Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi discuss many of the ways in which "the news" has changed for the worse over the past few decades. This is the type of discussion you don't see on most news outlets--news media fail to cover problems with news media.
Here's something almost everyone can agree about: Dysfunctional public discourse is ubiquitous. What is feeding it? There are many ideas out there, but one that I find compelling is that the mass media has adopted "Dysfunctional public discourse" as its favorite method of providing us with "news." Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone boils down his criticisms into the form of "Ten Rules of Hate." First, here is an excerpt from his article:
We’ve discovered we can sell hate, and the more vituperative the rhetoric, the better. This also serves larger political purposes. So long as the public is busy hating each other and not aiming its ire at the more complex financial and political processes going on off-camera, there’s very little danger of anything like a popular uprising. That’s not why we do what we do. But it is why we’re allowed to operate this way. It boggles the mind that people think they’re practicing real political advocacy by watching any major corporate TV channel, be it Fox or MSNBC or CNN. Does anyone seriously believe that powerful people would allow truly dangerous ideas to be broadcast on TV? The news today is a reality show where you’re part of the cast: America vs. America, on every channel. The trick here is getting audiences to think they’re punching up, when they’re actually punching sideways, at other media consumers just like themselves, who just happen to be in a different silo. Hate is a great blinding mechanism. Once you’ve been in the business long enough, you become immersed in its nuances. If you can get people to accept a sequence of simple, powerful ideas, they’re yours forever. The Ten Rules of Hate.Here are Taibbi's Ten Rules, but I highly recommend reading the entire article: 1. THERE ARE ONLY TWO IDEAS - Republican and Democrat, liberal and conservative. Boolean political identities. 2. THE TWO IDEAS ARE IN PERMANENT CONFLICT 3. HATE PEOPLE, NOT INSTITUTIONS 4. EVERYTHING IS SOMEONE ELSE’S FAULT ("The overwhelming majority of “controversial news stories” involve simple partisan narratives cleaved quickly into hot-button talking points. Go any deeper and you zoom off the flow chart"). 5. NOTHING IS EVERYONE’S FAULT ("If both parties have an equal or near-equal hand in causing a social problem, we typically don’t cover it.") 6. ROOT, DON’T THINK ("By the early 2000s, TV stations had learned to cover politics exactly as they covered sports, a proven profitable format. The presidential election especially was reconfigured into a sports coverage saga.") 7. NO SWITCHING TEAMS ("Being out of touch with what the other side is thinking is now no longer seen as a fault. It’s a requirement.") 8. THE OTHER SIDE IS LITERALLY HITLER 9. IN THE FIGHT AGAINST HITLER, EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED. ("If the other side is literally Hitler, this eventually has to happen. It would be illogical to argue anything else. What began as America vs. America will eventually move to Traitor vs. Traitor, and the show does not work if those contestants are not offended to the point of wanting to kill one another.") 10. FEEL SUPERIOR. ("We’re mainly in the business of stroking audiences. We want them coming back. Anger is part of the rhetorical promise, but so are feelings righteousness and superiority.")
I know I'm late to the game on this Google incident, but this is such a good illustration about how we, as a society, are unable to talk and think about serious issues except through our ideological filters. Further, some questions that can be explored through science apparently should no longer be even raised. First, a comment from a Gizmodo article by Melanie Ehrenkranz, who characterizes former Google Engineer James Damore as follows: "The man thinks women are inferior to men as engineers." That is typical of a lot of how Damore has been treated on the Internet. Now consider the basic facts about what Damore wrote at Google:
Calling the culture at Google an "ideological echo chamber", the memo says that while discrimination exists, it is extreme to ascribe all disparities to oppression, and it is authoritarian to try to correct disparities through reverse discrimination. Instead, it argues that male/female disparities can be partly explained by biological differences. According to research he cited, those differences include women generally having a stronger interest in people rather than things, and tending to be more social, artistic, and prone to neuroticism (a higher-order personality trait). Damore's memorandum also suggests ways to adapt the tech workplace to those differences to increase women's representation and comfort, without resorting to discrimination.Damore has given detailed interviews about what happened at Google and why he wrote his comments. That includes this interview with Joe Rogan:
Lee Camp refuses to let go of important issues of the day, and that is why he, and others who follow the facts where they lead, ended up at RT. But RT's shows are now being smeared with a broad brush, as though all of its shows are the product of Russian propaganda. Lee Camp's response:
Terror attacks carried out by Muslims receive more than five times as much media coverage as those carried out by non-Muslims in the United States, according to an academic study.
Analysis of coverage of all terrorist attacks in the US between 2011 and 2015 found there was a 449 per cent increase in media attention when the perpetrator was Muslim.
Muslims committed just 12.4 per cent of attacks during the period studied but received 41.4 per cent of news coverage, the survey found.