Photo by Vojtech Bruzek
Reading time: 7 minutes
punditman says…
Whenever some tedious dispute occurs down at the pub surrounding some arcane piece of trivia, a friend will quip, “Gee guys it's too bad you don't have a magical device in your pocket that will give you the answer.”
“Chicago reached the Stanley Cup final in 1973, but Montreal won it. Next question?”
As for resolving simple factoids, our tethered devices do a decent job. Yet these Knowledge Infusers offer so much more — such as providing access to an immense array of excellent podcasts and high-quality, independent journalism.
Of course there are endless rabbit holes of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation (all distinctly different) and now with AI platforms like ChatGPT, the occasional “factual hallucination.”
Maybe that’s why I've noticed many folks in my realm remain attached to what they consider “tried and true” sources like CNN, CBC, BBC, The Guardian, or what have you — the assumption being they’re more trustworthy.
This baffles me. If I’m totally honest, it triggers me too, having spent a good chunk of time researching and critiquing corporate media as part of a long ago graduate thesis. But it also helps explain why I continue to get strange looks when I mention independent, award-winning journalists who have left traditional corporate media such as Matt Taibbi or Chris Hedges or Canada’s Tara Henley.
In any case, big media is in big trouble – but not just because of technology, economics and poor business decisions. Mistrust in legacy media pre-dates, by far, their current attrition — the elephants in the room being major failures on several investigative fronts: from the Iraq War WMD debacle to Russiagate delusions, to the attempt to control the narrative surrounding every angle of the Covid-19 pandemic, no matter how controversial, including censorship of skeptics (without getting into all the murky nuances of that mammoth topic). Then there’s the one-dimensional, censored doublethink that passes for sober analysis of the geopolitical cluster@!#$ that is the Russia-Ukraine War (again, a massive topic, for another day).
Indeed, the elephants on Big Media’s cutting room floor have been piling up for as long as I can recall. Thus when I encounter those who rely exclusively on these legacy media portals, I shake my head in wonder. Is it the fear of veering off the web’s cleanly swept highways onto some ramshackle byway inhabited by oddballs? Or the dread of having to adjust one’s paradigm, that keep some from straying from the “safe lane”?
I don’t think the original vision of the World Wide Web was to simply mirror corporate media in digitized form. I seem to recall something about democratizing information. And I’m not saying there’s no place for online content moderation (another tangent I’ll gleefully dodge).
Canadian novelist, playwright, journalist, and critic, Rick Salutin, observed back in 2014 that “though in decline, mainstream media bias remains a far more serious issue than “fake news.”
Perhaps media bias was in decline in 2014. But if so, it was the calm before the storm.
As the Twitter Files and Facebook files investigations reveal, that bias has been weaponized. Spearheaded by an alliance of government agencies, NGOs and the elites who run the Democratic and Republican parties — working in concert with Big Tech — contrarian views that run counter to the accepted "groupthink" on a host of issues, are being systematically suppressed under what can only be considered a censorship industrial complex.
The Bill C-18 Debacle
For Canadians reliant on social media news feeds, Canada's Bill C-18 became law in June. But this attempt by legislators to require Big Tech to compensate Big Media when they host Canadian news website content on their platforms has backfired: Google and Meta rejected the framework and have begun to block Canadian media from Facebook, Instagram and Google. Canadian users will have to go directly to these media sites for access.
Whatever the outcome of this mismanaged dispute, it’s not a good look (though tellingly, citizens of Canuckistan aren’t exactly reaching for their pitchforks and appear to be navigating their lives without due hardship).
I assume most of us have some idea of how social media algorithms work, yet we continue to act as if we don’t. By being fed mostly posts we agree with (mainstream or otherwise) there's a tendency to think we must be correct because…”it arrived on my phone”…or “all my friends agree”! Thus the shock and or vitriol that occurs when the highly insulated web commenter encounters a creature from the “other side” of an issue.
Fun fact: Search for some phrase or person you disagree with and then behold how crafty web gremlins start sending you more of the same. You may actually uncover facts and perspectives for which you were hitherto unaware…viola, mind expansion!
Retain your critical faculties, but enjoy the journey.
One Guy’s Utopia is my Dystopia
The world is complex, its narratives intricate. Storytellers vary from the astute to the deluded, as always. Yet there are also those — from across the ideological spectrum — who, if given the chance, would stamp out free speech in an instant.
I recently encountered a person on YouTube who didn’t like a particular video, commenting:
One day YouTube will install AI fact checkers into their algorithms and bollox like this will be removed.
To which I replied:
I'd rather have a free marketplace of ideas than an AI-run dystopian prison programmed by big tech under the watchful eye of our already censorious overlords.
To which he countered:
We would all love a world full of freethinking liberal guardians of humanity...Alas there are far too many bullshitters on the planet to make this a reality. Unfortunately, people as a whole are not individual and never will be. It's in our nature to follow the pack and move with the herd. Some of us can move forward and filter out what's wrong, unjust and truly good for humanity, and some of us walk around in circles, recycling absolute nonsense like the contents of this video.
I left it at that. Who will develop and oversee the giant Thinkatrons in this guy’s twisted utopia? — a future whereby "wrongthink" is policed by automated algorithmic enforcers, all in the name of combating disinformation.
Evidently, Mr. Enlightenment failed to consider the possibility that the very deceivers he ridicules might also include centralized, controlling, and corrupted hubs of corporate power, rather than benevolent bots. Or perhaps he did.
Accepting a reasonable degree of speech restriction is one thing; it’s another matter entirely to advocate for censorious subjugation by ethereal “AI cops” — all for the greater good of humanity, of course.
Diminished Discourse & Fragmented Cults
On one side, there are those who reflexively believe the latest establishment narrative without question. They “read” the Internet all the time — all mainstream sources. This group is prone to obey and comply and support the “next thing.” On the other side, there are those who impulsively reject whatever the mainstream media or whatever the government of the day has to say, believing instead whatever online sources they happened to have latched onto, no matter how objectively absurd or unhinged. Both sides cherry pick kernels of truth.
What portion of “Netizens” inhabit these zealous domains that I’ve conveniently and tritley constructed? I’ve no idea. Regardless, it's depressing to realize how polarized the two camps are; the space for good faith discussion further diminished.
These digital confines continue to wall us off. But not just into camps — increasingly into innumerable fragmented cults, as Bob Lefsetz vividly depicts in the Lefsetz Letter. "Today you’ve got no idea what people are talking about, unless they’re a member of your cult."
Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, Taylor Swift, the show “Succession” — all cults. And, as Lefsetz notes, nobody can change the world from the top down anymore.
Photo by Karla Hernandez
Aside from scale, today’s ecosystem of online independent media is not unlike the old offline alternative press in which I was once immersed; the offbeat journals, the shoestring magazines. They too could be quirky, and unbalanced, and of course they didn’t get everything right. Nobody does. But because I had learned to mistrust the establishment narrative, I gobbled up a lot of that old counterculture content, often putting me on the outs with my “normies” back then too.
Such is the curse of the inquisitor. But it feels worse now: the sheer vastness, the hyper polarization, the fragmentation. (Gee, it’s too bad I don’t have a magical device in my pocket that contains an app that tells me when enough is enough).
Anyway, I'll continue to encourage people to seek out counter narratives, if for no other reason than to prompt them to question their biases. Some will continue to raise an eyebrow and poke fun at my nuanced, contrarian ways. And I’ll try not to take it personally or assume they're indoctrinated.
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” is often a good way to begin a dicey discussion. Or end it.
Another is: “How about those Blue Jays!?”
Thank you so much for reading! If you enjoyed this article and want to encourage Punditman to keep going, you can buy me a coffee below. Every little bit helps!
Sadly too many of my friends buy into the Western media's take on so many things especially including the war in Ukraine which is ostensibly caused by one satanistic guy (Putin, Khadaffi, Assad, etc.) , falling in the process for justifying US hegemony in all its ugly guises. It baffles me as well how many of them consider themselves to be credible, liberal minded intellectuals. And also they should be won't read Jonathan Cook and Seymour Hersh! Yes, the mainstream, and I would say, bourgois bias continues to be perpetuated by these lame media organizations and many on social media that spout the corporate line have long ago stopped doing investigative journalism. Your piece is very well written Wayne. I can also see that your graduate work on media bias strongly shows through. I like your insightful take on how we fall for what the algorythms tell us to read.