I still get my news by perusing web sites, but the list is a lot shorter than it used to be. Its too much work trying to figure out what isn't propaganda anymore. Its safe to assume its all propaganda...
I'm curious if you have ideas for how, or even think it might be possible or desirable, to reverse this process and restore new media to some semblance of seriousness? Obviously, substack has arisen as a place where mainstream challengers can work, but do you foresee issues with subscriber ideology dictating content? Must we simply hope that there are enough people of integrity out there and ignore the rest?
I remember as a kid in the 90s thinking, wouldn't it be great to be able to watch/read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted? Then came the Internet and streaming services. Then as an adult in the early aughts, I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just pay for the channels I wanted? And now everything is a subscription. I don't have a problem with the concept, but I only have so many dollars to devote to $5 or $6 subscriptions per month. : /
I don't really have an answer. As much as I appreciate substack, it obviously can't scale, first for the reason you point to (a la carte is expensive), and second, because, as you also note, substack doesn't solve the problem of ideological capture. In a sense, it telescopes it.
Moreover, I'm starting to lean more and more in the direction of thinking that the mass media has not just diminished in social value, but is now becoming an actively anti-social force. We're getting to the point, if we haven't gotten to it already, that we would be better off with no media at all than what we currently have.
"as you also note, substack doesn't solve the problem of ideological capture. In a sense, it telescopes it."
Right, any partisan reading this article would call you out on doing the very thing you are condemning, except doing it for the benefit of the bothsides-ist, centrist, f&*k 'em all crowd. As a card-carrying member of said crowd, your article, like many on Substack, confirms and amplifies my ideological priors. The "both right and left wing media are applying predictable egregious ideological spin to story X" take is itself a predictable take from the Substack writers I read. While I happen to believe it is an objectively correct take, it is difficult to express to people in right or left wing echo chambers why my nonaligned Substack echo chamber is anything substantively different from their partisan echo chamber on any empirical ground.
I think history provides a good empirical basis for the superiority of the nonaligned "bothsides" take, but this is a difficult point to get across. For instance, asking a leftist to reflect on the certainty with which they believed Mueller was going to produce unassailable evidence of corruption and collusion prior to the disastrous congressional hearing should elicit a realization that they were taken for a ride by the likes of Rachel Maddow. But instead it results in dissembling and reference to other evidence that Trump is an unsavory character (but, but, insurrection!). Asking a right-winger to reflect on birtherism, Benghazigate, and many other right-wing staples that have not held up well results in a similar response.
Not sure what my point here is other than that we're right, they're wrong, but we're all f*&ked.
I entirely agree that there's such a thing as a "both sides" echo chamber, because that's precisely what the mainstream media was in the 20th century, when the ad-based revenue model was still intact. In order to attract advertisers, outlets were compelled to bring in as large an audience as possible, so they had a vested interest in not alienating anyone. So there was a built-in tendency toward moderate politics, straight reporting, and doing the whole both-sides thing.
The incentives are now completely the reverse, because of the changed revenue model for mass media. A partisan could critique me in the way you suggest, sure, but they would also have to contend with the rest of the argument, which is that there are concrete structural incentives toward producing more polarizing content. In other words I'm not merely making a subjective judgment.
That said, we agree that the problem is replicated on substack. I could easily become afraid of my subscribers bailing on me for saying something unpopular, and become addicted to their approval, and feel financially compelled to conform my opinions to theirs, and become ideologically captured in the exact way I'm describing for the institutional media today. So substack doesn't solve the problem at all.
You're never gonna solve that problem. If they are critical thinkers they'll recognize a good argument when they see one whether they agree with you or not. Those are the people you want, the rest of em can go pound sand. But you know that already.
What I can't believe is how quickly people I watched and read for 20 years devolved into the uber partisan hacks I always suspected they might be. Respectable journalists that have Pulitzer prizes turned into frothing at the mouth wack jobs almost over night. Whether you like Trump or not, that old boy exposed an awful lot of people in the media...
Oh I just thought of another good example: I was a sophomore in college when Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, and I was like, "what does Iraq have to do with anything?" And I went from there. At that point, I was a conservative who would've voted for Bush if I had been a few months older.
We've got to do a better job of teaching kids how to think, to not be automatic toe-the-liners.
For what it's worth, I don't have cable, and my news sources were things like online newspapers, Vox, ABC/NBC news. My main way of engaging with politics was the people in my life and Instagram (virtually never anything on facebook). I've recently been following substackers not just of the "both sides" variety but people who are very open about their liberal or conservative politics (or their disgust with both) but who aren't afraid to critique their own side of the political spectrum. I came to this from internal, genuine reflection. I have a strong natural tendency to question without becoming overly cynical. So when social justice activists started doing and saying things that veered off the heterodox tracks so far that I wouldn't follow, I began researching other voices.
I realize this isn't something we can expect masses of regular people to do. I have the time and more importantly the inclination to engage in deep intellectual and philosophical thought.
The path of least resistance is to just pick a tribe and outsource your thinking to the tribe's leaders and influencers. I also was in college and becoming more politically aware during 9/11 and the "war on terror" and was probably guilty of the path of least resistance at the time - the Republicans were so obviously wrong that any criticism of them was so obviously right.
But then things got murky after Obama got elected because, after campaigning against Bush's attacks on civil liberties and absurd campaigns of military intervention, Obama basically doubled down on Bush's worst policies, keeping Guantanamo going, extraordinary rendition, assassinating American citizens abroad with drones, persecuting whistleblowers, aiding and abetting the overzealous spy agencies' efforts to spy on everything and everybody, continuing and even escalating the failed Afghanistan intervention, etc.
By that point, as someone who values civil liberties above all else and opposes foreign military intervention barring defense necessity, I realized neither party represents my values or interests. Also, I realized the liberal media was full of shit, as the policies they assailed when Bush was president all of a sudden became the responsible thing to do under Obama.
And then we got Russiagate and the Great Awokening, which unveiled a new depth of dishonesty and propaganda from the blue tribe with which I previously identified. How so many can fall for this crap is pretty mind blowing. But if one looks at history - the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, McCarthyism etc. - it becomes clear that the human instinct to instinctively value tribal loyalty over truth, justice, and basic decency is overwhelming.
Hence the market for propaganda as a service that Mr. Woodhouse lucidly describes in this piece. I have no idea how to get partisans to see it all for what it is, despite how transparent it all is by this point.
Politics is rarely life and death. This is a good chance to use one of my new favorite phrases; if you must engage in hyperbole, conflate concepts, or redefine words to make a point you have no point to make.
Them’s fightin words! Maybe we could skip all the standardized testing of elementary and middle schoolers and instead teach media literacy and things like, I dunno, how not to be a lemming 101?
For passingly mentioning the possibility that it was a hoax in a lengthy piece about how the coverage of the incident by the social justice media was dismally credulous to the point of amounting to propaganda?
I have a relative that has advanced math degrees/works for Facebook.
I spoke to him about his work and how they would overcome some perception/acceptance problem they felt the public had about something Facebook wanted them to do/believe.
It came down to me asking him if you guys think you can just "math out" the problem with whatever algorithm they manufacture and without hesitation he said "yes".
Maybe he was just dumbing it down for me, but I think it is more likely that these people really believe that they can get you just by using the correct math.
Lester Holt just received an award for "advocacy journalism". His speech was something like ... don't let the absence of facts get in the way of the correct messaging. His award was for sanctioned lying, and he admitted it on the spot.
Look no further than the Universities ... During my own education in the 1970s I had a professor of Marxist philosophy, Douglas Kellner, who summed up freedom as a shallow thing... the freedom to buy the products you like. He is now at UCLA and has a long CV that reads ... messaging through education is the new product. It's especially successful in America where our ethnic and familial bonds are scissored through by multiculturalism. His educational progeny have been infiltrating public education for 2 generations. It's been a bottom-up transition inside the public schools. It will take another 2 generations to purge this intellectual filth from society.
What is a "member of Antifa", exactly? Were you at these protests? Did you get people's names to cross-reference with the official Antifa Membership List?
You are completely mistaken about the WiSpa incident, this is very disappointing from you. There have been 5 women who've lodged complaints about trans women entering the womens section of that spa. A spa staffperson in the video confirms there was a trans gender person in the womens section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HGsAaaVBc0&t=3s . The article that originally claims it was a hoax is from a Calif. LGBT publication, who sent a reporter to the spa to ask very cursory questions. The piece in this screenshot debunks the findings of that original article https://twitter.com/adhib/status/1420145315504664582?s=20 . This gentleman was THERE when it happened and confirms the incident was real https://twitter.com/bennetkelley/status/1416561456741421056 . This was very lazy on your part.
Yes you said this on twitter but I have yet to see this evidence you're referring to. The spa staffer's comments are unintelligible. The screenshots are a non sequitur. The person in line just documents what we already know — that people complained about a transgender person in the locker room. That's not evidence that there actually *was* one.
What I said in the piece is that there's no evidence that it happened and some reason to believe it didn't. I did not say dispositively that it did not happen. That remains just as true as before you left this comment, whose links do not prove or disprove anything. It wasn't "lazy" of me to note this, it was responsible.
Several posters frame the problem/solution in terms of logic and reason. I think that will mostly miss the mark. We now have a journalism that by aim or by carelessness creates fact sets that are untrue. Science the same. The result of applying good logic to a false fact pattern is rot. I am back to Descartes myself, searching for anything I can take to be true.
Yes, we should reverse Ronald Reagan's legacy and restore the FCC rule that media NEWS outlets cannot knowingly report anything they have not independently documented as fact AND only report the fact-based truth. They may editorialize elsewhere, but they cannot call that "news." One would expect the algorithm you describe from the New Republic and FOX News, but credible journalism is still happening at the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere around the globe. When I independently research some of their news stories, I rarely find inaccuracies of fact or only one-sided political spin. To lump all news outlets in the "algorithm boat" exaggerates the scope of the pandering exaggerations sold as news today by unscrupulous outlets like FOX and their friends.
Yeah. So true. But the author does equilize the two sides of our polarized nation despite the objective fact that the left alternately denies and hold up as truth the institutions of science and history according to their preferred narrative.
Great piece Leighton! As a side note if you want to correct it -- there is no "The" in "Red Scare". Thanks for the piece!
I'll correct! oops.
I still get my news by perusing web sites, but the list is a lot shorter than it used to be. Its too much work trying to figure out what isn't propaganda anymore. Its safe to assume its all propaganda...
I'm curious if you have ideas for how, or even think it might be possible or desirable, to reverse this process and restore new media to some semblance of seriousness? Obviously, substack has arisen as a place where mainstream challengers can work, but do you foresee issues with subscriber ideology dictating content? Must we simply hope that there are enough people of integrity out there and ignore the rest?
I remember as a kid in the 90s thinking, wouldn't it be great to be able to watch/read whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted? Then came the Internet and streaming services. Then as an adult in the early aughts, I thought, wouldn't it be great if I could just pay for the channels I wanted? And now everything is a subscription. I don't have a problem with the concept, but I only have so many dollars to devote to $5 or $6 subscriptions per month. : /
I don't really have an answer. As much as I appreciate substack, it obviously can't scale, first for the reason you point to (a la carte is expensive), and second, because, as you also note, substack doesn't solve the problem of ideological capture. In a sense, it telescopes it.
Moreover, I'm starting to lean more and more in the direction of thinking that the mass media has not just diminished in social value, but is now becoming an actively anti-social force. We're getting to the point, if we haven't gotten to it already, that we would be better off with no media at all than what we currently have.
"as you also note, substack doesn't solve the problem of ideological capture. In a sense, it telescopes it."
Right, any partisan reading this article would call you out on doing the very thing you are condemning, except doing it for the benefit of the bothsides-ist, centrist, f&*k 'em all crowd. As a card-carrying member of said crowd, your article, like many on Substack, confirms and amplifies my ideological priors. The "both right and left wing media are applying predictable egregious ideological spin to story X" take is itself a predictable take from the Substack writers I read. While I happen to believe it is an objectively correct take, it is difficult to express to people in right or left wing echo chambers why my nonaligned Substack echo chamber is anything substantively different from their partisan echo chamber on any empirical ground.
I think history provides a good empirical basis for the superiority of the nonaligned "bothsides" take, but this is a difficult point to get across. For instance, asking a leftist to reflect on the certainty with which they believed Mueller was going to produce unassailable evidence of corruption and collusion prior to the disastrous congressional hearing should elicit a realization that they were taken for a ride by the likes of Rachel Maddow. But instead it results in dissembling and reference to other evidence that Trump is an unsavory character (but, but, insurrection!). Asking a right-winger to reflect on birtherism, Benghazigate, and many other right-wing staples that have not held up well results in a similar response.
Not sure what my point here is other than that we're right, they're wrong, but we're all f*&ked.
I entirely agree that there's such a thing as a "both sides" echo chamber, because that's precisely what the mainstream media was in the 20th century, when the ad-based revenue model was still intact. In order to attract advertisers, outlets were compelled to bring in as large an audience as possible, so they had a vested interest in not alienating anyone. So there was a built-in tendency toward moderate politics, straight reporting, and doing the whole both-sides thing.
The incentives are now completely the reverse, because of the changed revenue model for mass media. A partisan could critique me in the way you suggest, sure, but they would also have to contend with the rest of the argument, which is that there are concrete structural incentives toward producing more polarizing content. In other words I'm not merely making a subjective judgment.
That said, we agree that the problem is replicated on substack. I could easily become afraid of my subscribers bailing on me for saying something unpopular, and become addicted to their approval, and feel financially compelled to conform my opinions to theirs, and become ideologically captured in the exact way I'm describing for the institutional media today. So substack doesn't solve the problem at all.
You're never gonna solve that problem. If they are critical thinkers they'll recognize a good argument when they see one whether they agree with you or not. Those are the people you want, the rest of em can go pound sand. But you know that already.
What I can't believe is how quickly people I watched and read for 20 years devolved into the uber partisan hacks I always suspected they might be. Respectable journalists that have Pulitzer prizes turned into frothing at the mouth wack jobs almost over night. Whether you like Trump or not, that old boy exposed an awful lot of people in the media...
write for free ... problem solved ...
Oh I just thought of another good example: I was a sophomore in college when Bush announced the invasion of Iraq, and I was like, "what does Iraq have to do with anything?" And I went from there. At that point, I was a conservative who would've voted for Bush if I had been a few months older.
We've got to do a better job of teaching kids how to think, to not be automatic toe-the-liners.
For what it's worth, I don't have cable, and my news sources were things like online newspapers, Vox, ABC/NBC news. My main way of engaging with politics was the people in my life and Instagram (virtually never anything on facebook). I've recently been following substackers not just of the "both sides" variety but people who are very open about their liberal or conservative politics (or their disgust with both) but who aren't afraid to critique their own side of the political spectrum. I came to this from internal, genuine reflection. I have a strong natural tendency to question without becoming overly cynical. So when social justice activists started doing and saying things that veered off the heterodox tracks so far that I wouldn't follow, I began researching other voices.
I realize this isn't something we can expect masses of regular people to do. I have the time and more importantly the inclination to engage in deep intellectual and philosophical thought.
The path of least resistance is to just pick a tribe and outsource your thinking to the tribe's leaders and influencers. I also was in college and becoming more politically aware during 9/11 and the "war on terror" and was probably guilty of the path of least resistance at the time - the Republicans were so obviously wrong that any criticism of them was so obviously right.
But then things got murky after Obama got elected because, after campaigning against Bush's attacks on civil liberties and absurd campaigns of military intervention, Obama basically doubled down on Bush's worst policies, keeping Guantanamo going, extraordinary rendition, assassinating American citizens abroad with drones, persecuting whistleblowers, aiding and abetting the overzealous spy agencies' efforts to spy on everything and everybody, continuing and even escalating the failed Afghanistan intervention, etc.
By that point, as someone who values civil liberties above all else and opposes foreign military intervention barring defense necessity, I realized neither party represents my values or interests. Also, I realized the liberal media was full of shit, as the policies they assailed when Bush was president all of a sudden became the responsible thing to do under Obama.
And then we got Russiagate and the Great Awokening, which unveiled a new depth of dishonesty and propaganda from the blue tribe with which I previously identified. How so many can fall for this crap is pretty mind blowing. But if one looks at history - the Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, Khmer Rouge, McCarthyism etc. - it becomes clear that the human instinct to instinctively value tribal loyalty over truth, justice, and basic decency is overwhelming.
Hence the market for propaganda as a service that Mr. Woodhouse lucidly describes in this piece. I have no idea how to get partisans to see it all for what it is, despite how transparent it all is by this point.
Some of us are forced to choose sides. Our lives depend on it.
Politics is rarely life and death. This is a good chance to use one of my new favorite phrases; if you must engage in hyperbole, conflate concepts, or redefine words to make a point you have no point to make.
Them’s fightin words! Maybe we could skip all the standardized testing of elementary and middle schoolers and instead teach media literacy and things like, I dunno, how not to be a lemming 101?
waiting for you to acknowledge that you were wrong about the WiSpa incident - https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/some-mainstream-outlets-cant-even?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&token=eyJ1c2VyX2lkIjoxMTI2NTg3NiwicG9zdF9pZCI6NDA4NjcxMDksIl8iOiJkTkJqYyIsImlhdCI6MTYzMDY4MzU5OSwiZXhwIjoxNjMwNjg3MTk5LCJpc3MiOiJwdWItNDgzMyIsInN1YiI6InBvc3QtcmVhY3Rpb24ifQ.c82tYOxH31x8JWBzAvGeY6jKFKACEahMteIb7eyLuBk
For passingly mentioning the possibility that it was a hoax in a lengthy piece about how the coverage of the incident by the social justice media was dismally credulous to the point of amounting to propaganda?
I have a relative that has advanced math degrees/works for Facebook.
I spoke to him about his work and how they would overcome some perception/acceptance problem they felt the public had about something Facebook wanted them to do/believe.
It came down to me asking him if you guys think you can just "math out" the problem with whatever algorithm they manufacture and without hesitation he said "yes".
Maybe he was just dumbing it down for me, but I think it is more likely that these people really believe that they can get you just by using the correct math.
They can get the aggregate you. with computers and more data, they will eventually reach youas an individual
Not if you don't subscribe to their pipeline of propaganda machine.
Propaganda pays BIG when it feeds the hysteria funneling $$$$$$$$$$ to the party in power, hence the inordinate influence of the Zuck-raker.
Lester Holt just received an award for "advocacy journalism". His speech was something like ... don't let the absence of facts get in the way of the correct messaging. His award was for sanctioned lying, and he admitted it on the spot.
Look no further than the Universities ... During my own education in the 1970s I had a professor of Marxist philosophy, Douglas Kellner, who summed up freedom as a shallow thing... the freedom to buy the products you like. He is now at UCLA and has a long CV that reads ... messaging through education is the new product. It's especially successful in America where our ethnic and familial bonds are scissored through by multiculturalism. His educational progeny have been infiltrating public education for 2 generations. It's been a bottom-up transition inside the public schools. It will take another 2 generations to purge this intellectual filth from society.
if we did not have Fox news we would have NO news.
What is a "member of Antifa", exactly? Were you at these protests? Did you get people's names to cross-reference with the official Antifa Membership List?
Oh, right, I forgot, Antifa is an "idea."
You are completely mistaken about the WiSpa incident, this is very disappointing from you. There have been 5 women who've lodged complaints about trans women entering the womens section of that spa. A spa staffperson in the video confirms there was a trans gender person in the womens section https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HGsAaaVBc0&t=3s . The article that originally claims it was a hoax is from a Calif. LGBT publication, who sent a reporter to the spa to ask very cursory questions. The piece in this screenshot debunks the findings of that original article https://twitter.com/adhib/status/1420145315504664582?s=20 . This gentleman was THERE when it happened and confirms the incident was real https://twitter.com/bennetkelley/status/1416561456741421056 . This was very lazy on your part.
Yes you said this on twitter but I have yet to see this evidence you're referring to. The spa staffer's comments are unintelligible. The screenshots are a non sequitur. The person in line just documents what we already know — that people complained about a transgender person in the locker room. That's not evidence that there actually *was* one.
What I said in the piece is that there's no evidence that it happened and some reason to believe it didn't. I did not say dispositively that it did not happen. That remains just as true as before you left this comment, whose links do not prove or disprove anything. It wasn't "lazy" of me to note this, it was responsible.
This is the video I meant to send https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0-mz56kfRA
Several posters frame the problem/solution in terms of logic and reason. I think that will mostly miss the mark. We now have a journalism that by aim or by carelessness creates fact sets that are untrue. Science the same. The result of applying good logic to a false fact pattern is rot. I am back to Descartes myself, searching for anything I can take to be true.
Yes, we should reverse Ronald Reagan's legacy and restore the FCC rule that media NEWS outlets cannot knowingly report anything they have not independently documented as fact AND only report the fact-based truth. They may editorialize elsewhere, but they cannot call that "news." One would expect the algorithm you describe from the New Republic and FOX News, but credible journalism is still happening at the New York Times, the L.A. Times and elsewhere around the globe. When I independently research some of their news stories, I rarely find inaccuracies of fact or only one-sided political spin. To lump all news outlets in the "algorithm boat" exaggerates the scope of the pandering exaggerations sold as news today by unscrupulous outlets like FOX and their friends.
Yeah. So true. But the author does equilize the two sides of our polarized nation despite the objective fact that the left alternately denies and hold up as truth the institutions of science and history according to their preferred narrative.
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