Politically speaking, I am a lifelong independent.  If we want to see the world more accurately, we’d all be better as independents. As Jonathan Haidt has written, the warm glow of being affiliated with a particular tribe comes with at a stiff price. It distorts our thinking process.

Morality binds and blinds. It binds us into ideological teams that fight each other as though the fate of the world depended on our side winning each battle. It blinds us to the fact that each team is composed of good people who have something important to say.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion

This distortion was vividly demonstrated by Solomon Asch in 1956. He discovered that social pressures can distort even basic perception. This distortion has worked its way all the way up into our sense-making institutions. We now have two legacy media “teams” that correspond to the two political parties. On the right, the client is FOX. On the left, the clients are NPR/NYT/WP/MSNBC. These two teams have demonstrated that they are happy to throw overboard all principled reporting of facts whenever it furthers the power cravings of their respective clients (DNC and RNC).

Increasing numbers of people have noticed that large swaths of “news” is focused political propaganda. The spin is especially intense when a particular story can benefit one of the two political parties. In modern times, it has never been more clear that a very effective way to lie is to tell only true things, making sure that you report only selective true things and suppress inconvenient true things. This is the thus the GOLDEN AGE OF JOURNALISTIC PLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY.  The news media has never been perfect, but In the past few years the fealty to a political party has gone so overboard that our legacy “news” outlets now enthusiastically report lies.  Our once-respected news legacy news outlets have been caught reporting outright lies on major stories for years, without correction. Matt Taibbi has described one version of this duplicity as “Bomb Holing.”  The de facto newsroom platforms for most media outlets have become “The Ends Justify the Means.”

Given the situation, it’s not surprising that trust in the news media is at such low levels. An exception is that those on the political left seem to be getting exactly what they want to believe.  In the Gallup poll above, I suggest that it is more important to focus on those who are political unaligned, the political independents, only 31% of whom trust the mass media. These are the people who less affected by tribal distortions.

This is our information report card.  This is the sad state of the raw materials our brains need to function as a collective, in a country in which the news media (“the press”) is the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution. The Founders knew that this Grand Experiment could work only if the electorate were well informed.  I share their guiding assumption: People will usually act “rationally” based upon the information they receive. Give them good information and they will eventually come around. On the other hand, shit in results in shit out.

U.S. voters are largely not receiving good information. In part, this is because the big media outlets are captured by the two major political parties.  In part, it is because most people choose to “favorite” a few news outlets, typically a few legacy news outlets aligned with one political party. Most people don’t want to do the work to reach out to perspectives and information that make them feel uncomfortable.

Yesterday, Julian Assange heard the terrible ruling that he will now be sent to the U.S. to stand trial for reporting information that pisses off the establishment elite.  We can now expect a ghastly spectacle of major U.S. legacy news outlets celebrating this devastating blow to free speech.

I’m distressed that our pretend media is highly motivated by its own corrupt inner failures to miss the relevance of the prosecution and persecution of Julian Assange.  I have friends of FB that don’t want to know the facts (e.g., major revelations by Wikileaks here and here). They want to believe that Assange is “bad,” and end of story. Here’s what I posted on FB today:

If you have not taken the time to understand what is going on with Julian Assange, I urge you to do so. If you are inclined to skip over the story of Wikileaks, halt all sense of curiosity and merely conclude that Julian Assange is “bad,” you are acting self-destructively. Human beings are absolutely incapable of making good decisions based upon bad information or no information. Much of what we think of as the “news media” is duopolistic PR system that is pawning you and dividing you from your neighbors and friends. Crap in, crap out, with lots of hate stirred in. Don’t you deserve better than that? The news media (“the press”) is the only industry mentioned in the U.S. Constitution because this entire grand experiment fails if we lack good information.

A friend responded: “It only effects journalists willing to publish classified military documents and run to enemy states for protection.”

My reply:

Agree, but I would add this: How many reporters out there are being chilled? How many were inspired by Woodward and Bernstein but wouldn’t dare step out there to further that mission of reporting in ways that piss off the establishment elite and the Dark State (liberals used to acknowledge that it existed). How many are now content to simply call themselves “reporters” in exchange for serving as stenographers for the political party “clients” of their employers and earning a paycheck?

Now that it is clear that both our schools and our news media are failing badly, our country is function much like any other well-designed informational system.

And now, Twitter’s new CEO is not sufficiently motivated by the principle of free speech.

Does anybody have any good ideas for how to fix this mess?