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You're conflating (and changing) the standard of comparison. Competent is not synonymous with subtle, particularly in a context where survival (a screening factor for what is / is not competent) is characterized by exceptionally enthusiastic support for a cause.
Being unsubtle is not a lack of competence in and of itself. Competence is the characteristic of what it takes to succeed. The metric of success in the selection effect to be a modern journalist is surviving as a modern journalist, not being a subtle propagandist.
You are correct. Signalling piety and subtlety are sometimes at odds. Willingness to believe in the correct kind of bullshit is a strong shiboleth.
I think my hiccup is that I think subtle propaganda is synonymous with effective propaganda and that, therefore, a subtle propagandist is synonymous with an effective propagandist for the cause which in turn would translate into signalling value. That is evidently not the case. But why?
Compare, say, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver. People here will argue that the former was just as much of a propagandist as the latter, but he was definitely more subtle, and hence more effective. Why do we only get the Olivers now and not the Stewarts?
Human psychology, the difference between biases and fallacies, and what you are trying to use propaganda to do.
One of the critical points / takeaways of studies of psychological biases like anchoring or confirmation or others isn't that they are a tricky things to be avoided, but that they have an effect even if you are prepared and trying to resist them. You can know what the anchoring bias is, be forewarned that it's about to apply, and your frame of reference is still going to be the first number you hear that you don't reject outhand. This isn't an error of reasoning, it's how the brain works.
By contrast, fallacies are errors of reasoning. They can be dumb and pedestrian, but they can be high-effort as well. In fact, some have to be. It can take a lot of time to develop a compelling fallacy in a way that isn't as obvious as a bias.
The issue with propaganda is that biases can be as good as fallacies, but a lot easier to pump out. Time is money and number of influence opportunities, and fallacies aren't so much better that you'd rather invest in them instead of biases.
When you thus get into a resource-constrained environment- like a journalism sector in the age of zealous activists- with people more interested in audience-impact than the nature of the argument itself- like an activist zealout- then your better tool and the one more available to you is the bias, not the fallacy.
One argument is that they weren't that different, but you were just younger and didn't notice the nature.
There was a theme in the Jon Stewart era that the Republicans were the evil party but the Democrats were the stupid party for failing what should be slam-dunk conflicts. The theme-evolution would be that when Trump came into office at the end of Stewart's career, that sort of division was untenable- the Trump was deemed to be both evil and stupid, and so the market (and the supporting coverage that keeps the media industry afloat) pressured in that direction.
The counter-argument to that, and to your difference, is that in practice Jon Stewart-era commentary was always that the Republicans were both evil and stupid, and that the Democrats were just sometimes stupid, maybe, if it wasn't actually a Republican fault to begin with. Remember that the most Conservative-leaning persona on Stewart's cast was the man who coined the term 'truthiness' to make fun of... the republicans he was presenting a caricature of for the liberal audience to laugh at. The bias was never subtle, it was possibly just more aggreable to you.
The breakpoint is that tastes changed, both with age and with changes in the audience. The target audience later actors cared about was different from the Stewart-era audience. It was one where Donald Trump was THE thing, and nuance was to be discarded because it might help him. On the other hand, your tastes evolved differently. As such, when presented with something disagreeable, you started to notice more than you would have before, and once you noticed it was no longer subtle.
Good post!
Gracias.
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