MSNBC has often disappointed me over the years, but this commentary by Mehdi Hasan is excellent. There is a high principle at stake with regard to the prosecution of Julian Assange. Trump was wrong to bring the case and Biden is wrong to continue the prosecution. Obama’s DOJ was correct that there is no way to prosecute Assange without violating the First Amendment. As far as Assange’s allege hacking, Hasan correctly comments that the main witness to that claim has recanted, something not widely reported because it does not fit the narrative of most legacy news outlets. You might not like Assange, but that has nothing to do with the merits of his case. Numerous civil liberty organizations are horrified about the prosecution of Assange. If you support the prosecution merely because you think that Assange is “bad,” this is a good time to revisit the legal basis for your opinion.
The Profitable Siloed-Audience Business Model of Modern "News." Matt Taibbi explains how we got to this point, based on his book, Hate, Inc.
They want to make sure that they can wind you up as much as they can—not just every day, but in the internet era, there's a commercial imperative now to do this every hour, every minute, really every second. It's a moment-to-moment competition and the only way to really compete is to keep riling people up as much as much as you can. They use that CRossfire formula of constant combat to attract audiences and to keep them and addict them to this experience and this can be very damaging to people's mental health, to say nothing of what it does to society.
As a parting thought, I want to leave you all with this idea to recognize that when you watch the news, most people think of this as a public service and in some cases it is. But you really have to understand that it's also a consumer product very much in the same way that blue jeans or cigarettes or twinkies are news products and there are properties that we use to sell our product in the same way that those other kinds of consumer businesses use to sell theirs and what we've learned is that division is the thing that sells most in this current era and you have to understand that just as cigarettes or twinkies can be bad for you the news can also be bad for you. It can be bad for your mental health. It can be addicting in the same way that those products are. So please understand that from our point of view, we've gone from being something that was a business more in the direction of being just about delivering information to being very consumer-oriented, in the current incarnation, and much more about audience and demographic targeting.
"Do the Next Right Thing" is a phrase that has often focused me. Where did this phrase originate? The Marginalian explains that on December 15, 1933, Carl Jung responded to a woman who had asked his guidance on how to live. Jung wrote:
Dear Frau V.,
Your questions are unanswerable because you want to know how one ought to live. One lives as one can. There is no single, definite way for the individual which is prescribed for him or would be the proper one. If that’s what you want you had best join the Catholic Church, where they tell you what’s what. Moreover this way fits in with the average way of mankind in general. But if you want to go your individual way, it is the way you make for yourself, which is never prescribed, which you do not know in advance, and which simply comes into being of itself when you put one foot in front of the other. If you always do the next thing that needs to be done, you will go most safely and sure-footedly along the path prescribed by your unconscious. Then it is naturally no help at all to speculate about how you ought to live. And then you know, too, that you cannot know it, but quietly do the next and most necessary thing. So long as you think you don’t yet know what this is, you still have too much money to spend in useless speculation. But if you do with conviction the next and most necessary thing, you are always doing something meaningful and intended by fate. With kind regards and wishes,
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
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?
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