Arkady
President
Here's a pair of good articles about the way stoking anti-intellectual sentiment has set the stage for con-men like Donald Trump:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/06/30/donald_trump_is_the_inevitable_result_of_decades_of_gop_denial_of_reality.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/134667/conservatives-groomed-perfect-suckers-trumps-epic-scam
Those focus on how the GOP cynically fed the know-nothing impulse for short-term political advantage, only to find themselves saddled with Trump as a result. But I think it's also worth looking into why the media played along.
I've made this argument before, but I think that, paradoxically, it comes down to the news media having gotten better at their job -- if you think their job is maximizing viewers/subscriptions/clicks. They've become much more aware of what actually sells in the news business, especially since the start of the Internet age. An old-line newspaper could fool itself into thinking people bought it for its thoughtful investigative reporting about important issues. But a website knows it's the garbage that gets attention. They have the hard data now, measuring actual reader clicks on a story-by-story basis.
This has taught the media financially valuable and civilly dangerous lessons about what "news" consumers actually care about. It has taught them that the politics of personal destruction amuse people. It has taught them the value of keeping faux-outrage turned up to 11, regardless of the importance of the story. It has taught them that when they cover politics as sports, they get a lot more attention than when they delve into policy analysis. So, they focus on horse-race handicapping, analysis of political strategy, gaffes, and other infotainment.
They cover politics the way the sports pages cover the home team when it's facing off against its hated rivals (red team or blue team, it doesn't matter). The outlets that first realized how stupid and petty the audience really is were the outlets that stood to gain the most. Roger Ailes understood early that the majority of potential news consumers were hateful dipshits, and he fed them the trashy partisanship they craved, laughing all the way to the bank.
Economics have factored in, too. News media outlets were once prestige businesses, run by families who used quality of coverage to accumulate social cachet. Now they're mostly run by huge for-profit corporations, which treat news like any other business in their portfolio of subsidiaries. They just try to maximize return on the investor dollar. Investigative journalism and in-depth policy analysis aren't cost-effective. Instead, they just have charismatic talking heads yell their respective political team's talking points at each other for a few minutes, which fills the news cycle cheaply.
Ironically, the public is actually smarter today than ever before, by pretty much any measurable indicator. IQs are up, literacy is up, drop-out rates are down, advanced educations are more common, etc. Yet you wouldn't know that from the news coverage. It's put together for imbeciles, these days, and that's having an increasingly dangerous effect on our politics. It has habituated people to a mindless, reflexive way of responding to issue of national concern. And that is the perfect milieu for people like Trump.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/06/30/donald_trump_is_the_inevitable_result_of_decades_of_gop_denial_of_reality.html
https://newrepublic.com/article/134667/conservatives-groomed-perfect-suckers-trumps-epic-scam
Those focus on how the GOP cynically fed the know-nothing impulse for short-term political advantage, only to find themselves saddled with Trump as a result. But I think it's also worth looking into why the media played along.
I've made this argument before, but I think that, paradoxically, it comes down to the news media having gotten better at their job -- if you think their job is maximizing viewers/subscriptions/clicks. They've become much more aware of what actually sells in the news business, especially since the start of the Internet age. An old-line newspaper could fool itself into thinking people bought it for its thoughtful investigative reporting about important issues. But a website knows it's the garbage that gets attention. They have the hard data now, measuring actual reader clicks on a story-by-story basis.
This has taught the media financially valuable and civilly dangerous lessons about what "news" consumers actually care about. It has taught them that the politics of personal destruction amuse people. It has taught them the value of keeping faux-outrage turned up to 11, regardless of the importance of the story. It has taught them that when they cover politics as sports, they get a lot more attention than when they delve into policy analysis. So, they focus on horse-race handicapping, analysis of political strategy, gaffes, and other infotainment.
They cover politics the way the sports pages cover the home team when it's facing off against its hated rivals (red team or blue team, it doesn't matter). The outlets that first realized how stupid and petty the audience really is were the outlets that stood to gain the most. Roger Ailes understood early that the majority of potential news consumers were hateful dipshits, and he fed them the trashy partisanship they craved, laughing all the way to the bank.
Economics have factored in, too. News media outlets were once prestige businesses, run by families who used quality of coverage to accumulate social cachet. Now they're mostly run by huge for-profit corporations, which treat news like any other business in their portfolio of subsidiaries. They just try to maximize return on the investor dollar. Investigative journalism and in-depth policy analysis aren't cost-effective. Instead, they just have charismatic talking heads yell their respective political team's talking points at each other for a few minutes, which fills the news cycle cheaply.
Ironically, the public is actually smarter today than ever before, by pretty much any measurable indicator. IQs are up, literacy is up, drop-out rates are down, advanced educations are more common, etc. Yet you wouldn't know that from the news coverage. It's put together for imbeciles, these days, and that's having an increasingly dangerous effect on our politics. It has habituated people to a mindless, reflexive way of responding to issue of national concern. And that is the perfect milieu for people like Trump.
