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Richard Hanania thinks that if everything can be faked, (we'll be forced to trust the establishment)[https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/deepfakes-will-make-the-establishment] CNN has more to lose by lying with a deepfake than John Q Anon on your message board of choice.
CNN went big on the Steele Dossier. They don't need AI generated fake content. They already deliver old fashioned handmade artisanal fake content.
They seriously discussed a bit of (erotic?) fiction in which Trump paid Russian prostitutes to pee on a bed and then slept in the piss bed in order to defile something that Obama once used.
At the time it seemed farfetched but since then we learned that he really did sleep with a pornstar. If these events had happened in reverse I'd find it highly plausible he did that kinky Russian prostitute thing too.
The bigger lesson is that rich and famous people really are engaged in crazy things that the rest of us don't get to do. A separate moral universe.
The dossier was traced to alcoholic russian chancers. Who made it up basically.
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But Trump is famously a germaphobe. Of course he cheats on all his wives and doesn't inhabit whatever moral realm you and I are on, but he isn't sleeping in piss beds.
CNN beclowned themselves with the pee pee tape talk.
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Actually no, I don't think every gross old rich guy does have whores. Much less famous pornstars.
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If he got the incentives right, then CNN wouldn't have torpedoed it's credibility to where it is now.
Even if we grant that they would be able to vet the footage they get, I don't see how much would change, since most internet commentary disagrees with MSM on interpretation, not facts. But I don't see a reason to grant that, because there's no reason to believe MSN would be better at vetting the material than internet randos.
I once again am confused why anyone ever took Hanania seriously.
<feels seen>
That's almost the whole point of this kind of forum for me -- users can build some sort of credibility that they are a real person over time (even if the details of their background may be utter lies) and then be trusted in certain domains.
Bots will need to become much better at consistency to pull this off I think -- but as of now there are quite a number of users on here who I would trust over CNN in case of a conflict.
This actually happened with the trucker protests -- there are people I have known for many years on more local fora that were completely contradicting the State Broadcaster narrative, starting early on when the story was "there's actually only like five trucks, what a nothingburger" -- guess who I believed?
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To your first paragraph - I already said most Internet commentary works by taking facts reported by the MSM, and providing independent commentary, so like I said not much would change.
If something significant happened and the only source is third party video, why would I believe CNN would be better at vetting it than randos on the internet? Time and again they've proven themselves to be incompetent and actively malicious. In an environment of limitless deep fakes, I would trust MSM less, not more, and would require confirmation from multiple sources.
Edit: let's make this specific. There's another wave of BLM, and CNN goes with the fiery but mostly peaceful narrative again. Political streamers go on site and report riots. Who do I trust? Definitely the streamers. It's not even a contest, contrary to Hanania it's obvious they have a bigger incentive to not lie.
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I see where you’re coming from, and the specific examples you selected are indeed examples where I could expect CNN to, if not have the most useful analysis or interpretation of events, to at least have the on-the-ground presence and footage necessary to give me an accurate impression of the available information. However, my concern is that I think you’re underestimating just how many things, even in terms of international news, are touched by the culture war.
For example, I don’t believe that CNN or MSNBC are giving me even remotely trustworthy information about the war in Ukraine. I believe that they are either intentionally concealing, or simply totally unaware of, tons of information that would be harmful to the meticulously-crafted narrative about Ukrainian prospects, and are also intentionally amplifying false or misleading information for the same purpose. Given that this is one of the most noteworthy things happening on an international level, and ostensibly does not involve the American culture war, one would naïvely assume that CNN could at least be counted on to give me an accurate picture of what’s happening, but that turns out to be the opposite of reality.
Additionally, I think you’re downplaying the extent to which CNN lies by omission: how they can control the public’s impression of a particular state of affairs by simply refusing to broadcast or comment on relevant information/footage. What I found most radicalizing about the Floyd riots wasn’t even the hundreds of hours of footage of the events that I watched, as disturbing as that footage was; what disturbed me most was that major news networks just did not display any of this footage at all, pretending that it did not exist, creating a massively inaccurate impression in the minds of millions of Americans. The whole “fiery but mostly peaceful” narrative was blatantly false - one could go on Twitter or /r/ActualPublicFreakouts and find real-time footage of looting, violence, mass property destruction, etc. with zero effort - but was able to propagate because of attitudes similar to the one you’re presenting: “surely of something that significant was happening, CNN would at least acknowledge it and show the footage, even if they would then smother it with narrative-friendly commentary and contextualization.” But… no, they literally just pretended it didn’t exist.
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It goes further than that, because most people expect CNN to be biased rather than dishonest.
I think even people who discard every word an anchor says will still trust that footage or numbers are real. At most they’ll realize it might not be representative à la Covington Catholic. But something like “Jan 6 footage was faked” is a pretty fringe position.
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CNN hasn't torpedoed its credibility. Almost everyone still believes them, even those who claim on polls they don't trust them. CNNs credibility doesn't come from telling the truth. It comes from being part of a network of "credible" institutions all of which will back them up. It's inexhaustible in practice.
To the extent this is true, deep fakes will have zero impact on the credibility of CNN, so again Hanania is just wrong.
No they won't - why should anyone believe, say, Andy Ngo started uploading deep fakes all of a sudden, instead of personally captured video?
I thought Ngo tended to upload his own footage? Anyway what makes you think MSM won't uncritically cite a deepfake? In the past they've cited completely made up nonsense many times. And if they're able to vet it, why wouldn't Twitter nobodies?
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