Legacy Media Was Better Than This

our information environment did not improve on net because we yelled at journalists. why are we surprised

I used to mainline legacy media, spending quite literally the whole day reading through pieces from most of the recognizable name brands: Jacobin, the American Conservative, the National Review, Reason, the Federalist, and obviously your NPRs, your NYTs, your Atlantics, and no, this is not an exhaustive list.

I would argue that if people who hated journalists enough to yell them off Xwitter entirely read the volume and sources that I did, they would not have hated journalists nearly so much nor would they have Goodharted us into the position we currently find ourselves in.

I’m not sure I forgive journalism haters for finding their way into a belief that it couldn’t possibly get worse than the New York Times being annoying, elitist, and cherrypicking.

I too would like to pull the sun out of the sky due to its tendency to cause drought and sunburn, of course, of course, etc.

Perhaps the autistic rationalist bros managed to help topple the symbolic statue of legacy media for the crime of misleading the nation, without considering what substrate of the population had substantially favorable kinetics to fill the power vacuum.

Brandolini’s law, etc.

If you’re so smart, how could you possibly have misjudged the second order effects of removing elites with plenty of standards from power simply because they failed to adhere to all of them, perfectly?

Perhaps this is downstream of a belief in the systemic power of legacy media, a utopian belief that if this system can be disrupted from the ground up than the purer, less power-driven motivations of the grass roots will take over, and the best ideas and the truth will naturally rise to the top in response.

Libertarians and radical free market evangelists never get sufficient credit for being the extraordinary pollyanna utopians on human nature that they are. Their only rival on this subject are their hated foes deep to the left. They have such an endearing confidence that leaving people be will produce the best, or at least the least destructive outcomes.

Where the market is concerned, I’m more sympathetic. Where information is concerned, I couldn’t be more bearish. You would think that the human biodiversity enjoyoors would recognize the limitations of a free market of ideas, peddled by people across the IQ and ideological spectrum, but this is strangely never accounted for in idealist arguments about information networks, and never accounted for in journalism.

But of course it isn’t, the above would have to come from grappling with journalism as a whole on its own terms, actually consuming it for its own sake and considering whether it meets expectations broadly and what could be done if it does not. Most haters of journalism, however, come from people who don’t fucking read, or don’t read posts longer than those they can scroll past on social media. Criticism from people who regularly consume a product is naturally more trustworthy than is criticism from people who consume the product exclusively when their friends told them it really sucked and they should see for themselves. That’s the quality of anti-journalist ideas we’ve been laboring under for a decade.

Hopefully obviously, this isn’t even to say that there are no reasonable critiques to be made about journalism. Journalism is guilty of plenty of what it was accused of, not just the NYT. Insular, biased, generous with claims of experts, and so forth. This is less of a problem if you actually bother to read journalism across the spectrum of political beliefs - what can be corroborated across differing accounts is the most trustworthy. This, of course, is not the median consumer. More than reasonable to go on to argue that journalism not require the median consumer to go to so many different outlets to get a truly reliable picture of the whole. Hardly reasonable to cheer the death of mainstream journalism because Cade Metz identified Scott Alexander.

Social media in general has taught the world to believe itself equally well-informed when they’re scrolling through posts rather than reading long-form journalism. Social Media Killed the Journalist Star, but more importantly, I sincerely believe that they didn’t deserve to die, and that if you think they did, you likely weren’t reading nearly enough good journalism.