Watched @chucktodd's @MeetThePress special on disinformation & the media crisis. Its clear he recognizes *some* of the issues w his show as of late. I'm glad he focused it on having on @deanbaquet & @PostBaron- the editors of The Times & The Post. I talk to audiences about the
process by which a story gets into print at these papers- the scrupulous vetting & editorial process, esp in the Trump Era, where any mistake is a disaster. And I talk about accountability- about what happens at a major outlet when something intentionally gets screwed up, like
the Rolling Stone UVA rape story. About how careers are ended. And I talk about incentives & how looking at people's incentives (combined w their constraints) are a good way at judging reliability. Journalists have incentives to get a hot story, but they have major constraints-
the story NEEDS to be right. That's not the case in the infotainment world- their only incentive is cash in and increase their audience sizes. And increasingly there is NO accountability in that sector, conspiracies they push are proved false but there is no penalty. When I do
conservative media, I often talk about my incentives either for my polling for my analysis, which is to be right, and the fact that I always face a judgement day, which is Election Day. If I say Democrats are going to win the election, I need to be right. My career depends on it.
Once thing lacking from the convo on the show though is the intentional erosion of trust in media on the right. It was an intentional strategy, adopted by campaign strategists, politicians, & right wing media personalities to turn the media into a villain. It helped them win
elections and control narratives when things didn't go so hot, like w the Great Recession, which became a story of consumer greed and not Wall Street greed via right wing media outlets. But Trump has taken it to a new level, using the presidential bully-pulpit to de-legitimize
the entire normal media ecosystem. And now half the population is conditioned to believe anything negative they hear about the president is fake, over-hyped, or taken out of context. In addition, the right wing media ecosystem & the president's twitter account is now capable of
propelling crazy conspiracy theories and even known Russian propaganda like the Ukraine interference conspiracy theory. The goal, as the panel on the show aptly points out, is to confuse voters to the point where they simply give up. They assume Biden must have done something
because enough official looking people keep saying he did (or might have, we should we really look into it). In this regard, assuming Biden is the nominee, Trump's efforts in Ukraine to sully Biden have been a full success. Functionally, we have a situation right now in the U.S.
where a not-insignificant portion of the public has been successfully cut off from most, if not all, legitimize sources of non-state controlled sources of information. That's a pretty scary proposition.
