WAS: What Adults Saying about the End of Media
It's the First Institution to Collapse--It Won't be the last
The esteemed polling company Gallup has just released data which are simultaneously stunning, and yet confirmatory. American’s confidence in its mass news media has collapsed to historic lows! As told here weeks before the election, this was foreseen. But the speed of this decline has been stunning. Over a very short period our culture has gone from a working “fourth estate” media with broad social utility to a vast information vacuum. What’s worse, 47’s administration is all in to both sustain this trend and exploit it for seemingly nefarious reasons.
Watching this sobering prediction come true is painful and cause for more, grave concern going forward. In the modern era, American’s have never been less literate, misinformed and uncritical thinkers about its government and its actions. At the very time when a strong news media might help make sense of madness in Washington, we are left with no credible players in the game.
There has never been a democracy on earth who could continue to credibly govern when those governed are disengaged and/or ignorant. By definition in such a situation, those governed would be plebes or serfs—or now in our country—just enabling dimwits who are bored, easily manipulated by propaganda and think that 47 as leader is grand entertainment. It is both sickening and problematic; worrisome and enraging; rueful and attention-grabbing.
The reasons for this are many and varied and do not align with any simplistic view of “what’s going on?” However, there are three themes that seem to predominate:
Media business models have changed so drastically that business officers now feel justified in visiting editorial offices and directly shaping news coverage.
Social media and the threat of AI have struck fear in the hearts of literate journalists and their operations. In response journalists have done the worst thing possible: Patterned their offerings after social media and AI content.
In reeling from the above two things, remaining media have seen fit to kiss the orange ass of 47 so that short term problems might be mitigated and their careers, survive until Friday at five o’clock.
This is a working definition of an institution that has been rocked off its heels to the canvas and isn’t even sure whether it wants to get back up. It’s also foretells that whatever content emerges, its credible authority will be low.
Never in the American experience has an institution so important to daily social function had such a dramatic, and potentially damaging, collapse. That we collectively distrust media as much as Congress, speaks to both American frustration and that making semblance of daily reality will now splinter more wildly where one person’s view “of what’s going on” will sit with dozens of alternative views. Such chaos about information flow and our social reality offers limited silver linings in such dark clouds.
As a cherry on top of an already dangerous situation corporate propaganda efforts (both domestic and internationally) are full throated to fill the information vacuum with nonsense and falsities. One moment the world clicks along with a normative gait and the next it questions fundamentals like the social value of childhood vaccinations, the canons of science, the damage of carbon-based energy sources and other realities already factually established. This isn’t happening because Americans are intellectually evolving with new evidence. It’s happening because of the opposite and corporate image-makers everywhere are glad to facilitate such ignorance to further vested interests.
A fundamental for anyone in the propaganda game (political or business) is that your view need not be embraced by the masses but simply, create enough confusion so that no view is embraced. The Gallup data have driven home that day has come. Truly, while scratching our collective heads at a feverish rate, we don’t “believe” in much of anything anymore. That must now be said to include, sadly, ourselves. When that happens how is a government by the people supposed to work?