One element of Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public is the collapse of trust in journalism as practiced by newspapers and mass media. There are various diagnoses of this.
1. Gurri himself would say that the Internet has made the knowledge distribution more egalitarian. People are not as dependent on the media for knowledge, so that professional journalists cannot just stand on their authority.
2. Someone on the left would say that the problem is that bad actors have appeared on the scene: Fox News, the Internet’s right-wingers, etc. We could get back to the golden age if we could just get rid of censor these evil, “post-truth” outlets.
3. Eric Weinstein would say that we are living through a time in which our “sense-making apparatus” (one of his favorite terms) is up for grabs. He would say that he always was suspicious that the New York Times was feeding us a narrative and covering up stuff. Of course, since he is on the left, what he complains about mainstream media covering up is not what someone on the right would complain that mainstream media is covering up.
4. Yuval Levin (his book will finally be out shortly) would say that the institution of journalism no longer functions well. The institution of journalism ought to form journalists by giving them a sense of obligation to report truthfully and objectively. Instead, journalists see their organizations as platforms from which to pursue their individual careers, primarily by enhancing their personal “brands.” This leads them to take sides and play the outrage-stoking game.
5. Many of us point to the incentives of advertising-obsessed media to amplify those who stoke outrage and stifle those who are moderate and/or reasonable.
My thoughts are these:
I don’t think we are going back to the Age of the Single Narrative, when the left-wing media were more centrist and the right-wing media did not exist. Nor is that necessarily the age we would want to go back to if we could.
I think that mainstream media outlets like the Times are behaving in a manner that is nearly suicidal. On the one hand, they are taking up the silliest causes of the campus left. On the other hand, they are insisting that they should be taken seriously. They seem to think that any day now, the country will come to its senses and accept their narrative as definitive. I think that they will be lucky to retain as much of a following as they currently have.
It could be that a new sense-making apparatus will emerge. This will produce a new set of observers and analysts to replace traditional media. This will be highly decentralized.
Some people will specialize on gathering observations. Think of the people who have written books on the Opioid Crisis. Some have looked at the characteristics of users. Some have looked at the actions of pharmaceutical companies. Some have looked into the illegal Opioid production and distribution system.
Some people will specialize in analysis. Think of someone like Scott Alexander.
Some people will specialize in calling attention to good ideas and debunking bad ones. Think of someone like Tyler Cowen.
The question is whether this decentralized process will lead to consensus or fracturing. I am guessing a bit of both. That is, I think that weird opinion niches will thrive. But in a best-case scenario we will reach a point where some narratives are widely accepted. Even more ideally, where narratives are contested, most people will be familiar with the best arguments on each side, and not be rigidly committed to their preferred narrative.
I don’t think we are going back to the Age of the Single Narrative
1) In terms of journalism, we forget there was no real national journalism until the 1930s and really significant in WW2 and coming TV in 1950s. (I assumed the main reason why media was left center in Post WW2 because most were New Deal babies in 1930s.)
2) The main reason why journalism won’t return…It is not profitable. Why has Fox News moved more right and Trumpian over the years? Because they gained viewers! And remember the election of Obama was the greatest thing that happened to them for profits. (Note rightward move started in 2005/2006 when the Iraq/Bush Jr. popularity diminished.)
3) Look at NYT? Their digital subscriptions have jumped since election. So they are moving left because of profit motive!
I always found weird that the Ayn Rand world the press is mostly bad (they leeched by whipping bad stories on the protagonist that sell papers.)
And the only press are the risk their profitability of the papers.
I assumed the main reason why media was left center in Post WW2 because most were New Deal babies in 1930s.
I have heard it said that during the 1930s, newspaper owners were “on the right” and had their people write anti-New Deal editorials, but the reporters were pro-New Deal. So most readers would get a generally “left” message.
Yea, it does shock people to think the NYT and LAT both were hard right papers before WW2. But most of the national media of the 1950s, such as Walter Cronkite, were in college during the FDR years.
I guess the biggest problem for the right with FDR is the New Deal had a lot of failure but the economy did after turn in 1933 and by the time the economy was strong enough to campaign against FDR economics in 1940, the issues of WW2 were growing and the experienced FDR really was better prepared to be President in 1941. (I place economy turning in 1933 was the bank legislation stopped bank runs.)
I think this is right. News – in the ‘just the facts’ sense – is easier than ever to gather and disseminate. So newspapers have to switch to selling something else, and since they already sold op-eds anyway, it makes sense to make that their main product now.
“fox news has moved more right and Trumpian over the years,” you obviously haven’t been watching fox news. they have moved to the left and more anti-trump since the younger murdocks have taken over.
I think the reason why there is no central narrative is because there is no point in having one. There is no war to win, nation to unite, great depression to combat.
In the absence of any meaningful purpose for pooling society’s resources all that’s left is to bitch about comically petty subjects (gender, who’s got more money, etc).
If and when the real need for a central narrative appears (China manages to both grow out of its demographic collapse and acquire imperialistic desires, water levels actually flood Miami, unemployment goes to 50% as AI replaces everyone) new public prophets, aka journalists, will gain currency
I thought it interesting the notion I heard (can’t remember where, maybe Eric W’s podcast with Tyler) that if you ask in congress about China, there are many opinions that do not precipitate along party lines, unlike almost every other issue (domestic especially). China is about as much ‘the enemy’ as the US has. No doubt that if and when it gets more serious, it will be a rallying flag.
I do fear that Girard (Thiel’s favourite) was right and there is the inevitability of violence, leading (if you follow his reasoning) to a major scapegoat that provides a healing. The assassination of a president maybe.
The obvious ex-post scapegoat for violence in which one side triumphs is … the other, vanquished side, the very continued existence of which will continue to be used as a blame object.
A scapegoat which permits comity, coexistence, and reconciliation while both sides remain mostly unchanged in their views (i.e., wasn’t converted by the sword and forced to renounce former beliefs) is much more elusive. All the ingredients for revived acrimony would still be in place.
In 2021 all three branches of the federal government will be controlled by authoritarians. The narrative will be used to advance their agenda. Polls show significant portions of the USA public support criminalizing to one extent or another various types of speech. We can see the path ahead by the penalties already imposed in different places for “misgendering.” Authoritarian greens have long called for the execution of climate skeptics. Who really thinks that a weather vane like John Roberts would tell them no once they accede to power? A top Sanders campaign official was recorded promoting gulags for the USA. And courts and prosecutors have long given antifa terrorists a free pass. Faced against these forces, we cannot expect anyone, much less journalists, to demonstrate courage. The smart move will be to hunker down and avoid attention until the new authoritarian movement burns itself out from within.
So how long have”antifa terrorists” been active in the USA? What are some of the notable terrorist attacks perpetrated by them? What are some of the “free passes” given? Free passes like what the Bundy family has been given?
Free passes like the unconstitutional stripping of second amendment rights by the fascist regime In Richmond so that their allies in “antifa” are free to assault protesters tomorrow.
Its tomorrow. Reports are the fascist regime in richmond hosted a peaceful protest.
For all the news we’re hearing about the New York Times’ financial problems, it still feels like theirs is the dominant narrative, and that seems unlikely to change. The list of Stuff You Can No Longer Say seems to keep getting longer. The range of fashionable opinions remains narrow. The woke multiply and their influence extends. I think what this suggest to me is that the New York Times and its ilk were not quite as influential as people think/thought.
#4: Levin and Kling expect journalists to be these perfect angels and then are frustrated when this completely unrealistic expectation doesn’t bear out. The wiser approach is to have more realistic expectations. Journalists aren’t perfect nor are they villains, they simply are capable of selfish behavior and respond to incentives like normal humans do. When discussing every other facet of life, Kling and Levin would presume humans to be flawed and respond to incentives, I don’t see why they would consider journalism to be an exception to this.
The future of journalism, I would hope, will involve better mechanisms to verify facts, and measure ideological biases. Journalists have to earn the trust of their audience. Audiences will have more choice and more tools to get what they want. Some audiences want ideological bias and manufactured outrage, they should be able to get that, but people should be able to see it for what it is.
I am 50 years old
I do not remember any time in my life when journalism and journalists were respected or trusted
and reading or watching works of fiction that predate my birth I believe that that has always been the case
so what gives?
And yet journalism is a respected and high status occupation among everyone I know. Unless you work for Fox or Breitbart.
I guess you like being propagandized.
In india future of journalism is very dark. Here media only says what government want to hear.
I would say #2, in the opposite direction. The vast majority of the media are addicted to the habit of constantly asserting the existence of phony emergencies and demanding that politicians “do something,” whether rational or not, because emergencies sell papers. The left has built its narratives to dovetail with that fundamentally dishonest and evil practice.
+1
See how little coverage there has been for “History’s Greatest Decade” — the one we just went thru.
The fewer the life-threatening problems, the more the petty problems become over-complained about.
I wholeheartedly agree with Kling’s assessment. I’d like to add emphasis on the technical aspects, as outlined in Wednesday’s “The State of the Internet” post, that are independent of human agency and the memes we hold/spread.
Part of the problem with the current state of Journalism is that they either ignored or could not comprehend John Perry Barlow’s description of the digital disruption and its predictable outcomes. In the world of the Web, the link is king and newspapers simply continue acting like they are the single source of truth and never link to external sources or references.
Going with the technical aspects of “the link”, one of the ironies that Kling pointed out is that Barlow’s “economy of ideas” article is hidden behind a Wired paywall. This is something Barlow missed, and its structural rather than due to evil intent: the owner of the domain name that is used as the identifier (URL/URI) for content becomes the de-facto copyright owner of any content it serves.
There are other weird outcomes of structural choices. Content without URL identifiers, such as books and (the weirdest case of all) podcasts, are forever stuck in Internet Limbo without norms to link to the underlying content and acknowledge the creator/owner. Maybe we need to simply embrace the existing URI standard and make sure our content has a canonical URI that does not require a DNS name lookup.
Another key feature of underlying architecture of the Web is Representations (as described by Roy Fielding) and a second irony of the symposium was that all the content was in binary PDF format, and the two Barlow articles were converted to PDF from the original HTML with text URLs in the footnotes. This kind of stuff makes me giggle endlessly.
As authors/creators, we need to embrace Barlow’s “economy of ideas” and also address the issues we’ve learned since then. Git and its mechanism of using cryptographic signatures for content identifiers is now the ubiquitous (and easy) mechanism to store content and the processes we use to build the various representations. Barlow talks about the wine bottle but it turns out the owner of the name on the bottle label was more important. If the “economy of ideas” is the ability to make perfect copies of the wine, we should ensure that we don’t give future gatekeepers a perpetual license to rent seek.
Journalists go away?
In the future humans will be specialized on certain subjects and write technically. The search engines will advanced enough to collect multiple specialized articles and combine them into one general thematic article, and do this in run time (on the fly).
“Even more ideally, where narratives are contested, most people will be familiar with the best arguments on each side, and not be rigidly committed to their preferred narrative. “
Such optimism is likely misplaced. Theodore Dalrymple points out how difficult it is to know how much to trust such commonplaces as “Poland and Hungary have become authoritarian states” or “Europe needs demographic renewal.”
He wistfully adds, no doubt remembering when Christianity was widely practiced in Europe:
“If Jesus were to return to earth in Europe, he would no doubt say, ‘Why beholdest thou the authoritarianism that is in thy brother’s polity, but considerest not the authoritarianism that is in thine own polity?’”
-Theodore Dalyrmple
https://www.takimag.com/article/on-whose-authority/
“Price Discrimination explains everything”.
But what price discrimination actually means is ‘consumer discrimination’, that is, identifying their differentiation in terms of willingness to pay based on personal utility, taste, quality preference, patience, conspicuous consumption status signalling, etc.
If there is low variance and most consumer preferences and willingness to pay are homogeneous and in a tight distribution, there is a typical mass market of not-very-differentiated products or prices.
But if consumer are highly differentiated in bifurcated or multi-modal distribution of niches, then one ends up with a lot of different types of product appealing to the particular preferences of small market segments, with even the most popular products only usually getting some small share of the overall market. This is obviously the case for entertainment media – especially since the end of ‘the pop consensus’ era – for movies, TV, music, books, and so forth.
And now it’s true for “market for confirmation bias” infotainment media too. Er, I mean, “journalism”.
So, it’s not advertising: it’s just the market equilibrium.
Love in the Time of CholeraCompetition in The Time of Polarization.Here is a test for this these: Do we see more moderation in this regard when revenues are more derived from subscriptions than advertising?
There is of course a lot of advertising (and digital tracking!) obsession, but it seems to me that in the last several years we’ve seen many of the top-tier publications move more toward subscription revenues with paywalls and (decreasingly leaky, increasingly stingy) gated access.
And I just see zero correlation between the ratio of subscriber-to-advertising dollars in the revenue stream and the moderation or objectivity of top journalistic publications.
By the way, if I’m right that “niche-narrative-confirmation agitprop” is the market equilibrium for journalism in a time of high consumer polarization and acrimony, then that provides a market-skeptical addendum for your guess as to what Levin might say about failing journalistic institutions.
It would be that it’s not just that journalistic institutions are failing to form reliably ethical journalists of high character, it’s that even if the purely journalistic institutions were healthy in that regards and doing everything possible to encourage that, it would still be unreasonable to expect that to build in the necessary resistance to the irresistible temptation of market forces to which, without some kind regulation, private organizations trying to maximize profits would inevitably succumb.
Just like niche entertainment media, when a “””news””” organization can build and focus on a mostly woke audience, then they have an exception to the “get woke, go broke” dynamics of serving a mass audience, in which they would risk alienating large numbers of existing or potential customers.
So we have the worst of both worlds – a “market for confirmation bias” equilibrium, and journalistic formative institutions that are not only failing to extol objectivity but actively advocating for maximum spin and abuse of platforms to achieve social influence in a particular direction.
I agree. We are making the mistake of assuming that the digital media revolution has a causative relationship with the rise of social justice activism. The overlap of the two socially disruptive trends is incidental.
We should be talking about the future of journalism along two separate dimensions: 1. The Fifth Estate in the age of digital media, and 2. journalism as the voice of the social justice echo chamber.
Come 2099, we’ll still be arguing about as much as today in the USA, but it won’t matter as much.
Population wise, the US and the European Union and other “Western” nations are going to be far outnumbered by the Chinese, the Indians, and some alliance of African states. Economically and technologically, due to sluggish growth rates and the increasing independence of globalized corporations like Google and Amazon and Alibaba and TenCent, we’ll be second class as well. We won’t be throwing our weight around in the world as we do today. Right and left debates about what we ought to be doing in foreign policy will probably continue, but they’ll be about as significant as such debates are today in say Thailand and Belgium.
I suspect in the US, at least, climate change deniers will have triumphed over the people worried about global warming. On the other hand, we’ll be spending a couple hundred billion bucks every year on flood relief, drought relief, fighting forest fires, cleaning u after hurricanes and the like, shifting farm crops out of the Midwest to central Canada and so on as a response to continuing bad weather. So it’s going to look to someone from our age like Global Warming is happening, but no one’s going to have much energy left or interest for arguments about what our grandparents might have done differently in the halcyon days of the 2050s and 2060s.
We’ll be genetically modifying humans as a regular thing, trying to breed out Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia and half a dozen other illnesses. Likely, we’ll be “improving” cats and dogs and sheep and cattle and probably “wild” animals like wolves and deer and alligators and snakes and apes and earthworms and a couple hundred insect species, partially to make them more “useful” in the overall ecology of the world as we understand it. People will still be debating about whether Darwinian natural selection or God is responsible for peopling the earth and filling it up with animals, but it’s going to be philosophical and academic rather than a matter for in-the-gut faith.
Religion is going to subside as a matter of importance. We’ll still have Catholics and Methodists and Orthodox Jews and Shi’ites and Shintoists, but the truly devout of those faiths will have as much influence as say Amish or Dukabors.
Infrastructure repair and replacement is going to be a big government task. Dams and highways and sewage systems and recycling landfills and enlargeningpower plants. There’ll be arguments about whether these should be paid for as ongoing tasks or financed through long-term bonds, but the work will need doing no matter how it’s paid for.
One way or another, by 2099 we’ll have settled whether most of the adult population should be working to support themselves and their offspring or whether most of us will living on various universal income schemes. We’ll also have reached consensus on whether the vast majority of low income, low status “citizens” have much say about what the national government does, or whether billionaires and computer algorithms make the decisions which really matter. Likely the latter, though I suppose we’ll keep Republicans and Democrats around to argue back and forth much the Blues and Greens of imperial Rome. Nobody really needs newspapers to fuel political arguments actually.
I think the media will stay exactly like it is as long as the journalism schools teach that a news reporters job is to advance the political agenda not tell the truth and report accurate information to the public.
Of course, journalism schools do not teach “that a news reporters job is to advance the political agenda not tell the truth and report accurate information to the public.” They teach that journalists should tell the truth, and should be ethical. They should report what is newsworthy. That’s not the problem. The problem is how that is operationalized.
If you begin believing that Donald Trump is awful and the biggest domestic story (“meta-narrative”) is good people trying to thwart him, then anything they do is newsworthy. You will generally present what they say in a favorable light, giving them and their arguments more time than people and arguments favorable to Trump. You won’t lie but it will be obvious who you believe and who you don’t. You will generally consider facts unfavorable to Trump to be newsworthy and facts favorable to be not worth reporting on. You will provide context when it is favorable to the good guys and not when it is favorable to the bad guys. All this is part of being ethical and being a good citizen (of the United States and of the world).
The root of the problem with journalism is not with the journalists.
It’s with the public, the majority of which has no interest in facts.
Or more accurately for whom their opinion has become fact. They only want to hear more opinion that props up their opinion.
People with leftist opinions, listen to leftist news. AKA The MSM.
People with right wing opinion listen to FOX.
They hang out on Facebook groups that echo their opinion, they follow Twitter Tweeters that echo their opinion.
They don’t want facts, they want to hear their opinion fed back to them.
They DO want facts. They just would prefer facts that are consistent with their opinion. So the NYT gives its readers all the social justice news that’s fit to print. WaPo makes sure that democracy does not die in darkness by telling you all the anti-Trump facts you need to know to feel good in your opposition. Instapundit does something similar for anti-left people.
There are very few unfacts, very few bald-faced lies.
There’s an issue brewing in the Journalism business. It is illegal to try to copyright a news story. By law, news is considered to be public property. So you can copy and paste and quote a news story all you want. There’s no copyright on news stories, and there never can be. But News Agencies like Bloomberg, and The Associated Press are illegally placing copyright notifications on their news stories. That is in direct violation of the law. The reason that these Agencies are doing this is that they want to erase history. They will use copyright to stop future historians from examining the documents in their archives. The Catholic Church does that now. According to Bloomberg, Oceana has always been at war with Eurasia. And America has always been fifty percent black. That’s when it became perfect.
The illegal attempt by Michael Bloomberg to copyright his news stories is also to monetize reality. In the future, news and social events will be mixed-together; so that Michael can claim the whole thing is copyrightable. And then it will be illegal to let somebody else read news stories that were computer-generated for you alone. That would be stealing.
Mike’s plan will address systematic discrimination. Mike will defend the rights of protected groups by reinvigorating and reorienting the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Dept. He will also shed light on discriminatory practices by requiring companies to report on hiring, pay and procurement and collecting more complete lending data. Mike’s plan also ties federal housing funding to progress in reducing segregation, requires implicit bias training for police, teachers and federal contractors, and restores voting rights by addressing practices such as ID requirements, roll purging and gerrymandering.
First of all, I can assure you that Mike wouldn’t touch gerrymandering with a ten-foot pole. He would be swinging from a lamp post on K Street the next day. Political people spent decades creating sure-winners, through perfect district design. They decide who’s going to win; not those stupid voters. And his idea to require private employers to submit to even more intrusive involvement in their hiring practices is not going to help black people. The factories will just move to Mexico, as so many have already done. Nobody wants black employees. He can’t can’t change that reality by changing the law. The only thing he can do is scare all the jobs away. (Unless the government owns every single company in America.)
Then he talks about Federal Housing Funding. But there is no such thing. What he means is that he wants to flush a trillion dollars down the toilet, again, by giving easy term loans which will never be paid back. And he knows it. But hey, it’s not his money.
The fact is, there is no reason for the Federal Government to be involved in any housing activity. HUD is the biggest cesspool of corruption and embezzlement on earth. If Bloomberg really wanted to help, he would close HUD, and Also Ginnie Mae, and Fannie Mae. Those organizations are just vote-buying machines. Plenty of banks are willing to initiate a mortgage, if they think you’re a good risk. Unfortunately, most black people wouldn’t pay-back a hundred dollar pawn shop loan. This all brings us back to the subject of journalism. What Mr. Bloomberg and his copyright friends plan to do is change the definition of journalism. It will no longer be the act of reporting and analyzing current events. It will become just a part of each person’s copyrighted narrative. So each person will get the news (true or not) that makes him or her happy. And there won’t be any more bad news. Who needs it anyway? And everybody will just keep pushing that “Like” button, because there is no “Dislike” button.