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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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There are people who will tell you on a survey they doubt the credibility of the NYT. The next day they'll be credulously repeating whatever it is they read in the NYT and sneering at "Faux News".

Are you seriously asserting that nobody doubts the credibility of the NYT, or that they have not caused at least some people to lose trust in them?

Nobody who is anyone doubts the credibility of the NYT (obviously "deplorables" or "MAGA republicans" do), and the NYT (and mainstream media in general) has gained trust over the past few years even as they've gone more off the rails. For some reason COVID got everyone who was wavering back in the fold and then some.

Right-leaning and centrist political and business elites often doubt the NYT. Many regular people have NYT-incompatible views but simply don't pay enough attention to the NYT to notice.

The NYT is a product of today's (overwhelmingly blue tribe) cultural elites, so naturally they find it credible and reenforce this through the other organs of cultural production under their control. However, there's a huge amount that's not under their control, now including Twitter. They can refuse to grant these things status within their system, but people outside of that system have little reason to care.

Right-leaning and centrist political and business elites often doubt the NYT.

There are no such people.

Many regular people have NYT-incompatible views but simply don't pay enough attention to the NYT to notice.

But if they did, they would change their views to be compatible.

However, there's a huge amount that's not under their control, now including Twitter. They can refuse to grant these things status within their system, but people outside of that system have little reason to care.

Twitter is outside their control for now, until they recapture or destroy it (they can deny it ad revenue indefinitely). And you can't get outside their system, not in the US anyway. They control too much.

Republican politicians and Republican-donor business executives (for starters) all unquestioningly believe the official narrative according to the NYT?

Twitter ad boycotts don't actually seem to be going so well. Apple and Amazon, sometimes rated as the #1 and #2 brands in the world, have reportedly already resumed advertising, which is basically a green light for anyone to do so. Casually scrolling my timeline for two minutes with personalized ads turned off, I see ads for Hyundai, Kia, Chevron, Robinhood, StateFarm, a film called M3GAN (NBCUniversal), Hulu (also NBCUniversal), the NFL, ESPN, and Walmart.

Seeing NBCUniversal show up twice is pretty funny given that some of the dumbest anti-Musk rhetoric has come from their journalists. They literally can't even get the company they work for to not hand Musk money. Establishment journalists overestimate their power, and so do you.

"Nobody who is anyone" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting for you there. And moreover, it's moving the goalposts. You said "the NYT's credibility is unassailable", not "the NYT's credibility is unassailable among the elites".

Unless you're really prepared to bite the bullet and say that nobody doubts the credibility of the NYT, or that nobody has lost faith in them, then their credibility isn't unassailable. And while it may indeed be unassailable among cultural elites at this time, I don't for a moment believe it will always be so. If they keep burning credibility with the common man, sooner or later it will bleed over into the "anyone who is anyone" crowd as well.

The problem is the right has been completely unable to actually create a right-wing alternate to the NYT because there is no audience for that among the Right - it's all DailyWire/Brietbart pushing out the sensational stuff or the day or it's money-losing magazines being propped up by rich donors. There is the WSJ, but it seems unwilling to move beyond its place focusing on business news.

The actual problem is 90% of what the NYT is reliably truthful, even to an ardent right-winger.

I suspect actually that the right has been unable to create a right-wing equivalent of the NYT because that sort of centralized top-down narrative setting is a holdover from an earlier era. The natural means of narrative formation and spread today is social media. Traditionally structured media outlets can't hope to produce narratives as memetically fit as those honed on Twitter, so largely just write sensationalist stories built on top of those. It's not just the right; this describes younger media outlets on the left as well. Even the NYT itself is not immune to this. One now regularly sees echos of Twitter discourse in is coverage.

(All of this is why establishment journalists were so eager to place themselves or their ideological allies in positions that allowed them to influence what ideas could spread on social media, via "trust & safety" councils, official labeling of "misinformation," etc. and why many seem to be practically unraveling in response to Musk getting rid of these things.)

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