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The entire motive for this "mainstream media is fake/lies push" to get people to ignore anything that doesn't come from them. It's exactly the same as the Fear,

The entire motive for this "mainstream media is fake/lies push" to get people to ignore anything that doesn't come from them. It's exactly the same as the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt legal strategy pursued by people like SCO only you don't have the benefit of court managed discovery to force a version of the truth out in the open. "Even the big names get it wrong" isn't the same thing as "trust no one [but me]"

emodendroket 10y ago
I don't think that's entirely true. Of course Trump and other mendacious characters have seized on it, but I think the general distrust and skepticism of news media is both organic and well-warranted.
- wahern 10y ago
  I wouldn't call it organic. The Republicans have purposefully employed a multi-decadal strategy of painting the "mainstream media" as biased and untrustworthy. This has sown excessive and mostly unwarranted _generalized_ cynicism, and granted people carte blanche to outright reject challenging facts and perspectives in favor of much more partisan narratives. This cynicism has infected not just conservatives but most other factions. It turns out that if you repeat a narrative often enough even your opponents as well as the "mainstream media" will pick it up and run with it. The organic parts would be the dissolution and fragmentation of the mid-century media empires--broadcast news, regional newspapers, etc--into all the various cable and Internet outlets we have today. That fragmentation means readerships are more self-selected, creating market pressures for outlets to cater to their particular readerships' preferences and biases. This is in some sense a regression to a 250-year mean of political culture, but that's a mean of slow and highly volatile social, economic, and scientific progress. And there's no excuse for the slash-and-burn, nihilistic tactics adopted by conservative strategists. You simply cannot have a functioning democracy unless society retains the _myth_ of an objective, shared truth. It's one thing to nurture skepticism, it's another to nurture cynicism. Not that there's no fault on the part of the left or other political factions. But I'm not going to equivocate factions which, say, pursue ill-considered policy objectives with a faction that undermines the fundamental prerequisites for a functioning body politic. The Donald Trump phenomenon and the age of alternative facts is principally a result of a _particular_ concerted partisan political effort. And it's not new--it goes back to before Reagan, although really got going with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, which finally solidified a unified GOP narrative on all policy matters. The only difference is that we're now much more focused on some of the starker consequences of that shift in strategy.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    You think the problem with the media is a lack of centralized control? Sorry, I don't think we're anywhere in the same neighborhood on this issue.
    - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
      Not centralized, but consolidated: when people all got their news from the same half dozen or so sources, they were a lot more capable of agreeing on basic sets of underlying facts with which issues could be debated, instead of just going through endless cycles of recusals and spin about the facts and their basic interpretation. Sure, it didn't live up to certain capitalistic ideals, but maybe it turns out that not every domain of human life benefits from existing in a bare knuckle free market.
      - emodendroket 10y ago
        Media has undergone a massive consolidation in the last few decades, though, and a bunch of blogs without serious resources don't change that.

emodendroket 10y ago

I don't think that's entirely true. Of course Trump and other mendacious characters have seized on it, but I think the general distrust and skepticism of news media is both organic and well-warranted.

wahern 10y ago
I wouldn't call it organic. The Republicans have purposefully employed a multi-decadal strategy of painting the "mainstream media" as biased and untrustworthy. This has sown excessive and mostly unwarranted _generalized_ cynicism, and granted people carte blanche to outright reject challenging facts and perspectives in favor of much more partisan narratives. This cynicism has infected not just conservatives but most other factions. It turns out that if you repeat a narrative often enough even your opponents as well as the "mainstream media" will pick it up and run with it. The organic parts would be the dissolution and fragmentation of the mid-century media empires--broadcast news, regional newspapers, etc--into all the various cable and Internet outlets we have today. That fragmentation means readerships are more self-selected, creating market pressures for outlets to cater to their particular readerships' preferences and biases. This is in some sense a regression to a 250-year mean of political culture, but that's a mean of slow and highly volatile social, economic, and scientific progress. And there's no excuse for the slash-and-burn, nihilistic tactics adopted by conservative strategists. You simply cannot have a functioning democracy unless society retains the _myth_ of an objective, shared truth. It's one thing to nurture skepticism, it's another to nurture cynicism. Not that there's no fault on the part of the left or other political factions. But I'm not going to equivocate factions which, say, pursue ill-considered policy objectives with a faction that undermines the fundamental prerequisites for a functioning body politic. The Donald Trump phenomenon and the age of alternative facts is principally a result of a _particular_ concerted partisan political effort. And it's not new--it goes back to before Reagan, although really got going with Newt Gingrich's Republican Revolution, which finally solidified a unified GOP narrative on all policy matters. The only difference is that we're now much more focused on some of the starker consequences of that shift in strategy.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  You think the problem with the media is a lack of centralized control? Sorry, I don't think we're anywhere in the same neighborhood on this issue.
  - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
    Not centralized, but consolidated: when people all got their news from the same half dozen or so sources, they were a lot more capable of agreeing on basic sets of underlying facts with which issues could be debated, instead of just going through endless cycles of recusals and spin about the facts and their basic interpretation. Sure, it didn't live up to certain capitalistic ideals, but maybe it turns out that not every domain of human life benefits from existing in a bare knuckle free market.
    - emodendroket 10y ago
      Media has undergone a massive consolidation in the last few decades, though, and a bunch of blogs without serious resources don't change that.