Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.
It doesn’t require coordination any more than a flock of birds requires some “master bird” to tell it which way to turn. When all your friends are journalists, and all your Twitter friends are journalists, and you have to think about what your journalist friends will think about what you’ve written if you want to stay gainfully employed, or when you’re looking for a job in a few years, no dictatorial Illuminati is required.
That’s the old Chomsky quote from Manufacturing Consent: "[the mass communication media of the U.S.] are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion".
There is no need for a conspiracy for the media to be misleading.
I feel like newsrooms mislead, but more of in a Manufacturing Consent/Hate Inc sense. It feels obvious after reading articles about stuff I know about, and has lead me over time to generally not trust the media as an institution. Organized conspiracies make no sense, but perverse institutional incentives at scale has a lot of explaining power.
It doesn't have to be a conspiracy, its just natural for big news corporations to promote news that benefits big news corporations, and to stay quiet about the news that doesn't benefit them
Conspire, no, but the emergent behavior is like stochastic terrorism; if everyone in the chain of production places their finger slightly on the same side of the scale, you can very easily end up with a very misleading result. You can produce misleading news by who you don't cover as much as who you do.
A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
> A current example: https://www.glaad.org/new-york-times-sign-on-letter-from-lgt... ; coverage of trans people is heavily skewed, partly because it's risky being a named source in the paper, or people have had previous bad experiences with the press. So you get lots of articles that don't cover the side from the point of view of people most closely affected.
That is a demand from a trans advocacy group. They don't want criticism of the movement they are promoting because it brings up uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights, and the medical abuse of children. Rather than addressing these questions, they attempt to shut down any coverage. Much of social media has been censored this way already, and they are attempting complete ideological capture of traditional media too.
> uncomfortable questions about impositions upon women's rights
The only right alleged is a right to exclude trans women, and consequentially a right to screen all women suspected of being trans.
> and the medical abuse of children
The children in question want to transition, and their parents or the state want to prevent them; defining this as "abuse" without actually listening to the allegedly abused is the problem.
That is of course just your opinion, and reflects only one side of the issue. It would be a very biased journalism if only this and closely similar viewpoints were to be promoted.
Which is basically what the NYT said in their response:
"We received the letter from GLAAD and welcome their feedback. We understand how GLAAD sees our coverage. But at the same time, we recognize that GLAAD's advocacy mission and The Times's journalistic mission are different.
"As a news organization, we pursue independent reporting on transgender issues that include profiling groundbreakers in the movement, challenges and prejudice faced by the community, and how society is grappling with debates about care.
"The very news stories criticized by GLAAD in their letter reported deeply and empathetically on issues of care and well-being for trans teens and adults. Our journalism strives to explore, interrogate and reflect the experiences, ideas and debates in society - to help readers understand them. Our reporting did exactly that and we're proud of it."
Children also want to only eat chocolate coco puffs, so it gets complicated (parenting is hard) how to care for them when clearly their strongly held beliefs should be questioned.
I was in 2 tv interviews so far and both of them have released footage that totally and entirelly distorted the message to an infuriating degree. This was in a top tier European country, once state tv , once a major private station.
Complete red herring. The question as asked does not require a conspiracy. It doesn't even require all news organizations to be pulling in the same direction.
This line assumes that each person exists in the world as an ideal individual, subject only to their own independent logic, biases, and whims. In reality, we all have concrete material interests which are determined by concrete economic relations. Our logic, biases, and whims—the very nature of our consciousness—all flow from our material and social reality.
These material interests are not entirely individual and distinct; they fall within broad strata based on the overall structure of the economy (e.g., the class of people with the capacity to own a major media organization and the class of people who make a living by serving them). Thus, there is no need for a conscious conspiracy coordinating every aspect of the media machine since the basic character of the consciousness of those involved flows from a more fundamental material reality. At the same time, there’s no reason one can’t become consciously aware of the stratum of shared material interests that one exists within, and I think it would be foolish to assume that the people at the highest levels of power and wealth in the world have failed to do so.
This is mostly due to local news stations being lazy and regurgitating copy without doing any work on their own. The way news works involves stories and information being piped from party to party. Much of it comes from the AP or major national news bodies. Having seen how the sausage is made for these small local outfits, they are often run on a low budget with limited staff, old equipment and little bandwidth for their own editorial work outside of specific local news. Anything larger is likely going to be a copy paste job. The same is true for the weatherman. He's mostly just reading what the weather service puts out.
Plus aren't a ton of local news stations owned by Sinclair? MBA Bean Counting 101 would suggest that if you owned 200 news channels across the country that the first thing you'd do is look for stories that are relevant across all (or multiple) channels then pay 1 person to write it once. Rather than paying 200 people to write the story 200 times.
You'd also likely want to implement standards around language use that would create a consistent product with broad appeal, limit an editor's ability to go off the rails and do something that would harm the brand image, and that limits legal liability.
No it’s not due to laziness. Most local news is now owned by conglomerates or hedge funds that are “streamlining” them, removing their journalists and circulating non-local stories from other sources they own. The vast majority of “local” news - print or television, has been bought up. Sinclair, digital first media, Gannett, Tribune, etc. all own vast swaths of the “local” news media landscape.
The problem there is consolidated ownership of local television. Sinclair and Nexstar own the majority of TV stations in this country that aren't owned and operated (O&O) by the networks themselves. Actual local television ownership is dwindling, and those stations lose network affiliation, because the networks would rather work with large station groups to get more money in retransmission fees (as stations getting paid more money by operators means that the networks can demand more money from all affiliates).
Oh, I agree it's all (or at least mostly) emergent behavior. I also believe that a lot of reporters are misleading me, either because they have their own agenda (which often but not always lines up with the overall bias of the organization they work for) or because they're just overworked and it's easier to parrot someone's simplified narrative then do the real research.
Not directly related, but I've come to really appreciate the idea that a drug cartel is the ultimate example of a conspiracy, because not does it fit the definition really well, but it demonstrates what one actually looks like. There's no shadowy boardroom of hooded figures meeting in some underground bunker, but rather playboys loudly broadcasting their wealth & power with only the barest minimum of deniability maintained at the legal perspective, with the general populace fully aware but powerless to really do anything about it. And yet, it still is a multi-national network of coordinated logistics and execution for multiple tons of product that both the official powers & general public would really prefer to not to be there.
The scary part is that they don't conspire to mislead. They actually believe their own bullshit. It's enforced ideological conformity in hiring and groupthink. If they were organized Machiavellian propagandists, I could at least respect the skills.
Sure, it's emergent behaviour, and it emerges from having an intuitive feel for how to avoid upsetting the wrong people. If you lack finely tuned antennas on such matters, you don't get ahead.
Most of all, you understand the risk of breaking rank. If you look at a story, and think "hey, why aren't others covering this story? Why aren't more people upset at this? Shouldn't this be a big deal?", you either learn to think "No. Everything is all right in the media world." or you have a bad, bad time.
It doesn't require central coordination, a distributed norm enforcement network causing self-censorship is fine. In this case, it's done by Twitter: all journalists are on Twitter, all journalists are petrified of saying something that will upset the other journalists on Twitter, and so they all self-censor to not do that. No master plan needed.
> Bette yet: half of Americans believe in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities.
But they are not well co-ordinated or executed, that is the reason many people are catching on to the manufactured narratives.
This isn't done by some Matrix-type entity or does it need to be run by something as perfect as an AGI. All it takes is to have the top editors deciding which stories to run and with what narrative.
Of course this break down as the rank and file journalist are the ones in charge of writing the stories and presenting them.
And the people at the top of this aren't by any matter a cohesive group or a big brother type entity rather just people with money and power doing what they think will help them keep money and power.
I think the main argument here is not that they're conspiring to mislead. It's that they wouldn't be mainstream media if they weren't willing to publish propaganda.
There’s misleading snd there’s misleading. I’ve never worked in a newsroom. However it seem natural to me that changed incentivises (i.e. clicks / engagement) would change how content is written.
I’m fairly distrusting in even my preferred primary news source, not because I suspect that there’s some grand conspiracy, but because the system under which modern journalists (seem to) operate encourages very subtly but very consistently stretching the truth. The KPIs are the puppet master.
America believes in in conspiracies with superhuman coordination and execution capabilities because they've done those themselves multiple times.
- nuclear bombs
- the man on the moon
- darpa's internet
Superhuman coordination and execution abilities along with extreme secrecy as needed.
I have problem organizing 2 intelligent people to place dirty laundry in the laundry box or to do their homework on time or to place dirty dishes in the dishwasher.
But there's a mastermind somewhere who can organize something so complex, with so many variables where each depends on a human being of varying intellect and skillset and the plan is so intricate that out of 100,000 possibilities - all of them play in the hand of the mastermind. And the plan includes the two from above, who can barely get a cup of water when they're thirsty!
If such mastermind existed, I wouldn't even be angry for being manipulated - in fact, I would like to continue to be manipulated because if such a person (or group) existed - please, continue! Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Why wouldn't I imagine first that there exists a mastermind capable of weaving order out of chaos using divine ability granted to them by the Excalibur Fairy after praying at the Stonehenge?
The story you're portraying doesn't need any kind of imagination, Hanlon's razor works perfectly well there and doesn't require any kind of special ability granted by smoking weed while doing nothing besides looking for conspiracies.
> Creating order out of chaos is a divine ability.
Religion shaping culture, and thus the decisions of countless people to go out and actually kill each other is a thing. Divine? I think so.
Culture is programming for the masses. Is culture a conspiracy? Our intel agencies have caught onto this, color revolutions are a conspiracies, but the victims of such revolutions would hardly consider their own deeply held beliefs and subsequent actions to be conspiratorial.
Culture shaping happens now at an insane speed with everything from the search engines we use, to the radio, tv, music, advertisements, and so on. If you can pull those levers, people will act accordingly. Pfizer has advertising dollars everywhere. Is it a conspiracy that people will literally stake their professions on defending Pfizer vaccines?
I’ve worked in a newsroom. The idea that puppet masters thousands of miles away are controlling things is absurd to the point of hilarity.
Yes, Rupert Murdoch, etc. But it’s all emergent behavior. There is no master plan. These organizations are not well run enough to deliberately get stories out in time, let alone conspire to mislead.