{"id":63814,"date":"2021-01-12T07:48:06","date_gmt":"2021-01-12T13:48:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=63814"},"modified":"2021-01-12T07:48:06","modified_gmt":"2021-01-12T13:48:06","slug":"63814","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=63814","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Who\u2019s Promoting A Civil War? The Media.<\/p>\n

\n

We Need a New Media System<\/a>
\nIf you sell culture war all day, don\u2019t be surprised by the real-world consequences<\/em><\/p>\n

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.<\/p>\n

Media firms work backward. They first ask, \u201cHow does our target demographic want to understand what\u2019s just unfolded?\u201d Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s why\u00a0Fox News\u00a0<\/em>uses the term, \u201cPro-Trump protesters<\/a>,\u201d while\u00a0New York<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0The Atlantic<\/a>\u00a0<\/em>use \u201cInsurrectionists.\u201d It\u2019s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon\u00a0shut down the \u201cFree Speech\u201d platform Parler<\/a>\u00a0over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly\u00a0planned for January 19th or 20th<\/a>.<\/p>\n

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the\u00a0Hate Inc<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the\u00a0Fox<\/em>-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a \u201cJust the facts\u201d newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.<\/p>\n

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan?\u00a0Fox\u00a0<\/em>slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for \u201ceconomic reasons.<\/a>\u201d The\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/em>counters by running a story about how the caravan\u00a0was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House<\/a>\u00a0staring at poor results in midterm elections.<\/p>\n

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell\u00a0put it last week<\/a>, a country:<\/p>\n

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn\u2019t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Everyone monetized Trump. The\u00a0Fox<\/em>\u00a0wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to \u201cfamily values\u201d from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability\u00a0Fox<\/em>\u00a0had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they\u00a0did with Glenn Beck<\/a>). He reinvented\u00a0Fox<\/em>\u00a0as a platform for Trump\u2019s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some\u00a0more-Fox-than-Fox<\/a>\u00a0imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump\u2019s voters for four years.<\/p>\n

In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (\u201cLesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says<\/a>\u201d is one from years ago that stuck in my mind),\u00a0Fox<\/em>\u2019s business model has long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America\u2019s decline. It villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists \u2014 anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox\u2019s narrative.<\/p>\n

The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn\u2019t see coming in Trump\u2019s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.<\/p>\n

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump\u2019s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story \u2014 which didn\u2019t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic \u2014 was more or less constantly distorted.<\/p>\n

Trump began to be described as a cause of America\u2019s problems, rather than a symptom, and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed from\u00a0Fox<\/em>, which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors. Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer, making the hate more real.<\/p>\n

I came into the news business convinced that the traditional \u201cobjective\u201d style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of \u201cabove the fray\u201d columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, \u201cOnly one thing\u2019s for sure: time will tell.\u201d As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse\u2019s book about the 1972 presidential campaign,\u00a0The Boys in the Bus,\u00a0<\/em>describing the work of Hunter Thompson:<\/p>\n

Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, \u201cWhat was it really like?\u201d Thompson\u2019s wife knew from reading his pieces.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What\u00a0Rolling Stone\u00a0<\/em>did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull \u201cobjective\u201d format.<\/p>\n

The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.<\/p>\n

If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of success) not only wouldn\u2019t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.<\/p>\n

We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:<\/p>\n