It actually always has been that laborious, you just once trusted a bunch of shit that you shouldn’t have. Most never figure it out, though.
Manufacturing Consent was published in '88 and is still very relevant to this conversation for two big reasons: 1) Huge news organizations are not monolithic, there are in fact good people especially those doing investigate journalism; 2) however, the pro-corporate bias of the major media means that these good people will not reach positions of authority and leadership.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Man, I’ll LOL media with the best of them, and they probably gave us Trump in 2016. But if he loses 2020, that’s almost certainly due - in large part - to the efforts of investigative journalists. We make their jobs harder, and less safe, by calling them enemies.
The media is a serious grey area. Let’s LOL and boycott the trash, but the world owes a huge debt (and perhaps millions of lives saved, collectively) to the good ones. Let’s avoid lumping them together.
I’m writing a book now with a lot of expository writing about Mesoamerica, and I’m starting to have some sympathy for how it happens. It can be extremely challenging to be completely accurate, fit in all the nuance, and still tell a good story - in under a bajillion words. Add a deadline to the equation and I can easily see where journalists often fail.
To them I bet a lot of it falls under the rubric of “well at least I got the gist of it right” which they may or may not have done. It’s like combining two characters in a supposedly true story to make the plot move better. Once you move down that road, you have to decide where to draw the line.
I’ve managed to hire a top-notch Mesoamerican professor as a fact-checker. He’s catching so much blatant wrongness that I might have otherwise gone to print with - it’s terrifying. Some of it is the kind of stuff you can google, some isn’t. I got much of this blatant wrongness from published books, even one that was big enough to make into an audiobook. There’s a lot of wrong out there and not much accountability.
Like this very first question. Holy shit how tone deaf. He is only appealing to white racists who don’t want to see themselves as racist. The guy follows up and pounds on Trump like what we wish journalists would do. It’s really something, and I’m all for broadcasting interactions like this. Even Stephanopoulos jumps in to say dude, stop lying.
of course thats their plan, anyone that follows politics knows the GOP will let the entire nation burn under Biden if at all possible, all the while blaming him for it. Thats why everyone here at least knows we need senate and filibuster removed so that we can actually make improvements in his first 2 years, if we can’t, shit could be really bad.
I’m hopeful that Biden isn’t stupid and will use the first time the GOP uses the filibuster to stop something as the excuse he needs to blow up the filibuster. We help this a lot by winning a landslide and giving him a huge popular mandate as well.
It sucks that the establishment Dems need ‘cover’ to do the right thing, but it is what it is. It’s landslide or bust. It’s always been landslide or bust.
