The Bullshit

The media is universally garbage, why are you stating the obvious?

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!

And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.

He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex:

>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.

When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.

This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope

>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.

What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.

The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.

Media was once so money intensive, that no privat endeavour could provide it, thus the public media was created - payed by the public in general with a fee/taxes. When the private TV/Radio came up, the question was if they could survive. Advertisment money is good money, which we came to know much later, when those streams of revenue past over to the big internet companies (mainly Google and Facebook) and they thrived. Today we still see the first generation of media being still around ("public"), the second "private" also struggling and we have a lot of private persons (eg. "YouTubers") making big money, today. There are huge shifts and ignoring that is probably because of the "if your job depends on it". So the encumbents bent and twist themselves, like CNN ("fake news") and claiming things like "freedom of the press is in decline". No!,... times change and we need to and are all adapting and shifting. Except for those still working in the "private" and "public" news sector. With it also it's characteristics change: You rather follow the person(journalist), who is an expert in his field and someone you like and trust, like "Tim Dodd, the everyday Astronaut" (reporting on SpaceX) and others with bigger reach and smaller, weirder and less weird, with more attack surface and less. Some of them get themselves into trouble and need to move to other platforms or vanish completely. I remember Anonymous being expelled from Facebook and moving over to the Russian VKontakte network around 2015. Some stuff seems to only surface on 4chan. Bans or defunding of channels/outlets do get noticed and discussed in those "alternative" communities, or on the original platform/community itself. There is no hiding, it's getting less and less, actually. The freedom of the press got actually... democratized.

It's easy to test that proposition.

Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".

I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.

It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.

As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.