Moral Majority Media Strikes Again

The media landscape today is such that msnbc, Fox News, the Washington post, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are all competing for the same advertising dollars and the same eyeballs. We have all seen how outrage drives engagement. I think it’s the same force at play here.

> The problem lay in the reason the error spread, which happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. These include everything from wrong reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, to tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, to the pee tape, to Julie Swetnick’s rape accusation, to the Covington high school fiasco, to Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, to Bountygate, to the “mass hysterectomies” story, and dozens beyond: the media business has become a machine for generating error-ridden moral panics.

This is a predictable result of combining declining profitability of media companies, cut-throat competition in the industry, and the political orientation of your average national media reporter. No big conspiracy—just harried people working under lowered standards confirming their priors and manifesting their personal biases.

I wonder how much of the resentment is driven by elite overproduction—I.e. people who got a college degree and think that should lead to some particular standard of living, but who are faced with writing clickbait articles by the word on a freelance basis. Then put those people in NYC or SF, where all the money and social status goes to Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

I would argue the mass media has always been this way - events are always filtered through the dominant narrative before being reported. There is very little challenging of how events are described, at least in the major media companies and the smaller ones that do challenge come off as fringe and are easy to dismiss.

The crux of the article:

The problem lay in the reason the error spread, which happens to be the same reason underlying innumerable other media shipwrecks in the last five years. These include everything from wrong reports of Russians hacking a Vermont energy grid, to tales of Michael Cohen in Prague, to the pee tape, to Julie Swetnick’s rape accusation, to the Covington high school fiasco, to Russian oligarchs co-signing a Deutsche Bank loan application for Donald Trump, to Bountygate, to the “mass hysterectomies” story, and dozens beyond: the media business has become a machine for generating error-ridden moral panics.

News has become a corporatized version of the “Two Minutes Hate,” in which the goal of every broadcast is an anxiety-ridden audience provoked to the point of fury by the un-policed infamy of whatever wreckers are said to be threatening civilization this week: the unvaccinated, insurrectionists, Assadists, Greens, Bernie Bros, Jill Stein, Russians, the promoters of “white supremacy culture,” etc. Mistakes are inevitable because this brand of media business isn’t about accuracy, but rallying audiences to addictive disgust. As a result, most press people now shrug off the odd error or six — look at Maddow leaving her tweet up — so long as they feel stories are directionally right, i.e. aimed at deserving targets.

I never thought this could happen, but people like Maddow, Reid, and the editors of the New York Times opinion page have taken over the role once occupied by Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. As a kid I tilted blue in my politics in significant part because I couldn’t stand (or understand) crusading moralists like Falwell, whose entire raison d'être was driving millions of followers to hate and fear people they not only seemed to know nothing about, but claimed they hoped never to meet: gays and lesbians, punk and rock musicians, rappers, comics who used naughty words, fantasy gamers, and scariest of all, goth teens who drew pentagrams on their Trapper-Keepers.

Falwell and his imitators mixed a conspicuously un-Christian unforgiving attitude with undisguised glee at the suffering of anyone they understood to have brought divine retribution upon themselves. Sound familiar? Remember the fundamentalist opinion on AIDS patients, that “if the homosexual community would stop doing what they are doing, they would stop getting what they are getting”? Then there was Falwell’s take on New York after 9/11, that “when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad,” and “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians [and] the ACLU… I point the finger in their face and say ‘you helped this happen.’”

  This is an excerpt from today’s subscriber-only post. To read the entire article and get full access to the archives, you can subscribe for $5 a month or $50 a year.

I can't see much point to this essay aside from reassuring populist basket-cases to buy an Orphan Taibbi Secret Decoder Ring.

If the 'MSM' is moralizing to discourage people from skipping the vaccine and taking Ivermectin, that's the least of the world's problems.

"Moral panic" is bang on. The pandemic is the first global mass hysteria.