Megan McArdle writes (WaPo, paywalled),
The media’s pronouncements about fighting “misinformation” often sound perilously close to declaring that the common presumptions of a handful of major media outlets should define the bounds of accepted truth for everyone. That’s both arrogant and impossible, and I don’t blame anyone for recoiling. But I do question those who have reacted by casually (and publicly!) suggesting that they’ll use their entrepreneurial mojo to destroy journalism and replace it with something better.
She refers to discussions on Clubhouse. I have observed the same thing. In fact, her description of Clubhouse as like a big conference with lots of panel discussions going on fits with my experience.
In rooms discussing media where tech people are on the panel, the tech people complain about journalists of having abandoned objectivity. In rooms with mainstream media on the panel, the journalists complain about consumer having abandoned tradition news outlets for social media and fake news. I see both sides as trying to click their heels together three times, hoping to be transported back to the 20th century. I want to shake everyone by the collar and make them read Martin Gurri’s Revolt of the Public, or at least his essay about the NYT.
As an aside, Bret Weinstein seems to have observed more dramatically the militant black-power element that first struck me (Dick Gregory’s Clubhouse).
Also, listen to Heather Heying’s take in the podcast with Bret. I personally place her above Bret in my FITs rankings. Bret reminds me of the story I read about the KC quarterback in the Super Bowl racking up 497 yards behind the line of scrimmage, running back and forth to try to evade defenders. She instead runs straight at you. I would draft her to pick up some W’s.
As another aside, room population size on Clubhouse is a great illustration of an autocatalytic process. The more people who are drawn to a room, the more additional people will be drawn. If you have only a handful of people in the room, you are going to be stuck at a low level. If you have close to 1000, you room will keep growing. That is because of the way the “feed” algorithm works. You get alerted when people you follow are in a room. So if 1000 people are in a room, it is much more likely that one of them is someone I follow than if the room has only 5 people. In addition, other things equal it seems that the algorithm shows rooms in population-size order. So if I am just scrolling through the rooms, the first one I see will be the one with the most people.
I can easily imagine a dynamic where if someone with thousands of followers leaves room A and goes to room B, then room A pretty much empties out and room B fills up. This could be regardless of what the panel discussion is like in room A vs. room B.
Honest question: why should I be interested in Clubhouse when I’ve got so many HQ podcasts in my feed already? Maybe I’m just missing the point somehow?
It just seems like a low brow townhall meeting.
Example: click to the YouTube video in the link below. Is that even a remotely interesting conversation between Weinstein and the militant left?
https://twitter.com/swipewright/status/1366239536410333184?s=21
+1 Mainly a platform for elites to strut about.
Also, listen to Heather Heying’s take in the podcast with Bret. I personally place her above Bret in my FITs rankings.
+1
Thank you! Just listened based on your recommendation.
Here were my takeaways:
1) blacks can be just as racist as the kkk.
2) blacks have a much higher societal status (i.e. power) than the kkk since the left wingers in academia and the MSM have near exclusive access to hand out the status cards.
3) no one wants to acknowledge either 1) or 2). It’s a secret that you’re not supposed to disclose. Shhh!
I’ve known all of this already since the 1990s after witnessing the white glove treatment of vile charlatans like Louis Farrakhan. And, I don’t want to suffer through a long winded Clubhouse chat to re-confirm what I already know.
Lastly, completely agree with you that Ms. Heying is amazing. They both are and witnessing their brains at work at the same time is a joy.
They are a textbook illustration of the stereotypical strengths and weaknesses of the sexes. Brett is way crazier and therefore way more likely to come up with the brilliant heterodox insight. And he needs Heather to explain to him why most of his attempts are wrong.
+1 A couple of months ago Brett convinced himself that the cause of his WiFi problems was radioactivity seeping into his house due to smoke from the fires in the area.
Clubhouse is “live”, relatively unscripted, and tends to have far more participants than a simple podcast. Each “Room” is different though. They’re also typically not recorded for later listening. Recording without permission and a statement in the Room’s description goes against the ToS.
Following people is interesting as you can configure the app’s notifications to ping you when they start or enter a room. The app also lets users schedule Rooms ahead of time with the option to add it to your phone’s calendar.
Ultimately whether you find it useful is a personal preference though.
Just can’t get into hour long listenings to hear 20-30 minutes of good stuff.
Journalists need to do more reporting what happened, who did what. Accurately. Not like the NYT lie about a police officer being beaten to death with a fire extinguisher, which they falsely reported, and it was widely retweeted, with huge amounts of misinformation.
As long as the Democrats excuse Fake News which they support, there will continue to be less trustworthy journalism. Of course, real news about what Biden actually says, including his misspeaking, makes him look like a sad old senile man – just as only conservative media said he was. Destroying Fake News journalism is a good idea – those paid to get the truth but who instead give out fake news are rotten.
Lots of unpaid people give out stuff – worth twice what is paid for. Like these blog comments. Glad that substack seems to be producing a model for better reporting and rewarding those more honest / believable.
“Retweet” is a great expression of what too many elites are doing instead of thinking.
Here’s what Vogue says about Clubhouse (launched April, 2020):
https://www.vogue.com/article/everything-you-need-to-know-about-clubhouse
“A dizzying bringing together of live podcast-style conversations, panel discussions, networking opportunities (some savvy people are already swapping ‘influencer’ for ‘moderator’) and advantageous multiple-room use (locked and private options are available so you can talk to pals too), the social-media app mimics real-life interactions.”
As usual, lots of popularity >> status >> influence (/power?) some are going for “moderator”.
Arnold: if I am just scrolling through the rooms, the first one I see will be the one with the most people.
It would be great to have more FIT folk doing more public talking. My kids are much more video and audio oriented rather than reading transcripts, like me. The sort of like the reddit style of up votes & downvotes for popularity. We could use more innovation for better choosing of best things to listen to, still.
Sometimes good speeches are transcribed and available for free like Trump’s:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-cpac-2021-speech-transcript
So much better than listening to anybody just talking.
I don’t hold any special place in my heart for modern mainstream media, but if our tech oligarchic class thinks it can do better, what exactly are they waiting for? It’s not as if the New York Times started to stink yesterday! And the one tech billionaire who owns his own legacy media property runs it like a legacy media property (sorry, Megan). Substack is nice and all, for the present, but it’s pure opinion, from what I can tell; it’s a substitute for blogs and small opinion journals like National Review, largely. Try creating a substitute for the New York Times, otherwise quit whining. Or hey, keep shoveling money at Ibram X Kendi; maybe he’ll manage to fix things.
Clubhouse sounds terrible, by the way.
“tech people complain about journalists of having abandoned objectivity….journalists complain about consumer[s] having abandoned tradition[al] news outlets for social media and fake news.”
So, tech people complain about declining journalistic standards, and journalists complain about…competition.
The Gurri essay about post-journalism and the NYT starts out superbly. I don’t think I appreciated that, with the internet, there is no more market for traditional “objective” journalism. (The thesis is that, in the internet age, audience is too fragmented to herd into a “passive consumerist mass” with non-volatile traditional factual reporting. Instead, one needs to appeal to passionate segments with post-journalism opinion.)
I think Gurri goes astray though when he focuses on Trump and 2016. Researchers have documented a hockey-stick explosion of woke language in the NYT starting about 2010, long before Trump. In fact, it might be better to view Trump as a type of candidate that was enabled by post-journalism. We should also acknowledge that Fox News, post-journalism on the right, emerged long before Trump and even before the 2010 hockey-stick explosion of wokeness at the NYT. Fox News, which always lets us know that they have the highest ratings, is a good example of the demand for post-journalism in a fragmented market (hundreds of cable channels instead of three major networks).
Rather than placing NYT’s reaction to Trump at the center, I think the story is better told in terms of economic forces. Internet led to audience fragmentation, which leads to post-journalism opinion. In this view, it was inevitable that the NYT would become, or would be replaced by, the left-wing version of Fox News. If Trump didn’t catalyze the process in 2016, the process started around 2010 would have caused the NYT to evolve gradually anyways.
From this perspective, if tech people want a return to pre-post-journalistic objectivity, then they’re going to have to invent a platform that can once again herd audiences into a passive consumerist mass for advertisers. I don’t know what that looks like, and I’m not sure most tech people do either. They don’t like to view their jobs as attracting audiences for advertisers. Usually, they just invent “cool” tech, and the tech that survives is the tech that eventually finds a viable business model to support it. (Lots of cool tech doesn’t survive, btw.)
I believe there IS a market for true, accurate news. In politics, there are 4 types:
positive for Dems, positive for Reps;
negative for Dems, negative for Reps.
The problem is finding any source willing to give all 4 aspects. Fox was closest, so I’ve read – but I didn’t like watching them nor CNN / MSNBC. They were often the only ones to cover some positives for Reps, and the only ones to cover some negatives for Dems; I suspect they seldom ignored those positive for Dems or negative for Reps. Their opinion folk were far more Rep oriented, which contrasted with the Politically Correct other snob-news.
I often find Russia Today better with both types of negative news.
Gurri’s essay is great, even tho many themes had been previously touched on.
As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around.
“Free news” is what is demanded, altho Free Good News is what folks are willing to pay for. And the good news they want is: reports from the “front” in the war of our side (good) against them (bad / evil). With OrangeManBad to be against, NYT made tons of money by selling their creed.
Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls.
Up until 2018, I’d call that creed “Political Correctness”.
One of the main reasons Trump won in 2016, and got even more votes in 2020, is his willingness to fight against the PC-nazis.
Today it’s “Wokeness”, the Religion without a God.
journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.”
Funny sad, I’m thinking of donating more to conservative sites because I’m afraid of Wokeness. Fear sells. And probably sells news better even than sex, tho sex sells other stuff better. Part of the idea of “news” is to assuage the fear thru foreknowledge.
NYT started doing this consciously in 2016, because of its irrational hatred of non-snob Trump.
But Political Correctness has long been gaining power in academia, media, and gov’t.
https://www.academia.org/the-origins-of-political-correctness/
Here’s Bill Lind in 2000:
For the first time in our history, Americans have to be fearful of what they say, of what they write, and of what they think. They have to be afraid of using the wrong word, a word denounced as offensive or insensitive, or racist, sexist, or homophobic.
Cultural Marxism. See the famous quote from Stalin’s time, 1930s:
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/historical-origin-political-correctness/
. . . “Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.”
. . . “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”
The anecdote was a vital reminder in Stalin’s empire: Stray from the party’s official position and it could mean death. Whether or not something was true mattered less than whether or not it advanced the Idea.
Stray from the Woke position, often changing, and it can end your career among the elite snobs.* Gurri’s article focuses a lot on Trump and how opposition to him crystalized the change to post-journalism, from NYT media reporter Rutenberg :
“If you view a Trump presidency as something that is potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that.” Objectivity was discarded in favor of an “oppositional” stance.
The Dems are treating Trump and Trump supporters exactly as racist Dems used to treat Blacks:
“If you view a Black as someone that is potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that.” Objectivity was discarded in favor of an “oppositional” stance. ”
It’s also how Nazis viewed Jews:
“If you view a Jew as someone that is potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that.” Objectivity was discarded in favor of an “oppositional” stance.”
Not so far from anti-commie McCarthy:
“If you view a Communist as someone that is potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that.” Objectivity was discarded in favor of an “oppositional” stance. ”
Prejudice allows folk to imagine what isn’t there, and confirmation bias helps them find reasons to continue believing.
In a recent thread Nicholas W. imagined an alt-reality where the Jan 6 protest was actually an armed insurrection intent on murdering Congressmen. I find it ridiculous, but lots of smart folk really imagine that Trump wanted that. Based on ZERO evidence – but the lack of evidence is easily explained: “Trump is so incompetent.” The idea of elite snob critics of Trump is that he’s both Evil, but incapable. And all evidence to the contrary is twisted to support this emotional, but irrational, analysis.
I was Never Hillary; I became pro-Trump based on his policies and the results of those policies; I’ve also become anti- irrational anti-Trump snob critiques. Mislabeling an “insult”, fully protected by First Amendment (altho often rude), with “bullying”, causing actual harm, is a common tactic of irrational Trump haters.
Trump certainly wants “Republicans”, who have power or influence because of their Party, to be more supportive of him, personally. If any oppose him (first), he’ll insult those who don’t do as he wishes – but it’s voters who decide and have the power. Including Reps voting to not boot Liz Cheney from her high spot in the Rep Party. I don’t call that “bullying”, nor firing anybody he’s hired, for any reason.
Woke is the new PC is cultural Marxism and leads to speech police and thought police based on groups dominating individuals. Trump Republicans are the currently the best way to fight these thought police.
*Like Brendan Eich, who founded Mozilla, was booted because he thinks society is better without gay marriage (which I think, also – the legality of gay marriage is a fact, whether society is better or not is opinion).
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/11/23/brave-blockchain-cryptocurrency-browser/
I’m using Brave now. Tried in 2018 but didn’t like it then; it’s much better now.
I read Gurri’s essay; great essay, it succinctly captures the NYT and broader trends in media. It’s largely saying things I already agreed with and noticed: NYT has become more activist and aggressive about framing news to fit a narrative, and that is what subscribers are paying for.
I’m curious about what Kling suggests should be done moving forward.
One point is that people should accept NYT for what it is, which is an activist framing of the news of the day and not an objective journal of record.