Chad Orzel comments on one of my pet peeves today:
The way journalists are trained to select and construct stories drives the media toward promoting the very worst stuff, all the time. Put that together with the increasing nationalization of the news, and you’ve got a huge sample from which to draw Bad Things. If some guy lost his shit on a plane in Salt Lake City in 1991, that was a local story that you likely wouldn’t hear about in New York. In 2021, it’s a viral video, and every NYC-based writer is rushing to the keyboard to either QT-dunk on it or embed it in a thinkpiece about the age of rage.
I call this the "big country problem": in a nation of 300 million people, there's always someone doing something stupid every single day of the year. If you want to scare people into thinking that liberals are going to take their guns away, it's easy to find dozens of examples of some local nitwit doing or saying something about taking people's guns away. If you want to scare people into thinking that fascism is overtaking America, it's easy to find dozens of examples of some local nitwit doing or saying something about gunning down protesters in the streets.
The first time this really hit me was about a decade ago. I don't remember the details, but there was some student at Harvard, maybe, who wrote a private email to a friend that contained some sketchy thoughts about race and genetics. For some reason the friend got mad a few months later and made the email public.
It's hard to think of anything more trivial. A private email! From a college student! And not even racist per se, but just poorly thought out. Thirty years ago it would have sparked controversy on campus—at most—and that's it. But in 2010 it became viral news, and the student became a national poster child for intolerance.
This kind of thing happens constantly these days: local stories that somehow get picked up and go national. Nothing has really changed much on the ground, but the constant coverage of this stuff makes it look like it's way more widespread than it used to be. And by "stuff" I mean whatever happens to be your hobbyhorse. If you want to scare people about anything, we live in a golden era. Internet culture has evolved to the point that it's easy to do, but hasn't yet evolved to the point where we're all savvy enough to realize that it's mostly meaningless.
So we all run around thinking the world is going to hell, even though practically every actual indicator of wellbeing suggests quite the opposite. Somebody must be laughing their ass off about this. I'm just not quite sure who. Rupert Murdoch?
Thank you for the timely reminder. My sister and I have been wishing for something that will curate the news for us... remember when reading two newspapers and watching the news made you well-informed? And now we get "news" from everywhere on earth, but we are no more effective. I'm not sure if our brains need to evolve to comprehend it all, or our news outlets needs to improve, but something's got to give.
My theory about this is that it's a transitory phenomenon caused by technological progress once again leapfrogging social progress, in this case the incredible reduction in the cost of widespread publicity made possible by the advent of social media and handheld personal digital devices.
It's not dissimilar to what happened when newspaper publication first became widespread. Suddenly, HUGE numbers of people had access to a MUCH wider range of information than before, and on the flip side, a significant number of information sources suddenly has access to a MUCH wider audience than before. The number of "links" increased by orders of magnitude.
It took a while for society to adjust, during which time there was MUCH thrashing and wailing about the awful plague of newspapers and how wrong it was that all the uneducated rabble had access to all this information and how dangerous that publishers had such power and blah blah blah. And indeed the new equilibrium was noticeably different from the old one (and I would say more small-d democratic, but that's just me).
But there will be no "curation." The genie is out of the bottle. Society will adapt, both individually and collectively. How long it will take is another question ...
Humans as a species evolved to survive scarcity. Scarcity of food countered by the ability to pile on fat whenever possible. Scarcity of information, by the ability to generalize from mere bits of data. We were not "made" for modern society, which requires the ability to sip from a fire hose.
Whether consciously or not, I think you're stealing my oft-used fire hose line 🙂
Yeah, well it was just a few months ago that one of our major political parties tried to overthrow the government, so this might not be the best time to reassure us that the extremism we can all see around us is due only to "some local nitwit".
Well, it you put all the local nitwits together....
I heard the leader of the Wack Pack, Jacob Angeli, has asked thru his attorney not to be called the QANON Shaman anymore.
Good luck with that!
That seems a lot more reasonable than men asking to be called women or women asking to be called men.
Actually, schizophrenia & gender dysphoria are both acknowledged medical/biologically-driven conditions.
A dude taking clonopin to mute the voices in his head, or a woman taking hormone suppressors to make her physical apparition align with her internalized sex are the same thing, when you think about it.
Indeed.
KD: "If you want to scare people into thinking that fascism is overtaking America, it's easy to find dozens of example of some local nitwit doing or saying something about gunning down protesters in the streets."
Alternately: "If you want to scare people into thinking fascism is overtaking America, all you have to do is report the news. One of our two major political parties has abandoned any pretense of democratic government, openly supporting those who attempted a coup just a few months ago, openly hostile to minorities and immigrants, actively engaged through state legislatures and courts to subvert hard-won rights, including the right to choose and the right to vote."
I guess you could argue whether to call this fascism or some brand of neo-fascism, but it's a variant of the same plague, and to call it trivial is ridiculous.
Right. KD has made a shameful false equivalence between left and right: some random lib said something too extreme! vs. hundreds of wackadoos tried to overthrow the government, and most of the elected officials in one party are fine with it.
Yes sometimes woke culture causes some individuals to go to far. But the fascist rise is real.
"Florida Man" is still my favorite local nitwit.
I feel so much better. Probably 640k of us or so might disagree, though, if they were still around to remind us what a big country it is.
It is undeniable that fascism is growing in power in the US. That violence as a political tool is seen as standard among the right. We are in the midst of an unprecedented explosion of murders. Sometimes things seem to be getting worse because they ARE getting worse.
Lolz, nope. What your talking about taint "fascism".
Your boy Haw-Haw Hawley has said he considers himself a Nat-C.
GoP shows all the characteristics.
Derp
What he is talking about is authoritarianism.
No. Actual fascism. Authoritarians want to submission. Fascists want a total transformation. Society has to be destroyed and rebuilt from the ground up, a new nation. That is absolutely what a growing number of republican supporting groups want and these groups are growing in power.
That is so fifteen years ago (2006/2007) ... when the US population was 300 million...
Indeed. According to the last Census, which probably deliberately skipped a lot of folks, we're at 332,721,914. Or thereabouts.
DeSantis will get us back to 300!
Zuckerberg, Brin & Rupert Murdock are laughing all the way to the bank. Arguably, Trump rode this wave & pushed it bigger all the way to the Presidency. (If you look at all the undocumented immigrants, you can find some violent criminals, and some of their telgenic, tragic, female, white victims). The best answer I've seen is Jaron Lanier, http://jaronlanier.com/ case for deleting your social media accounts. Although it feels like spitting in the wind, quitting social media is a relatively easy step to take. (Do as I say, not as I do - I still have a Twitter account)
There used to be more local news--but most local news reporting has collapsed with the death of local papers.
And building codes and regulations. House fires are not that common anymore, and with smoke alarms, there are fewer injuries and deaths. Death rate from car accidents is less than half of what it was in the '70's. Gun crime is up--by typically you don't have the pictures to go with the story, no burning house or exploding car, so they are not as important.
So local broadcasts spend time on in depth stories on local issues? No--they'll report on a house fire states away.
We need journos, now more than ever, to provide context. For our local stuff, maybe you know how many drunk guys go bonkers on a plane. Sh-t isn't Utah dry or something (if he's LDS he shouldn't be drinking at all) so maybe this happens all the time there.
This sounds similar to something Kevin named years ago as "nutpicking" - making your point by finding some Nimrod on the internet saying something worthy of outrage. What viral media did was eliminate the need to go looking for nuts to pick - now they come to you.
Then destroy the "media".
Clog the lamestream with dead fish.
"If you want to scare people into thinking that fascism is overtaking America"
Side note: this reminds me of multi-platform wingnut Mark Levin and his latest book ("American Marxism"), which he pushes incessantly. Perhaps an indication of his, uh, scholarship is given by the fact that he keeps referring to the "Franklin School," which he says "came out of Berlin." (That would be the Frankfurt School, which was originally based in, you know, Frankfurt.)
(That is, he says Marxism is overtaking America, though he also throws around the term fascism/fascist.)
The truth is that Leninism and Nazism are remarkably similar in every way but their economic systems. The Leninists have the State own the important parts of the economy, while the Nazis allow private "ownership" but tell the owned companies what they may and must produce.
The rat-on-your-neighbor and good-stuff-happens-only-for-party-members social system is identical.
So they’re the same but totally different? Ok.
The Frankfurt school rejected class for individual bias. Yet that simply isn't possible. It's a fake version of "Marxism" which was eventually rejected by the people behind it, itself. It's why I say Trotskyist and idiots like the dykes that created "blm" are frauds.
Thanks for a good laugh at the expense of a RW nutjob!
We are living in a tabloid world. The Internet & associated communication platforms helped get us here.
Fox News is overwhelmingly tabloid - no surprise, since its founder was "t*ts and bum" broadsheet Murdoch.
Trump is tabloid. He doesn't lie so much as radiate tabloid-ism.
A view from Britain:
https://antidotesforchimps.com/2018/11/14/how-tabloids-are-ruining-your-country/
Tabloid headlines seek to evoke a self-righteous anger in the reader, with entries such as “FURY AT POLICE IN BURKAS”, “MIGRANT CRISIS: SORT IT NOW”, and “GERMANS DECLARE WAR ON OUR £”. The stronger the emotional response, the more likely it is that the person will buy the newspaper to read more, with the stories themselves often brimming with irrational nonsense. The reader is now angry at the “state of the country” and wonders how Britain ever got into such a mess. It is of course, complete and utter bullshit. The truth might be found in other publications, but tabloid readers don’t really want that, they enjoy being outraged because it elevates them to the high-horse that we all so desperately love to climb onto. Who doesn’t love feeling right? Maybe tabloid readers need to find their self-confidence in more constructive ways.
Murdoch just took over what was already there. According to John Mortimer, the "News of the World" was dubbed "News of the Screws" long before Murdoch left the sunny shores of Oz.
Stephanie Grace is (was) the Harvard Law 3L that sent the racist email. https://abovethelaw.com/2016/09/above-the-law-celebrities-where-are-they-now/
Yes instant news from all over
None of it vetted of course but who cares? It sounds good, it sounds "exciting".
So it much be true right?
No longer do we get the local news from Moms hairdresser down the street. She posts it on the internet and voila, away it goes. It goes from an outright lie to a raging belief to a society changing event and no one bothers to check and see what the truth is.
We WANT to believe every damned salacious rumor we hear because most rumors are about someone else
And they say journalists are out of work! It seems to me there are too many journalists doing crummy work. Too many bloggers too? Sorry Mr. Drum, but this is all your fault! And Mr. Murdoch too!
John Stewart was right. CNN crossfire ruined everything. They set up Fox News.
We need less news. Less political analysis. It’s all wrong anyway.
Still true.
https://youtu.be/aFQFB5YpDZE
Jon Stewart calling out CNN.
You mean Plandemic Truther Jon Stewart?
Yeah... fuck that guy.
Kevin, you have the right stick by the wrong end, imho. No journo can tell a story without the anecdote or two to hang it on-- that's their training, as you say, based in the view that nobody pays any attention to things that don't immediately grab them personally (which I think is actually the deeper problem with our media). Social media is a bottomless source of eye-catching and rage- or contempt-inducing anecdotes, true.
But stupid narratives do not have to follow from stupid anecdotes. They come from simple-minded, puerile, shallow narratives. That's the right end of the stick, I think. It isn't the anecdotes' fault, but the story-tellers'.
Right-wing media pump out a predictable set of narratives hung on predictable kinds of anecdotes. The fox won't change its spots so there's no point even thinking about that side of the spectrum.
Which leaves the shallowness of mainstream narrative as the real aggravation. Fascistoid tendencies are too deep for most mainstream narrative construction. So are many other longer-term and deeply important trends, like, oh, maybe climate issues, or a couple of generations of expanding economic degradation in the country. Even, with some good exceptions, a covid pandemic.
Attention is the currency the media need. "Person bites dog" sells attention. Better narratives can use that attention for better purposes.
The economy isn't degrading, capitalism is dying. Using asset securities as mythical "income" gives the illusion that there is large wealth inequality. The truth is, we are all poorer than 1973, when the post war boom ended and growth went back to 1901-28 levels. Since 2000 it's slowed down even more, only held up by public debt, debt based private credit growth and scale of economy. If the 2008 financial crisis had been allowed to go through, the collapse would have shattered the dollar and sent America reeling into food shortages, supply lines. Global anarchy like after 1931.
The industrial revolution is over and the debt based ponzi is all that's left.
My wife and I are going to take a plane trip soon for the first time since 2019. The other day she asked me if I was afraid we'd see someone misbehaving on the plane. I said of course not because every time it happens it makes the news so clearly it doesn't happen all the time.
My wife is not a dumb person but this is the way the news makes you think about stuff like this.
Availability heuristic.
On the other hand, maybe some of this really is dangerous.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/03/arizona-dad-confronts-principal-quarantine-zipties/
Rishi Rambaran, 40, stormed into Principal Diane Vargo's office on Thursday with zip-tie handcuffs, according to a since-removed Instagram video. He and two friends accompanying him claimed the school broke the law when administrative officials told his kid to wear a mask and quarantine after potential exposure to COVID-19.
Wait, there’s more:
Kelly Walker, one of the men who backed up Rambaran, shared a video to Instagram that appeared to show him driving to the school.
"I'm headed to Mesquite Elementary School right now, where a friend just notified me and some others that his son was indiscriminately taken to the office to be quarantined because supposedly someone had decided he but not other kids in this classroom were exposed to COVID," he said.
"And they shoved a mask on his face, wouldn't let him call his parents, and now his dad is there," he continued. "The school is blatantly breaking the law, blatantly going against the will of the people. I think this community has expressed that they're not going to have this kind of bullying of our kids, these kinds of scare tactics."
So we have three dudes rolling up on an elementary school. Only one of them is a parent with a kid enrolled—the other two are just . . . backup? Muscle? They’ve got zip ties and they’re taking video and making demands and threatening a “citizens arrest.”
What’s important to understand here is that this isn’t a random event. This is the congealing of a bunch of stuff that’s in the air.
So a group of thugs show up at an elementary school and threaten the principal with violence and they’re cited and released and charged with misdemeanor trespassing? Right wing privilege is definitely a thing.
Wingnuts almost invariably imagine themselves the authority in any situation and infiltrate authority wherever they can.
Here's a wingnut for whom being a deputy mayor was just not enough, he had a collection of illegal weaponry and fake ID badges from numerous Federal agencies,
https://www.businessinsider.com/deputy-mayor-charged-after-found-with-unregistered-guns-fbi-badges-2021-9?op=1
For a guy like this his only interest in his job was the authority it represented, and he would have no interest at all in what the job is actually about. In fact he probably entirely resented any attention he had to pay to it, or accountability that was required of him.
Is this the gritty reboot of Michael J. Fox's Spin City?
Charlie Sheen (who already replaced Fox on SC once) is made for that role.
Re: Charlie Sheen. And to think his father was Good President Jeb Bartlett.
A crank trumpist?
Charlie Sheen seems way too mellow and rational for the part.
Maybe Steven Seagall?
Charlie will take crank for the role.
I can't help but think that these same men didn't blink an eye when they heard about the six year old African-American child who was handcuffed by police for having a temper tantrum in class.
I saw that with a 9 year old white kid in the 90's. Your missing these things are not new.
Was it the gifted & talented education student in Paducah who shot up his school six years before Columbine?
In this case I think it's a case of journalists desperately trying to keep up with social media before it escapes their influence completely. Posts at some well-known websites these days consist of little more than a series of copy/pasted tweets linked with a few lines of commentary, presumably in the hope it will keep readers visiting the website instead of abandoning it altogether to subscribe to Twitter feeds.
No doubt it's all very deplorable, but I'm not persuaded it signals any dumbing down of political commentary in the media. I mean 270 years ago, Britain went to war with Spain because a ship captain's ear was cut off.
In this case I think it's a case of journalists desperately trying to keep up with social media before it escapes their influence completely.
Got it in. AS I KEEP SAYING (sorry about that, but this observations seems to fall on deaf ears) traditional reportage -- the so-called MSM -- is dying as their viewers abandon them. Their younger viewers. As MSM viewer/readership dwindles, the remaining audience becomes older, whiter, more conservative. Sure there's some editorial bias towards 'balance' in play, but it's as much to retain what eyeballs they have left as it is to who owns the megaphone.
Oh, I know!
Republicans!
All you have to do is close the hospitals!
(That way no one will die in hospitals).
Healthcare problem solved.
As Kevin's blog can be broadly described as a search for connections that only some decent analysis and a good chart can provide, I submit he should take a swing at the following connections.
1. Per this post, I mean, how dumb do you have to be to believe that one anecdote equals data? I'm serious. I will submit as Exhibit A to this theory the number of people who were surprised that Trump won in 2016 and were only slightly less surprised that he got close in 2020 after four years of nonsense. The surprise was because for the intellectual left, all those examples of the idiots who would actually vote for Trump were just that, examples. It could not possibly mean that 43% of the entire country was that stupid. The examples were numerous but the educated left knows that one example does not equal data. We believed this at our peril.
2. This should link to the post a day or so ago about "intelligence." Can everyone agree that there has never been a time in human history where there is less opportunity for the less intelligent? In the first world, there are large swaths of the barely educated who really have no clear way to even make as good of a living as their parents, let alone savor the real upside of living now. Here, you can't even get top quality healthcare without plenty of dough. If everyone couldn't get cell phones the revolution would have already happened.
3. These people feel that something is wrong. They are not reading this blog, but they know they are somehow screwed.
4. Enter Trump, talk about a guy who knows how to sell an anecdote. And all those angry people are looking for some group to blame, and Trump gives them educated, elite liberals.
Circling back to point one, again, actual elite liberals still cannot believe that the rubes fall for the weak, anecdotal, false arguments.
Kevin even falls for it. Post after post about some event happening in "cancel culture at Yale" per an article in the Atlantic! I mean, the readership of the Atlantic, let alone the substance of the articles in the Atlantic, might as well be one nutjob on a plane.
But the connection is that its the less educated that are more likely to fall for an argument based on one anecdote, and its never been easier to find those anecdotes.
I guess what I would like to see, maybe not here, is less "shock" from the left at the most recent discovery that 43 percent of the population is ready to be fine with fascism, and more of an effort to get our share of the dumb.
Won't happen here, but maybe the plan? Please?
Fascism??? Nope. Plutocracy, yup. Your so stupid, you don't get it.
I will not have you disparaging Doctor of Veterinary Medicine & Interspecies Erotica Enthusiast Conor Friedersdorf!
"The first time this really hit me was about a decade ago. I don't remember the details ..."
Oddly enough, I also remember a particular moment where this sort of phenomenon (more or less) first really struck me. The moment came while watching an 11:00 pm news broadcast on one of the major networks (probably NBC). So, I was not necessarily interacting with the internet, but the news network may have gathered their info from Internet sources.
And they were talking about a particular type of crime, and I can't remember for certain what it was. But I think they were talking about abductions or suspected abductions. And, at any given time, there are likely to be abductions taking place somewhere in this country. But what this broadcast did was to put up a map of the country with bright red dots showing recently reported abductions. And then they started filling up the map with those red dots.
So, those sorts of graphics are, of course, misleading. The actual number of abductions per population must have been vanishingly small. But, by dramatically filling a map of the country with those bright red dots, they created a clear impression that a wave of abductions was sweeping the country. If parents are watching that kind of stuff, no wonder they no longer let their kids play independently outside anymore!
And I remember watching that and wondering what the hell was wrong with these news people who were clearly presenting a particular statistic in the scariest and most (graphically) exaggerated manner imaginable! But this sort of thing wouldn't even remotely surprise me any longer ....
Can't overestimate the laziness of Johnny Deadline.
Given a choice between Bosch's Dictum--"Get off your ass and start knocking on doors."--and writing 500 words about something that came in thanks to the internet . . . that's no choice at all.
Hit "Send" and then go out for a Mai Tai!
Think I may have turned up where the ivermectin thing came from,
https://incels.wiki/w/FeminismIsCancer
Mare of Easttown.
Is that a picture of this Catherine the Great?
Yes.
Is that a picture of Catherine the Great?
Yet another riff I will keep riffing on is that this sort of misdirection on the part of any agent with power or authority will most likely get worse, possibly a lot worse, before it gets better.
And that is why our education model needs to change for 21 C and beyond. Finding the needle in a blizzard of chaff 'flooding the zone with shit' as one wagscallion put it will become harder and harder the less curated information becomes. Process, not facts. Critical thinking skills, not regurgitated algorithms are the order of the day.
"If you want to scare people into thinking that fascism is overtaking America, it's easy to find dozens of examples of some local nitwit doing or saying something about gunning down protesters in the streets."
This sounds good and well. But if the nitwit in question is either a member of Congress or was the POTUS for four years I believe we should the take the threat a tiny little more serious. Don't you? BTW they are already laying the grounds to claim that the California recall election was "rigged". Is this also just a "big country problem"?
Sometimes "some nitwits" can cause serious problems. Another one right now is the epidemic of gun violence that. The fact that the shooters are indeed all of them "local nitwits" does not make it a non-problem.
If it comes to minor stuff like that Harvard student's musings the big-country-problem approach is maybe feasible (though that would depend on the details).
> if the nitwit in question is either a member of Congress or was the POTUS for four years I believe we should the take the threat a tiny little more serious. Don't you?
Yes! Yes I do!
Counterpoint: 30 years ago you could get away with all kinds of bad behavior without any consequences, especially in a close-knit community, and even more especially in a close-knit community with heterogenous opinions on issues such as race and gender. Today, actions have consequences.
It's all a matter of perspective, I guess.
It's the ease of the mechanism and the valuation of attention in the Internet that is driving this, not the content. There have always been people doing stupid things or attacking celebrities for offenses. I found this out recently while reading letter columns in a pop music paper of the 1960s. "Why aren't we boycotting Elvis for supporting George Wallace?"
But back then, if you were interested in that, how would you find it? It's the search function of the Internet that turns collating the daily outrage from an extremely difficult task into an easy, even automate-able one. Combine that with a need to get eyeballs on your site as a form of moneymaking and the human desire to see things that get our dander up, and you have the current situation.
The other issue that is causing it is the tendency to assume that what one sees of something on the news is the mean. From personal experience, I know that when news crews go out to an area racked by floods, they are going to look for where the floods look the worst. People at home see this and think that's the average way that area looks instead of the most extreme. If they see night after night of crime reported in a city, they will assume that's the average experience in that city instead of something that is actually rare.
"I call this the "big country problem": in a nation of 300 million people, there's always someone doing something stupid every single day of the year. If you want to scare people into thinking that liberals are going to take their guns away, it's easy to find dozens of examples of some local nitwit doing or saying something about taking people's guns away. If you want to scare people into thinking that fascism is overtaking America, it's easy to find dozens of examples of some local nitwit doing or saying something about gunning down protesters in the streets."
Exactly. In the time before the internet, to be able to find out what was going on in many different cities and communities, you needed to go to a library in a big city and spend hours looklng at various newspapers, some of which were days old and you probably wouldn't have been able to do so in the hours that library was open. Today? Well my Yahoo news feed, to use myself as an example, I can get stories from newspapers all over the country, large and small and read all sorts of stories in minutes. At first I thought it neat. Now I'm reducing the number of news stories I could read . I don't need to know everything, everywhere and quite frankly I don't want to.
All of this has political implications because if you get all sorts of news from different sources across the country and the world, and the news being the news, its easy to become depressed and distraught at all the bad events taking place. In fact you can be overwhelmed by it and obviously it affects your views on how the country and its leadership is doing. It also leads to that stupid "world on fire" meme which also depresses people as well, as if the world has never been "on fire" before. It just messes with your head and you're just better off using the old adage "no news is good news."