Category: Media Page 4 of 9

It is not possible to make good decisions without good information.

In a well functioning society, the media would be part of that system by providing accurate, useful information to the public.

That isn’t the media we have. Strictly speaking, we’ve never had that media, though some periods were better than others.

Let’s run through a few of the issues:

Man Bites Dog; If It Bleeds It Leads

The more we see something, the more of it we think exists. But the routine and normal doesn’t make sensational news.

The truth is that violent crime is at multi-generational lows, but most people don’t think that.

The truth is that the person who will hurt or molest your child is almost certainly not a stranger, but a family member, friend, or other trusted adult.

The truth is that terrorism is not a significant threat to Americans. You’re more likely to get hurt when you slip in your tub.

In almost all advanced, industrial societies, the greatest threat to your well-being, with very rare exceptions, comes from your own politicians and business leaders. They are the people who will hurt and kill you, and that’s simply the case. Even in times of war, this is true, because leaders usually caused the war.

The media does not reflect these facts and other similar ones. As such, it gives people an inaccurate picture of the world, which they then act upon and get disastrous results.

Fake News

There’s a lot of hysteria about fake news lately, but it’s about fake news from non-approved people.

It’s not that the media doesn’t lie its ass off, it’s that “OMG, other people are able to get their lies believed.” 72 percent of Americans didn’t think Saddam was behind 9/11 because the media didn’t lie. And who was one of the worst offenders? The New York Times, the apex of the establishment press.

So, yeah, when the media lies, or passes on what they know or suspect are lies, people get hurt, and badly.

Class Interests

Journalists at elite institutions used to be mostly working class. Now they are mostly university graduates, with a high concentration of Ivy League grads. The more senior you are, the more likely you went to an elite college.

You lunch with politicians and business leaders. You went to school with them. They are your friends. They are your people. You understand them.

Speaking from experience, it’s hard to write something mean about someone who’s really nice to you. People who want good press can be amazingly nice. Heck, there’s an entire industry of public relations people whose job it is to make people in the media like them. Some of them are very, very good at their jobs.

This gets even harder when you come from the same group and share the same experiences and beliefs.

This is part (but only part) of why Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn gets lied about over three-quarters of the time in the press, per academic studies. The people reporting on him, and especially the editors and producers, genuinely despise his politics and think they are wrong, even evil. They want him destroyed. To them he’s practically Stalin or Hitler, and anything they do is justified in the name of defeating him.

A shared world view is a powerful thing. You don’t have to censor people who genuinely believe the same thing as their leaders.

Horse Race vs. Policy

Writing about who can win, rather than analyzing who would do what if they won, guts Democratic decision making. The media should support people choosing who would do those things they agree with, not simply act as if voting is a sport.

He Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules/Freedom of the Press Belongs to Those Who Own Won

If someone hires you to do something, they expect to get more from you doing it than they pay you. This is fundamental: You have a job because you are of benefit the person who controls the money. That is ALL.

Media conglomerates (and remember, they are very, very concentrated) are run by people who expect a return for their money. That doesn’t always mean direct cash. Robert Murdoch loves owning newspapers because newspapers control the news cycle: What newspapers write in the morning is what TV news discusses in the evening.

What is controlling the media cycle worth? Who cares if the newspaper doesn’t make much directly, anyone with other interests knows it’s just a loss leader.

Murdoch also used his newspapers as intelligence operations. He would have phone calls with beat reporters which went on for hours, learning everything they knew about their beats.

The ability to control, or at least strongly influence the public and to decide who gets publicity and who doesn’t, is valuable even when it doesn’t make a lot of money. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos didn’t buy the Washington Post out of public spiritedness.

So even when the journalists, editors, and columnists resist what the publisher wants, the publisher gets their way. It’s just that simple. Those pundits and journalists who wrote against the Iraq war in the run-up to war lost their jobs or had their careers stall out. Phil Donahue had his show shut down, and his show had excellent ratings. It wasn’t about how much money Phil was making them directly: They wanted war, and he was in the way.

You don’t get to use the platform to attack the perceived interests of the people who control the platform.

This should be dead obvious.

The people who control the media have interests. They use media to promote those interests. They are all part of one big club, and while there is elite infighting, they are agreed on most fundamentals. To them, a Corbyn or Sanders is a far greater threat than a Trump or Boris Johnson. Heck, Trump gave them a huge tax cut. Johnson will gut worker’s rights.

They’re basically okay with both, they just find them distasteful people.

The Media Is Part of the Enemy

Perhaps that sounds harsh, but what can be said about an industry which helped ensure the Iraq war happened? An industry which covered for banker bailouts?

Yeah, they’re gushing money because the internet destroyed their business model. Yeah, that may lead to an even worse future (sure as hell Facebook and Google are pure evil), but they were never the good guys.

The media was the least malfeasant, and did some good when they were broken up into many pieces, when the American elite was much larger and less concentrated and had more internal differences, and when journalism was a working class job and most editors and reporters hated the people they reported on, rather than thinking they were part of the club.

Something similar could be done today. It would require legislation and some technological fixes, but it could be done. We could also impose rules that require context to deal with the problem of sensationalism, which would be an issue even with the best will in the world.

But none of this will happen unless it is forced, and it will only be forced if current elites are broken of their power.

Nothing lasts forever. Every elite falls. There will be chances.

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So, there’s a lot of BS about fake news. Trump claims that most stories about him are lies (most of them aren’t, some of them are), the media claims that Russians are spreading fake news (yes, like everyone else), and so on.

And, I mean, this is bad. But I find it hard to get super-worked up about it.

Why?

Because…

For the avoidance of doubt, here is what the Mail alleged. Jeremy laid wreaths at the graves of Munich Terrorists. Difficulty for the Mail is that these terrorists are buried in Libya & this photo is taken in Tunisia. Jeremy commemorated 47 killed in Israeli air strike on Tunisia pic.twitter.com/JDuES1gLfl

— Tory Fibs (@ToryFibs) August 14, 2018

This sort of thing is just routine. The vast majority of news stories about Corbyn either misrepresent or lie.

Meanwhile, the New York Times systematically lied about Iraqi WMD to justify the Iraq war.

In the 2004 election, the New York Times held back a story on mass surveillance because they were concerned it would cost George Bush the election. Given how close that election was, the New York Times probably helped ensure a Bush victory by withholding accurate information from voters.

They lie when it supports right-wingers and they withhold true information to protect right-wingers.

And, mostly, they just don’t cover stories they don’t want people to know about.

The media is owned by very rich people. The journalists who work for the media serve the interests of those very rich people.

It takes a special sort of stupidity to think that the media is immune from the rule that people who hire people expect their employees to serve their interests and make sure that they do.

If you want the media to have at least a chance of telling the truth, you need individual outlets to be small, you need there to be many, many outlets and it needs to be cheap to own and run one. In such circumstances, while it will still run towards serving the rich, it won’t serve the super-rich as much as it does today, when a few conglomerates control almost all the media.

Any sector which is a private sector oligopoly (like the media) will obviously serve the interests of the wealthiest in society.

The current conglomerates, online, include Facebook and Google, both of which need to be broken up, and the search engine industry needs to be rigorously regulated, since it decides who sees what. ISPs, without network neutrality, may also take on this role, and obviously network neutrality needs to be reinstated.

Since ISPs provide no value except as a pipeline, they should be regulated as utilities or simply bought by the government. If regulated, their profit should be fixed at 5%+central bank interest rate, or something similar, no stock options and other such nonsense should be allowed, and any profit over that number should simply be taken away by the government. (This will, indirectly, encourage them to build more infrastructure, but you can also do as was done to utilities in the 50s and 60s and specify how much is to be spent.)

ISPs should never be owned by other companies, if allowed to remain private.

Social media is likewise a commons, and should be regulated as such. The way they are currently engineered, they operate as dopamine depleters, and research shows that happiness decreases in direct proportion with engagement to social media. They will have to be forced to stop playing dopamine games, get rid of most of their algorithims, and give control over timelines explicitly to users.

All of this may seem like a lot of work, or an “intrusion,” but we can either control our own lives as voters and members of the public, through government, or we can allow private interests who care only about the benefit to a few people to do so.

So, while in one sense I’m not upset by “fake news,” on the other hand, I am. I’m upset by the control of a few major companies over who gets to spew what propaganda at the public.

Control the major media (and economic) actors, or they will control us.

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The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.