Interesting piece by Eli Tan in the NY Times about a town in California's Central Valley where there is not much local news of the professional variety. Hardly anyone subscribes to mainstream news sites like the Times or the SF Chronicle. Instead, many people rely on a combination of local FaceBook groups, cable news, podcasters, and weird web sites. The piece takes off from an incident that took place in 2020, when several armed militia members showed up to defend the town against a rumored invasion by Black Lives Matter protesters. (The same thing happened in several other American towns.) This led to a split within local FaceBook groups, with some banning political posts and unsourced "news", and people who wanted to post such things moving to groups that called themselves "Unfiltered" or "Double Unfiltered."
The result in an environment in which many people have no idea what to believe:
Fred Smith, a gun store owner in Oakdale, grew up watching broadcasts of the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite when he was called “the most trusted man in America.” Until recently, he was a regular viewer of CNN and Fox News after work and estimates he spent over $100,000 advertising his store in the print pages of the Modesto Bee in the early 2000s.Two events that come up over and over with people and the news are the pandemic, which left many folks bewildered, and the media's failure to report on Biden's dementia:
But that trust has waned as traditional cable outlets have started to feel “more like entertainment than news,” he said. He’s gravitated toward podcasters like Joe Rogan and Shawn Ryan, a fellow veteran. But he doesn’t necessarily trust all the information on those podcasts, either.
“It used to be you had one source of news and you trusted it,” Mr. Smith said. “Now the news comes from everywhere, and I take it all with a grain of salt.”
He now finds himself inundated with “more news than he’s ever felt in his lifetime” in the first months of Mr. Trump’s second term, and he doesn’t trust any of it. Asked if he ever gets his news from social media, Mr. Smith opened his Instagram feed to show an A.I.-generated image of Mr. Trump riding a bald eagle. “You can’t trust that either,” he said.
Working alongside Mr. Smith at his gun store is Jimmy Freeman, 50, who is known around the shop as a news hound. But whatever trust Mr. Freeman had in mainstream media disappeared while watching the last Biden-Trump presidential debate.
Watching President Biden struggle to string together complete sentences, he couldn’t help but think that the press corps in Washington that was supposed to keep the country informed — including Oakdale — had let him down.
“It felt like a failure,” Mr. Freeman said. “How could the media not tell us what we were seeing?”
This is an issue I worry about all the time. The shaping of the current media environment in the US goes back to the 1960s, when a series of big time government lies – the U-2 flights, a hundred things about the Vietnam War, Watergate – led a lot of people, including a few I know, to decide that everything we were being told was lie. Some of them still feel that way. Another big moment was the aftermath of 9-11, when many people felt that we had not been told the whole story, which was followed by the Bush administration's nonsense about yellowcake uranium and so on. The cluelessness of most media about the Wall Street near collapse of 2008 was another moment. I sometimes feel like people do not understand the enormous impact of their lies, which may really be undermining our civilization.
On the other hand, governments lie all the time, and I don't think the current US government is worse than average.
So I think something else is necessary. The internet is the obvious factor, multiplying people's suspicions with a barrage of innuendo, spin, and lies. But I wonder what else there is.
7 comments:
John, you talk about governments lying, and people not trusting governments, but you don't really seem to offer any opinion on the media other than suggesting they are "clueless".
Can you honestly believe that the media was -clueless- about Biden's condition? As opposed to them simply actively choosing not to talk about it? Ya know - in the exact same way the media chose not to talk about Reagan's mental condition, despite it being an open secret?
Are you unfamiliar with how media access and press credentials work? Are you not aware that if you humiliate the government or rock the boat badly enough, you can and will face serious consequences for doing so which will make it much, much harder for you to compete with other outlets, because they will get priority access to information that you will be forced to wait to hear secondhand? And do you not understand that such arrangements are very, very, very old in this country?
So I think something else is necessary. The internet is the obvious factor, multiplying people's suspicions with a barrage of innuendo, spin, and lies. But I wonder what else there is.
The "something else" that you seem to be missing is the consequences of corporate conglomeration over the past few decades. Media outlets no longer have the diversity they used to have in the late 20th century. The number of actually distinct sources for news has dwindled shockingly (but very quietly) in just a few decades. Now, a mere handful of companies (owned by a mere handful of the ultra-rich) control essentially the entirety of the media landscape - and that's not exaggeration, they literally control everything that matters.
And those ultra-rich owners have agendas. And more importantly, they have complete control over which stories their holdings loudly tell, and which ones they quietly ignore. And they pick and choose what topics get talked about, and which ones get buried - and those choices are made entirely in the contexts of A) "what will get us the most clicks / profits", and B) "what will give us the greatest political leverage to help shape laws that will increase our profits even more".
And we no longer live in an age where plucky, truth-seeking investigative journalists can push back against corporate complicity. You can't exactly threaten to take your scoop to someone else, because there IS no one else. If you bother to actually look up who owns what, you quickly realize that rather than there being hundreds of different media outlets in the country, there are really only 3 or 4, and the rest are all "subsidiaries" beholden to those few parent companies.
And the worst part is, since those megacorporations are so massive, the owners have all realized there's no sense in trying to compete with each other very much, and they instead largely collude. In the exact same way that the world's major organized crime factions realized it was stupid of them to fight and try to destroy each other with catastrophic losses and damage, when instead they could compete in more subdued ways, through backroom dealings, while observing a general code of conduct to keep the peace and keep the profits flowing.
*Part* of the reason there is so much distrust is, as John says, the government, media, and other elite institutions have lied in the past. But part of it is that people often prefer explanations other than the truth. I'm not surprised parents prefer to believe autism takes place because vaccines are an evil conspiracy, and not because life is, to a great extent, a cruel genetic lottery. Likewise they prefer to believe that Kennedy and others were assassinated by conspiracies and not be lone gunmen, because the latter is much less satisfying morally. The POW/MIA fantasy is another example: some prefer to believe that the lost are stuck somewhere and the government knows about it, than that they died alone, their deaths meaninglessly unwitnessed and unmemorialized.
Conspiracy theories also reveal much about group psychology. Consider that, when they lose an election, MAGA stalwarts ask "Who fucked us?" and "How do we get revenge?" Liberals ask, "What did we do wrong?" and "Do we have a future?" and "Should we start talking more like the people who beat us?" MAGA's tendency to direct its aggression outward and find ways to rationalize that to itself is, at the moment, proving a more effective instrument of power. (Incidentally, it's perhaps worth noting that the old, institutional Republican Party could act more like the liberals; that's, more or less, how they responded initially to the 2012 defeat. Remember that Louisiana governor, I think it was, who said, "we've become the Stupid Party?")
I think the above may describe an important psychological distinction between old establishments whose members rose through the ranks as good little high achievers, and new, hungry groups whose leading members rose through the ranks as an expression of their own aggression.
I agree that people have a hard time accepting that sometimes things are meaningless (eg your example of autism being a result of a genetic lottery), but people also prefer a simple straightforward narrative rather than the complexity of real life.
Lisa
I think that's very true . . . though some conspiracy theories can be pretty, let's say, elaborate! Granted, their elaborateness is often more a crude cut-and-paste designed to falsely pass muster against life's deeper complexity.
"On the other hand, governments lie all the time, and I don't think the current US government is worse than average."
Trump Administration:
1. Ukraine started the war
2. Kilmar Abrego has MS-13 tattooed on his hand
3. Haitians were eating cats and dogs
4. Democrats trying to pass laws to execute babies
The lies are endless from this administration (ranging from dangerous to trivial) and excusing the torrent of misinformation with a shrug and sigh that "everybody does it" is itself a lie. The Trump Administration is not average!
Hear, hear!
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