I want to like this, but there's a lot of problems:
1) You paint the past as far better than it was, to make the pressent seem more of an abberation than it was. The Printing Press did not, arguably, make us smarter- at least not at first. It lead to centuries of religious warfare (remember, Guttenber started with the Bible, and translation of the Bible into the vernacular- aided by the printing press- was one of the many schisms between Protestant and Catholic). It took quite a while for reading and writing to become "respectable" in the way we now think of it.
As for your point about Lincoln-Douglas: those debates coincided with penny dreadfuls, full of tales of 'orrible murder and depraved crime. They were followed a few years later by the era of yellow journalism- an era that you could have cited to bolster your point about competition leading to error, but you ignore (because it goes against your point about the good old days of media and the virtues of the printed word, perhaps?)
And, on the subject of oration: I know a few people who love 8 hour YouTube documentaries that are just one person talking. Or three hour podcasts where people go back and forth. For all that some of the populations attention has diminished (and does seem, on net, to have diminished overall) I think a good argument must account for or at least try to explain away these continuities.
If one wants to use history to bolster their argument, then one needs to account for history in its totality, not the most flattering examples.
2) "you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists."
It's 2022, The Last of Us has been turned into a series that will win Emmies, and we're still on this?
Ah, yes, video games. Those childish amusements, that obviously have no artistic value (well... except for Braid. And Portal. And Chrono Trigger. And Wind Waker. And... well, I could go on for days, but I believe the point is clear). They contain no reading (well... except for visual novels. And text based games. Oh, and those RPGs sure are wordy). There is nothing deeper to engage with and analyze (because video games have not been the subject of essays... right?)
Actually, now that I've mentioned essays: how cavalier you are in dismissing deeper engagement with television, radio, and film. It's not like whole academic disciplines are devoted to "reading" these "texts" or anything. And, sure, once again, many people DON'T engage with them on a deeper level, but if anything the internet has popularized deep textual anaylsis of non-textual works.
You could have at least tried to make some kind of argument like, "People write books about Citizen Kane- do you honestly think that they will do so with Marvel movies?"
It would have at least bosltered your "everything has gotten worst" point.
3) Let's talk about "the golden age of American policy." Who was it a golden age *for*?
Well, certainly not many African Americans, who were under the segregationist policies of Jim Crow in the South and expierienced redlining- a business policy- nationwide. Women weren't doing so great either. Nor were people who were gay. Oh, and let's not forget Native Americans- the protests that happened at the end of the 60s showed the failure of those policies.
Interestingly, while the article you link does talk at length about the seriousness of the Petagon Papers (and I am awfully glad that they thought so very "seriously" about lying to the American public and sending teenagers to die in a war on false pretenses), it doesn't talk much (I actually didn't see it talk about this at all, but maybe I missed a sentence) about the civil rights movement, women's liberation, gay liberation, etc etc, and how these movements showed the failures and blindspots of the "golden age".
So, in conclusion:
I think you do have a point about competition being bad for media truth. Given a choice, many will go to the person who tells them what they want to hear.
But in making this point, you rely on ignoring inconvenient information and historical realities. You snobbishingly deingrate all but reading, without critically examining print media in its totality. You commit the same sins you find in others: telling people a flattering story over a far messier truth.
Thanks for the good, meaty comments. A few thoughts in response...
1. I don't believe in golden ages or that everything is getting worse; neither do I believe that everything now is the best it's ever been. I think we can say that, in some respects, some moments of the past had advantages over ours. The fact that the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred at a time of partisan and often sensationalistic journalism isn't inconsistent with anything I wrote. The latter point confirms my point about the bad incentives created by fierce competition (I didn't have time to talk about the deficiencies of the 19th c. press, but you'll note I emphasized how competition slowed down in the 20th c. and quality improved); the popularity of that style of oration illustrates the cognitive advantages of 19th c. print culture. Good things and bad things can be happening at the same time.
2. I don't have anything against video games! I don't play them now, but I loved playing them when my boys were little--it was the first time we could compete on something and I didn't have to hold back (in fact they mopped the floor with me). I also don't have anything against TV--I've been a pretty heavy viewer all my life, and of course that's much less cognitively demanding than video games. The point is that there are higher things--and on that I am an uncompromising snob. Reading, especially reading books and other long and complex texts, is the best exercise your brain can get, and your brain is like a muscle in this regard: exercise it regularly or watch it atrophy.
3. I didn't say golden age of policy, I said golden age of state capacity. State capacity refers to the government's ability to actually accomplish what it sets out to do; it's not a judgment on whether the government's goals were good or bad. I believe, and I have written at length for the Niskanen Center, that American state capacity, or ability to govern effectively and in particular to get big things done, peaked in the decades after World War II. Many, many things have improved since then, but government effectiveness has gone in the other direction.
Talk about ignoring historical realities...you minimize the real impact of the printing press when you write that it "lead to centuries of religious warfare" ie, it transformed society and started a new historic era. Up until the introduction of interactive digital media, print, telegraph, radio and TV entailed a single message received by many and were limited by the boundaries of time (6:30 w/Walter Cronkite) or space. Today we have a completely new dynamic of many-to-many communications that are not limited by time and space. More importantly, they have introduced new "biases" that impact the way people interact, current research indicates, with each other.
Imagine Jefferson and Washington reconnecting on social media after decades of being fierce rivals? After their third interaction they would hate each other even more because of the expectation of instant feedback and the amplification of their various allies would fan the flames of their initial comments. But instead they wrote letters, often months apart. With more than 220 characters, they wrote more meaningfully about their observations and regrets. Most importantly, they had time to reflect and--most importantly for a democracy--deliberate in their correspondences. What we now consider some of the most important writings that have shaped our history (Adams/Jefferson letters) would have never had happened if they communicated via Twitter. (And the new Republic would never have survived the brutal 1800 election. Printed "attack" flyers of that time, are quant compared to the sophisticated tools of propaganda at our disposable in the digital age.)
This is what we have lost: Media technology that conducive to a democracy. One that promotes deliberation and not quick, snarky replies. Mediums that give one time to reflect, rather than anxieties because not enough people "liked" what they wrote.
Sure, no historical analogy is perfect, so let's not let that get in the way of a very good analogy.
I think you make some good points. I do think social media has some rather bad effects- the way it invites constant comparison to the percieved lives of others (which may be false, may be an outlier, but makes many miserable); the way it stokes division; and the way it encourages audience capture.
I did end my rather lengthy comment by saying I liked his idea of the divison between competition and good media.
However, I do have some issues. You mention the brutal 1800 election- I think it bears mentioning how brutal is was. Adams was attacked for being "hermaphorditic" (which, given modern fights about gender and gender identity... not the same, but history does rhyme if not repeat). We tend to remember the staid, glorious statesmanship of the letters you refer than the fact free, vile broadsheets published to attack opponents.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that we managed to have a bloody, brutal civil war, all with just the printing press to disseminate ideas. That war was neccesary and moral, but newspapers and articles helped form those moral, cultural ideas, and the internet has not yet lead to a civil war.
Which is not to say that it couldn't. It just seems to me that the divide should be less "print=good; internet=bad" and more "print=old, and we have at times and over time figured out guardrails; internet=new and we're figuring it out as we go." In order to avoid a civil war, or religious wars, or any war caused by the bloody internet, we probably do need guardrails, and I like the parts of this article that advocare for that.
But I think it hurts the effort to construct guardrails if we don't look at the past in its totality, if nothing else to learn from it. And looking at it in its totality, I find more parallels than aberrations, and I therefore think this article focuses too much on the aberrant nature over the continuity with the past
Unlike twitter or facebook, where I have a theory that it only takes two or three exchanges between two strangers before they start arguing and hurling insults at each other, but we are moving closer to agreeing than disagreeing. I attribute that to two general factors. First is the people (you and me) and our situational awareness, second is the tool we are using to communicate. We are here to talk about a "serious" issue, so we are in a more open minded mood, rather than a twitter environment where we may have our guard up. We also read a fairly long piece on this issue and we now have ample time and space to fully say what we mean.
So it really is an interaction between human nature and technology that creates our communication "system". Given this, can there be any doubt that the use of "leaflets" in 1800 had less of an impact on humans reading about Jefferson's interracial affairs and the names Adams was called? As opposed to modern memes depicting much more graphically than a leaflet? Like I said, I don't think a young Republic could have survived if the "issues" of the the 1800 election were transmitted with the kind of communication tools we have today.
So people can behave both good and bad and technology can be used for good and bad. And that's where guardrails come into place. But before you know where the guardrails need to go, you need to have some bad crashes to identify the dangerous places along the road. That's where we are at right now. The "old guard" media system is dead and the perils of the new system are just becoming clear.
Sadly I'm reminded of the quote by biologist Edward Wilson: “The problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”.
1- it’s a small thing, but I really appreciate what you had to say about video games. They are the one piece of my media diet that I *don’t* think is making me stupid.
2- I think the “golden age of three TV networks and one daily paper” claims are best judged by asking the question “do you think the people who passed the 1964 civil rights act could do so in our media environment, i.e. with Fox News and Twitter?”
We literally have a thing called “wokeness” which promotes the radical expansion of civil rights concepts and is embraced by nearly all powerful institutions.
They fly the blm and transgender flags around the world. English soccer players take a knee before games.
Gay marriage literally passed in the social media era.
I do have some ideas, but at the outset of this blog I've been concentrating on identifying and analyzing the daunting nature of the "permanent problem." I think my eventual discussion of possible solutions will make more sense once I've made clear the problems they're meant to solve.
Remarkable essay, Mr. Lindsey. Thank you. I was just thinking this morning about how much the entertainment industry has affected, even created, bad policing. Showing quality "peacekeeping" just doesn't hold the attention of viewers, but perhaps Hollywood should have more impulse control over profit-making before it shoves a steady diet at us of cops-as-thugs.
This media piece also puts the screws to political "entertainment." I read once that a former Fox executive admitted that the presentation of info-tainment on that network was contrived purposely to be seductive, addictive, and distractive. It prevents their audience from any type of extended focus on complex issues. The running chiron, which they adopted a la CNN, is part of that. They have even analyzed which part of the screen to place certain features on, to more easily align with brain receptivity.
I have watched as the better quality journalism outlets have succumbed to the necessity of profit-making clickbait in order to grab just a part of their former audience. Even the Guardian succumbs occasionally. The Google News algorithms are hogged by Fox, which uses clickbait headlines liberally. Some people never do climb out of their social media silos and are passively fed their "reality."
And it is disturbing to see my left wing friends prefer MSNBC. Although that venue does place more value on accurate reporting, their use of "talking heads" is often too manipulative for my taste.
You are correct in saying that "good old days" of TV news reporting were prone to manipulation, propaganda, and omission of information in service to the party line. But the one thing we had then was that the networks were forced to maintain fairly high standards of journalism, in that they self-monitored or monitored one another. Facts were facts, more often than not. There was little indulging in opinion pieces, which were designated time slots. The contemporary Wild West of the internet creates an audience which while complaining endlessly of partisan news, finds it difficult to distinguish opinion from fact -- especially when it fits one's own paradigm of belief.
And like others on this thread, I ask the question: just how do we save ourselves? We are on a relentless slide toward autocracy -- perhaps with the current oligarchy we have already arrived.
That was an outstanding essay! You did, however, leave out one critical puzzle piece, education. Over time, an embarrassingly smaller and smaller segment of the population comes out of the public education system with critical thinking skills. When I was working I was generally gifted with a 2 hr/day commute. My radio was always tuned to the local NPR station. As for TV, PBS. And yes, I always responded to their respective fund raiser.
Feb 7, 2023·edited Feb 7, 2023Liked by Brink Lindsey
This is a great essay, as all of them from this Substack have been. I'd go so far as to say the first many were among the most illuminating essays I've ever read on our contemporary political situation.
Two quibbles with this one, neither of which undermine your main argument but both of which seem important to historical accuracy:
1. You misattribute a quote to Les Moonves. He said that “it may not be good for America" not that "it may be bad for America."
2. You write that "[The mainstream media] assuming [the] role [of being an Anti-Fox News] while still claiming the mantle of old-style objective journalism couldn’t possibly work, and so it didn’t. The mainstream media’s authority as a reliable source of facts for both sides was wrecked." The Gallup data appear to me more ambiguous than your claim.
First, public trust of media has been on a very steady decline since 1976, almost a straight line. Second, there was already a large disparity between D's and R's trust in news media before Trump. Third, yes, Dems' trust in media shot up during the Trump years while R's trust cratered (while I's continued steadily downward), but even this last development leaves ample room for alternate explanations: for example, perhaps Trump's critical rhetoric about MSM was the larger cause. (Personally, I do tentatively agree that MSM reaction to Trump squandered their credibility with his supporters.)
Thanks for your kind words--and for catching my misquotation. I have a real gift for rewriting quotes in the space between reading them and typing them. For all the books I've written, I got interns to check every quote and offered $5 for every error they spotted--and they found lots! On this blog, though, I'm counting on my readers to set me straight. As to your second point, I've decided to write more about this topic for next week, and I will be addressing the Gallup data in more detail.
All of my claims in paragraph two are from the Gallup data hyperlinked in this sentence of the essay:
"The mainstream media’s authority as a reliable source of facts for both sides was wrecked: according to Gallup last October, 70 percent of Democrats continue to trust newspapers, radio, and TV to report the news accurately and fairly, but they are joined by only 27 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans."
Great post. Disappointed you don’t have a plan to save democracy. I read Amusing Ourselves to Death last year as well and came to the same conclusion: 1) what a bore 2) his main thesis is correct
Thank you for connecting all these dots. Changes will be required on many fronts. I am interested in understanding how we think. since It seems inadequate for the new information environment. One way to approach this is the new science of cognitive immunity, I think it shows a great deal of promise. https://cognitiveimmunology.net/.
The link below is a case study (documentary) chronicling the 2016 media coverage of the early days of the presidential election to demonstrate your points. As one talking head said back then, "to understand the origins of 'fake media', you have to look at the practices of the real media." As the producer/narrator I concluded that "the media (system) is incapable of thoughtfully covering a national election". https://youtu.be/ATktPy8vOgo
Imagine someone saying "there is no difference between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, why are we fighting?"
But of course from everything we know in Star Trek there was a vast difference. Just as there was a vast difference between their Original Series stand ins: the USA and Soviet Union. One was an evil empire, and it's a good thing it was fought in any realistic scenario not involving contrived alien powers.
It's worth noting that the "reality based community" got the Soviet Union and communism wrong for a very long time.
Looking at our own situation, there is a class of people who want to believe politics doesn't matter. Until 2020 I was more or less on board with this view, at least I thought my impact on things was small enough that it wasn't worth my time and I often didn't even vote.
Then they locked my in my home, closed my schools, made me and my family wear a useless mask everywhere, promoted vast rioting based on genocidal racial rhetoric that they have written into policy, and passed such a degree of wasteful spending on a party line vote it destroyed the currency.
No, politics matters. And one side is WAY more correct than the other.
Imagine living in Florida these last few years instead of California. The difference in quality of life was vast. Hundreds of thousands of people have voted with their feet on this one.
I once added up everything one could save between the two states based on cost of living, taxes, and school vouchers (Florida is about to give people universal school vouchers via HB1). For a professional couple with kids, it's like winning the lottery. And they don't even teach weird queer shit to kids in elementary school.
You know what people are going to write about Trump in fifty years.
1) His time as president was prosperous. He passed a common sense tax reform and the economy did well.
2) He started no wars, pretty good for a US president.
3) While erratic, on the whole he mostly supported open schools and greater freedom during COVID, which we can all agree was the correct position.
This is the great demon?
The NYTimes did a glowing review of Fauci in their paper recently. Poster child #1 for the "reality based community". Is there any man who did more to make the pandemic worse than him?
I think implicit in this entire post is the idea that there is some community of individuals that has all the right answers and would implement them if only the carnival barkers would get out of the way.
That's nonsense. I've seen those people, they don't have the answers.
Maybe if our reality based community was more like Lee Kuan Yew (actually correct rather than thinking they are correct) some kind of moderate censorship laws would make sense. As it stands I'd be very afraid of letting our existing "reality based community" control the discource.
"Then they locked my in my home, closed my schools, made me and my family wear a useless mask everywhere, promoted vast rioting based on genocidal racial rhetoric that they have written into policy, and passed such a degree of wasteful spending on a party line vote it destroyed the currency."
Countries that had lockdowns and masks had low rates of COVID fatalities -- the US had enormous numbers of fatalities. We were the shame of the world. A once in a hundred years pandemic requires some societal sacrifice and cooperation. It's incredibly self-centered to refuse to cooperate to save you, your family, or your neighbors. The proof is there, if you choose to see it.
The rioting charge is ridiculous. Protests by and large were peaceful. When you have large groups, you can easily cherrypick exceptions. And you do not mention the J6 event in that light. Is that because you treat it differently?
"Wasteful spending" is a subjective term. It brought us out of the pandemic, and kept employment fairly strong post-pandemic -- as it is today. FDR created some "wasteful spending" in the New Deal. I'm sure most Americans would not want to give up what remains of those programs. Instead, we take them for granted as entitlements.
Trump's "common sense" tax "reform" was a boondoggle for the very wealthy, who received a permanent cut -- for the middle class, it had an expiration of a few years. Can you explain the logic of that without favoring the elites?
It's obvious that you and I see recent events through a very different lens of the media that Mr. Lindsey describes. Personally, I prefer to strongly vet my Presidents before choosing my vote. Donald Trump's personal and business track records, not to mention his vulnerability to manipulation from others are a non-starter for me.
And remember that the US had a divided federal government, and 50 states with their own separate, often divided governments. Meanwhile in the UK the Johnson government had a historic majority, and the constitutional authority to revoke powers from lower levels of government.
The idea that the US was the worst in the world in managing COVID was a pure beatup by the entire world media (it was pushed here in Australia daily during 2020), and it was based on journalists WILLFULLY being statistically illiterate in repeatedly showing the total casualty numbers rather than per-capita. It's such a basic mistake that it cannot be anything other than deliberate, and it was done specifically to take shots at you know who. (It was also based on the idea that you can trust the official government death rates outside of Europe, North America, and a few countries in Asia. This is all stuff you would be immediately skeptical of if you didn't WANT to be fooled.)
"Countries that had lockdowns and masks had low rates of COVID fatalities"
Nope, not even close. And even if it were true, it would still fail a cost/benefit analysis.
"A once in a hundred years pandemic requires some societal sacrifice and cooperation"
You've got to sacrifice some freedoms to bring about the workers paradise comrade.
"Protests by and large were peaceful."
You're insane bro. It's like your on an alternate planet.
"It brought us out of the pandemic."
What brought us out of the pandemic is when they stopped the pandemic policies.
"FDR created some "wasteful spending" in the New Deal."
The highest federal deficit during the Great Depression was 5.36% of GDP. The deficit was 14.9% and 11.9% for 2020 and 2021, and that doesn't count Fed actions. The New Deal fed starving people. COVID paid them to order takeout on their phone (and that would be the least wasteful of the spending).
"Can you explain the logic of that without favoring the elites?"
Trump eliminated SALT, one of the most affluent focused and distortionary tax breaks out there. He increased the standard deduction to the point where it made sense for most people not to itemize.
This is not one of your best. The country is divided because, well, because the country is divided. The dramatic slowdown in productivity growth, the dramatic transformation of the Great Lakes region from greater than average to less than average prosperity, the emergence of environmentalism as a major issue, putting "quality of life" ahead of economic development, the drive for racial and sexual equality, and the lack of a unifying enemy (i.e., communism) have created a society divided between blue state winners and red state losers that is very different from the "good old days", which at age 77 I remember quite well, though in fact, if you're financially comfortable, life is much better now than it used to be. In the good old days everyone except open segregationists and a few cranky businessmen benefited from New Deal liberalism. That is no longer the case. Fox News exists not because of some sort of plot, but because liberalism has not solved the problem of America's racist heritage, and the new attempts--demonizing standardized testing, for example--are both ludicrous and disastrous. The sexual revolution is also "controversial". It is not an accident that Catholics and evangelicals reject leadership roles for women in their religious establishments. Thinking that if everyone would believe everything they read in the New York Times everything would be fine is not a good idea.
As I wrote in the piece, and in numerous other essays on this blog, I agree that there are many factors besides the media environment that explain our social and political divisions--but that doesn't mean that the media environment is irrelevant. I don't believe in the good old days, or have any interest in returning to them, and I've argued that the New York Times can partially blame itself for the fact that it is so distrusted outside the left. But I do think that the media environment for public affairs is really bad, and it will be hard to maintain stable democracies and effective governance unless we can figure out how to improve things.
Thanks for both "thoughtful" replies. One difference between "today" and the past is that neither side has a controlling majority in the country. Constant failure has a tendency to make one bitter. Liberals are painfully unwilling to admit just how costly the liberal devotion to racial equality--equality of outcomes, not opportunity--is to them. The New Deal really was the White Deal, which is why FDR was so "wildly" popular. People like Brad Delong were furious with Obama because he didn't "rule" like FDR. If Obama had had FD's majorities in Congress--which increased in both 1934 and 1936, he would have. Similarly, Republicans were driven crazy by Clinton's wins in 1992 and 1996 and stunned in 2000 when their beloved "mortal lock" on the presidency (remember that?) failed to reassert itself. Yes, vicious rumors and falsehoods do circulate easily on the internet, but I would remind you that it was the entire foreign policy and policy establishment, with painfully few exceptions, that gave us the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Obama administration both continued the war in Afghanistan despite the disastrous example of Iraq, and gave us "Iraq lite" in Libya, and then even tried to do it again in Syria, only to back off at the last minute. The drug of regime change--which, I might point out, is "illegal" as well as immoral, bloody, and counterproductive in the extreme--has yet to wear off. A. J. Liebling, whom perhaps Kevin remembers, liked to say that there would be no freedom of the press until every man had his own printing press. Well, we're there.
For me at least, the fact that we were somewhat united in the Depression (w/a Dem super majority) and we are bitterly divided today still begs the question “why”? I understand the historical forces that bitterly divided the country pre and post civil war. Also the debate between “equality” vs “liberty” are older that our Republic and is a long theme in our national debate. So I’m not convinced that blaming equity overreach is valid.
And the answer is the Liebling quote you provide. We all have not just a personal printing press, but personal Tv stations and studios. (Hell I singlehandly followed Prez candidates with a camera and with $400 software edited a film about the experience). And it is this decentralized media environment where we are all “the media” that is what different than previous historical epochs.
Sure things are economically uncertain today and there is good reason for people to be “mad”. And while neither of us lived in the depression, our parents did and I suspect you know Depression history well. It brought great threats from the left (Huey Long) and the right (Father Coughlin). Contrasted against today, the legitimate despair of today pales in comparison to the 1930s. Yet the rise of political extreme and anger of today is greater today, with Jan 6th insurrection and homegrown fascists not influence by outside factors like what was happening in Europe in the 30s. If you accept my theory that todays “outrage” is far worse than the depression, when you compare the real economic conditions on the ground, you have to ask: what is different? Why did a decade of mass unemployment and poverty NOT cause greater social unrest, than the unrest we see today when unemployment is 3.4%? My theory is the powerful emotional impact of new media creates angrier media consumers, ESPECIALLY when they are purposely manipulated by very bad actors. Do you think our current “outrage” about our world today is on par with the public outrage/economic conditions s of the depression? If not, why?
Late to the party but heard your interview today on the Enemies List and thought I would respond; I definitely want to replay that episode again!
I would love to get your take on something I've wondered about for several years: How we absorb, process information.
Now I (heart) my Kindle and iPhone and admittedly do a lot of reading of longer form articles (you know, the kind with verbs) on them. But I wonder if you did a controlled study; giving two groups of people the same ten books/magazines but one group could only read them electronically and the other group could only read hard copies . . . which group at the end of a month would score better on a quiz of material taken from these sources, and could write more detailed, intricate arguments about the stories they have read?
I want to like this, but there's a lot of problems:
1) You paint the past as far better than it was, to make the pressent seem more of an abberation than it was. The Printing Press did not, arguably, make us smarter- at least not at first. It lead to centuries of religious warfare (remember, Guttenber started with the Bible, and translation of the Bible into the vernacular- aided by the printing press- was one of the many schisms between Protestant and Catholic). It took quite a while for reading and writing to become "respectable" in the way we now think of it.
As for your point about Lincoln-Douglas: those debates coincided with penny dreadfuls, full of tales of 'orrible murder and depraved crime. They were followed a few years later by the era of yellow journalism- an era that you could have cited to bolster your point about competition leading to error, but you ignore (because it goes against your point about the good old days of media and the virtues of the printed word, perhaps?)
And, on the subject of oration: I know a few people who love 8 hour YouTube documentaries that are just one person talking. Or three hour podcasts where people go back and forth. For all that some of the populations attention has diminished (and does seem, on net, to have diminished overall) I think a good argument must account for or at least try to explain away these continuities.
If one wants to use history to bolster their argument, then one needs to account for history in its totality, not the most flattering examples.
2) "you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists."
It's 2022, The Last of Us has been turned into a series that will win Emmies, and we're still on this?
Ah, yes, video games. Those childish amusements, that obviously have no artistic value (well... except for Braid. And Portal. And Chrono Trigger. And Wind Waker. And... well, I could go on for days, but I believe the point is clear). They contain no reading (well... except for visual novels. And text based games. Oh, and those RPGs sure are wordy). There is nothing deeper to engage with and analyze (because video games have not been the subject of essays... right?)
Actually, now that I've mentioned essays: how cavalier you are in dismissing deeper engagement with television, radio, and film. It's not like whole academic disciplines are devoted to "reading" these "texts" or anything. And, sure, once again, many people DON'T engage with them on a deeper level, but if anything the internet has popularized deep textual anaylsis of non-textual works.
You could have at least tried to make some kind of argument like, "People write books about Citizen Kane- do you honestly think that they will do so with Marvel movies?"
It would have at least bosltered your "everything has gotten worst" point.
3) Let's talk about "the golden age of American policy." Who was it a golden age *for*?
Well, certainly not many African Americans, who were under the segregationist policies of Jim Crow in the South and expierienced redlining- a business policy- nationwide. Women weren't doing so great either. Nor were people who were gay. Oh, and let's not forget Native Americans- the protests that happened at the end of the 60s showed the failure of those policies.
Interestingly, while the article you link does talk at length about the seriousness of the Petagon Papers (and I am awfully glad that they thought so very "seriously" about lying to the American public and sending teenagers to die in a war on false pretenses), it doesn't talk much (I actually didn't see it talk about this at all, but maybe I missed a sentence) about the civil rights movement, women's liberation, gay liberation, etc etc, and how these movements showed the failures and blindspots of the "golden age".
So, in conclusion:
I think you do have a point about competition being bad for media truth. Given a choice, many will go to the person who tells them what they want to hear.
But in making this point, you rely on ignoring inconvenient information and historical realities. You snobbishingly deingrate all but reading, without critically examining print media in its totality. You commit the same sins you find in others: telling people a flattering story over a far messier truth.
Thanks for the good, meaty comments. A few thoughts in response...
1. I don't believe in golden ages or that everything is getting worse; neither do I believe that everything now is the best it's ever been. I think we can say that, in some respects, some moments of the past had advantages over ours. The fact that the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred at a time of partisan and often sensationalistic journalism isn't inconsistent with anything I wrote. The latter point confirms my point about the bad incentives created by fierce competition (I didn't have time to talk about the deficiencies of the 19th c. press, but you'll note I emphasized how competition slowed down in the 20th c. and quality improved); the popularity of that style of oration illustrates the cognitive advantages of 19th c. print culture. Good things and bad things can be happening at the same time.
2. I don't have anything against video games! I don't play them now, but I loved playing them when my boys were little--it was the first time we could compete on something and I didn't have to hold back (in fact they mopped the floor with me). I also don't have anything against TV--I've been a pretty heavy viewer all my life, and of course that's much less cognitively demanding than video games. The point is that there are higher things--and on that I am an uncompromising snob. Reading, especially reading books and other long and complex texts, is the best exercise your brain can get, and your brain is like a muscle in this regard: exercise it regularly or watch it atrophy.
3. I didn't say golden age of policy, I said golden age of state capacity. State capacity refers to the government's ability to actually accomplish what it sets out to do; it's not a judgment on whether the government's goals were good or bad. I believe, and I have written at length for the Niskanen Center, that American state capacity, or ability to govern effectively and in particular to get big things done, peaked in the decades after World War II. Many, many things have improved since then, but government effectiveness has gone in the other direction.
Talk about ignoring historical realities...you minimize the real impact of the printing press when you write that it "lead to centuries of religious warfare" ie, it transformed society and started a new historic era. Up until the introduction of interactive digital media, print, telegraph, radio and TV entailed a single message received by many and were limited by the boundaries of time (6:30 w/Walter Cronkite) or space. Today we have a completely new dynamic of many-to-many communications that are not limited by time and space. More importantly, they have introduced new "biases" that impact the way people interact, current research indicates, with each other.
Imagine Jefferson and Washington reconnecting on social media after decades of being fierce rivals? After their third interaction they would hate each other even more because of the expectation of instant feedback and the amplification of their various allies would fan the flames of their initial comments. But instead they wrote letters, often months apart. With more than 220 characters, they wrote more meaningfully about their observations and regrets. Most importantly, they had time to reflect and--most importantly for a democracy--deliberate in their correspondences. What we now consider some of the most important writings that have shaped our history (Adams/Jefferson letters) would have never had happened if they communicated via Twitter. (And the new Republic would never have survived the brutal 1800 election. Printed "attack" flyers of that time, are quant compared to the sophisticated tools of propaganda at our disposable in the digital age.)
This is what we have lost: Media technology that conducive to a democracy. One that promotes deliberation and not quick, snarky replies. Mediums that give one time to reflect, rather than anxieties because not enough people "liked" what they wrote.
Sure, no historical analogy is perfect, so let's not let that get in the way of a very good analogy.
I think you make some good points. I do think social media has some rather bad effects- the way it invites constant comparison to the percieved lives of others (which may be false, may be an outlier, but makes many miserable); the way it stokes division; and the way it encourages audience capture.
I did end my rather lengthy comment by saying I liked his idea of the divison between competition and good media.
However, I do have some issues. You mention the brutal 1800 election- I think it bears mentioning how brutal is was. Adams was attacked for being "hermaphorditic" (which, given modern fights about gender and gender identity... not the same, but history does rhyme if not repeat). We tend to remember the staid, glorious statesmanship of the letters you refer than the fact free, vile broadsheets published to attack opponents.
I would also be remiss if I didn't mention that we managed to have a bloody, brutal civil war, all with just the printing press to disseminate ideas. That war was neccesary and moral, but newspapers and articles helped form those moral, cultural ideas, and the internet has not yet lead to a civil war.
Which is not to say that it couldn't. It just seems to me that the divide should be less "print=good; internet=bad" and more "print=old, and we have at times and over time figured out guardrails; internet=new and we're figuring it out as we go." In order to avoid a civil war, or religious wars, or any war caused by the bloody internet, we probably do need guardrails, and I like the parts of this article that advocare for that.
But I think it hurts the effort to construct guardrails if we don't look at the past in its totality, if nothing else to learn from it. And looking at it in its totality, I find more parallels than aberrations, and I therefore think this article focuses too much on the aberrant nature over the continuity with the past
Unlike twitter or facebook, where I have a theory that it only takes two or three exchanges between two strangers before they start arguing and hurling insults at each other, but we are moving closer to agreeing than disagreeing. I attribute that to two general factors. First is the people (you and me) and our situational awareness, second is the tool we are using to communicate. We are here to talk about a "serious" issue, so we are in a more open minded mood, rather than a twitter environment where we may have our guard up. We also read a fairly long piece on this issue and we now have ample time and space to fully say what we mean.
So it really is an interaction between human nature and technology that creates our communication "system". Given this, can there be any doubt that the use of "leaflets" in 1800 had less of an impact on humans reading about Jefferson's interracial affairs and the names Adams was called? As opposed to modern memes depicting much more graphically than a leaflet? Like I said, I don't think a young Republic could have survived if the "issues" of the the 1800 election were transmitted with the kind of communication tools we have today.
So people can behave both good and bad and technology can be used for good and bad. And that's where guardrails come into place. But before you know where the guardrails need to go, you need to have some bad crashes to identify the dangerous places along the road. That's where we are at right now. The "old guard" media system is dead and the perils of the new system are just becoming clear.
Sadly I'm reminded of the quote by biologist Edward Wilson: “The problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology”.
I love that Wilson quote, which I learned of only recently.
1- it’s a small thing, but I really appreciate what you had to say about video games. They are the one piece of my media diet that I *don’t* think is making me stupid.
2- I think the “golden age of three TV networks and one daily paper” claims are best judged by asking the question “do you think the people who passed the 1964 civil rights act could do so in our media environment, i.e. with Fox News and Twitter?”
We literally have a thing called “wokeness” which promotes the radical expansion of civil rights concepts and is embraced by nearly all powerful institutions.
They fly the blm and transgender flags around the world. English soccer players take a knee before games.
Gay marriage literally passed in the social media era.
“We couldn’t pass civil rights because Fox News?”
What alternative universe do you live in?
"How do we put the fire out?"
I would love to see some ideas for this.
Maybe someone with a substack called The Permanent Problem already has some ideas (theirs or others) about possible solutions?
I do have some ideas, but at the outset of this blog I've been concentrating on identifying and analyzing the daunting nature of the "permanent problem." I think my eventual discussion of possible solutions will make more sense once I've made clear the problems they're meant to solve.
Wouldn't it be easier to leave the house?
Well I moved to Thailand, but I don't think that's going to work for everybody.
Remarkable essay, Mr. Lindsey. Thank you. I was just thinking this morning about how much the entertainment industry has affected, even created, bad policing. Showing quality "peacekeeping" just doesn't hold the attention of viewers, but perhaps Hollywood should have more impulse control over profit-making before it shoves a steady diet at us of cops-as-thugs.
This media piece also puts the screws to political "entertainment." I read once that a former Fox executive admitted that the presentation of info-tainment on that network was contrived purposely to be seductive, addictive, and distractive. It prevents their audience from any type of extended focus on complex issues. The running chiron, which they adopted a la CNN, is part of that. They have even analyzed which part of the screen to place certain features on, to more easily align with brain receptivity.
I have watched as the better quality journalism outlets have succumbed to the necessity of profit-making clickbait in order to grab just a part of their former audience. Even the Guardian succumbs occasionally. The Google News algorithms are hogged by Fox, which uses clickbait headlines liberally. Some people never do climb out of their social media silos and are passively fed their "reality."
And it is disturbing to see my left wing friends prefer MSNBC. Although that venue does place more value on accurate reporting, their use of "talking heads" is often too manipulative for my taste.
You are correct in saying that "good old days" of TV news reporting were prone to manipulation, propaganda, and omission of information in service to the party line. But the one thing we had then was that the networks were forced to maintain fairly high standards of journalism, in that they self-monitored or monitored one another. Facts were facts, more often than not. There was little indulging in opinion pieces, which were designated time slots. The contemporary Wild West of the internet creates an audience which while complaining endlessly of partisan news, finds it difficult to distinguish opinion from fact -- especially when it fits one's own paradigm of belief.
And like others on this thread, I ask the question: just how do we save ourselves? We are on a relentless slide toward autocracy -- perhaps with the current oligarchy we have already arrived.
That was an outstanding essay! You did, however, leave out one critical puzzle piece, education. Over time, an embarrassingly smaller and smaller segment of the population comes out of the public education system with critical thinking skills. When I was working I was generally gifted with a 2 hr/day commute. My radio was always tuned to the local NPR station. As for TV, PBS. And yes, I always responded to their respective fund raiser.
This is a great essay, as all of them from this Substack have been. I'd go so far as to say the first many were among the most illuminating essays I've ever read on our contemporary political situation.
Two quibbles with this one, neither of which undermine your main argument but both of which seem important to historical accuracy:
1. You misattribute a quote to Les Moonves. He said that “it may not be good for America" not that "it may be bad for America."
2. You write that "[The mainstream media] assuming [the] role [of being an Anti-Fox News] while still claiming the mantle of old-style objective journalism couldn’t possibly work, and so it didn’t. The mainstream media’s authority as a reliable source of facts for both sides was wrecked." The Gallup data appear to me more ambiguous than your claim.
First, public trust of media has been on a very steady decline since 1976, almost a straight line. Second, there was already a large disparity between D's and R's trust in news media before Trump. Third, yes, Dems' trust in media shot up during the Trump years while R's trust cratered (while I's continued steadily downward), but even this last development leaves ample room for alternate explanations: for example, perhaps Trump's critical rhetoric about MSM was the larger cause. (Personally, I do tentatively agree that MSM reaction to Trump squandered their credibility with his supporters.)
Thanks for your kind words--and for catching my misquotation. I have a real gift for rewriting quotes in the space between reading them and typing them. For all the books I've written, I got interns to check every quote and offered $5 for every error they spotted--and they found lots! On this blog, though, I'm counting on my readers to set me straight. As to your second point, I've decided to write more about this topic for next week, and I will be addressing the Gallup data in more detail.
Thank you for the gracious response! I look forward to your future posts.
(1) The salient point about Moonves' quote does not lie with the exact wording, but that he "said it out loud." But yes, quotes should be exact.
(2) I'm curious about your claims in the second paragraph of your comment. Citing research would have been helpful.
All of my claims in paragraph two are from the Gallup data hyperlinked in this sentence of the essay:
"The mainstream media’s authority as a reliable source of facts for both sides was wrecked: according to Gallup last October, 70 percent of Democrats continue to trust newspapers, radio, and TV to report the news accurately and fairly, but they are joined by only 27 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans."
It was probably easy to miss. Here is that link for your perusal: https://news.gallup.com/poll/403166/americans-trust-media-remains-near-record-low.aspx
Thank you.
np :)
Great post. Disappointed you don’t have a plan to save democracy. I read Amusing Ourselves to Death last year as well and came to the same conclusion: 1) what a bore 2) his main thesis is correct
I do have some ideas for solutions! But right now I'm cataloging problems--building drama until the intellectual cavalry arrives...
Thank you for connecting all these dots. Changes will be required on many fronts. I am interested in understanding how we think. since It seems inadequate for the new information environment. One way to approach this is the new science of cognitive immunity, I think it shows a great deal of promise. https://cognitiveimmunology.net/.
The link below is a case study (documentary) chronicling the 2016 media coverage of the early days of the presidential election to demonstrate your points. As one talking head said back then, "to understand the origins of 'fake media', you have to look at the practices of the real media." As the producer/narrator I concluded that "the media (system) is incapable of thoughtfully covering a national election". https://youtu.be/ATktPy8vOgo
I love Star Trek, but it can be contrived.
Imagine someone saying "there is no difference between the Federation and the Klingon Empire, why are we fighting?"
But of course from everything we know in Star Trek there was a vast difference. Just as there was a vast difference between their Original Series stand ins: the USA and Soviet Union. One was an evil empire, and it's a good thing it was fought in any realistic scenario not involving contrived alien powers.
It's worth noting that the "reality based community" got the Soviet Union and communism wrong for a very long time.
Looking at our own situation, there is a class of people who want to believe politics doesn't matter. Until 2020 I was more or less on board with this view, at least I thought my impact on things was small enough that it wasn't worth my time and I often didn't even vote.
Then they locked my in my home, closed my schools, made me and my family wear a useless mask everywhere, promoted vast rioting based on genocidal racial rhetoric that they have written into policy, and passed such a degree of wasteful spending on a party line vote it destroyed the currency.
No, politics matters. And one side is WAY more correct than the other.
Imagine living in Florida these last few years instead of California. The difference in quality of life was vast. Hundreds of thousands of people have voted with their feet on this one.
I once added up everything one could save between the two states based on cost of living, taxes, and school vouchers (Florida is about to give people universal school vouchers via HB1). For a professional couple with kids, it's like winning the lottery. And they don't even teach weird queer shit to kids in elementary school.
You know what people are going to write about Trump in fifty years.
1) His time as president was prosperous. He passed a common sense tax reform and the economy did well.
2) He started no wars, pretty good for a US president.
3) While erratic, on the whole he mostly supported open schools and greater freedom during COVID, which we can all agree was the correct position.
This is the great demon?
The NYTimes did a glowing review of Fauci in their paper recently. Poster child #1 for the "reality based community". Is there any man who did more to make the pandemic worse than him?
I think implicit in this entire post is the idea that there is some community of individuals that has all the right answers and would implement them if only the carnival barkers would get out of the way.
That's nonsense. I've seen those people, they don't have the answers.
Maybe if our reality based community was more like Lee Kuan Yew (actually correct rather than thinking they are correct) some kind of moderate censorship laws would make sense. As it stands I'd be very afraid of letting our existing "reality based community" control the discource.
"Then they locked my in my home, closed my schools, made me and my family wear a useless mask everywhere, promoted vast rioting based on genocidal racial rhetoric that they have written into policy, and passed such a degree of wasteful spending on a party line vote it destroyed the currency."
Countries that had lockdowns and masks had low rates of COVID fatalities -- the US had enormous numbers of fatalities. We were the shame of the world. A once in a hundred years pandemic requires some societal sacrifice and cooperation. It's incredibly self-centered to refuse to cooperate to save you, your family, or your neighbors. The proof is there, if you choose to see it.
The rioting charge is ridiculous. Protests by and large were peaceful. When you have large groups, you can easily cherrypick exceptions. And you do not mention the J6 event in that light. Is that because you treat it differently?
"Wasteful spending" is a subjective term. It brought us out of the pandemic, and kept employment fairly strong post-pandemic -- as it is today. FDR created some "wasteful spending" in the New Deal. I'm sure most Americans would not want to give up what remains of those programs. Instead, we take them for granted as entitlements.
Trump's "common sense" tax "reform" was a boondoggle for the very wealthy, who received a permanent cut -- for the middle class, it had an expiration of a few years. Can you explain the logic of that without favoring the elites?
It's obvious that you and I see recent events through a very different lens of the media that Mr. Lindsey describes. Personally, I prefer to strongly vet my Presidents before choosing my vote. Donald Trump's personal and business track records, not to mention his vulnerability to manipulation from others are a non-starter for me.
I'm sorry to say this, but you have been fooled by the media. From Wikipedia, COVID deaths per million (at February 11, 2023):
US: 3,293
UK: 3,219
EU: 2,686
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_death_rates_by_country
And remember that the US had a divided federal government, and 50 states with their own separate, often divided governments. Meanwhile in the UK the Johnson government had a historic majority, and the constitutional authority to revoke powers from lower levels of government.
The idea that the US was the worst in the world in managing COVID was a pure beatup by the entire world media (it was pushed here in Australia daily during 2020), and it was based on journalists WILLFULLY being statistically illiterate in repeatedly showing the total casualty numbers rather than per-capita. It's such a basic mistake that it cannot be anything other than deliberate, and it was done specifically to take shots at you know who. (It was also based on the idea that you can trust the official government death rates outside of Europe, North America, and a few countries in Asia. This is all stuff you would be immediately skeptical of if you didn't WANT to be fooled.)
"Countries that had lockdowns and masks had low rates of COVID fatalities"
Nope, not even close. And even if it were true, it would still fail a cost/benefit analysis.
"A once in a hundred years pandemic requires some societal sacrifice and cooperation"
You've got to sacrifice some freedoms to bring about the workers paradise comrade.
"Protests by and large were peaceful."
You're insane bro. It's like your on an alternate planet.
"It brought us out of the pandemic."
What brought us out of the pandemic is when they stopped the pandemic policies.
"FDR created some "wasteful spending" in the New Deal."
The highest federal deficit during the Great Depression was 5.36% of GDP. The deficit was 14.9% and 11.9% for 2020 and 2021, and that doesn't count Fed actions. The New Deal fed starving people. COVID paid them to order takeout on their phone (and that would be the least wasteful of the spending).
"Can you explain the logic of that without favoring the elites?"
Trump eliminated SALT, one of the most affluent focused and distortionary tax breaks out there. He increased the standard deduction to the point where it made sense for most people not to itemize.
This is not one of your best. The country is divided because, well, because the country is divided. The dramatic slowdown in productivity growth, the dramatic transformation of the Great Lakes region from greater than average to less than average prosperity, the emergence of environmentalism as a major issue, putting "quality of life" ahead of economic development, the drive for racial and sexual equality, and the lack of a unifying enemy (i.e., communism) have created a society divided between blue state winners and red state losers that is very different from the "good old days", which at age 77 I remember quite well, though in fact, if you're financially comfortable, life is much better now than it used to be. In the good old days everyone except open segregationists and a few cranky businessmen benefited from New Deal liberalism. That is no longer the case. Fox News exists not because of some sort of plot, but because liberalism has not solved the problem of America's racist heritage, and the new attempts--demonizing standardized testing, for example--are both ludicrous and disastrous. The sexual revolution is also "controversial". It is not an accident that Catholics and evangelicals reject leadership roles for women in their religious establishments. Thinking that if everyone would believe everything they read in the New York Times everything would be fine is not a good idea.
As I wrote in the piece, and in numerous other essays on this blog, I agree that there are many factors besides the media environment that explain our social and political divisions--but that doesn't mean that the media environment is irrelevant. I don't believe in the good old days, or have any interest in returning to them, and I've argued that the New York Times can partially blame itself for the fact that it is so distrusted outside the left. But I do think that the media environment for public affairs is really bad, and it will be hard to maintain stable democracies and effective governance unless we can figure out how to improve things.
Thanks for both "thoughtful" replies. One difference between "today" and the past is that neither side has a controlling majority in the country. Constant failure has a tendency to make one bitter. Liberals are painfully unwilling to admit just how costly the liberal devotion to racial equality--equality of outcomes, not opportunity--is to them. The New Deal really was the White Deal, which is why FDR was so "wildly" popular. People like Brad Delong were furious with Obama because he didn't "rule" like FDR. If Obama had had FD's majorities in Congress--which increased in both 1934 and 1936, he would have. Similarly, Republicans were driven crazy by Clinton's wins in 1992 and 1996 and stunned in 2000 when their beloved "mortal lock" on the presidency (remember that?) failed to reassert itself. Yes, vicious rumors and falsehoods do circulate easily on the internet, but I would remind you that it was the entire foreign policy and policy establishment, with painfully few exceptions, that gave us the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Obama administration both continued the war in Afghanistan despite the disastrous example of Iraq, and gave us "Iraq lite" in Libya, and then even tried to do it again in Syria, only to back off at the last minute. The drug of regime change--which, I might point out, is "illegal" as well as immoral, bloody, and counterproductive in the extreme--has yet to wear off. A. J. Liebling, whom perhaps Kevin remembers, liked to say that there would be no freedom of the press until every man had his own printing press. Well, we're there.
For me at least, the fact that we were somewhat united in the Depression (w/a Dem super majority) and we are bitterly divided today still begs the question “why”? I understand the historical forces that bitterly divided the country pre and post civil war. Also the debate between “equality” vs “liberty” are older that our Republic and is a long theme in our national debate. So I’m not convinced that blaming equity overreach is valid.
And the answer is the Liebling quote you provide. We all have not just a personal printing press, but personal Tv stations and studios. (Hell I singlehandly followed Prez candidates with a camera and with $400 software edited a film about the experience). And it is this decentralized media environment where we are all “the media” that is what different than previous historical epochs.
Sure things are economically uncertain today and there is good reason for people to be “mad”. And while neither of us lived in the depression, our parents did and I suspect you know Depression history well. It brought great threats from the left (Huey Long) and the right (Father Coughlin). Contrasted against today, the legitimate despair of today pales in comparison to the 1930s. Yet the rise of political extreme and anger of today is greater today, with Jan 6th insurrection and homegrown fascists not influence by outside factors like what was happening in Europe in the 30s. If you accept my theory that todays “outrage” is far worse than the depression, when you compare the real economic conditions on the ground, you have to ask: what is different? Why did a decade of mass unemployment and poverty NOT cause greater social unrest, than the unrest we see today when unemployment is 3.4%? My theory is the powerful emotional impact of new media creates angrier media consumers, ESPECIALLY when they are purposely manipulated by very bad actors. Do you think our current “outrage” about our world today is on par with the public outrage/economic conditions s of the depression? If not, why?
Late to the party but heard your interview today on the Enemies List and thought I would respond; I definitely want to replay that episode again!
I would love to get your take on something I've wondered about for several years: How we absorb, process information.
Now I (heart) my Kindle and iPhone and admittedly do a lot of reading of longer form articles (you know, the kind with verbs) on them. But I wonder if you did a controlled study; giving two groups of people the same ten books/magazines but one group could only read them electronically and the other group could only read hard copies . . . which group at the end of a month would score better on a quiz of material taken from these sources, and could write more detailed, intricate arguments about the stories they have read?