Taibbi: The News Media Is Destroying Itself

The gathering of facts is a time-consuming, difficult, labor-intensive and expensive enterprise. The presenting of opinions is cheap and easy. And the same goes for the audience, too. Fact-laden narratives are complex and require attention. Opinions can be consumed like potato chips, with no effort required.

 

So... we’re fucked.

 

"There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it."


not mentioned:

 

I'll leave the monsters of cable TV to others, but attacks on the print media can start, and linger, at the top. Too many newspapers sold out to chains and then, even worse, to venture capitalists, and then they destroyed themselves from within. First they got rid of most of the editors, whose primary focus is to keep all that content fair and balanced, and then they ran off most of the veteran writers and photographers.

Now we're left with a much more inexperienced talent base, and institutional memory has vanished, too. Everyone wants to throw heat at the reporters, and often rightly so, but let's remember that the corporate overloads are behind the the dismantling of the great newsrooms throughout America. There's generally nobody left to watchdog those newsrooms anymore, much less train and guide the reporters.

It's too easy, and lazy, to blame overworked reporters. Readers should take their demands straight to the publishers.

 

What a brilliant piece. I imagine it's being passed around the media world because two separate people sent it to me within hours of it being published.

The fear of dissent, any dissent, that permeates newsrooms right now is palpable. The editors are the most scared of all because they have the most to lose -- in terms of money, career, prestige -- and they know that one misstep, any challenge to the orthodoxy, can not only cost them their job but make them permanently unemployable.

The challenge, of course, is that the orthodoxy shifts so rapidly.

COVID is such a good example. In a matter of 24 hours, anyone who questioned the quarantine went from being an evil, selfish person who was willing to kill Grandma to a hero of our time. And woe be unto anyone who didn't get the memo that the standards had shifted. I almost feel sorry for them.

I think it's a hard climate to survive as a news reporter if you came up in the "old days" of pre-2005 or so. For the younger reporters, this is all they know.

 

Thanks for the post. My thoughts:

1. The problems with the American right - which I spent many posts, on this board, examining over 12 years - are to me a territory explored, harmful to be sure but a concern thoroughly addressed here and elsewhere with sufficient emotional and intellectual force that, in time, those critiques will be the catalyst to significant check of the right - particularly in the media. Taibbi himself wrote about it for years, and it's part of the Hate, Inc. There is no shortage in the media of critiques of Trump or the meretricious, self-serving olds of that party that age and time will claim soon enough.

2.I do not think it's a 10% problem, in part because this hysteria can and is being manipulated in ways that serve some of the other concerns listed. Corporate ass kissing? What else are phony shows of moral solidarity by said companies and celebrities on Twitter? Deference to authority? Authority comes in a lot of forms, and the nature of who's in charge - and why - is rarely static. Academia, for example, has extraordinary authority in America. Is there a sufficiently cautious eye and ear to an institution overwhelmingly-funded by taxpayers? When YouTube took down a Michael Moore doc because it dared question the effectiveness on the green energy movement - a move not made for any of his other docs, mostly critical of conservatism - did the mainstream media sufficiently go "hmmm" to that?

3. A piece that "makes a lot of good points" is nevertheless willfully blind because it does not sufficiently engage in both-sidesm. Taibbi engaged in both-sideism in the Hate book, but I suspect what happened - what I think he may have intended to happen - was the backlash to equating Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow, and the backlash to subsequent pieces questioning whether Russiagate was as tight as the left claimed it was, nudged him toward examining an angle that a lot of journalists lack the latitude and permission to explore.

If the weakness of a piece is that it didn't include a long disclaimer/apology for the picayune, unimportant nature of the topic, that kind of makes Taibbi's point.

And, yeah, that is kind of a smarmy move. He knows his subjects of his attack will be mad, and I think he gets a charge out of seeing them get mad and he relishes too much the role of the outcast journalist. Taibbi's tell in the piece is when he points out Fang's irritation with those "who grew up in affluent circumstances and might intellectualize topics that have personal meaning for him." It's Taibbi's hang-up, too.

 

OK, yeah, you're right. Sorry, my brain was apparently shut off when I read last night.

I can't really disagree with any of this piece. I could say a mouthful here, but I think there's so many factors at play for why this is happening in the media now.

Obviously, with the industry hanging by a thread and overall unemployment spiking to record levels, no reporter or editor is going to risk anything that might result in job loss. At the end of the day, a paycheck and supporting your family is going to come before anything for pretty much everyone. I wish I could say I'd lay down my job at a moment's notice for a cause I believe in, but if you think that's an easy thing to do, then you can't be older than 25.

Secondly, this is all the nature of the beast now. With social media, there simply is no depth to anything anymore. It's all instant gratification. If editorials don't agree with the larger narrative, they're going to be shouted down. I personally feel it's a devastatingly dangerous thing for editorials and content to be policed at all to weed out anything that may "offend" anyone. As a liberal myself, I want to scream at the cancel culture-"ers" about how that very thing just devastates the foundation for everything which they seem to want in society.

But I've long since accepted that the general pulse of society has no regard for depth and perspective anymore.

Really, in my little opinion, Taibbi is just putting to words a phenomenon that's existed for all of humanity's existence: People want what people want. And even when their motives and attitudes actually wind up hurting causes that are worthy and noble, like true, honest social justice, selfishness eventually overwhelms everything.

It's happened before, it's happening now, and it'll happen again. Same as it ever was.

 

still up

copyright problem, as was accurately reported

Michael Moore film Planet of the Humans removed from YouTube

 

Good post.

Taibbi is sticking to his point. There needs to be no disclaimer that the right is to blame, too, or that the topic rates somehow as more or less important than other topics.

I kind of said otherwise in some earlier posts, but I was wrong. I rather like reading pieces that call out "themselves," as it were with more liberal media. Maybe Taibbi is an asshole, I have no idea really, but you can't dislike this piece on the grounds that you disagree with what he says.

And there really isn't anything to disagree with. I'm all for social justice, but dragging people through the mud, getting them fired and trying to ruin their lives with no context, no second thought or no sense of moral culpability or perspective is stunningly irresponsible.

 

I'm glad YT hasn't found the 85 Iron Bowl yet.

 

I don’t recall the press being paralyzed one bit in escoriating Trump for that moment. Seemed pretty engaged.

 

but according to you and Taibbi, not interesting