Andrew Cuomo, the Emmy Award–winning governor that a swooning press held up as the enlightened standard for an effective pandemic response... may have covered up nursing-home fatalities....The Lincoln Project, the great conquering super PAC of the 2020 election, hailed as the work of geniuses and lavished with attention on cable news, has imploded upon revelations that it is a sleazy scam.And the widely circulated story of the death of Officer Brian Sicknick, a key element of Trump’s second impeachment, is at the very least murky and more complicated than first reported.
You could extend the list a lot longer than that, and I'm sure each of you has your own favorite example.
When speaking of the wilder conspiracy theories like Qanon, I've lately been proposing that they're successful because they actually are more plausible than the official story. The official story is that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
The author says there are no ready solutions, but there are: there just aren't ready actors. The solutions are to speak the truth, to stop treating journalism as a front for cultural warfare, and to stop believing that 'your team' are the good guys. Not 'playing for the team' is apparently not an option, however; 'winning' or 'advancing the ball' seems to be what journalism has become.
Costs exist, however. Credibility and attention are the currency, and if you become incredible people stop paying attention, too. Then what have you got? You've got people looking for alternative sources, and some of those sources believe in lizard people.
4 comments:
You could extend the list a lot longer than that, and I'm sure each of you has your own favorite example.
I'll bite. The list can be extended a lot further back in time, too, and the canonical example of journalism's dishonesty, for me, is that icon of journalism, Walter Cronkite, at the outset of the Tet Offensive, bleating "What's going on here," knowing full well by shortly after the offensive began, that what was going on was the utter destruction of the Viet Cong as a military and political entity. But he never acknowledged that plain fact, preferring to let his pretended confusion stand uncorrected.
...'winning' or 'advancing the ball' seems to be what journalism has become.
At least as far back as shortly after the 2016 election when the New York Times published a piece saying bluntly that objectivity could no longer be a part of journalism; the guild (my term) must take the side against Trump. And journalists have taken the Tabloid of Record's admonition to heart since.
Eric Hines
"...more plausible than the official story." That seems a good explanation. I think QAnon is crazy, but it is fair to ask "Compared to what?"
People are not experts on conspiracy theories. It requires them to consider theories and conspiracies. Two topics that are in rrsistance due to mental compartments.
It is like combining gun control with gun owners together as one topic. Aka trigger control.
Also grim said these conspiracy theories are never on topic.
Although what he had in mind,, nobody knows because the thinking is in contradiction there. Ideas have to be explored to resolve the value function. Ignore it long enough, and you get more t red, more ymars, and more q. That is inevitable. Plus factionalism cw2.
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