If you have not yet heard the podcast with Jonathan Rauch and Andrew Sullivan, I strongly recommend it. Rauch thinks that “the counter-movement is beginning to form” against the religion that punishes heretics. Along the way, he and Sullivan get into some heated, but friendly, disagreements.
One of the disagreements concerns whether the mainstream media has earned distrust or not. Sullivan and I would say that it has. Rauch tries to argue otherwise. On the lab leak hypothesis, for example, Rauch argues that we should give the media credit for eventually turning around. Sullivan points out that media hatred of Mr. Trump was the reason that they failed in the first place. But listen to the episode before you comment.
I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation and have really enjoyed Sullivan’s past several interviews (however he was pretty weak in his most recent with Bryan Caplan).
Rauch does seem to overstate the role of Trump & Trump backlash in the truth discussion (e.g. media).
Just take outright false claims made by the MSM and governments in the West regarding COVID (masks, lab leak, border closing).
He’s also pretty casual in down playing the media’s previous ridicule of the lab leak theory as something like: “well at the time the facts supported this, and now new facts have emerged”.
That response is part of a much larger problem with what it means to evaluate and communicate uncertainty about evidence generally and the outcomes complex of socio-economic issues. Their is no consideration of the need to communicate the degree of confidence in which we believe something, and the likelihood of other possible outcomes and what the impact of that would be.
Furthemore, it is willfully ignorant of Rauch to downplay the mainstream’s (e.g. NYT) shift towards an extreme form of bias & truth distortion.
(https://twitter.com/JoeRini6/status/1402184145103622145?s=20)
Obviously Gurri and Mir provide a more compelling argument for why this is happening:
https://www.city-journal.org/journalism-advocacy-over-reporting
“it is *willfully* ignorant of Rauch to downplay the mainstream’s (e.g. NYT) shift towards an extreme form of bias””
Why do people take this shill for the Elites seriously?
When is the last time he stood for any key truth, or vs. any major Elite BS, before the herd caved, and made the truth into CW?
Indeed, when is the last time that any of the Brookings crowd did anything major, other than shill for the Elites?