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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29282 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Elon Musk has suspended a slew of liberal journalists and pundits from Twitter. It is, as Benjamin Braddoc puts it, a red wedding for the liberal establishment. I initially believed that he was just the "controlled" opposition of the deep state, obviously he's stepped on way too many toes for that. This imo underscores an important truth to the ultra principled who believe in free speech absolutism and neutral institutions, the overton window won't shift the other way just to punish the "heretics" who've assailed this sacred virtue. Social media, our Frankenstein, has made it insanely easier for mob rule to influence culture (not that it wasn't already).

I still don't believe we're witnessing complete course reversal, but this could just be the first legitimate W for the right.

EDIT: It looks like he's lifting the suspension.

Definitely the biggest W for the right since Trump. If Elon can succeed in bringing "the press are regime shills, institutions are all controlled by progressives, progressives only care about who/whom" to the mainstream, then a lot of the hard work is done. All these institutions have going for them is credibility. Once it's gone, it doesn't come back.

How is this a W? What part of banning liberal journalists is a W? Was their credibility somehow based on not getting banned from Twitter?

When someone high-status like Elon Musk tweets "That is because The New York Times has become, for all intents and purposes, an unregistered lobbying firm for far left politicians," it hurts their credibility.

No, it hurts Musk's credibility. The NYTs credibility is unassailable.

To echo what I said to @pointsandcorsi, I an amused by the implication that the NYT has credibility to assail.

I think it illustrates how different our worlds are, you're always here acting like "Epstien didn't kill himself" and "the NYT are a bunch of partisan hacks" are whacky, out-there, Alex Jones-tier takes when in my experience they are the popular consensus. I know you live in Manhattan but every time you make one of these comments I find myself biting back the urge to ask if you've actually met anyone who isn't a registered democrat or under the age of 70?

The NYT has credibility because they are among the definers of credibility. The truth doesn't matter; if you go against the NYT you're automatically wrong, among anyone who counts. Think of it like the BATF and machine guns. Sure, you know that a shoelace isn't a machine gun and I know a shoelace isn't a machine gun, but if the BATF says a shoelace is a machine gun it is, and anyone with a shoelace is liable for prosecution. And the prosecutors will prosecute and the judge will go along and so will the higher courts and no amount of pointing out that it's a shoelace will save you from jail time. And to add insult to injury, if and when all this commences, all those law-n-order conservatives who agreed that indeed a shoelace was not a machine gun will say "Well, what did you expect? You knew a shoelace was a machine gun, BATF said so." They don't actually believe a shoelace is a machine gun, but they believe in institutions and the institutions said it was.

Same with the NYT. What they say is truth will be taken as truth, by anyone who matters. Even if it's patently ridiculous.

And the prosecutors will prosecute and the judge will go along and so will the higher courts and no amount of pointing out that it's a shoelace will save you from jail time. And to add insult to injury, if and when all this commences, all those law-n-order conservatives who agreed that indeed a shoelace was not a machine gun will say "Well, what did you expect? You knew a shoelace was a machine gun, BATF said so."

Somehow I suspect that it is hyperbole and not what you actually believe, but I am not really sure.

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Why? He doesn't seem to be saying anything unreasonable.

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This is, to a large extent, self-referential. The NYT is always credible within the "mainstream" narrative because the NYT is a core part of the network of institutions that sets that narrative. But I've got scare quotes around "mainstream" because the NYT and allied outlets simply don't represent any sort of board social consensus anymore. They represent the official line of establishment Democrats, with space occasionally given to more extreme leftist positions to keep activist groups on-side. Their function is to align elites within these spaces and sell Blue Tribe normies on what those elites want.

Republican politicians and other explicitly right-wing public figures and organizations can already almost entirely ignore the NYT, because none of their supporters care what it says. Only 14% of Republicans and 27% of independents have confidence in mass media to report accurately (source).

The danger for "mainstream" media in Musk's Twitter takeover is that Twitter has deep reach among Blue Tribe normies. Musk is going to allow 'unapproved' narratives to spread to and among them, and these narratives will in many cases likely outcompete those coming from above. This could have the effect of seriously undermining the ability of Blue Tribe elites to sell any large constituency on their views, with obvious electoral consequences.

If that were actually true, then nobody would doubt the credibility of the NYT. But there are plenty who used to find them credible and no longer do. Whether Musk will cause more people to lose credence in the NYT remains to be seen, of course, but their credibility most certainly is not unassailable.

There are people who will tell you on a survey they doubt the credibility of the NYT. The next day they'll be credulously repeating whatever it is they read in the NYT and sneering at "Faux News".

Are you seriously asserting that nobody doubts the credibility of the NYT, or that they have not caused at least some people to lose trust in them?

Nobody who is anyone doubts the credibility of the NYT (obviously "deplorables" or "MAGA republicans" do), and the NYT (and mainstream media in general) has gained trust over the past few years even as they've gone more off the rails. For some reason COVID got everyone who was wavering back in the fold and then some.

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The problem is the right has been completely unable to actually create a right-wing alternate to the NYT because there is no audience for that among the Right - it's all DailyWire/Brietbart pushing out the sensational stuff or the day or it's money-losing magazines being propped up by rich donors. There is the WSJ, but it seems unwilling to move beyond its place focusing on business news.

The actual problem is 90% of what the NYT is reliably truthful, even to an ardent right-winger.

I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.

(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)

So was Pravda's. Now its name is synonymous with propaganda

Pravda was always synonymous with propaganda. There is no news in the Truth and no truth in the News.

Pravda's name was always synonymous with propaganda. Even inside the Soviet Union.

More so inside the Soviet Union than in America, though.

More likely to find a Pravda believer on the faculty at Yale than in Moscow.

Among who, though? Looking back on the USSR everyone wants to say "oh yeah we knew the whole time," but I call bullshit. I bet a sample of American opinions on NYT is similar to Soviets about Pravda in 1955. And when the NYT falls, whoever writes about it will do so in the same manner.

As Amadan has alluded to, it's one of those "those who know" kind of things. Sure, you can argue that a preference cascade happened and everyone flipped their opinions from what was clearly the opposite, but I personally choose to believe that the actual heart-of-hearts sentiment was indeed the opposite of what was publically-permissible to say pre-1991.

There were some naive people who took it seriously, but the disparity between propaganda and what your eyes saw was far, far greater than anything NYT ever wrote until the late Obama age decline.

Everyone else was simply afraid to speak up, because you had a permanent record* you couldn't check or dispute and were you known for saying stuff like that, it'd have ended noted there.

And your children would have zero hope of getting into university, and were you to persist and became an actual dissident, only the worst jobs would be available to you. If you persisted for years and were good at it - eventually the state would stop treating you like others and encourage you to leave the country.

*I'm assuming that they had, given it was done in satellite states.

Don't just "bet" on things that conveniently fit your worldview when you don't have an accompanying historical knowledge of the times.

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