I agree with most of the criticisms of current media in this article but do not think I agree with the claim that things were better in 2015/2010/pre-Trump/in the Before Time. I’m not entirely sure how to go about testing this claim, but my strong impression is that e.g. media treatment of science has been roughly this quality for approximately ever. I don’t think e.g. the recent media narrative around vaccines is meaningfully worse than e.g. the media narrative around nuclear power has been for a long time.
I think you are right, but zvi included this in his “wet ground causes rain” that you notice in any article about something you really are an expert on (either because it’s your professional /scientific field, or, and to me it’s often more enlightening and more brutal, because you or one of your close ones are part of the story). This indeed has always been the case.
What is new is that you start to feel the narrative in the sources themselves, it’s percolating down to experts (Mediatic ones first, which makes sense because media are their peers more than other experts, and you red lines are often about losing your pant in front of your peers) and to science journals (oped, summaries, then abstracts and conclusions and finaly (but i think we are not quite there) article cores.
I think things are really changing: direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy. Which means being close to sources is no longer a less strenuous alternative to building your own reality model and do a lot of cross checking… Maybe it also means reality becomes less relevant and narrative more relevant to decision making and personal success in more and more cases (more often and for more people), which i find super frightening...
direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy.
The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren’t available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don’t face the pressure to propagandize—either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.
Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.
I agree with most of the criticisms of current media in this article but do not think I agree with the claim that things were better in 2015/2010/pre-Trump/in the Before Time. I’m not entirely sure how to go about testing this claim, but my strong impression is that e.g. media treatment of science has been roughly this quality for approximately ever. I don’t think e.g. the recent media narrative around vaccines is meaningfully worse than e.g. the media narrative around nuclear power has been for a long time.
I think you are right, but zvi included this in his “wet ground causes rain” that you notice in any article about something you really are an expert on (either because it’s your professional /scientific field, or, and to me it’s often more enlightening and more brutal, because you or one of your close ones are part of the story). This indeed has always been the case. What is new is that you start to feel the narrative in the sources themselves, it’s percolating down to experts (Mediatic ones first, which makes sense because media are their peers more than other experts, and you red lines are often about losing your pant in front of your peers) and to science journals (oped, summaries, then abstracts and conclusions and finaly (but i think we are not quite there) article cores. I think things are really changing: direct sources are more and more available to the public… But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy. Which means being close to sources is no longer a less strenuous alternative to building your own reality model and do a lot of cross checking… Maybe it also means reality becomes less relevant and narrative more relevant to decision making and personal success in more and more cases (more often and for more people), which i find super frightening...
The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren’t available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don’t face the pressure to propagandize—either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.
Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.