Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But in fact it is not. People deciding what policies to use doesn't become less democratic simply because someone thinks these people are stupid/mislead by false news etc. Refusing them the right to vote or to communicate their beliefs is just as undemocratic as refusing well educated citizen the same right.
The focus should be on finding ways to make decisions less global, so that ill effects of a bad decision are experienced only by the people making it, and they have an opportunity to learn from it and make a better decision the next time.
The solution is to stop voting for people and vote for individual policies. With open online direct voting with a way to trade votes and option to delegate votes [1], we'll discover that in reality we agree on much more than we are led to believe from following social media. And we'll discover that there is a huge space for compromise that we were unable to explore so far because exploring it was disadvantageous to the representatives that we had to elect.
I did find it interesting that the URL is "digital-revolution-democracy-fake-news.html" but the headline (and title tag) is "Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us"
I that some kind of SEO thing or did the title/headline change while the URL stays the same? Earlier there was just this discussion on "Investigating how the New York Times A/B tests their headlines" which made me wonder.
It's one of the reasons slugs tend to be more generic/SEO friendly.
Trump was not our guy but popular therefore he was a populist and a demagogue and problematic.
Obama was our guy and popular therefore he represented the aspirations of the common people.
The people who opposed him before could cite numerous other examples, and to be honest I can't really imagine how many people changed their minds over that one if they'd accepted everything else. If they do exist, it's hard to imagine that it came as a complete surprise. I would imagine that in retrospect they'd have to say, "Yeah, maybe the people whose guy he wasn't weren't completely off base".
That is, it's not just the usual "not our guy" thing. This was different in kind, not just in amount. Maybe some people opposed him just because he wasn't their guy, but there were things that should have broken the mold of "he's our guy therefore he's ok".
We always assumed that saying the quiet part out loud worked against you. Turns out that people like saying the quiet part out loud. It gives them a rush. And the people who weren't supposed to hear the quiet part heard it all along, so it doesn't really change anything.
So yeah, they can go ahead and say "Anybody who dislikes my guy is Socialist/Communist/Leftist/Other Vacuous Word That Means Bad To Me". They enjoy it, you hate it, but you can't vote against him any harder than you already were. And for those who were meh on it, they either join in on the joy, or remain meh rather that push back.
It's pretty much win-win for them. It didn't work last time only because of a literal pandemic that would have worked against anybody who was in charge, even if they didn't obviously bungle it.
So basically, expect more of it. Because it works, and it will continue to work.
Clever conspiracy seems less likely than sloppy stupidity. This didn’t need “collusion” for the same bad outcome.
”Collusion is a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation between two or more parties to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading or defrauding others of their legal right.”
In what way was NYT in a deceitful agreement or secret cooperation with the government to influence the country to go to the Iraq war?
NY Times has said, “The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not the Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous.”
Media Matters covered this at the time, and also quoted Slate, attributing the collusion as between Bush administration and Chalabi, and NYT report Miller and Chalabi, with Chalabi as the common element:
“Chalabi is providing the Bush people with the information they need to support their political objectives with Iraq, and he is supplying the same material to Judy Miller. Chalabi tips her on something and then she goes to the White House, which has already heard the same thing from Chalabi, and she gets it corroborated by some insider she always describes as a 'senior administration official.' She also got the Pentagon to confirm things for her, which made sense, since they were working so closely with Chalabi.”
https://www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/how-iraq-war-sti...
This is not saying Miller colluded with the White House, but that the method of corroboration was flawed, as both paper and government were relying on the same (false) source such that fake news checked out.
Insufficient skepticism of a very high ranking source is not the same thing as collusion with another party also over-reliant on the same source. And journos protecting a source or CIA keeping a source secret are also not secret cooperation. The result is the same for similar reasons, you want future sources to be willing to share, but this doesn’t imply collusion.
TL;DR: Hanlon’s Razor: “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity". Most “conspiracies” are probably just people being coincidentally dumb, incompetent, or lazy.
At some point Hanlon’s razor becomes a middlebrow dismissal, and a bit of a red herring. It’s a good rule of thumb for not getting mad at your boss, but useless when analyzing the actions of powerful institutions.
It really doesn’t matter whether we can prove some kind of ‘malice’ in the hearts of NYT journalists.
It does seem unlikely that they are any more malicious than any other corporation.
However that is utterly irrelevant to whether their institutional biases or lack of analytical capacity make them harmful given the power they hold.
Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics.
The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve.
Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
I don’t think that changes the sense of what I said.
‘Collusion’ can be a conspiracy of people actually meeting in smoke filled rooms, or it can be simply giving the benefit of the doubt to ones ideological bedfellows.
> Having studied and earned money from journalism, giving me familiarity with the education and the professional newsroom, I’m skeptical of journalism skeptics. The existence of big journalism (particularly getting paid to investigate and shine a light) seems to bring an important check-and-balance on big religion, big enterprise, and big government
I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry.
> it’s unclear how else to systematically achieve.
That’s a problem. What you are callings journalism skepticism, I consider to be journalism criticism.
It’s reasonable to assume that Journalism is just as susceptible to institutional problems as any of the institutions it purports to be a check-and-balance on.
I’m not anti-journalism, but I’m appalled by the lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for it negative impacts.
> Zuckerberg’s boosterism aside, it seems The Fifth Estate has not yet shown itself able to achieve the same scope, depth, and truth ratio, of coverage as a well-funded newsroom.
Being ‘better than Facebook’ is at this point, not much different from being better than a cigarette company. I agree without but I’m not why you’re even mentioning this, but it’s not a good thing to compare journalism with.
- - -
> I’ve seen this claim from people who work or have worked in the industry.
That seems dismissive — it’s been the consensus from those who do not work in journalism for centuries. The point I was making is that the journalism industry tends to be taught and worked by people feeling a mission to help citizenry vs. power.
> appalled by lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for its negative impacts
Having worked in finance, I’m not certain journalism is “just as” susceptible as any.
Or is it that journalism is a higher standard as the aim is positive impacts for the public? What % of reporting is positive impacts, and what % of reporting is negative impacts? Should we account by all media, or just those with investigative journalism newsrooms?
Certainly mission oriented industries, healthcare, global aid, religious institutions, grapple with this more than capital oriented industries, by the nature of those drawn to them before they know better.
Whole drama-watch blogs exist dedicated to following particular newspapers (or, rather, the humans who work there) grappling with it, often played out in their ombudsman and editorial pages and dissected by the bloggers (the 5th estate watching the 4th, which I consider useful).
Meanwhile, “lack of self-awareness and responsibility the industry takes for its negative impacts” seems to be the general stance about Silicon Valley too. Not ironically, awareness often emerging through San Jose Mercury News.
Speaking of which, I mentioned Zuckerberg as he specifically commented on the so-called “Fifth Estate” vs. “gatekeepers” in the “media”:
"People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a 'Fifth Estate' alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands."
I’m not advocating for or defending “media”, especially opinion media. On the contrary, I’d argue the golden age of news media died during my lifetime, and what’s left is on life support. That worries me, as I hold the capital-P “Press” — when performing the mission of neutrally (not in a fake two-sides way, but factually) informing the public — is vital.
Oh come on, there is documented State representative meeting with NYT direction...
So they go the route that should have been obvious
1) Declare a problem that threatens all 2) Spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt 3) State that they are the solution
Step two also involves using seemingly unrelated parties along with their own efforts to make it appear more of a problem than it otherwise would be. It is along the lines of when a group of politicians suddenly all use the same new word, a word they never used before and likely to never use again.
they had the public trust when the public did not know better and we have a very well established self checking system where nearly every false claim can be called out and usually is. I don't know of a legacy media brand that has not tarnished their name.
Social media is here to stay and while some may not like Facebook, Twitter, and similar, the legacy media and the politicians who rely on them to spread the news they desire look to muzzle all forms of communication they don't themselves control or influence.