Thread by @airbagmoments

.@jayrosen_nyu published this illuminating thread about "the public" and the media.

It made me want to do a thread of my own here about the real audience of what I think of as the "benevolent media," i.e. media outlets that think of themselves as a public service.

I don't exclude for-profit outlets, as long as their staffers feel they and their bosses sincerely see public good as an intended and actual net result of their output.

It does exclude rightwing media and tabloid media, with their various malevolent agendas.

An old saw about journalism is that it should afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.

One likely quality shared by many of the "afflicted," who are part of Jay's "public," is naiveté due to poor education.

The naive afflicted are not really the intended audience of benevolent journalism, but they are the intended beneficiaries of it.

The audience of benevolent journalism is made up of decently-educated, comfortable people, who can directly or indirectly benefit the afflicted.

Examples:

* People who work to be high information voters
* Elected and appointed government officials
* The donor class
* Community leaders of various kinds

These are the people who can create pressure to implement policy and direct capital flows to benefit the naive public.

A good example during this "interesting time" we've been cursed to live in is the concept of "commercial speech," a.k.a. advertising.

The naive among Jay's public are easily manipulated into buying products that make false claims, some of which are even harmful.

The traditional "public service" process to address this affliction is theoretically:

-A reporter investigates & publicizes a false claim.

-Pressure builds from influencers to do something.

-Something is done, ie a government agent forces the entity making the claim to stop.

When this model is functioning, the naive public is protected - without ever knowing it happened.

But this process is "bad for business," & libertarians believe that if a naive consumer is harmed it's likely their own fault for not protecting themselves from fraudulent claims.

Powerful people get most angry at "the liberal media" when it inspires influencers to protect the afflicted in ways that cut into profits, such as the regulation of industrial toxins or the prevention of dangerous products from reaching the market.

Charles Dudley Warner said that "everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."

The wealthy decided to stop treating "the media" like the weather.

They'd complained about it for years, but finally decided to do something about it.

Wealthy people such as Hearst had owned news outlets and used them to pursue their own ends before, but for decades their influence was often blunted by numbers of competitors with other agendas.

But, for the last forty years, several dynamics have radically altered this scene.

-Media conglomeration meant less competition from fewer companies.

-The internet blew up the advertising model that had made newspapers so reliably profitable.

-After Nixon's impeachment, rich conservatives decided to take a more active role in media ownership and manipulation.

FOX News, in particular, sought conservative viewers who had already been trained to believe the "media" was corrupt and in the service of liberals.

Among these are many of the naive members of the public who found FOX weirdly entertaining.

The platinum blondes in dresses coyly displayed beneath clear plexiglass tables or arrayed on a sofa.

The kaleidoscopic, amygdala-tickling threats ginned up hourly.

Resentment porn, perfected.

FOX (etc), on behalf of its wealthy owners, mentally shanghaied many of the low-information afflicted to join an army of high-bad-information soldiers seduced into fighting hard against their own self-interest.

The real American carnage.

Funded by wealthy reactionaries, the Tea Party, assisted by fawning coverage form mainstream outlets, elected these angry soldiers into federal office & converted the already elected who feared primaries.

(Some of them, surely, were merely playing a part scripted by FOX News.)

Lather rinse repeat.

More and more wealthy conservatives own and shamelessly manipulate more and more of the news media.

The system that once rhythmically comforted the afflicted is failing.

RW media has subsumed many of the people I listed above as influencers into the now much larger modern naive public.

They may not all be among the afflicted, but they are all deluded and no longer part of the audience of benevolent reporters.

Meanwhile the benevolent media grows weaker and less confident, economically and politically, and the whole public suffers as a result.

Trump's election was overdetermined, but this media degeneration was a huge part of it.

The unnecessary death & suffering from the entire right wing ecosystem's bungling of the pandemic are part of it.

IDK how this ends, but unless the people of earth develop antibodies to propaganda it looks a lot like global kleptocracy/oligarchy 'til we kill the biosphere.

I'm not a historian, but this is how I've experienced and observed these trends.

Please comment on things that are wrong or fatally over-simplified.

FIN

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