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Yes? And? So what?
This is not an argument that the media is honest or good. This is an argument that the media is more honest and better, but without making the case that it's good enough. This matters, because in a great number of things 'better' is not 'good enough'- a runner with only one broken leg, only an ounce of sewage in a bottle of win, a teacher who usually wears a condom when tutoring a student one-on-one. These may all be things that are strictly preferable to alternatives, but that does not mean that a lack of alternatives means any are acceptable, or not worse than going without.
To quote the article-
To which one might as well respond- and where are you going to start describing what's the problem with nihilism?
Setting aside that the Hanania doesn't identify how society is actually being made smarter by the current media, he also doesn't identify what society being 'dumber' even means. He raises the spectre of nebulous chaos as bad not because chaos is bad, but because of what the effects of chaos can do to a healthy society... but if the society is already sick or insane- and Hanania pre-emptively concedes that the other side has 'lost their mind' on extremely fundamental issues on social composition- this doesn't actually mean it's getting worse. 'Not having any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics' is not a loss when the the superfulousness of words to describe them is already bringing about the bioethics of queer studies to the applause of the media that is being defended.
If the consequences of a dumber society with no common media environment are different than the consequences of the current media environment, that doesn't mean it's worse. Hanania presupposes that everyone accepts the current dynamics as good enough and that an alternative is worse. While this is a fundamentally status quo bias that's understandable for how Hanania himself has personally benefited, it makes no such appeal to those who have not, or who have been harmed, or who see their long-term interests of the trajectory as being threatened by the very institutions supporting positions Hanania himself calls crazy.
Yes, a lack of common shared vision of the world will create a low cohesive society. This is not the same as making the case for why people should commit to a cohesive society that disagrees with them on a fundamentally cultural level.
As with Scott's attempt awhile ago, this falls into the trap of 'we must have something common and good to all believe in.' Hanania frames it as a resistance to nihilism, but it's really not. This is just the rationalist tendency to want other people to support social cohesion for its common good effects, without grasping on how dynamics like social cohesion come about. People do not subscribe to common beliefs because social cohesion enables good things- social cohesion comes about when people subscribe to common beliefs, which define what good things are. Appealing to people to submit their view of what is good for the sake of maintaining the benefits of social cohesion is fundamentally missing the cause and the effect.
Hanania wants people to separate the insanity he admits is fully present in the system. The system is broadly comfortable and profitable for him. It is not broadly comfortable or profitable for others, who he makes no case are being well served by the current institutions that 'only lie a little', and the fact that the lack of a superior alternative will make the lack of a single information sphere less comfortable for a lot of people is not, in fact, a compelling reason for others to defer to the established institutions who see them as the problem.
I think he's self-centered and blind to his own mediocrity. No one so self-flattering of their own IQ should be making so many basic mistakes of argument, history, or social cohesion.
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