The virus (and fights against masks and vaccines) are merely McGuffins, props in the crazy right's anti-intellectual effort to own the libs, the experts, institutions, authority: anger for its own feel-good sake. Tighting them over masks falls into their trap, misses the point.
How then to design journalism to counteract emotions and psychoses, not misinformation? That is the challenge. It starts not with fact-checkers but with shrinks and cognitive scientists.
If you reach for smelling salts over Germans "believing" Qanon you miss the point: It's not about believing that shit but about them saying "we" (uneducated white people) hate "you" (others and their allies). The only known solution: education. Does journalism have a role?
When the problem is mass psychosis, racism, hatred, and fear from people who know they're losing their hold because they are uneducated and unprepared for the future, stories about them will accomplish nothing but give them the lib-owning attention they desire.
I'm not sure where to start with a strategy but, again, I would start with psychologists and cognitive scientists to understand how their brains are operating. Our old theories--the bases of journalism, criminal justice, and drama--are wrong. medium.com/whither-news/a…
If our first goal is to stop more "converts" from "believing" conspiracy insanity, trying to silence it will not work; it inflames it, spreads it farther. Somehow, people need to be taught that the hate they think feels justified and good is eating at them and there's another way
This is why some went to religion. But now--outside the mainline--that is not the other way; it is a path straight to hate and hell. Is there another belief system, another path to present? Here I want to hear from historians of religion.
My point: All our old tools don't work not because they're outmoded by anything new (the net, social media) but because they never worked; we were fooling ourselves. We never understood the psychology of these so-called "movements." That is what we must attack.
So rethinking journalism is not a matter of finding new ways to fact-check or present stories or pay for them. If there is a role for an institution to inform the public conversation it needs to call upon other disciplines to better define the problem based on what we now know.
That institution--fine, call it journalism--could be an amalgam of psychology, neuroscience, anthropology, social history, and drama. My only point is that this is far more complex and far harder than we have imagined.
Journalism needs to start not with its goal, not its history: to convene respectful, informed, and productive public conversation. Think of all the barriers to that--no, not Facebook, that's inanely simplistic; racism, start there.
So then journalism is not "objective"--oh, no, not at all. Journalism has a goal and is measured against it: the quality of the public conversation. It--and, now, Facebook and social media as well--should start by modeling that conversation, by setting norms and expectations.
Reading the history of coffeehouses where Habermas says the public sphere began (spoiler: it didn't), the conversation was not idealized as he wished. It required rules to establish norms in a new institution.Those rules weren't about facts. They were about expecting respect.
Similarly, reading Montaigne on the value of public conversation, he--like Milton & Franklin after him--valued lively debate for the way it exercised his thinking. But none of them suffered fools. They had standards.
Freedom of speech means just that. I celebrate the speech we can now at last year. But that's just a first step. The next is to decide what is worth listening to. That's what the @SZ at the start of this thread was saying: You don't have a right to be heard.
I was struck, too, by a tweet a few weeks ago from Prof. @mkirschenbaum, who said you also don't have a right to a conversation: that is, you need not and likely should not engage with trolls. Engagement is what they want and what media are giving them.
I'll end it here: Start by setting standards for respectful, informed, and productive conversation. Then I want to seek out experts from other disciplines to better understand the psychosis, the disease among us to better understand how to fight it.
