To any sane person who’s worked in journalism, the idea that the Washington Post would conspire to fabricate a story like this is plainly ridiculous. But an unsettling number of Americans now seem to find it plausible.
(That is, incidentally, pretty much the *only* way to discount the story, given how wildly improbable it would be for so many people to independently decide to lie about the same thing.)
Worth asking how we got to a point where something so disconnected from how reporting at reputable outlets actually works sounds plausible to so many people. My impression is that it’s relatively recent.
It’s not *just* a function of partisan polarization: Conservative writers with actual experience in journalism understand it doesn’t work that way, & rarely advance such conspiracy theories. nationalreview.com/article/447693…
One piece of it, I suspect, is the shifting economics & demographics of journalism itself. Why am I so sure it doesn’t work that way? Well, lots of reasons, but partly because I know a lot of journalists.
But a lot of people don’t, as journalism has (a) shifted from a working class trade to a profession populated by alumni of elite colleges, and (b) centralized in NY & DC.
National political reporting used to be where folks typically arrived mid-to-late career after paying their dues at a local paper. Now the local paper’s probably gone & the national outlets are skimming promising writers much earlier.
Also, of course, the frenetic pace of the Internet Era news cycle combined with an alternative media ecosystem poised to pounce on errors (not a bad thing in itself!) mean it’s easy to routinely find examples of press getting stuff wrong.
And when journalists seem like an alien class concentrated in far-off cities—not the folks from the local rag you might bump into at the pub—the idea that they might be conspiring to make stuff up maybe seems less ludicrous than it should.
It’s also, of course, completely toxic, because once you accept that the mainstream press isn’t just occasionally sloppy or slanted, but literally willing to fabricate stories whole, truth turns into Calvinball. Believe whatever you want!
Incidentally, while plenty has been said about how social media feeds into this, I suspect the the aesthetic uniformity imposed by platforms, silly as it may sound, is a bigger factor than is generally appreciated.
We put a lot of stock—too much—in appearances when judging credibility, and the more conflicting information is, the more we lean on those heuristic markers. But Facebook (and the Web as a whole, to a lesser extent) is the great aesthetic equalizer.
In your Facebook feed there’s no *visual* distinction between an exhaustively reported NYT story and a viral rant from a guy who heard from his wife’s cousin’s buddy in the FBI that its all a big hoax.
