It was fascinating to hear Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn discussing, with apparent astonishment, a NYT "documentary" on itself ["All the President's Mice"](click here) and the Washington Post's official announcement that objective journalism is passe'. Even more so Taibbi's somewhat more orderly converstion with Chris Hedges. They give context to the Jeff Gerth article in the Columbia Journalism Review, [The Press Versus the President](click here). Having read the whole thing, I'd have to say the "Russiagate" media frenzy had as much substance as the recent "spy-balloon" hysteria, but sucked in the major media and the public for years. It reminded me of those stories of soldiers marching through jungles asleep, each with a hand on the next guy's shoulder, snaking through the bush, and then the point man fell asleep too. Now we're all like those guys, waking up neck-deep in muck.
We still don't understand what hit us. There are too many perps, or scapegoats, depending on your point of view. But the idea that bad actors pulled the wool over our eyes for so long at such unprecedented scale, doesn't get us very far toward resolving the problem. And it's a massive problem.
The problem is so massive, it is probably structural. Since everything went online, no media enterprise could remain afloat on ad revenue backed by solid journalism. So, Taibbi, like Hedges, Mate', and now Seymore Hersh, is coming to us on Substack, because he, like them, is a solid journalist.
As the twenty-first century dawned, and information was displaced by aggregated attention, the balance of power shifted dramatically. But it is a mistake to think of such a change in informational terms, when the dominant commodity of this age, the new basis of power, is no longer information. Today the balance of power depends on what stories get the most attention, not what information they might carry. If any. And today anything that gets attention seems real. A "spy-balloon"? Seriously?
Attention connects media platforms to momentary personal online behavior, from which thousands of data-points are derived. So audience is more important than content; any content will do, the more lurid and shocking the better. However, in this new networked paradigm, attention also carries any story so far at such speed that facts can't keep up. While that's only collateral damage to media conglomerates, who care only for sucking up more and bigger data on us while we're staring at flashy pixels, its social impact is profound and terrible.
If a story can't get enough attention to sell media, it aint worth squat. This has always been so. The difference now is a structural change in the economic landscape that's got nothing to do with Ukraine, or Chinese "spy-balloons" or the antics of any presidents. The bandwidth and speed and penetration of our networks went super-critical, and cheap sensationalism, which had lain almost dormant like ancient bacteria under the thawing permafrost, got loose on an unsuspecting world. In this new media terrain spectacle gets there first for the most money. By the time the facts arrive there's a new disaster across town. No contest.
All media messages are designed to arouse, not inform. Ambient fear became the backdrop of our lives. As a result, we react instead of communicating. Social fragmentation is the toxic byproduct of competing feudal internet fiefdoms.
Here's what we get out of this. Generals and pundits and politicians don't try to diffuse and defuse public delusions, they work with them to get elected. It's no surprise then, when millions, no, billions of dollars were spent to shoot a "spy balloon" out of "our air-space." A surveillance technology at least 200 years out of date.
On the other hand, maybe all those generals and pundits and politicians were actually doing a one-eighty. Maybe they finally realized they've done too good a job beating war drums to fatten up the MICC. Maybe they went with the "spy balloon" hysteria for a noble purpose.
Because maybe it distracted a benumbed and terrified public from demanding that Biden order the "Space Force" to shoot down the Tiangong Space Station that's drifting overhead in low Earth orbit.
1
1
