The mainstream media's function isn't exclusively, or even mostly, political propaganda and general misinformation - whether it's calling elections, writing about relevant events like antitrust lawsuits, reporting on trends in international politics, or just cooking, the MSM serves plenty of useful functions.
Wouldn’t even worse journalists just fill the void? That would be one effect. Yet the bigger effect, I warrant, would be a Great De-escalation
If the MSM disappeared and nothing else changed, people wouldn't stop caring, lying, or bullshitting about politics - the many independent left/right wing journalism websites, and twitter accounts, that are less 'fact-based' than either cnn or fox demonstrate that. There's plenty of demand, and the marginal costs of producing it are very low.
If "all misleading and not-motivated-by-truth media production" disappeared, that might be nice - but that's so common it's more in 'gene editing' or 'AGI' territory than 'just remove the MSM and we're fine!'.
I consume near-zero mainstream media, but I voraciously read history and empirical social science
My guess is this isn't true, and caplan gets a lot of information from the MSM. So:
one of the few Substackers to have a New York Times article about her - in fact, part of the even more select group of Substackers who got NYT articles about them consensually. The Times describes her as a mild-mannered history professor who rose to superstardom “by accident” after an essay she posted took off. Her day job is studying the Civil War, and part of her shtick is comparing modern Republicans to Civil War era slaveowners, something there is certainly not zero demand for.
Still, all of her posts are like this. A daily discussion of one timely issue, a lot of useful context and explanation, and a paragraph or two about why it proves that the Republicans are the party of hatred and bigotry.
... along with Matthew Yglesias, "Bulwark+", Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. Which isn't that much better than the MSM, if we interpret the MSM to include big center-right media as well.
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Notes -
The mainstream media's function isn't exclusively, or even mostly, political propaganda and general misinformation - whether it's calling elections, writing about relevant events like antitrust lawsuits, reporting on trends in international politics, or just cooking, the MSM serves plenty of useful functions.
If the MSM disappeared and nothing else changed, people wouldn't stop caring, lying, or bullshitting about politics - the many independent left/right wing journalism websites, and twitter accounts, that are less 'fact-based' than either cnn or fox demonstrate that. There's plenty of demand, and the marginal costs of producing it are very low.
If "all misleading and not-motivated-by-truth media production" disappeared, that might be nice - but that's so common it's more in 'gene editing' or 'AGI' territory than 'just remove the MSM and we're fine!'.
My guess is this isn't true, and caplan gets a lot of information from the MSM. So:
... scrolling back on his twitter, an appearance on Tucker and and a RT of a NYT opinion by Douthat don't really count, but here's him posting a NYT article about NYC parking lots, here he approvingly QTs a Pinker article in the New Republic, he tweets "One of the best @arthurbrooks pieces" which is the Atlantic. That's all this January. He cites substacks like hanania or ACX more than he does the MSM ... but as hanania's approval of the media suggests, that doesn't cut the MSM out of the loop e.g. a few of the links in ACX linkposts are to the msm. But even if the MSM were fully cut out, and replaced with networks of independent blogs and substacks, we'd see more like Heather Cox Richardson's substack, topping substack's leaderboard at above 100k paid subs, described by Scott as
... along with Matthew Yglesias, "Bulwark+", Matt Taibbi, and Alex Berenson. Which isn't that much better than the MSM, if we interpret the MSM to include big center-right media as well.
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