There's a cost to awareness

July 28, 2024 12:09 PM

It's one of the most chilling things I've ever seen: the legacy media abandoning even their false neutrality to create a totally alternate reality, for the direct benefit of the worst person imaginable. It was an open capitulation to the fascist demand that media enter their misinformation stream and report on whatever it is they want said as if it were real. And it created permission for low-information people, who don't give a shit for anything beyond their own ease, to ignore reality; false equivalence where a more principled neutrality would delineate the differences. And so the seagulls descended. from The Seagulls Descend by A.R. Moxon

[Moxon, Previously]

posted by chavenet (13 comments total)

This is a really, really good essay.
posted by Gadarene at 12:27 PM on July 28 [4 favorites]

5) The media will test out these narratives of false equivalency, utilizing their practiced neutrality on matters of truth and fiction, and when they find a simple recipe that seagulls like, they will ride it all the way to November in a hellish feedback loop of mendacity.

I checked after it happened, and when "you won't have to vote anymore" wasn't the #1 fucking headline story on the beeb I kinda figured we'd crossed the Rubicon.

You're not just fighting fascists. You're fighting the apologist, media-owning billionaires. Who were probably content to let the populace have a little social progress, as a treat. Until it looked like their billions might be threatened with a 0.000000001% tax burden For Real This Time. Then they took off the mask.

The False Equivalency will hold, no matter what TFG does or says. Dijonmustardgate and TanSuitGate are gonna look fucking quaint over the next few months. TFG is gonna start saying The Quiet Part About Ending Democracy With A Megaphone and CNN et al are going to sit there looking at their shoes, fidgeting nervously and asking questions about Harris' fucking cat.
posted by howbigisthistextfield at 1:38 PM on July 28 [12 favorites]

LOL, the opening paragraph seems to summarize metafilter electoral discourse (in it's worst forms):

In the United States, I've noticed that elections seem to be a time for politically activated people to come together to bicker and fight and make points that everyone has already heard and considered, and prognosticate and proclaim and act like pundits even though we aren't pundits, and then, after a year or two of this, low-information voters who haven't been paying the slightest bit of attention at all swoop in during the final few days and decide the outcome based on something that they think they read somewhere.
posted by latkes at 1:41 PM on July 28 [23 favorites]

It is an interesting article. It only makes me wish I was a low information voter swooping in to help decide the election. Or swooping in for a tasty lobster roll.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 2:11 PM on July 28 [1 favorite]

It is a good essay, and it's always nice to read the truth plainly stated. But it will not be read by seagulls, because seagulls don't read. So, nice to read, but kinda makes me feel worse, because I fear even as little as this is too much to ask.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 2:13 PM on July 28 [3 favorites]

Thanks for posting this! It's a bit weird to talk about low information voters as the seagulls - most voters are low information voters for lots of reasons from shitty schools to a completely valid understanding that our electoral system sucks stinky balls. Being low information is normal and also the natural result of the system we have. But my other thing with this article is the conclusions:

I look at our electoral system (in the US) and think: this fucking sucks. Sure I'll vote (cost me nothing) but it is irrational to say that voting in presidential elections is how we can impact the system, especially if you're in a non-swing state. So I wish this author had engaged more with how governments do actually change. Powerful forces outside of the electoral system exert power that political actors are beholden to. The Right knows this - from right wing media to paramalitary actors on the street - these folks are pushing their Republican electeds, and society at large, to the right through their action outside of the ballot box. Sure, vote. If you simply love electoral politics - have at it. But building power with coworkers, neighbors, in unions, with folks in shared identity groups, etc, that is durable and lasting (not just a big march where everyone goes home afterwards) is how we change society. And political actors (and the media for that matter) follow.
posted by latkes at 2:23 PM on July 28 [5 favorites]

ctrl+ f gerrymandering

oh hm nothing there must be a mistake

ctrl+f citizens’ united

nothing there either!

ctrl+f suppression

oh, dear. nothing yet again. i see.
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 3:32 PM on July 28 [2 favorites]

There’s a lot said about low info voters and their power to decide elections, as well as how class and economic structures make it so that some people are forced to be low info voters. But I don’t think enough questions get asked of the media and by the media itself about their own culpability in creating and sustaining low info voters. The two party discourse reporting is so baked in that it turns a lot of people off to news and even ‘news’. if the horse race coverage could be limited for a moment to tackle substantive issues that go beyond clickbait perhaps low info voters would be more engaged.

Who benefits from low info voters? The two parties who spend million on changing their minds. The media who supposedly focuses on getting to the pulse point of the low info voter’s views. Swing states whose votes count for more than even more populous states. The rest of the electorate, even Dems and Repubs, who are desperate to know what a low info voter thinks of their candidate.

And because the chaos and drama and five fire alarms daily of a fascist presidency, the media apologist class will use the low info voter shibboleth for all its worth to propagate a scenario where the fascist ends up in power. I feel like the pundit and corporate media class want a dramatic, daily scandal, oh god look what trump has done now news cycle because it makes them feel they’re important witness to ‘history’ (with book deal dreams in the pipeline’ and of course more profits for news media.
posted by 23yearlurker at 3:34 PM on July 28 [2 favorites]

I do not know that there is a value in witness if there is no possibility of actual improvement. And that's what the whole essay leads up to, right? There's nothing you can do. The media is not in the business of reporting the news, it's in the business of making fascism palatable. I think that's a reasonable takeaway. The "totally alternate reality" is something we're already soaking in. It's not just journalism, obviously, it is driven by other media too; it's why none of our big movies are about climate change or fascism, why protest songs don't chart. If the narrative drivers of your entire culture are part of the problem, then you're left without a solution. Your witness gets published on a microblog and the world grinds on.

When we talk about the really big systemic and intractable problems facing us, I think the media is probably the biggest. There is no incentive for them to tell us the truth, not in a big, cohesive way that will make sense to everyone. We are living in a fake world with real and deadly consequences. Trump could retire tomorrow and there'd just be a new one, and one of us would post a comment about whatever weird philosophy du jour underpins them and their funders, and none of it would matter, because the larger story--you're in danger!--would be left untold.

So who are you witnessing for? And what good does it do? Or is it less a moral choice, and more a neurotic symptom?
posted by mittens at 3:47 PM on July 28 [1 favorite]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?
posted by Selena777 at 4:09 PM on July 28

To take just one example, I don't think Bezos would consider himself a victim of a dictatorial regime; he may note that such regimes cannot ever stop talking about themselves, even for a moment, and need an outlet for that speech; he may see WaPo as an appropriate outlet. Eroding freedom of the press doesn't mean we stop having a press, it just changes what it's allowed to say. (All of which, now that I read it and my prior comment, are actually like 90% doomier than I meant them--I do think change is possible!--but I am not sure how change in media is possible without actual removal of billionaires from newspapers and television stations, who are busy creating low-information voters.)
posted by mittens at 4:13 PM on July 28 [1 favorite]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?

They're profiteers who genuinely believe nothing will happen to them.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 4:14 PM on July 28 [1 favorite]

Why would the media generally be in the business of making fascism palatable if they're going to be victims of any dictatorial regime?

How many media organizations are owned or run by some rich guy who figures that a second Trump administration, while distasteful and no doubt dreadful for other people, will personally only mean his taxes going down? So much of the media coverage feels like people who might sympathize with the future victims but still haven’t appreciated that their privilege might not protect them.
posted by adamsc at 4:16 PM on July 28