Some call “the news” the first draft of history. Then we get historians and others who write books about history. I would like to read more of the Second Draft of History. A few years out. Papers could go back and look at the stories they wrote and update their narratives. I think this would add to their credibility and it would make them more accountable for their Bad Takes.
There is another reason that the media seems so terrible today. 50 years ago, social science was Freud and Marx and Keynes, so you could get a humanities degree and understand the basics of what social scientists were saying. In contrast, today it is impossible to understand social science research without also understanding at the very least statistics, but also dynamic programming, game theory, etc. And hiring in journalism has not caught up. We are still hiring the same kinds of people to report on beats that are increasingly outside their ability to understand. When reporting on hot button issues like crime, racism, or implicit bias, you are inundated with studies claiming contradictory things. Journalists in areas like this need to be able to evaluate these studies in order to properly convey the findings to the general public. In the absence of this knowledge, journalists just end up cherry picking the results and quoting the "experts" that confirm their own biases. The world is becoming increasingly specialized and journalism needs to catch up.
Two comments on whether "the media" is better or worse:
1. Copy editing has gotten steadily worse, even in formerly well copy edited publications like the NYT. Now it's "I no its corect 'cause spellcheck tolled me sew."
2. If you live in a medium sized or small city or in a rural area, you really need internet or a good paper news outlet for access to the larger papers, e.g., NYT, WaPo and WSJ, to get comprehensive print news. I live in a 1000,000+ metro area, and our daily paper, which is in the Gannett group, is a hollowed out shadow of its former, and even then not very distinguished, self. Luckily, a daily in our state's much smaller capital does a pretty good job of covering our state gov't.
There seems to be a common pattern where things get better but people’s opinions of how it’s going are getting worse. You point this out about the media, but in a different comment thread it seemed clear to me that something similar is going on with race relations. (Sentiment about race relations is relatively bad right now, but on nearly everything measurable (other than perhaps violence against Asians) race relations seem as a matter of fact to be better than any point in American history.)
In the study of the political and epistemic value of diversity, there’s often a finding that the things that make a group come to more accurate views often make the group feel like they’ve done worse (because things weren’t smooth and easy). I wonder how much that’s what’s going on in all these cases.
points well taken. but, i do think something has happened where the class origins of the DC<->NYC media axis is out of sync with the american public in a way it wasn't back in the 50s, and that's part of the issue (and why alternative media configurations emerge). most of the public also bought into the cold-war consensus back then so the lying probably would haves support
I think it would be interesting to know if there is any greater degree to which they are out of sync, or if it’s just that it’s now much easier to see how they’re out of sync because there’s so much more transparency in everything.
I would welcome more quantifiable evidence, but I don't see how the "out of sync" part can be too severely doubted. The exact numbers vary by survey, but it appears that for approximately the last 20 years at least, something in the high 80s to mid 90% range of self-identified journalists have a college degree or higher (2003 page saying only 11% have less than a bachelor's degree: https://www.poynter.org/archive/2003/journalists-are-more-likely-to-be-college-graduates/ 2022 page saying less than 4% have less than a bachelor's degree: https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journalist-findings ) and their degrees are overwhelmingly in journalism and communication (60.6% in either journalism (45.1%) or some form of communication degree (remainder), per the 2022 survey). The 2022 survey also shows the percentage of journalists identifying as Republican shrank from 25.7% in 1971 to 3.4% in 2022, and journalists' perception of the importance of reaching "the widest possible audience" dropped from 39% in 1971 to 7.4% in 2022. That said, I agree this is all circumstantial evidence, but it seems implausible that this wouldn't cause some greater degree of "out of sync-ness."
Very late in the day, but what do we make of the Seymour Hersh Nordstream article affair? One source, I presume, and there seems to be some discrepancies that people have noted in basic facts about the history and upbringing of the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, but not much talk outside of the heterodox crowd.
It’s been thoroughly debunked in defense/national security media. (As is usual with Hersh—numerous obvious errors. OSINT confirms the relevant ships and aircraft weren’t having exercises there, and the science in water and sound is inaccurate. I remember years ago when he had a dozen AC-130s circling the same location. Which was clearly impossible. His source was fucking with him.
Can I just say - I just joined Matt Taibbi's Substack (someone here linked to his book Hate Incorporated and I got curious), and while I think he's a bit more thoughtful and measured (just a bit!) than he probably gets credit for, oh my goodness his readers. Wow. Those people are pissed. Not a few of them hate "the left" (defined quite elastically) to their core (see also: some of Richard Hanania's readers). Here, I feel like I can read the comments and learn something, and not feel like I need to sit and stare at the wall for five minutes to decompress afterwards. People disagree, and occasionally someone will get snippy, but overall the tone is pretty civil (I know that MY has said posts on trans issues have caused problems here).
But there...? I mean, geez. I think Taibbi usually makes more or less fair critiques of the media, and I don't think he's actively *trying* to whip up rage, but there is no discussion as such in his comments (which usually top 1,000 per post); it's people yelling at each other. I mean, I get it, when I was younger and much stupider I would get impotently angry about politics and delude myself that yelling at people on the internet was somehow making a difference. But I feel like some of those people must be very, very unhappy if they feel like abusing people on a Substack is somehow accomplishing anything. I actually offered to call a dude from a Taibbi comments section on the phone and to help humanize "vile democrats" by explaining why I don't think I'm particularly vile, and he responded with something incomprehensible about angels on the head of a pin and getting in the way of real dialogue. As in, he apparently thinks making sweeping generalizations about his political enemies is more productive than actually talking one-on-one.
All of which is to say, I appreciate that people here are nice. Thanks for being nice.
Going by Matt Hagy's numbers[1] about commenters here: only about 2K of them have ever commented, about 50 of them have made more than half of the comments. That is ~0.06% of the readers. I would also bet that an even smaller percentage show up towards the top of the comments, and obviously those of us who visit the section will scan the comments but not see everything.
All this to say, we can't draw many conclusions about the readership based on the comment section, and I think that is true about other newsletters as well.
True, and thanks for the reminder; saying “readers” was not accurate on my part - a sort of sloppy synecdoche. In any case, I think it’s fair to say that MY’s *commenters* are way nicer than MT’s or RH’s.
This might amuse you. A comment from a self-awarw Hanania reader. I don't think I've ever read anything that's so emblematic of our times.
"I wonder to what degree compulsive lib owning leads to cons accepting the lib Equality/blank slate framing. In my early 20s I was at a party where a drunken girl French kissed me before passing out. The next several times I saw her I told her I was traumatized by her sexually assaulting me to which she profusely and sincerely apologized. I wasn't actually bothered at all, but I wanted to stick it to a lib. I eventually gave up and "accepted" her apology since I felt guilt about my needless, partisan driven sadism. It was only later when my dad said "she was probably into you before your stunt" that I realized I might have fumbled a chance to have sex with an attractive, nice girl because I wanted to own the libs."
Just to avoid any misunderstanding, I don't mean to mock the author, just the opposite. I appreciated his self-awareness and how well he captured the unfortunate current dynamic.
I always feel like The Economist should be the perfect magazine: full of timely facts with only a bit of timewasting but amusing nonsense. And it's fairly compact! If I would read a decent amount of it, I'd know so much about the world! But...I won't read it. It's mostly too boring. I guess I really don't want facts.
In the run up to the first Gulf War, there was some editorial grumbling, but once embedding started it was rally round the flag. I noticed this watching PBS joining in.
It's an implicit reference to the thesis of the 1988 book, "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. As described in Wikipedia:
"It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. 'are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion,' by means of the propaganda model of communication."
Because of the mid-century American media ecosystem, the large, legacy and prestige media outlets have a public reputation, deserving or not, of being "neutral" when it comes to reporting. And many of these outlets still like be perceived as neutral. But the fact is currently, most journalists at these outlets are personally invested in the progressive political project and therefore invested in the political success of the Democratic Party. That the "neutral" news sources people get a lot of their news from are no longer neutral makes many people upset, suspicious, and distrustful. Conservative media outlets have never had the reputation of being "neutral" and therefore don't have the ability to not live up to expectations in that way.
Not topic of your post, but just listened to your "Bad Takes" podcast this week and this is as good a place as any to comment.
There are a couple of things I wanted to critique. One, in the discussion regarding whether a Vox reporter's experience in buying women's clothes was representative of a wider phenomenon of consumer products getting worse, there was a name conspicuously absent from your discussion; Amazon. There is a lot of evidence that the products you're buying on Amazon really are worse than before and that there are very real business reasons as to why (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-does-it-feel-like-amazon-is-making-itself-worse.html.) Considering the very real dominant position Amazon holds on e-commerce and these days commerce more generally, I really think Amazon's business decisions last 2-3 years have to be considered and that yes, it's not entirely your imagination that the products you're getting are worse.
Second, how much of this is just an inflation story? If the same product you're buying today is 5%/10%/20% more expensive than a year ago, there's definitely going to be a psychological feeling that the stuff you're buying is crappier than before.
Another great piece. Thank you, again.
I don't trust the media I only trust Matt Ygl... wait a minute! He is just pointing out the flaws of his competitors!!
Thats it, from now on I only trust the lizardmen-are-secretly-ruling-the-world conspiracy guys.
This seems like a very insider-y way of defining “the media”.
Perhaps a better way to think about “the media” is an industry whose controlling attribute is persistent oversupply of labor.
Everything else flows from there in a manner similar to other industries that have persistent labor oversupply:
(1) Job advancement within a firm comes principally from eliminating peers and those above you, not producing superior work; and
(2) Job security within the industry comes principally from keeping many options open, which means conforming to the norms of the moment.
Some call “the news” the first draft of history. Then we get historians and others who write books about history. I would like to read more of the Second Draft of History. A few years out. Papers could go back and look at the stories they wrote and update their narratives. I think this would add to their credibility and it would make them more accountable for their Bad Takes.
How do you fix a bad audience?
There is another reason that the media seems so terrible today. 50 years ago, social science was Freud and Marx and Keynes, so you could get a humanities degree and understand the basics of what social scientists were saying. In contrast, today it is impossible to understand social science research without also understanding at the very least statistics, but also dynamic programming, game theory, etc. And hiring in journalism has not caught up. We are still hiring the same kinds of people to report on beats that are increasingly outside their ability to understand. When reporting on hot button issues like crime, racism, or implicit bias, you are inundated with studies claiming contradictory things. Journalists in areas like this need to be able to evaluate these studies in order to properly convey the findings to the general public. In the absence of this knowledge, journalists just end up cherry picking the results and quoting the "experts" that confirm their own biases. The world is becoming increasingly specialized and journalism needs to catch up.
Two comments on whether "the media" is better or worse:
1. Copy editing has gotten steadily worse, even in formerly well copy edited publications like the NYT. Now it's "I no its corect 'cause spellcheck tolled me sew."
2. If you live in a medium sized or small city or in a rural area, you really need internet or a good paper news outlet for access to the larger papers, e.g., NYT, WaPo and WSJ, to get comprehensive print news. I live in a 1000,000+ metro area, and our daily paper, which is in the Gannett group, is a hollowed out shadow of its former, and even then not very distinguished, self. Luckily, a daily in our state's much smaller capital does a pretty good job of covering our state gov't.
Copy editing here in the UK is abysmal. Comma splices for days, man.
There seems to be a common pattern where things get better but people’s opinions of how it’s going are getting worse. You point this out about the media, but in a different comment thread it seemed clear to me that something similar is going on with race relations. (Sentiment about race relations is relatively bad right now, but on nearly everything measurable (other than perhaps violence against Asians) race relations seem as a matter of fact to be better than any point in American history.)
In the study of the political and epistemic value of diversity, there’s often a finding that the things that make a group come to more accurate views often make the group feel like they’ve done worse (because things weren’t smooth and easy). I wonder how much that’s what’s going on in all these cases.
points well taken. but, i do think something has happened where the class origins of the DC<->NYC media axis is out of sync with the american public in a way it wasn't back in the 50s, and that's part of the issue (and why alternative media configurations emerge). most of the public also bought into the cold-war consensus back then so the lying probably would haves support
I think it would be interesting to know if there is any greater degree to which they are out of sync, or if it’s just that it’s now much easier to see how they’re out of sync because there’s so much more transparency in everything.
I would welcome more quantifiable evidence, but I don't see how the "out of sync" part can be too severely doubted. The exact numbers vary by survey, but it appears that for approximately the last 20 years at least, something in the high 80s to mid 90% range of self-identified journalists have a college degree or higher (2003 page saying only 11% have less than a bachelor's degree: https://www.poynter.org/archive/2003/journalists-are-more-likely-to-be-college-graduates/ 2022 page saying less than 4% have less than a bachelor's degree: https://www.theamericanjournalist.org/post/american-journalist-findings ) and their degrees are overwhelmingly in journalism and communication (60.6% in either journalism (45.1%) or some form of communication degree (remainder), per the 2022 survey). The 2022 survey also shows the percentage of journalists identifying as Republican shrank from 25.7% in 1971 to 3.4% in 2022, and journalists' perception of the importance of reaching "the widest possible audience" dropped from 39% in 1971 to 7.4% in 2022. That said, I agree this is all circumstantial evidence, but it seems implausible that this wouldn't cause some greater degree of "out of sync-ness."
Very late in the day, but what do we make of the Seymour Hersh Nordstream article affair? One source, I presume, and there seems to be some discrepancies that people have noted in basic facts about the history and upbringing of the head of NATO, Stoltenberg, but not much talk outside of the heterodox crowd.
It’s been thoroughly debunked in defense/national security media. (As is usual with Hersh—numerous obvious errors. OSINT confirms the relevant ships and aircraft weren’t having exercises there, and the science in water and sound is inaccurate. I remember years ago when he had a dozen AC-130s circling the same location. Which was clearly impossible. His source was fucking with him.
Can I just say - I just joined Matt Taibbi's Substack (someone here linked to his book Hate Incorporated and I got curious), and while I think he's a bit more thoughtful and measured (just a bit!) than he probably gets credit for, oh my goodness his readers. Wow. Those people are pissed. Not a few of them hate "the left" (defined quite elastically) to their core (see also: some of Richard Hanania's readers). Here, I feel like I can read the comments and learn something, and not feel like I need to sit and stare at the wall for five minutes to decompress afterwards. People disagree, and occasionally someone will get snippy, but overall the tone is pretty civil (I know that MY has said posts on trans issues have caused problems here).
But there...? I mean, geez. I think Taibbi usually makes more or less fair critiques of the media, and I don't think he's actively *trying* to whip up rage, but there is no discussion as such in his comments (which usually top 1,000 per post); it's people yelling at each other. I mean, I get it, when I was younger and much stupider I would get impotently angry about politics and delude myself that yelling at people on the internet was somehow making a difference. But I feel like some of those people must be very, very unhappy if they feel like abusing people on a Substack is somehow accomplishing anything. I actually offered to call a dude from a Taibbi comments section on the phone and to help humanize "vile democrats" by explaining why I don't think I'm particularly vile, and he responded with something incomprehensible about angels on the head of a pin and getting in the way of real dialogue. As in, he apparently thinks making sweeping generalizations about his political enemies is more productive than actually talking one-on-one.
All of which is to say, I appreciate that people here are nice. Thanks for being nice.
Substack says Slow Boring has 89K subscribers.
Going by Matt Hagy's numbers[1] about commenters here: only about 2K of them have ever commented, about 50 of them have made more than half of the comments. That is ~0.06% of the readers. I would also bet that an even smaller percentage show up towards the top of the comments, and obviously those of us who visit the section will scan the comments but not see everything.
All this to say, we can't draw many conclusions about the readership based on the comment section, and I think that is true about other newsletters as well.
[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/sunday-thread-964/comment/12545467
True, and thanks for the reminder; saying “readers” was not accurate on my part - a sort of sloppy synecdoche. In any case, I think it’s fair to say that MY’s *commenters* are way nicer than MT’s or RH’s.
This might amuse you. A comment from a self-awarw Hanania reader. I don't think I've ever read anything that's so emblematic of our times.
"I wonder to what degree compulsive lib owning leads to cons accepting the lib Equality/blank slate framing. In my early 20s I was at a party where a drunken girl French kissed me before passing out. The next several times I saw her I told her I was traumatized by her sexually assaulting me to which she profusely and sincerely apologized. I wasn't actually bothered at all, but I wanted to stick it to a lib. I eventually gave up and "accepted" her apology since I felt guilt about my needless, partisan driven sadism. It was only later when my dad said "she was probably into you before your stunt" that I realized I might have fumbled a chance to have sex with an attractive, nice girl because I wanted to own the libs."
Just to avoid any misunderstanding, I don't mean to mock the author, just the opposite. I appreciated his self-awareness and how well he captured the unfortunate current dynamic.
Agreed. Also, his father is a pretty wise guy.
Taibbi's or Hanania's father?
The above-mentioned commenter’s father (i.e. the guy who pointed out that his son chose scoring an incredibly petty victory over having sex).
I always feel like The Economist should be the perfect magazine: full of timely facts with only a bit of timewasting but amusing nonsense. And it's fairly compact! If I would read a decent amount of it, I'd know so much about the world! But...I won't read it. It's mostly too boring. I guess I really don't want facts.
In the run up to the first Gulf War, there was some editorial grumbling, but once embedding started it was rally round the flag. I noticed this watching PBS joining in.
Matt uses the phrase "manufacture consent" twice. What does that mean to a person who is a casual, haphazard consumer of news media ?
It's an implicit reference to the thesis of the 1988 book, "Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media," by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky. As described in Wikipedia:
"It argues that the mass communication media of the U.S. 'are effective and powerful ideological institutions that carry out a system-supportive propaganda function, by reliance on market forces, internalized assumptions, and self-censorship, and without overt coercion,' by means of the propaganda model of communication."
Sort of a "We will tell you what to think and make you think it's your idea."
Because of the mid-century American media ecosystem, the large, legacy and prestige media outlets have a public reputation, deserving or not, of being "neutral" when it comes to reporting. And many of these outlets still like be perceived as neutral. But the fact is currently, most journalists at these outlets are personally invested in the progressive political project and therefore invested in the political success of the Democratic Party. That the "neutral" news sources people get a lot of their news from are no longer neutral makes many people upset, suspicious, and distrustful. Conservative media outlets have never had the reputation of being "neutral" and therefore don't have the ability to not live up to expectations in that way.
Not topic of your post, but just listened to your "Bad Takes" podcast this week and this is as good a place as any to comment.
There are a couple of things I wanted to critique. One, in the discussion regarding whether a Vox reporter's experience in buying women's clothes was representative of a wider phenomenon of consumer products getting worse, there was a name conspicuously absent from your discussion; Amazon. There is a lot of evidence that the products you're buying on Amazon really are worse than before and that there are very real business reasons as to why (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/01/why-does-it-feel-like-amazon-is-making-itself-worse.html.) Considering the very real dominant position Amazon holds on e-commerce and these days commerce more generally, I really think Amazon's business decisions last 2-3 years have to be considered and that yes, it's not entirely your imagination that the products you're getting are worse.
Second, how much of this is just an inflation story? If the same product you're buying today is 5%/10%/20% more expensive than a year ago, there's definitely going to be a psychological feeling that the stuff you're buying is crappier than before.