When news goes bad
Andrew Sullivan confronts the politicised mess that is the US media:
“We all get things wrong. What makes this more worrying is simply that all these false narratives just happen to favor the interests of the left and the Democratic party. And corrections, when they occur, take up a fraction of the space of the original falsehoods. These are not randos tweeting false rumors. They are the established press.
“And at some point, you wonder: what narrative are they pushing now that is also bullshit?…
“I don’t want to feel as if everything I read is basically tilted through wish-fulfillment, narrative-proving, and ideology.”
Read the whole thing. As someone who worked in newspapers for years, this is depressing to see. But perhaps it’s still too rosy a view. Are we becoming more aware of a problem that is particularly acute now, but is in fact also older, deeper and very longstanding? It’s not like the New York Times has a golden past. Just watch the movie Mr Jones.
Perhaps the answer is for intellectuals to be less credulous. C.S. Lewis certainly thought so back in 1945, when he wrote his novel That Hideous Strength, in which one character says the following:
‘Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.’
How to be less naive? Maybe Michael Crichton’s concept of Gell Mann Amnesia is something to bear in mind.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray [Gell-Mann]’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.