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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29300 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.

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.)

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