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Beyond the Trump point, I think there is a very real concern being raised by Greenwald that the supposed fourth estate has suddenly uncritically been parroting
by forgingahead 6y ago
Beyond the Trump point, I think there is a very real concern being raised by Greenwald that the supposed fourth estate has suddenly uncritically been parroting the words of "their team", verbatim. While this may have become more apparent recently given all the political change and even COVID coverage, there is a history of this happening, most crucially in the run up to the Iraq War before everyone turned against it.
But if you take Iraq as an example, the corporate media has always been a consensus building machine. The danger then when it is presented as a monolith arbiter of the truth, is that if you accept the news as default "true", then any bad actor can start pushing the population in an unhealthy direction for society.
The opposite also has issues: If you accept the media as default "false", then what to believe? What is actually true outside of your own lived experience?
I see Greenwald's concern less about Trump or the politics of the day, and more about the sad lamentation of the death of his profession. The destruction of belief in institutions is increasing at a quicker pace, and that doesn't leave us as a society in a good place. And lecturing/hectoring people about "don't believe fake news, THOSE OTHER GUYS are wrong" doesn't work, because you often turn the page, and encounter something you know to be the opposite of what is being presented from that same media source. Gell-Mann Amnesia again and all that.
- rstuart4133 6y ago> The opposite also has issues: If you accept the media as default "false", then what to believe? What is actually true outside of your own lived experience? Everybody else's experiences? You point about the Iraq war (if that is what you were referring to), sums up how I perceived what happened at the time. However with a few hours digging it wasn't too hard to turn up primary sources - UN inspector reports and other information on what was happening inside Iraq's political elite. Suffices to say it didn't match the consensus the media had built amongst themselves. The same was true for Russiagate. Lots of smoke but after waiting for a while and the media fanned it furiously, but no fire appeared. It's true there were no retractions have forthcoming - but are there ever? Which brings us to the demise of 4th estate. You are worried about the demise of institution that manufactured a false justification for a war, or Russiagate on one side and the emails on the other? I didn't give up on them because they put themselves behind paywalls. I gave up on them because there are better sources of news.