By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, September 20, 2020
A lot of us were feeling pretty good about the future of
the media in late September of 2004.
Dan Rather and the CBS news division had just tried to
derail George W. Bush’s reelection campaign with some genuine fake news — based
on fake documents — and, in spite of the manful attempts of Democratic-allied
media outlets such as the Boston
Globe, which worked overtime to create just enough of a
reasonable-doubt defense for CBS’s bulls*** story to float on until Election
Day, CBS eventually was forced to acknowledge what everybody knew: The story
was a political hit disguised as journalism, a fraud executed with malice
aforethought. Dan Rather was chiseled off the Mount Rushmore of broadcast news
and became the witless conspiracy kook we all know and pity today.
CBS executive Jonathan Klein had sneered about his
citizen-journalist critics: “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the
multiple layers of checks and balances at 60 Minutes and a guy sitting
in his living room in his pajamas.” Oops. That remark lives on in the name of
PJ Media, now a division of Salem Media Group. (Full disclosure/self-serving
plug: Salem owns Regnery Publishing, which will be bringing out my Big White
Ghetto in October.) The age of the citizen-journalist — the partisan
citizen-journalist, inevitably — was at hand, though back then we were still
calling them “bloggers,” and social media hadn’t quite been invented. (“The
Facebook,” which had come online at Harvard in February of that year, was a
very limited thing.) Still, we understood that we were at the dawn of something
new and exciting.
We just didn’t know how much it would suck.
What came before wasn’t a golden age. Television news has
pretty much always been crap, produced by crappy companies on a crappy
commodity basis, in order to accumulate an audience to which various producers
of crappy consumer goods could advertise their crappy products. (Plus ça
change . . .) The best kind of television news consisted mostly of an
avuncular figure reading (generally without credit) the first three paragraphs
of the morning’s New York Times front-page stories and the afternoon’s
Associated Press briefs to an audience of millions without much in the way of
choice or alternatives.
The giants of 20th-century television “journalism” had
much more in common with actors than they did with reporters, though some of
them had been real reporters in their youth. Like Dan Rather, they had partisan
bias problems, and, like Dan Rather, more than a few of them were bonkers. I
met Walter Cronkite once in the 1990s, and he, being a crackpot, explained that
George W. Bush, then governor of Texas and getting ready to run for president,
was planning to overthrow the Constitution and impose a kind of Christian
Taliban arrangement on the United States. (He got crazier as he got older, and
at one point insisted that Karl Rove and Osama bin Laden were working together
on President Bush’s behalf.) They were better when they were just reading the Times
or the Wall Street Journal — when the big three networks actually got
off their asses and did something enterprising, they frequently got into
trouble or got it wildly wrong: Cronkite and the Tet Offensive, Dateline
rigging that GM pickup truck to explode, 60 Minutes and Alar,
etc.
Print journalism was (and is) generally better, though it
had and has similar problems of its own. In an earlier era, because of the
nature of pre-Internet news media, the bias and other problems at the big
newspapers and the Associated Press were communicated throughout the entire
news ecosystem. A daily newspaper in a conservative small city — e.g., my
hometown Lubbock Avalanche-Journal — might not suffer from a great deal
of left-leaning bias in its own reporting and editing, but such newspapers
relied on the AP and other sources for most of their national news coverage and
practically all of their international coverage. And so their pages were full
of the same biases that infect the big papers in New York, Los Angeles, or
Chicago. In some areas where it really mattered — most notably, coverage of
Washington — newspapers around the country caught bias the same way you catch a
cold. And this was a particularly urgent problem in an age in which the daily
news agenda was set by a group of men small enough to all be seated together at
lunch around a single table at the 21 Club.
Conservatives were, for obvious reasons, not very sad to
see all that go, beginning with the long-awaited defenestration of Dan Rather
in 2005. The conservative effort to build alternative institutions had enjoyed
some success — National Review and Firing Line prominent among
them — but rarely had been able to assert themselves very effectively beyond
the role of critic and corrective, “restricted
to What Precisely and If and Perhaps and But.” We modern American
conservatives always have been too
easily ensorcelled by populism and self-deludingly convinced that “the
People” are really on our side, only they haven’t realized it yet. The merry
dismemberment of the old media cartel and its replacement by an army of
citizen-journalists and activists liberated from the parochial smallness of the
Harvard-Georgetown-Manhattan circuit seemed, at the time, like an obvious and
unadulterated win.
The view from 2020 is a little more complicated.
The flow of information and commentary in 2020 has been
significantly, though by no means entirely, disintermediated compared to where
things stood in 2004. We have many more competing institutions than we did in
2004: National Review has been joined by a number of newer right-leaning
online media operations of varying degrees of quality and responsibility, the
left-wing media ecosystem has seen a similar multiplication, and digital
publications such as the Daily Beast and the Huffington Post have
recreated in digital form many of the virtues and most of the defects of the
20th century’s newspapers and magazines. Thanks in no small part to Steve Jobs
and the iPhone, the most important locus of news has moved from the desktop to
the pocket, accompanied by more or less exactly the intellectual and emotional
degradation one would expect from such a development. Thanks to the work of
Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, et al., the proliferation of news sites has been
swamped in turn by the almost completely disintermediated intellectual
ecosystem of social media, a destructive antidiscourse almost completely
dominated by disinformation, juvenile memery, and cultic phenomena such as
QAnon and Black Lives Matter — part cult, part low-stakes activism, part
role-playing game.
Our political discourse has, inevitably, adapted itself
to the new disintermediated environment. And so we have, e.g., Ted Cruz of
Princeton and Harvard trying his hand
at sophomoric insult comedy and making soy-latte jokes on Twitter. Senator
Cruz is a very intelligent man, maybe the smartest man in the Senate, and he
isn’t doing this stuff thinking it doesn’t work. It does work.
Politician-as-troll is not an obviously unpromising model: It made Donald J.
Trump, a game-show host who spent half of his life in bankruptcy court after
slamming his own testicles in the cash register more times than anybody can
count, president of these United States. Disintermediation doesn’t mean that
there are no gatekeepers — it means that instead of a Richard Salant or a Turner Catledge, the
gatekeeper is the dumbest and most irresponsible slice of the general public in
the form of a bunch of Twitter yahoos who think that algebra is racist or that Hillary Rodham Clinton is a
reptilian shape-shifter. Lyndon Johnson worried that he had lost Walter
Cronkite. Donald Trump has to worry about losing Twitter.
We traded the snobs for the mobs.
The upside of that trade is that it knocked down the
gatekeepers a few pegs and subjected their biases and unspoken priors to more
robust competition and critical evaluation. That is mostly to the good: As John
Milton argued in Areopagitica, open exchange is the best available
antidote for error. The downside of that trade is that those old gatekeepers
had been a source of bias but also had been the main source of institutional
responsibility and quality control in journalism, and no one in the new media
environment is willing — or even able — to fill that role. The new
disintermediated media did not replicate the virtues of the New York Times
while liberating journalism from its biases; instead, newspapers such as the New
York Times (especially its op-ed pages and its election coverage) have come
to more closely resemble Twitter — irresponsible, tribal, and careless with
the truth. Even the so-called fact-checking operations at Politifact and similar outlets regularly are engaged in
outright intellectual dishonesty. This isn’t a technical problem
or a market failure: It is a people problem. In a blind taste-test, nine out of
ten American media consumers prefer bulls***.
Our political discourse in 2020 is in important ways more
free, more diverse, and more robust than it was in 2004. It is also in important
ways worse — less intelligent, less honest, less responsible — more full
of it. We might have been better off with less but better total media output,
meaning, necessarily, a conversation with fewer but better participants. The
very suggestion rubs equality-minded Americans the wrong way, and enrages many
of them, who will be heard from in the comments. We Americans believe very
strongly in equality. But there are many kinds of equality: equality
before the law, equality before God, equality of standing among different
social or racial groups, etc. Those are matters of principle. But nobody who
has ever logged into Twitter or attended a political rally can really believe
in genuine equality as a matter of fact. Some people are morons. Some
people are liars. We may be equal as a matter of law and as a matter of
political standing, but it plainly is not the case that every citizen is
equally wise or responsible, or that every voice contributes something of equal
value to the national conversation.
American populism — in both its left-wing and right-wing
expressions — is predicated on a belief that we suffer from insufficient equality,
that We the People are being held back and frustrated by Them the Elites. But
we suffer at least as much — in fact, much more — from insufficient hierarchy.
We do not have the time or the ability to figure out everything for ourselves,
but where do we go for authoritative answers when presidents, senators, and New
York Times columnists increasingly are indistinguishable from Twitter
trolls, when the most ridiculous and indefensible conspiracy theories are taken
as articles of faith on both sides of the aisle, when the academic
establishment is held hostage by its own cowardice
and incompetence,
when “fact-checkers” lie and expertise is perverted for political ends?
I do not know what the answer to that is, but I am pretty
sure it is not amplifying the dumbest, angriest, and most dishonest voices in
the conversation.
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