunch of dry facts and trivia.
No matter how we do it, I think it will take a lot of time and effort before we can return to a place of more information sanity, and a society that values truth and reality over comforting lies and manufactured outrage.
I guess, to distill my point down, and not to take any blame away from the professional liars, trolls and enemy propagandists out there, I think these people are taking advantage of significant defects in our society, rather than being the sole cause of it. And a lasting solution will be to remedy those defects, rather than just punish bad actors as they pop up, like playing an endless game of whack-a-troll.
The fundamental principle of all propaganda was the repetition of effective arguments; but those arguments must not be too refined – there was no point in seeking to convert the intellectuals. For intellectuals would never be converted and would anyway always yield to the stronger, and this will always be the man in the street. Arguments must therefore be crude, clear and forcible, and appeal to emotions and instincts, not to the intellect. Truth was unimportant, and entirely subordinate to the tactics and psychology, but convenient lies (“poetic truth”, as he once called them) must always be made credible.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.
–Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian, paraphrasing Joseph Goebbels, WWII German Propaganda Minister
And then …
“It’s all documented in a 318-page “Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News.””
“Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.”
“The memo—called, simply enough,” A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News"— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes’ work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries."
Overwhelmingly, these are not stupid people. What they are is evil incarnate.
News in this country has always been for-profit. The Washington Post during Watergate was a for-profit enterprise. The big difference nowadays seems to be that owners of big media companies have no sense of civic responsibility. It’s all about racking up those views. And it doesn’t help that the Internet age destroyed the traditional business model for many newspapers.
I think my statement is more true of television and network news:
I also think the market segmentation of new media (ie, the Baskin-Robbins model: a flavor for every taste) further divided the pie and made the quest for profitability that much more difficult, so they hammer on the demographic that they’ve identified – ethics, journalistic integrity, and civic responsibility be damned.
This is also about where mentioning (the death of) The Fairness Doctrine usually comes in
As I’ve mentioned in a couple of other threads, they sometimes have Fox News on in the breakroom where I work, so I’ll occasionally watch 20 or 30 minutes chunks of it. And it’s a really a glimpse into a whole different world, one where Trump can do no wrong. Since the inauguration, the ass-kissing has been so blatant that even the people who run North Korean state media would probably tell them, “You should really tone this down a tad.”
In fact, the biggest difference between Fox News and North Korean propaganda is that most people who watch North Korean state media, I suspect, know it’s bullshit, but to say so would be a good way to end up in a Gulag. Most people who watch Fox News, on the other hand, enthusiastically lap it up and unironically parrot its talking points.
Anyway, I would not be at all surprised to one day see a headline on Fox News about Trump scoring nine holes-in-one in a row.
Ayup. I’ve posted this one before (there have been a fair number of similar topics in my time here. I think they’re important):
I’m generally a pretty middle-of-the-road moderate. I have a beloved brother who’s a Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, MAGA hat guy. I can always refrain from talking politics. He can’t.
Unfortunately, the way I’ve taken to ending the conversation is by reminding him of one simple fact: I read and watch news from NO END of different sources, from all parts of the political spectrum. He doesn’t. So … as I occasionally remind him … I know everything that he knows, while he knows HALF of what I know.
And everything that we’ve learned from the Dominion/Fox News lawsuit takes that to a dramatically worse level.
When I can get the conversation to come down to issues of fact, I always have the facts correct, and they always support my position. Most of the time, it’s a reflection of what his favored media outlets DIDN’T tell him (lies of omission).
[END]
Two huge things I discussed with my Trump-supporting neighbor, about which he knew absolutely nothing:
“The nearly 1,000-page report, the fifth and final one from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee on the Russia investigation, details how Russia launched an aggressive effort to interfere in the election on Trump’s behalf. It says the Trump campaign chairman had regular contact with a Russian intelligence officer and says other Trump associates were eager to exploit the Kremlin’s aid, particularly by maximizing the impact of the disclosure of Democratic emails hacked by Russian intelligence officers.”“The report is the culmination of a bipartisan probe that produced what the committee called “the most comprehensive description to date of Russia’s activities and the threat they posed.””
The lawsuit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems, the damning and incendiary Discovery that came out as a result, or the $787.5M settlement that resulted. In fact, Fox News ‘media journalist,’ Howard Kurtz, was told not to cover the story at all:
Yeah. It’s bad. It’s so unimaginably and existentially bad.
As I’ve said in past threads, I don’t really agree with the American take on free speech. In this case, why is it that defaming a person, or particularly, a corporation, is something which can have consequences, but you’re fine to knowingly lie about public health, or geopolitics etc all day long? Why is only one a problem for the principle of free speech?
(And I always include the word knowingly because I am aware that the normal retort is “Who gets to decide what is true?” but it’s not about what is true per se, but if you had reasonable grounds for your reporting).
Anyway, this is just to get a typical rant off my chest. I agree with your post overall. And the line of protected speech is largely moot in the information age…though I do think governments will need to look seriously at the reach and power of people like Musk. It’s in no society’s best interest to allow that flood of hateful disinformation.
