Childproof caps

I never thought I'd come to enjoy Matt Taibbi so much. 

This was the beginning of an era in which editors became convinced that all earth’s problems derived from populations failing to accept reports as Talmudic law. It couldn’t be people were just tuning out papers for a hundred different reasons, including sheer boredom. It had to be that their traditional work product was just too damned subtle. The only way to avoid the certain evil of audiences engaging in unsupervised pondering over information was to eliminate all possibility of subtext, through a new communication style that was 100% literal and didactic. Everyone would get the same news and also be instructed, often mid-sentence, on how to respond.

1 comment:

Grim said...

I was going to say that the phrase "no evidence" is characteristic of the sort of journalism he is describing, but I see he got to that. It's very widely applied, now, and not just to Trump matters.

At first I thought it was a failure to understand the distinction between 'evidence' and 'proof,' but lately it has become clear that it is merely an attempt to dismiss evidence and insist that there is no debate.