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1. Some thoughts on media, democracy, skepticism, and trust. It’s commonplace for us to teach kids to be skeptical consumers of media. But perhaps we should slightly reframe that advice to focus on how we decide which media to *trust*, and what we mean by the word “trust.”
2. All media is a representation of reality. No media offers *unmediated* access 2 truth. Cameras capture only what’s in the frame. Journalists always select wch quotes to use, who to interview. Etc, etc. Anyone who 100% trusts a form of media to tell the “whole truth” is a fool.
3. We have a representative democracy because every citizen can’t literally be present to make every decision the polity needs to make. Likewise, we have a representative media because every citizen can’t be present in every place at every moment where important things happen.
4. In a complex modern world, there’s no escaping representation...and hence, no escaping the problem of trust.
5. Because of the representative nature of both politics and media, it behooves us to be skeptical about both our leaders & our media. Citizens should never grant carte blanche trust to people who control the levers of power or the engines of media representation.
6. That said, we can neither govern ourselves or comprehend “reality” without such people. For better or worse, we need both politicians and media professionals.
7. An appropriate level of trust is essential to democracy. A nihilistic, universal skepticism about all politicians and journalists (“they all lie”) is just as corrosive to our democracy and our collective life as credulous, blanket trust.
8. In the days before the explosion of FB and Twitter, when the media was controlled by a few corporations, it made sense for us to emphasize skepticism over trust.
9. The big three or four media conglomerates were almost our only access to reality beyond our own experiences, thus we had no choice BUT to rely upon them for information (and to some degree trust them).
10. But over the past 10 years or so our media scape has been radically transformed. Now some rando can alter a video of Nancy Pelosi on their PC & hundreds of millions of people can see it. Entire alternate universes can be created and cultivated on Reddit, Fox News or Infowars.
11. The demise of gatekeepers who at least aspired to be responsible has enabled the emergence of media environments that float almost entirely free of the reality they are (putatively) intended to represent.
12. Like good post-moderns, the right wing alternative media universe has entirely severed the relationship between the signifier and the signified.
13. Trump’s barrage of lies exemplifies the extent to which many (if not most) contemporary Republicans live in a world in which they trust the MAGA signifier implicitly, and care less about the extent to which those signs correspond with the underlying reality.
14. A polity comprised of people who inhabit entirely separate & incommensurate realities has little hope of functioning well.
15. The only way out of this epistemological impasse is to rebuild citizens’ capacities to provisionally trust both each other, and the media which grants us access to the infinitely complex, collective reality we inhabit together.
16. How do we cultivate citizens who can trust without being credulous? How do we cultivate citizens who can be healthily skeptical without becoming nihilists? There’s no easy recipe that identifies the sweet spot between those poles.
17. Our profit-driven media system has little incentive to cultivate viewers with such nuanced habits of mind. Credulity and nihilism generate far more clicks and impulse purchases than subtlety. No one buys blocks of gold over the phone after a long period of sober deliberation.
18. To the extent that I have a solution to offer, it’s a pretty (small-c) conservative one. As any Burkean will tell you, institutions matter.
19. We should start from the presumption that any long-standing institution (like professional journalism) deserves the presumption of trust, and can be reformed if that trust has been abused.
20. A parallel might be the medical profession. Is it good to be skeptical about modern medicine? Absolutely. In a medical crisis, do you trust professionally trained doctors to care for you & do they generally do a better job than some self-credentialed rando? Most likely yes.
21. How do we know we can trust the dentist who’s about to drill into our teeth? How can we trust that some medicine won’t poison us? How do we know that the allergy drops we put in our eyes will ease the itching & not blind us? Institutions. Fallible, yet essential institutions.
22. All of us make discernments every day between who/what can be trusted & who/what can’t. And all of us also have experience recognizing that trust is a *relative* thing. Some dentists are better than others. Some "medical breakthroughs" turn out to be wrong.
23. The person who trusts no person or institution is someone who doesn't drive, eats only their own food, never goes to the doctor, and consumes no media. Perhaps a few such people exist today, but they have basically absented themselves from the modern world.
24. How do we cultivate a media industry that is worthy of citizens’ provisional trust? How do we cultivate citizens with the ability to discern between more and less trustworthy forms of media?
25. I don’t know the answers...but I’m fairly sure that the fate of democracy in the modern world rests upon our ability to come up with some.
26. And I’m terrified that the current silicon valley overlords of our social media world seem profoundly ill-equipped to answer them, if not utterly unconcerned about asking them.
27. Addendum: Here's an earlier thread where I interrogated the overly simplistic, BS claim that "Americans don't trust the government."
28. This thread makes a similar point in regard to the outrageous Hannity-Manafort texts that have been released. Why not use this as an object lesson in what journalism is, and IS NOT?
