Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I missed that Matt Yglesias started his own Substack newsletter. I was just look at something he wrote last week, and learned something, which is that the internal criticism at the NYT about things like the Cotton op-ed wasn't coming from reporters: |
Since the election I've traveling between three worlds.
World One is occupied by moderates who quickly acknowledged Biden unsurprisingly won the election. They acknowledge the media is generally slanted and anti-Trump, but they also could see through it and realized Trump was always likely to be a one term President. He'd been down in the polls all along and barely won in 2016. They're consuming "mainstream media" but taking with a grain of salt.
World Two is occupied by people who are buying every conspiracy theory about the election being stolen. They're reading these bizarre studies of voting anomalies and imagining warehouses full of ballots being filled out by nefarious fixers. You can dismantle their math at every turn, but they're reading right wing news sites, and they're on Parler, and your facts Just Don't Matter.
I tour One and Two. They're surreal.
World Three is where I live, reading Taibbi, Greenwald, Yglesias, Sullivan, watching Maher, listening to Harris, Rogan, Altchuler, Galloway, Zakaria, some Quillette, Swisher, Al Jazeera, Reason, perusing some selected bits of NYTimes. I very much like this world because it discusses all of the facts that World One offers, but instead of slanting them and editorializing them in favor of one side, it offers them unvarnished and then, where it does editorialize, it explains how the creators of World One and World Two media slant, lie, and foist agendas on the public.
World Three is fun also because it's destroying the others. Joe Rogan gets more listeners in a week than
Brietbart and Ezra Klein together get in a year. Yglesias just demoralized Klein by leaving the platform he'd founded, and Greenwald punctured the
Intercept. The gains of World Three directly tack along with public distrust for Worlds One and Two. While the right and left struggle to manufacture consent (hat tip, McLuhan and Chomsky), the audience flees. Worlds One and Two are increasingly left with tribal audiences - consolidating fellow travelers. (If you don't believe this, check out the comments on any NYTimes or WSJ Oped -- they're entirely old liberals and progressives arguing amongst each other in re: the former, conservatives and populists arguing amongst each other in re: the latter.)
The fourth estate is crumbling before our eyes, but not in a bad way. The tribal right and left will increasingly silo themselves, but those silos will become smaller and smaller as consolidations of shrinking markets do, while the "Wild West" of thinkers who cannot be categorized because they share a mix of views that don't fit under the legacy party or ideology umbrellas gain traction.
World Three is highly entertaining. Just yesterday I listened to Taibbi interview Roger Waters about everything from Israel to Cormac McCarthy to climate change to Native American sovereign rights. And Rogan's guests? Holy shit. Trevor Noah couldn't book half of those people, or go deep with them on topics like Rogan. And Galloway is dismantling higher education's business model like a man on a mission.
Fuck World One and World Two. They can't collapse quickly enough.
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