"Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" + "Factoids and Fake News"

Andrey Mir's book "Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers. The Media after Trump: Manufacturing Anger and Polarization" is a very thoughtful overview of the transformation of the news media over the last twenty years or so. The essence is a fight for survival in a media ecology that changed incredibly fast and faster than those in the middle of the change ever imagined.

The change can be reduced to a financial factoid:

In 1993 The New York Times Company bought the Boston Globe for $1.1 billion.

In 2013 The Times sold the Globe to commodities hedgefunder John Henry for $70 million, realizing a 93.6% loss on the investment.

The second rule of ecology—the first rule being "EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED"—the second rule is "Life will attempt to adapt to changed circumstances". This is true of everything from slime molds to the New York Times.

And with that longer than usual introduction here is Mr. Mir writing at New Explorations Weblog (Studies in Culture & Communication):

Postjournalism and the death of newspapers

Fake news is an overhyped issue. The greatest harm caused by media is polarization, and the biggest issue is that polarization has become systemically embedded into both social media and the mass media. Polarization is not merely a side effect but has morphed into a condition of their business.

The recent surge in polarization originated from the advent of social media, which unleashed the authorship of the masses. In this newly emerged horizontal communications, alternative agendas were gradually shaped. It soon became apparent that this direct representation of opinions forms very different agendas than those shaped by the more traditional representative form of opinion- making, the news media.

The clash between the alternative agendas of social media and the mainstream agendas of the news media entailed political polarization, which produced two waves of anti-establishment movements. The first wave was caused by the initial proliferation of social media in the early 2010s, when digitized educated progressive urban youth ignited the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement in the US, the protests of ‘indignados’ in Europe and worldwide protests against the old institutional establishment. The second wave of polarization started in the mid-2010s, when social media had permeated society deeply enough to reach and influence those who are older, less educated, less urban, and less progressive. The resultant wave of conservative, right-wing and fundamentalist movements influenced election polls and struck streets around the world.

Amid the growing political activity of the masses, facilitated by new media, it quickly became apparent that social media platforms result in higher end-user engagement. The more engagement, the more time is spent on the platform, the more user preferences are exposed, and consequently the more precise ad targeting can be. Engagement, much needed for the platforms’ business, appeared to be tied to polarization. There is nobody’s evil intent behind such settings; the hardware of this media environment just requires this software – polarization.

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In parallel, a tectonic shift occurred in old media. The news media business used to be funded predominantly by advertising, but advertising fled to the internet. The entire news media industry was forced to switch to another source of funding – reader revenue.

The scale of this shift is tectonic. The last time the mass media changed the source of revenue on such a scale was the period 1920–1950, when newspapers switched from selling copies to selling ads. That period coincided with the advent of radio and TV, so the change in the business model of journalism was not really reflected upon, as more attention was directed to the fascinating cultural impacts of the new electronic media.

However, by the 1980s, the discipline of the political economy of the mass media emerged, which revealed the impact of advertising money on agenda-setting in the news media. This brought about the framework for the understanding of the news media that the public still uses today. The media are corporate-owned entities representing the interests of ruling capitalist elites; they basically sell goods, distract from pressing social issues and manufacture consent amongst the audience.

Meanwhile, the very hardware of the news media industry has drastically changed since then. Over the last 10–15 years, both advertisers and audiences have fled to better platforms, where content is free and far more attractive, and ad delivery is cheaper and far more efficient. The internet and social media have taken away revenues from the news media. The classical business models of the news media, news retail and ad sales, have been shaken up so violently that it is hard for the media to survive.

Because of the internet, ad revenue in the media has declined much faster than reader revenue. The media were therefore forced to switch to the reader revenue business model aimed to sell content. However, as content is free on the internet, it is hard to sell. People almost always already know the news before they come to news websites because they invariably start their daily media routine with newsfeeds on social media. Increasingly, therefore, if and when people turn to the news media, it is not to find news, but rather to validate already known news.

Thus, the reader revenue the news media now seeks is not a payment for news; it is actually more a validation fee. The audience still agrees to pay for the validation of news within the accepted and sanctioned value system. After switching from ad revenue to reader revenue, the business of the media has mutated from news supply to news validation....

....MUCH MORE

 And here is Mr. Mir being interviewed at Discourse Magazine, April 13, 2021:

Factoids and Fake News
Martin Gurri interviews Andrey Mir about the future of journalism

Shortly after the publication of the first edition of “The Revolt of the Public,” I received a little book with the intriguing title “Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship.” The author was Andrey Miroshnichenko—having found his last name to be unpronounceable by English speakers, he later shortened it to Mir—and the book was a brilliant explanation of the internet.

To an uncanny degree, Mir and I shared the same assumptions, observations and sources. The same obscure passage from José Ortega y Gasset can be found in both books. It seemed fated that we would establish a lively long-distance intellectual friendship, sharing odd bits of information from the ever-expanding media universe. My understanding of the digital landscape would have been vastly impoverished without this exchange.

At present, Mir is a media scholar at York University, Toronto. He is a native of Russia and worked for 20 years in the Russian business media before turning his attention to the impact of new media on society. Mir is a prolific writer who has authored many books on journalism, communications and politics. He also blogs at Human as Media.

His latest book, “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers” (2020), breaks new ground in our understanding of the relationship between traditional and digital media. In “Postjournalism,” Mir explains the ideological corruption of newspapers—for reasons mostly related to business—and predicts the extinction of journalism as an institution and of the news as an industry, driven by an inexorable demographic transition. For anyone interested in the past, present or future of the news and of media generally, “Postjournalism” will be a revelation.

This interview was conducted in writing and has been edited for brevity. 

MARTIN GURRI: You predict with great confidence that newspapers will soon go extinct as an industry, and even provide the time of death: the late 2030s. Has anything occurred since the publication of “Postjournalism” to change that deadline? Is it possible that some innovation or change in public tastes might bring the newspaper back to prosperity? And can you describe what their “death” would look like?

ANDREY MIR: I don’t think anything can change the slide of the newspaper industry toward extinction. Some local events can slightly correct the development, as has happened in the U.S. with Donald Trump. Now that Trump has left the White House, the largest media outlets have lost a driver for business and are returning to a declining trajectory. But no newsroom innovations or investor’s efforts can change this trajectory, since the main problem is on the opposite side, on the side of consumption, not production.

The internet revealed that the business of the news media rested not on information but on the lack of information. Those conditions are gone. The market is already willing to abandon newspapers, but society is not yet ready. Social habits have slowed down the process. But it is demographics that have begun the final countdown. This is why it is possible to calculate the deadline, figuratively speaking. Millions of students today have never even touched a newspaper. They simply do not know how to consume the press, nor are they aware of why they should do it. As soon as this generation takes command, newspapers are done. Hence the last date for the industry—the mid-2030s.

The process of the newspapers’ extinction will look like a comet with a condensed core and long tail. Circa the mid-2020s, the biggest newspapers will stop printing and declare the final transition to digital. For many others, this will be the moment of veiled extermination. Those newspapers that have noncommercial funding will last a bit longer. But even the funding secured for the lucky few will make no sense if there are simply not enough readers around. So the media industry has about five years of agony and ten more years of convulsions ahead. The little that remains of the industry afterward will be vintage art forms.

But the main issue is that, while discussing newspapers, we are in fact talking about the fate of the news media as an industry and of journalism as an institution. Their business was in print and on the air, and it was based on the limited access of the public to the news. Old journalism does not have a viable business model in the digital world.

GURRI: What are the historical forces that have driven traditional journalism into “post-journalism”? Can you explain the difference in the ideals and value systems of the two practices?

MIR: Throughout the entire 20th century, the news media was funded predominantly by advertising, which brought in 70%-80% of the media’s revenue. The internet took this business away from the media. In 2013, the ad revenue for American newspapers dropped below the level at which the industry started measuring it in 1950. A dramatic and yet unnoticed switch had happened: The news media in general became dependent not on ad revenue but on reader revenue....

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"Slouching Toward Post-Journalism"

 I'll get off this Andrey Mir, post-journalism kick, I promise. But not yet. (shades of St Augustine)

The reason for my borderline obsession is the fact that mass media has changed so dramatically over the last five or ten years, which makes it imperative to understand and possibly channel the forces that attempt to shape our everyday view of reality. And it really is getting close to the point that the call to arms "If it isn't censored, it's a lie" is a description of what is going on.

And that would be a shame, we like journalists and, among other reasons,  get some of our best ideas from them.

Martin Gurri writing at City Journal:

The New York Times and other elite media outlets have openly embraced advocacy over reporting.

Traditional newspapers never sold news; they sold an audience to advertisers. To a considerable degree, this commercial imperative determined the journalistic style, with its impersonal voice and pretense of objectivity. The aim was to herd the audience into a passive consumerist mass. Opinion, which divided readers, was treated like a volatile substance and fenced off from “factual” reporting.

The digital age exploded this business model. Advertisers fled to online platforms, never to return. For most newspapers, no alternative sources of revenue existed: as circulation plummets to the lowest numbers on record, more than 2,000 dailies have gone silent since the turn of the century. The survival of the rest remains an open question.

Led by the New York Times, a few prominent brand names moved to a model that sought to squeeze revenue from digital subscribers lured behind a paywall. This approach carried its own risks. The amount of information in the world was, for practical purposes, infinite. As supply vastly outstripped demand, the news now chased the reader, rather than the other way around. Today, nobody under 85 would look for news in a newspaper. Under such circumstances, what commodity could be offered for sale?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, the Times stumbled onto a possible answer. It entailed a wrenching pivot from a journalism of fact to a “post-journalism” of opinion—a term coined, in his book of that title, by media scholar Andrey Mir. Rather than news, the paper began to sell what was, in effect, a creed, an agenda, to a congregation of like-minded souls. Post-journalism “mixes open ideological intentions with a hidden business necessity required for the media to survive,” Mir observes. The new business model required a new style of reporting. Its language aimed to commodify polarization and threat: journalists had to “scare the audience to make it donate.” At stake was survival in the digital storm.

The experiment proved controversial. It sparked a melodrama over standards at the Times, featuring a conflict between radical young reporters and befuddled middle-aged editors. In a crucible of proclamations, disputes, and meetings, the requirements of the newspaper as an institution collided with the post-journalistic call for an explicit struggle against injustice.

The battleground was the treatment of race and racism in America. But the story began, as it seemingly must, with that inescapable character: Donald Trump.

In August 2016, as the presidential race ground grimly onward, the New York Times laid down a marker regarding the manner in which it would be covered. The paper declared the prevalence of media opinion to be an irresistible fact, like the weather. Or, as Jim Rutenberg phrased it in a prominent front-page story: “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. This was not an anti-Trump opinion piece. It was an obituary for the values of a lost era. Rutenberg, who covered the media beat, had authored a factual report about the death of factual reporting—the sort of paradox often encountered among the murky categories of post-journalism.

The article touched on the fraught issue of race and racism. Trump opponents take his racism for granted—he stands accused of appealing to the worst instincts of the American public, and those who wish to debate the point immediately fall under suspicion of being racists themselves. The dilemma, therefore, was not whether Trump was racist (that was a fact) or why he flaunted his racist views (he was a dangerous demagogue) but, rather, how to report on his racism under the strictures of commercial journalism. Once objectivity was sacrificed, an immense field of subjective possibilities presented themselves. A vision of the journalist as arbiter of racial justice would soon divide the generations inside the New York Times newsroom.

Rutenberg made his point through hypothetical-rhetorical questions that, at times, verged on satire: “If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?” Rutenberg assumed that “working journalists” shared the same opinion of Trump—that wasn’t perceived as problematic. A second assumption concerned the intelligence of readers: they couldn’t be trusted to process the facts. The answer to Rutenberg’s loaded question, therefore, could only be to “throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of a half-century” and leap vigorously into advocacy. Trump could not safely be covered; he had to be opposed.

The old media had needed happy customers. The goal of post-journalism, according to Mir, is to “produce angry citizens.” The August 2016 article marked the point of no return in the spiritual journey of the New York Times from newspaper of record to Vatican of liberal political furor. While the impulse originated in partisan herd instinct, the discovery of a profit motive would make the change irrevocable. Rutenberg professed to find the new approach “uncomfortable” and, “by normal standards, untenable”—but the fault, he made clear, lay entirely with the “abnormal” Trump, whose toxic personality had contaminated journalism. He was the active principle in the headline “The Challenge Trump Poses to Objectivity.”

A cynic (or a conservative) might argue that objectivity in political reporting was more an empty boast than a professional standard and that the newspaper, in pandering to its audience, had long favored an urban agenda, liberal causes, and Democratic candidates. This interpretation misses the transformation in the depths that post-journalism involved. The flagship American newspaper had turned in a direction that came close to propaganda. The oppositional stance, as Mir has noted, cannot coexist with newsroom independence: writers and editors were soon to be punished for straying from the cause. The news agenda became narrower and more repetitive as journalists focused on a handful of partisan controversies—an effect that Mir labeled “discourse concentration.” The New York Times, as a purveyor of information and a political institution, had cut itself loose from its own history. 

Rutenberg glimpsed, dimly, the nature of the transfiguration he was describing. “Do normal standards apply? And if they don’t, what should take their place?” he wondered. Even if rhetorically framed, these were remarkable questions. Over the next four years, the need for answers would feed the drama in the Times newsroom.

There’s reason to suspect that Rutenberg and his colleagues regarded the abandonment of objectivity as a temporary emergency measure. Hillary Clinton was heavily favored in opinion polls; on election day, the Times gave her an 84 percent chance of victory. The election of Donald Trump to the presidency was a moment of profound disorientation for establishment media generally, and for the Times in particular.
Not only had the newspaper failed at the new mission of advocacy; it had also failed, egregiously, at the old mission of mediating between the public and the elite sport of politics. In a somber column published the morning after, Liz Spayd, public editor, announced that the Times had entered “a period of self-reflection” and expressed the hope that “its editors will think hard about the half of America the paper too seldom covers.”

The reflective mood quickly passed. Within weeks, the Washington Post connected the Trump campaign with fake news on Facebook planted by Russian operatives. By May 2017, less than four months into the new administration, Robert Mueller had been appointed special counsel to investigate potential crimes by Trump or his staff associated with Russian interference in the elections. So began one of the most extraordinary episodes in American politics—and the first sustained excursion into post-journalism by the American news media, led every step of the way by the New York Times.

Future media historians may hold the Trump-Russia story to be a laboratory-perfect specimen of discourse concentration. For nearly two years, it towered over the information landscape and devoured the attention of the media and the public. The total number of articles on the topic produced by the Times is difficult to measure, but a Google search suggests that it was more than 3,000—the equivalent, if accurate, of multiple articles per day for the period in question. This was journalism as if conducted under the impulse of an obsessive-compulsive personality. Virtually every report either implied or proclaimed culpability. Every day in the news marked the beginning of the Trumpian End Time

The sum of all this sound and fury was . . . zero. The most intensively covered story in history turned out to be empty of content. Mueller’s investigation “did not identify evidence that any US persons conspired or coordinated” with the Russians. Mueller’s halting television appearance in July 2019 convinced even the most vehement partisans that he was not the knight to slay the dragon in the White House. After two years of media frenzy came an awkward moment. The New York Times had reorganized its newsroom to pursue this single story—yet, just as it had missed Trump’s coming, the paper failed to see that Trump would stay.

Yet what looked like journalistic failure was, in fact, an astonishing post-journalistic success. The intent of post-journalism was never to represent reality or inform the public but to arouse enough political fervor in readers that they wished to enter the paywall in support of the cause. This was ideology by the numbers—and the numbers were striking. Digital subscriptions to the New York Times, which had been stagnant, nearly doubled in the first year of Trump’s presidency. By August 2020, the paper had 6 million digital subscribers—six times the number on Election Day 2016 and the most in the world for any newspaper. The Russian collusion story, though refuted objectively, had been validated subjectively, by the growth in the congregation of the paying faithful....

....MUCH MORE

Previously from Mir and/or Gurri:

• "Elites have lost control of the information agenda..."
• "Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" + "Factoids and Fake News"
• Mir: "The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden"
• "The Algorithm—The media's new business model is propaganda."
• Imagine That: Earliest Surviving Secular Song Is An English Guy Talking About The Weather
• Media: How Newspapers Are Like Resort Photographers 

"Disinformation Is the Word I Use When I Want You To Shut Up"

Bringing to mind the Ring Lardner quote: "Shut up, he explained" in his otherwise almost unreadable novel, The Immigrants. (it's the writing in dialect, tough to follow in 1920 much less 100 years later)

The author of this piece was a media analyst for the CIA and since his retirement has shown up on our pages a few times, usually in proximity to "ecologist of media" Andrei Mir.

From Martin Gurri at Discourse Magazine, March 30:

While your back was turned, the federal government erected a convoluted apparatus of control for what you can say and see online. They did this, we are told, to protect us. Protect us from what, you ask? Well, mostly from ourselves, but also from a threat that makes nuclear annihilation feel like a pinprick by comparison: disinformation. Also misinformation and malinformation—the latter defined as “bits of actual reality we totally object to.”

But disinformation is the big dog. And by “disinformation,” they mean the web. And by the web, they mean, of course, you—but I already said that.

I have written long, deeply researched tracts about the technical aspects of disinformation. Why did I bother? Nobody cares. Disinformation is just a jargon word with a subliminal meaning, thrown out by the mighty of the earth whenever they worry that they are about to lose an argument—something that happens with painful regularity these days. The word means, “Shut up, peasant.” It’s a bullet aimed at killing the conversation. It’s loaded with hostility to reason, evidence, debate and all the stuff that makes our democracy great.

The Biden White House is on record demanding that social media be held “accountable.” Accountable to whom, you ask—and for what? Well, accountable to them, naturally, for the spreading of disinformation. In 2022, Biden appointed Nina Jankowicz to lead an ambitious new Disinformation Governance Board that aimed to hold all of us accountable.

Who is Nina Jankowicz? She insisted, during the 2020 presidential campaign, that the Hunter Biden laptop story was part of a Russian disinformation campaign, something we now know  was false. She also can be found on TikTok claiming to be the “Mary Poppins of disinformation” and elsewhere online asking, in song, who she needed to have sex with to get ahead in life. That was way too much information, at least for the rubes living in the more obscure parts of the map, so the scheme for a Disinformation Board came to nothing.

In government, if you can’t do it legally, you pay shady people to do it for you. Ordinarily, this is considered criminal behavior. In Washington, it’s called partnering with the private sector. The Biden administration, after writing a few checks, reached out to Nongovernmental Organizations, or NGOs—a shady underworld full of self-proclaimed experts who’ll say pretty much anything for money.

The federal government’s quarrel with disinformation was laundered through outfits like Stanford Internet Observatory, Global Disinformation Index and the Aspen Institute. These places found the situation to be much worse than anyone had thought. More money was obviously needed. Here is Renee DiResta of Stanford Internet Observatory, loudest voice on the subject from the penumbral NGO world, sounding the alarm: “Over the past decade, disinformation, misinformation, and social media hoaxes have evolved from a nuisance into high-stakes information war.”....

....MUCH MORE

As has been pointed out by many observers, those decrying mis-, dis-, and mal-information the loudest are the same people who most frequently use the tactic favored by sexual and psychological abusers: gaslighting, also known as flat-out lying to your face.

It's a corollary to our mantra: "The less virtue, the more signaling." 

"The Problem with The Mass-Production of Elites, Looking into DoorDash's S-1 Filing"

 From Suthen Siva's Substack, November 2020:

Elite Overproduction

This is an interview from the Atlantic featuring Peter Turchin, someone who "has as been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an age of discord, civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed."

The center of his premise is around the idea of elite overproduction and supported by declining living standards among the general population and a government that can't cover its financial positions. 

He defines “elite overproduction as ­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill. One way for a ruling class to grow is biologically—think of Saudi Arabia, where princes and princesses are born faster than royal roles can be created for them. In the United States, elites over­produce themselves through economic and educational upward mobility: More and more people get rich, and more and more get educated. Neither of these sounds bad on its own. Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? 

The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do." 

This creates a growing number of counter-elites for every elite position. 

Take a look at protests around the world. 

Revolts have happened in poor countries like Somalia and affluent countries like France, Chile, and the US – and the public in revolt, when looked at closely, consists mostly of the middle class and college-educated people. That’s true everywhere.

The cycle looks like this "Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels. Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard. The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency."

This trend has been accentuated by social media - as explained in by Martin Gurri, the author of The Prophet of the Revolt. 

"The elites had abandoned the idea of serving the public before the arrival of the digital tsunami. What that catastrophe did was to reverse the polarities of power: it was the public that was now technologically adept, politically restless, and in revolt against the perplexed elites. The vast gap remained, and the elites have no wish to cross it – to do so would mean breaking that wall that protects the pure soul of the Brahmin.

We have no way of knowing whether a more talented elite class could have avoided the current anger mobilizing the public or the hair-trigger impulse to revolt. There are no laboratories that run parallel versions of history. I will say this: the struggle today is structural, not personality-dependent. Even an FDR or a Reagan would have difficulty preserving institutions whose authority has collapsed because of a radical reversal in the information environment."

A couple of interesting takes by Martin and Peter: 

The Case Against Credential-Oriented Education 

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise. I largely agree - we are increasingly seeing a world where credential does not equal an elite job as one may have hoped. At an aggregate level, you're fostering an entire generation that resents the status quo. 

 

Democracy is Aided by Conflict

The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale. “No one wants to accept that we live in the societies we do”—rich, complex ones with universities and museums and philosophy and art—“because of an ugly thing like war,” he said. But the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones. Democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present.

 

Writing History

 “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,” Walter Scheidel, an actual historian at Stanford, told me. (Scheidel, whose books span millennia, takes Turchin’s work seriously and has even co-written a paper with him.) Instead, they come from scientific fields where these taboos do not dominate....

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Previously on Turchin:

The Model That Forecast 2020's Political Turmoil In 2010, Says The U.S. Is Heading Toward Civil War.

I've said a few times that I don't think the United States will have a civil war, it is just so rare in established democracies. The only major exception I can think of is 1861 - 1865 when somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 people died.

In the in the American Civil War...

"Will the US Really Experience a Violent Upheaval in 2020?"

I don't have enough information to determine if Professor Turchin is correct in his analysis.
I do know that human beings are so good at pattern recognition that we can see patterns that aren't even there.
Here's a twofer, the prediction and the follow-up....

C.S. Lewis On Different Types Of Readers
Although these days we use pseudo-psycho-mumbo-jumbo like "Confirming my priors" and "Validating the reader", this old boy was writing about such things in his SciFi novel 76 years ago:

“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.”

— C.S. Lewis, That Hideous Strength, 1945

As we saw in yesterday's "Planet of the Grifters" with it's quick look at Turchin's idea that there are too many elites and wannabe elites, there is money to be made from feeding the fantasy of the wannabe. (as the degenerate state of academia shows)

See also: Pity the poor avocado-eating graduates: "University-educated millennials have absorbed elite values but will never enjoy the lifestyle"

And that probably accounts for some of the crabbiness we see from folks who, compared with our billions and billions of forebearers, back into the mists of time, are among the most privileged and advantaged ever to walk the earth.

They also get grumpy when reminded of that fact....

And "The Fragmenting of the New Class Elites, or, Downward Mobility"

"Elites have lost control of the information agenda..."

The New York Times still hasn't apologized, or even clarified, for reporting that Poland invaded Germany to start World War II. Though they did, to their credit, report that German panzers were rolling east, they left the Nazi's Gleiwitz "insurrectionists" story unadorned right there on the front page. I'll see if I can dig it up*

Our headline is from a piece written last April, the hook is yesterday's release of the latest Gallup polling numbers:

Americans' Trust in Media Dips to Second Lowest on Record

• 36% in U.S. have a "great deal" or "fair amount" of trust in mass media
• 68% of Democrats, 31% of independents and 11% of Republicans trust media
• Democrats' and independents' trust is down five points since 2020, GOP's flat

 Americans' trust in the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly has edged down four percentage points since last year to 36%, making this year's reading the second lowest in Gallup's trend.

In all, 7% of U.S. adults say they have "a great deal" and 29% "a fair amount" of trust and confidence in newspapers, television and radio news reporting -- which, combined, is four points above the 32% record low in 2016, amid the divisive presidential election campaign between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. In addition, 29% of the public currently registers "not very much" trust and 34% have "none at all."

Line graph. Americans' trust in the mass media when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately and fairly, since 1997. In 2021, 36% have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the mass media, and 63% have not very much or none at all. This is the lowest rating since 2016, when trust was 32%, the lowest on record.

These findings, from a Sept. 1-17 poll, are the latest in Gallup's tracking of the public's confidence in key U.S. institutions, which began in 1972. Between 1972 and 1976, 68% to 72% of Americans expressed trust in the mass media; yet, by 1997, when the question was next asked, trust had dropped to 53%. Trust in the media, which has averaged 45% since 1997, has not reached the majority level since 2003.

After hitting its lowest point in 2016, trust in the media rebounded, gaining 13 points in two years -- mostly because of a surge among Democrats amid President Donald Trump's antagonistic relationship with the press and increased scrutiny of his administration by the media. Since 2018, however, it has fallen a total of nine points, as trust has slid among all party groups....

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And from Martin Gurri at Discourse Magazine, April 13:

“Post-Journalism” and the Death of News
Elites have lost control of the information agenda and, despite the “Trump bump,” they’re not getting it back

Information matters because it sets the stage and arranges the props for the drama of social and political life. It places boundaries on human action. If you think the ship is going to tip over the edge of the world, you are unlikely to sign up for that cruise.

But why should “news” matter? The answer will in part depend on the historical context. In 1920, for many people, news and information were virtually synonymous. A century later, we find that the two categories have undergone a scandalous divorce. Yet from the first, and at all times, there has been a mystique surrounding the news.

Freedom of the press holds a special place in the liberal canon: James Madison expressed the general sense of the matter when he called it “one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty.” Editors and journalists who labored in this lofty place—think James Reston or Edward R. Murrow—are often portrayed in the heroic style. The stuff they churned out—the daily output of journalism—is never depicted as an industrial product that must be promoted and sold for consumption in the marketplace. Among democratic elites, the smell of newsprint evokes the odor of sanctity.

By the middle of the last century, the mystique had congealed into an implicit ideology. Journalism and the news were said to sustain democracy in two distinct but complementary ways.

By distributing objective reports to the public, they broke through the fog of government secrecy and political propaganda to hold elected officials accountable. Journalists spoke truth to power and exposed corruption at the top. The Watergate scandal and downfall of Richard Nixon were taken to be mathematical proof of this proposition—in the Hollywood version of “All the President’s Men,” investigative reporters assumed the guise of film noir detectives searching for truth in a dangerous and deceitful world. Absent such fearless light-bearers, democracy, we were told, would die in darkness.

Journalists, once considered shiftless scribblers, were also reimagined as political educators to the masses. They brought Washington to Wichita Falls and the world to Main Street. The theory of the “omnicompetent sovereign citizen” required that all who participate in democracy possess a masterful knowledge of issues and affairs. The news met that demand: to devour it was not a consumer choice but a patriotic duty. Kids in public schools were handed copies of Junior Scholastic and urged to keep up with “current events.” It went without saying that they would grow up to be newspaper subscribers. After all, the road to political wisdom led directly through the news, and the daily paper delivered all the news that’s fit to print.

But between the ideology of news and the reality of the news business, the distance was breathtaking. Far from speaking truth to power, the news was the means by which elites communicated their interests and intentions to a vast but silent audience. Rather than saviors of democracy, investigative reporters were bit players in the elaborate games of the political class. Watergate, properly understood, was a minor adjustment within this group—an intramural scrum. Nearly 50 years later, nothing much has changed.

Newspapers had little incentive to educate anyone. They needed to attract eyeballs that they could then sell to advertisers, and to this end they bundled together stories about wars and movie stars, earthquakes and baseball games, as well as comic strips, advice to the lovelorn, astrological predictions and crossword puzzles. Purchasers of this bizarre agglomeration of content were not to be frightened with the ugly truth but gently herded into a bland consumerist mass.....

....MUCH MORE

*From the New York Times archive:

Border Clashes Increase

Wireless to The New York Times

Berlin, Friday, Sept. 1--An increasing number of border incidents involving shooting and mutual Polish-German casualties are reported by the German press and radio. The most serious is reported from Gleiwitz, a German city on the line where the southwestern portion of Poland meets the Reich.

At 8 P.M., according to the semi-official news agency, a group of Polish insurrectionists forced an entrance into the Gleiwitz radio station, overpowering the watchmen and beating and generally mishandling the attendants. The Gleiwitz station was relaying a Breslau station's program, which was broken off by the Poles.

They proceeded to broadcast a prepared proclamation, partly in Polish and partly in German, announcing themselves as "the Polish Volunteer Corps of Upper Silesia speaking from the Polish station in Gleiwitz." The city, they alleged, was in Polish hands.

Gleiwitz's surprised radio listeners notified the police, who halted the broadcast and exchanged fire with the insurrectionists, killing one and capturing the rest. The police are said to have discovered that the attackers were assisted by regular Polish troops. The Gleiwitz incident is alleged here to have been the signal "for a general attack by Polish franctireurs on German territory."

Two other points--Pitsachen, near Kreuzburg, and Hochlinden, northeast of Ratibor, both in the same vicinity as Gleiwitz, were the scenes of violations of the German boundary, it is claimed, with fighting at both places still under way.

To this day people point to that NYT story to say Poland started it.

Ecologist of Media Andrey Mir: "‘Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror"

From Discourse Magazine, February 20, a review by Martin Gurri:

The Fifth Wave: Andrey Mir Takes on World History
In Mir’s big new book, ‘Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror,’ he explains how media made history and may soon end it

Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by riddles at every turn. How did we get here? Where are we headed? Amid the affluence and luxury, given global communication and cheap travel to iconic places, what is the right path as individuals and as a people—and why?

The 20th century gave us profound broodings on the meaning of history by authors like Oswald Spengler, José Ortega y Gasset and Arnold Toynbee. These thinkers put the human story in the widest possible context, thereby enlarging our understanding of the present and casting a flickering light into possible futures. They may have been right or wrong—mostly the latter, in my opinion—but they painted on a huge canvas and invited us to think of ourselves on a similar scale. Where are their heirs today? Glimpse, if you dare, at the New York Times bestseller list for nonfiction, and this is what you see: an obsession with celebrity, identity and Donald Trump—all of it amounting to the same fractured frivolity.

Then there’s Andrey Mir, whose books, if I may say so, redeem our age. Mir is the most adventurous and imaginative media scholar writing today. Born in communist Russia, an emigrant to Toronto, Canada—city of Marshall McLuhan, whose disciple he is—Mir brings a fresh and capacious perspective to his subject. Everything he writes is original. Much of it is memorably epigrammatic, even though English is his second language.

I first encountered Mir’s work when he mailed me a copy of his smallish book, “Human as Media: The Emancipation of Authorship,” shortly after I had published “The Revolt of the Public.” He claimed, with some excitement, that we were both saying the same thing. I read the book, amazed: Mir was right. “Human as Media” is the book I would have written if I had been born in Russia and could discipline my thoughts into 100 pages. We even cited the same lines from the same forgotten philosophers. With its concept of the “viral editor” (now transformed, in our harsher decade, into “viral inquisitor”), “Human as Media” remains mandatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the disruptions of the digital. Mir and I became fast friends and allies in the struggle to understand the effects of new media.

His next book, “Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers,” chronicled the rise and fall of the “Gutenberg Parenthesis”—the age dominated by the printing press. It is, in my opinion, a masterpiece of historical and media analysis. As a historian, Mir has a knack for identifying the space where new technology converges with economics, and he always asks the big questions. Why did something as strange as the newspaper come into the world? What was its actual purpose? And why are newspapers dying today? The term “postjournalism” pertains to the precipitous decline of the New York Times from objectivity to something like a hymnbook for the progressive creed. This great fall, we learn, has been driven more by a desperate business model than by ideology.

And now I’m happy to report that Mir has just published a new book, “Digital Future in the Rearview Mirror: Jaspers’ Axial Age and Logan’s Alphabet Effect.” As the long title hints, it’s his most complex and ambitious undertaking. From the start of history, the reader is swept along to its appointed end. My intention here is to write about this book—but I can’t imagine producing a conventional review out of such a layered tale. Allow me, then, to follow in Mir’s footsteps and reflect on writing as a medium, history as purpose and other perplexities of some importance to our species culled from his latest work.

The Dawn of History and the Axial Age
A major theme of “Digital Future” is that the internet has returned us to “digital orality,” that is to say, to the forms of communication prevalent before the invention of writing. This brings in a long train of consequences, not least concerning the nature of truth. In preliterate societies, truth is “relationship-oriented” and relative to the speaker—a function of charismatic persuasion. With the arrival of literacy, truth breaks free from space and time and attaches itself to a permanent and deeply inward medium: It becomes canonical, abstract and absolute. Today, the children of the web, as Mir correctly observes, are ignorant of canonical narratives and baffled by absolute propositions: Truth, for them, is once again relational, personal, “my truth.” “In digital orality, ‘Two plus two equals four’ is doubted if said by Hitler,” Mir writes.

Speech and writing aren’t just modes of communication. Like all media, they direct the mind in specific directions and reorganize the world. Civilization is the gift of literacy. Writing is sticky: Once invented, it rarely disappears. Civilization, too, is durable. Any given instance of it may be fragile and liable to be undone by a failure cascade, but as a whole—as the pervasive effect of literacy on human arrangements—civilization has survived the most determined assaults of the forces of barbarism and seems difficult to eradicate....

....MUCH MORE

Over the years we've linked to some of Mir's own writing with most links embedded in:
Andrey Mir: "How the Media Polarized Us"

...Having read a lot* of Mr. Mir's words I think he is too facile in timing the polarization; that he is shoehorning the facts into his mental matrix. To be clear, this piece is far, far from as egregious an example as some of the books that were popular a decade or two ago: "Business Lessons From Attilla the Hun," where an author might have one decent insight but then tries to stretch it out for two hundred pages, jamming as many square pegs into round holes as necessary to get the needed word count. 

 

Rather, in Mr. Mir's case it's just that he doesn't put as much emphasis on the fact that American media has always been partisan, and that in the half-decade 1985 -1990 it went hyper-partisan. 

However, even if that observation is true (it may not be, who knows?), Mir knows more about media ecology than just about anyone writing on the topic. period.

*Previous links to Andrey Mir:

• "Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" + "Factoids and Fake News"
• "Slouching Toward Post-Journalism"

I'll get off this Andrey Mir, post-journalism kick, I promise. But not yet. (shades of St Augustine)

The reason for my borderline obsession is the fact that mass media has changed so dramatically over the last five or ten years, which makes it imperative to understand and possibly channel the forces that attempt to shape our everyday view of reality. And it really is getting close to the point that the call to arms "If it isn't censored, it's a lie" is a description of what is going on.

And that would be a shame, we like journalists and, among other reasons, get some of our best ideas from them.

• "Elites have lost control of the information agenda..."
• "Postjournalism and the death of newspapers" + "Factoids and Fake News"
• "The Algorithm—The media's new business model is propaganda."
• Imagine That: Earliest Surviving Secular Song Is An English Guy Talking About The Weather
• Media: How Newspapers Are Like Resort Photographers
• Media: "Whoever will pay for journalism, they will pay not for journalism"
• "Reuters Institute 2022 Digital News Report is out - a lot of useful data."
• "Ubiquitous digital media offer potent rewards—but at the price of eroding our sensory and social capacities."
• Mir: "The news media: watchdogs prefer the paywalled garden"
• "Jeff Bezos’s Next Monopoly: The Press"
• That Time Marshall McLuhan Predicted Social Media

"Covid's Origins and the Death of Trust"

 From Matt Taibbi's Racket News, July 20:

....If you read the documents up at Public like a novel, and follow the chorus-like Slack exchanges between the four key scientists as a drama with a beginning, middle, and end, it’s hard to miss the brutal lesson. Four people whose job was to divine truth through scientific analysis were waylaid by social and political considerations that you can see attacking each of the characters with ferocity, even in their little digital haven of a private chat. With everything on the line, and millions of lives at stake, they were not only unable in the end to say what they really thought, but as my partner Walter Kirn points out, they joined up with a mechanism that worked to suppress and stamp out the very thoughts they themselves first had.

The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.

As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation. Once people see an institutional malfunction on this scale, it’s like walking in on a cheating spouse, they can’t unsee it. That’s what these scientists were risking when they played around with a lie this big: everything.....

Here's the whole thing: "Covid's Origins and the Death of Trust"

The 221 comments seem rather milquetoast. But then, any reaction sort of white-hot rage seems rather milquetoast.