What happens when the Venn diagram of “news” coverage by outlets on the political Left and Right have almost no overlap? What happens when our “news” outlets become singularities, where people on the political Left rarely tune into Right-leaning “news” outlets and vice versa? What happens when consumers of the “news” become too trusting, too obedient, too subservient to the carefully crafted political narratives of their favorite news outlets? It is at that point that news consumers become dupes. Worse, they become agitated dupes who don’t want to hear about their blind spots. People on both the political Left and Right insist that they are well informed merely because they get their “news” from the A, B, C outlets. In the meantime, John Stuart Mill is spinning in his grave over our collective self-induced sickness.
This is the current state of news media and its most rapacious consumers. Matt Taibbi explains the main danger: the lack of informational course-correction. It is now common that blatant errors of fact take root and live on indefinitely. Here is an excerpt from Taibbi’s latest article at TK, where he offers many examples (you will be pummeled with examples beginning at the 6-minute mark of Taibbi’s video, below). You can find this article at Matt’s Substack website. The title his article is “The Bombhole Era”:
This technique of using the next bombshell story to push the last one down a memory-hole — call it Bombholing — needed a polarized audience to work. As surveys by organizations like the Pew Center showed, the different target demographics in Trump’s America increasingly did not communicate with one another. Democrats by 2020 were 91 percent of the New York Times audience and 95 percent of MSNBC’s, while Republicans were 93 percent of Fox viewers. When outlets overreached factually, it was possible, if not likely, that the original target audience would never learn the difference.
This reduced the incentive to be careful. Audiences devoured bombshells even when aware on a subconscious level that they might not hold up to scrutiny. If a story turned out to be incorrect, that was okay. News was now more about underlying narratives audiences felt were true and important. For conservatives, Trump was saving America from a conspiracy of elites. For “liberal” audiences, Trump was trying to assume dictatorial power, and the defenders of democracy were trying to stop him.
A symbiosis developed. Where audiences once punished media companies for mistakes, now they rewarded them for serving up the pure heroin of shaky, first-draft-like blockbusters.
In the above video, Taibbi explains that the “news” media now operates like a Ponzi scheme, promising yet failing to pay off. Here is a quote from the one-minute mark:
You’ve heard of a Ponzi scheme? You promise guaranteed returns using money from the new suckers to pay off the old ones and nobody ever finds out you are bankrupt all along. The bombshell era is a journalistic ponzi scheme you sell every scandal as the biggest ever you stoke audience expectations with words like “historic,” “unprecedented,” “treason,” “Watergate,” “concentration camp,” “reichstag” and BOOM! You dismount into dramatic predictions before moving on to the next mania.
Michael Crichton covered this topic brilliantly in his novel, “State of Fear.” Crichton’s work was essentially a fifty-year-long essay on the need to approach complex systems with humility.
Two or three years ago, on an internet discussion board from which I have subsequently been banned for spreading misinformation such as defense of constitutional rights that must be violated “because Trump,” a fellow poster reacted to the State of the Union speech by writing “I didn’t bother listening to stupid-face, but the Democrats knocked it out of the park.” I congratulated him on limiting his information to what he already agreed with, and asked him how that was helping him develop his intellectual maturity.
There’s a way to get the narrative right even if the facts are wrong. I read a book about Reagan’s covert organizations that worked to get the US out of the hole and begin tackling the USSR head-on. It was released in 1989 or 90 and may have been the one written by Steven Erickson. All the facts were wrong but the story was right. In book form, it didn’t matter. When that parades as journalism, it matters greatly.