Thread by @PalmerReport

The pundits yelling “we’re getting nuked for sure” are getting all the retweets, TV bookings, and critical praise for “bravely telling it like it is.” And when they’re proven wrong, they’ll pay no price. There’s always 100% upside, and no downside, for pushing doomsday hysteria.

The pundits will keep feeding you this doomsday hysteria bullshit, and the media will keep amplifying and praising it, until you stop enjoying the taste of it. For career reasons, they have to feed you what you’re hungry for, even if they know it’s bullshit.

Even if these doomsday pundits are right (which they somehow never are), their advice on how to deal with impending doom is for you to sit there and stare at your screen in fear. The bad faith nature of their advice proves that they don’t believe their own premise to begin with.

There's just so god damn much revenue to be made these days from pushing doomsday hysteria – online, on MSNBC and CNN, wherever – it's the only thing most of the media and pundits are going to feed you each day, whether any of it's based in reality or not.

And while it says something that nearly everyone in the media and pundit class is willing to promote outright bullshit just to make their rent money, it won't change until YOU change it. You control what goes viral online, which kinds of stories get cable news ratings, etc.

If McDonald's starts selling vomit, and everyone buys it, McDonald's will keep selling vomit.

If everyone stops buying vomit and says they'd rather have Big Macs, McDonald's will go back to selling Big Macs.

It's exactly the same with what the media and the pundits sell you.

As always, some percentage of you are so damaged, you WANT the media to keep feeding you doomsday hysteria, because you're clinically addicted to outrage and fear. You folks need professional help. But the rest of us can force the media and the pundits to start becoming honest.

I can promise you there are numerous pundits sitting at home right now, thinking "I can't believe I have to come up with yet another bullshit doomsday hysteria narrative. I wish I could just give honest political analysis and make a living from it."

I've seen so many pundits start out their careers so honest and insightful, and then they happen to offer a doomsday take on one issue, and it ends up being twenty times more popular than anything else they've ever said. Then from there on out it's 100% doomsday stuff for them.

"But Palmer, you don't do doomsday hysteria, and you have a lot of followers."

I'd have twenty times the exposure if I did doomsday hysteria. Probably more than that, since i've figured out how this game is played better than anyone. I just refuse to play it.

Also, when I periodically spell out how the media and pundit industry is feeding you bullshit, those are usually my least popular tweets by far. Most people, even in my own audience, just don't want to hear the ugly truth about the media. That's the unnvering part.

The bottom line is this all comes down to you, the people reading this. If you stop engaging with doomsday hysteria, and start engaging with honest measured political analysis instead, the media and the pundits will go where you want them to. They need to make rent.

The most important thing you can keep in mind is that every political pundit, expert, and TV host does this for a living. Their income is dependent on how many retweets and page views they can get, how much airtime they can get on MSNBC for their publication, and so on.

I know that shatters the illusion for many of you. You want to pretend the pundits are all being earnest, and the MSNBC hosts are all your trusted friends. But for them, this is a job. And their job is to use you to hit their ratings marks.

You probably also don't want to be reminded that your favorite pro athlete is in it for the money, and your bartender doesn't really think the story you're telling is interesting. But that's harmless. When you delude yourself about political punditry, you end up disinformed.

And when you're disinformed about what's going on in the political world, you are never ever in a position to make a difference and win as an activist – particularly when you're being falsely told that you can't win anyway. It's just too important to treat it like a reality show.