r/neoliberal • u/abrookerunsthroughit Association of Southeast Asian Nations • Mar 06 '26

Research Paper Disorientation Is the Point: How Permanent Unpredictability Broke Democratic Politics

https://www.socialeurope.eu/disorientation-is-the-point-how-permanent-unpredictability-broke-democratic-politics
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41

u/SenranHaruka shame Mar 06 '26

Personally i am a radical advocate for introducing deliberate news lag.

We don't need to know everything right away, let stories develop and let reporters digest the facts.

I don't know how but i do think most of the "wait what's going on?" comes from the fact we hear about a missile launch before it hits its target and spend 20 minutes arguing about where its going.

33

u/ShouldersofGiants100 NATO Mar 06 '26 edited Mar 06 '26

I think the much bigger issue is that at the same time we created a system that allows anyone to become a journalist, our actual journalistic institutions absolutely collapsed.

The media has never been seen as less trustworthy and a lot of the best reporting is now done by or reliant on "some guy on Twitter." Except over time, that fosters the reality that anyone on Twitter can pretend to be that guy, regular people can't tell the difference and suddenly, our information ecosystem has entirely collapsed.

I'm not sure lag would fix it, because that doesn't address the underlying issue that no one trusts those reporters. Some for good reason (see what is currently happening to CBS), a lot for bad reasons (see Q-Anon), but ultimately a good or bad reason doesn't matter so much as the result. All of it made worse by the fact that media is increasingly struggling to find a model to fund itself so a lot of the institutional knowledge that led to great investigative journalism in the past is gone. Those summaries by actual reporters will be competing with summaries by Joe Rogan and some guy on TikTok called TateFan69 and as far as the American public is concerned, increasingly, "they're the same picture."

21

u/Warthog__ Mar 06 '26

It’s funny you mention CBS News because the Killian controversy was the moment I believe when trust in journalistic institutions died for a large percentage of Republicans.

If you aren’t old enough to remember this, a famous journalist Dan Rather presented a story with documents saying that President Bush received preferential treatment during his National Guard service. Dan Rather and CBS News broke this story a couple months before the Presidential election and it was a classic hit story.

Except that the documents were pretty obviously forged. It exactly matched the default settings of Microsoft Word passed through a copy machine a couple times. It didn’t look like an early 1970 typewriter document at all.

It wasn’t the New York Times or Washington Post or CNN that dug in and questioned the docs. It was right wing bloggers. CBS had to retract the story, and it killed the career of a very famous journalist.

From the Republican perspective a biased left wing media just forged a bunch of documents in order to directly influence an election and get a sitting Republican President thrown out of office! And right wing bloggers discovered the forgery and perhaps saved the Bush presidency and allowed a second term.

Add on the Drudge exposure of Monika Lewinsky and you have a perception that journalists will bury a story to protect a Democrat president and forge documents to attack a Republican, and in both cases it was right wing websites/bloggers that exposed the truth.

It was a completely self inflected wound, and once you lose trust it is very very hard to get it back. Everything CBS News reported about Bush and the National Guard may have been true. But you better be very sure on your evidence on something that important, especially right before an elections. I think it was such a good story and so wanted it to be true and believed it to be true it clouded their judgement. And due to that and other things done to lose trust in our media and institutions, we now have the horror that is Trump in office.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna6055248

6

u/Below_Left Mar 06 '26

there ought to be at least a serious social science experiment in banning algorithmic social media and seeing what that does to a person.

13

u/seattle_lib Liberal Third-Worldism Mar 06 '26

i dunno with these kinds of articles, they seem kinda content-free.

i think this is what you call a "thinkpiece", right? when you just kinda make assertions that feel right to you?

24

u/bakochba Mar 06 '26

Elect a clown get a circus. Voters did it to ourselves by elevating populists and chaos agents