Earnest Clowns

The legacy media’s role as information gate-keeper is fading. They are not happy.

ABC News recently reached a settlement with Donald Trump over a defamation suit regarding a false statement made by talking head George Stephanopoulous, who was and remains on ABC's payroll (and just got his contract renewed). Stephanopoulous had repeatedly stated on-air that Trump was "found liable for rape by a jury." The settlement, which has ABC News paying $15M towards the Presidential Library that will be created after Trump is out of office and Stephanopoulos himself coughing up $1M to pay Trump's lawyers, was reportedly a 'business decision,' and one that reportedly has poor George "apoplectic" and "humiliated," no matter that producers and lawyers repeatedly warned him not to use that “R” word.

Pride goeth before the fall.

Morale at ABC News is reportedly rather low. I suspect the same is true across the left-leaning legacy media outlets. Trump's victory, which from a business perspective should be quite good for the scolds, harridans, and brayers that have for years been making bank by stoking outrage over all things Trump, has them all crying into their chai lattes.

The outrage, already at eleven, has been cranked even higher by both the opinion-pretending-to-be-news and the opinion-pretending-to-be-wisdom segments of the Blue Blob.

Reactions from the Blob are what you'd expect, of course. A mix of outrage and doomsaying, with the latter asserting that this settlement will set a terrible, chilling precedent.

To which I say "nonsense." It's a settlement, not a legal ruling, and the only chill may come from the C-suites of those legacy media companies, who might think it a good idea to tell their talking heads "make sure of your facts before you run your mouth." As to the facts, Trump was found civilly liable for sexual battery, not rape. There is a legal distinction between the two, and if words are to have any meaning, that distinction matters.

The bigger picture, to me, is how this incident highlights the decline of the legacy media from the primary (and gate-keeping) source of information for Americans to an increasingly irrelevant side show. Technology has made it incredibly easy to create and disseminate content, so we have (literally) millions of alternatives to NYTCNNNPRABCNBCCBSETCEIEIO (literally) at our fingertips.

My brother commented just the other day how much time he spends watching reels on his phone, and that's just one of many information conduits that people have today that are not legacy media. You are using another one - Substack - at this very moment. The gate-keeping role has been assumed by Big Tech algorithms, but the "steer them back to what we want them to see and read" model that has in my opinion infected Google's search algorithms is giving way to "give them more of what they prefer."

The former is a path to disengagement (I don't use Google for politically-charged searches any more) and irrelevance.

The latter is good business - more engagement is a goal.

A concurrent phenomenon - the growth in self-importance of the various talking heads - is what prompted the title of today's bit. In their hyperbolic earnestness, in their attitude that Democracy itself can only be saved through their efforts, they beclown themselves. The harridans at The View are the funniest in that regard, but so many others are just as absurd in how pompously they present their half-baked and often tendentious opinions.

That self-importance often came through as smugness, as I recently blogged, but I expect we will be getting less smug and more, to echo Stephanopoulos's reaction, apoplexy.

Medically speaking, "apoplexy" is "copious extravasation of blood into any organ," but its most common use is re the brain or spinal column. In more lay terms, a stroke, and people "stroking out" when under extreme stress is a thing. As a kid who loved reading the annual Guinness Book of World Records, I first encountered the term when reading about Hetty Green, the world's "greatest miser," who per Guinness "died of apoplexy after arguing with a maid over the virtues of skimmed milk."

I don't wish harm of that sort to befall George S, but fortunately English vernacular has tamed "apoplectic" down from a burst blood vessel to "overcome with anger; extremely indignant."

Regular readers may recall my previous mentions of the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect, in which consumers of news discover how incredibly ill-informed and just plain wrong reporters can be when they talk about a topic consumers know well, only to immediately forget that and trust the reporters when they talk about another topic. The effect of this Effect, I surmise, is to insulate reporters from the remedy that is shaming feedback. Thus insulated, and then amplified by echo chambers and the self-selecting nature of our fragmented commentariat landscape, they start believing they are more important than they actually are.

So, when their viewership ebbs, and when people disagree with, mock, or ignore them, they don't ask themselves "what am I doing wrong?" Introspection, self-awareness, and humility fade away, and with them goes primacy of the truth. In their stead comes the stridency of demanding they be heeded, the self-importance that goes with that, and the notion that it's OK to exaggerate or even lie in order to bend the unwashed masses to their will.

Today’s Democratic Party is exhibiting the very same traits in its election postmortems, it’s worth noting. That the vast majority of legacy journalists are Democrats is, of course, no coincidence.

A libertarian friend and I have lamented the demise of journalism, fearing that it is becoming nigh-on impossible for the casual consumer to get honest, accurate, and unbiased news. I now think those laments were overwrought. Yes, people want confirmation bias, but people also want not to be lied to, and the endlessly ingenious market provides.

Yes, it's a bit more work to separate the wheat from the chaff, but it seems our brains are up to the task. The Democrats' recent thrashing at the ballot box tells us that people are capable of seeing past the bullshit. While Trump has shoveled his share of it, much of what he has claimed about media bias and media distortion and media lies has proven to be true.

If the ABC settlement prompts legacy outfits to insist on more fidelity to facts from their talking heads, I won't mind. I don't fear any chilling effect, because those legacy outfits are going the way of the buggy whip and the dodo bird. The information landscape is changing. Barriers are being torn down or bypassed, gatekeepers are losing their jobs, and freedom is growing.

Unlike the rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists, who felt compelled to cough up a shitload of dimes, you can ride around the toll booth. The gatekeepers no longer have the power to stop you.