https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=4Ax6peheiJQ
All right, well today we’re going to do something a little bit different. I’ve done something like this before, but I’m going to do more in story form. We’re going to talk about the fall of journalism or the failure of journalism, at least in the United States. I’m going to give you a bunch of ways for understanding that that hopefully you haven’t heard before and something to think about. So I conceive of the fall of the fourth estate in a sort of a different way from most people, right? So one of the things is I’m drawing on some of the topics I’ve talked about before, like signaling, I have a video on that, right, and why that’s important to us. And that plays into the story of what I witnessed personally, right, in terms of the fall of the fourth estate, right, or the collapse of journalism or the corruption of journalism might be the best way to say it. And this also plays into what moves us more, right, which I would say is the unconscious, and I have a video on conscious and unconscious. And so I want to tie some of these things together, including some of the other concepts from things like postmodernism and some of the other videos I’ve done, right, just to give you an idea of how I view these things. So I’m going to tell you a bunch of stuff, I’m going to make a bunch of claims. These are things that I witnessed, thoughts that I had mostly in the moment, right, I could be misremembering some of this stuff. I’m not sure I’ll get the entire timeline correct, like last time, because I did do this sort of once before, you know, how I sort of think about things. That’s another video to reference if you like this style in particular. So let me just give you a little background. I used to watch all the 24-7 news organizations, like all at once, all the time. And I would compare, usually in my head, sometimes I’d take actual notes, because I do occasionally take notes, what the stories were saying and how they were different. And then I would calculate what I would call skew. So you’d have a skew between the same story on CNN and Fox and MSNBC, and I’d have a skew number for each. And I’d be like, okay, well, that’s, you know, I’m not saying that you can take, say, Fox and CNN, and in the middle is the truth. I don’t believe anything like that, right? I believe, however, that you can measure bias. And because bias is inevitable, you kind of have to measure it. Nobody doesn’t have bias. They might not exhibit a bias about a particular thing, but that’s a trickier thing in my mind than to just assume they’re biased, have a measurement for it. It’s roughly correct, but 80% of the time, 80% is close enough for me. I’m a pragmatist. We calculate casualties and errors first. We’re not idealists. Idealists think the world can be perfect. And that’s how I would figure out what was going on in the news for real. And it’s pretty accurate. Then I’d do so much research, because a lot of this new stuff, if you want to be accurate with the news, just involves a lot of research on your part. To find the bad framing. Is that really what the person said? What was the full quote of the person? Things like that. And I sort of went over that. In that last video I was referencing about basically what went down, we’ll say, with Obama and in Cambridge in particular, and the Beer Summit. A lot of that stuff is, oh, we’re taking snippets of information. We’re leaving out key points. It lies by omission primarily, not lies by telling you something that isn’t true, but just by losing a bunch of context. Again, very postmodern. In this case, I want to talk about journalism and what I saw when it fell. I can make a case, which I’m going to do here, for when exactly it fell and why and how. This all begins with the timeline of George W. Bush being president. People were going after him in the media. In particular, there was a story that Dan Rather put out there on air and claimed that George W. Bush was not in the National Guard or didn’t do what he said he did in the National Guard, whatever it is, it really aren’t all that relevant. It was based on some documents. Those documents were later found to be forgeries. Now, the problem with that framing that I just used, later found out to be forgeries, is that that is technically incorrect. The producers working on the story were told they were forgeries before they used them. They knew they were forgeries. They were aware of this fact. They had sent the documents off to a couple of experts who came back and said, these are definitely forged documents, definitely. Okay. It wasn’t found out later. It was later revealed. You can see how framing plays a role. Oh, wait a minute. It was revealed not only that they were forgeries, but that the people who published them and claimed they were authentic knew they were not authentic, because there’s three different conditions in there. One is an honest mistake was made and somebody was told they were authentic when they weren’t. Two is that nobody checked to see if they were authentic, and an honest mistake was made, or maybe two mistakes in that case, I would say. Three is this condition of, no, no, no, no, you did the right thing, and you were told the right thing, and you proceeded as if that wasn’t true. That’s many more crimes in my mind. That’s a bigger chasm to leap. You might say, oh, well, Dan Rather lost his job over this, and roughly speaking, he did, and he was blamed for it, and fair enough, and they didn’t really like me to him. That wasn’t a thing, but they did say, well, he was tyrannical, and this is why this happened. They made an excuse to blame him. Now, the problem that I have with this, and I was never a particular fan of Dan Rather, believe me, is that it’s probably unfair to Dan Rather. It doesn’t look like he knew that the producers who are responsible for fact checking and feeding him his information were told that these documents were forgeries. If he didn’t know, then he’s guilty of trusting bad people at the very worst, and we all do that. Okay, maybe, but there’s a point at which you have to trust people. You have no choice, and there might be good reasons to trust people because they’ve been trustworthy in the past. Fair enough, or they were trustworthy enough that they never got caught, and this happens all the time. Why is it important that Dan Rather got in trouble? Well, the producers who did the bad thing didn’t get in trouble, or at least not to the degree that Dan Rather did, and maybe they lost their jobs. I don’t think so, though. There was no shakeup at the network, and you may say, well, why does that matter? That happens all the time. No, I don’t think it does, and that’s the problem, and this goes back to signals. Let’s suppose you’re an insider in the news media, and I’ve had contact with people inside the news media on and off for years. I’m one of those people that actually contacts people who write articles or put articles, publish articles, and I say, hey, I know some funny things about this. Can you tell me more about your story sort of a thing? Sometimes I actually get responses, and they’re rather helpful in understanding what people are thinking, what’s going through their minds. That is to say, I have done my research, not on this particular thing, because I didn’t think I needed to. I thought that all the facts, or at least enough facts, were known. You can always add facts, but actually, you just usually need a small number of facts to know what to do, and more facts just confuses the issue. In this case, I think I have enough facts. I didn’t really do any digging. I’ve done digging in the past. I understand, roughly speaking, how these people tend to think and how they tend to make their errors. Whether I’m right about them making their errors is sort of maybe, but maybe not. They don’t care. If you don’t believe me, don’t watch. I’m fine with it. I’ll never know. If you don’t believe my thesis of what happened, that’s fine too, because I’m going to make a lot of claims, and I think you can hunt them all down, and you’re welcome to do that, and I encourage you to do that. If you’re not going to, that’s fine too. You can not do your research and not believe me. There’s no law against it. When Dan Rather gets in trouble, the person who did the bad thing didn’t get in trouble. The insiders in the news media go, oh, we know what happened here. We’re familiar with this pattern. We respect Dan Rather, and we know full well that the presenter on the screen has no idea about the authenticity of documents, because we work in the industry, and we know they almost never know that. Well, fair enough. We know that the people who were responsible behind this story, who actually made this story that way for the presenter, didn’t get punished. Bad media lying in the media happens all the time. The New York Times is in a scandal every 10 years, like clockwork, where they get caught fabricating stories and plagiarizing. You can look at this. The New York Times would report on itself. Oh, yeah, we could clock doing this, and here are the changes we’re going to make in our organization. Now, what didn’t happen in this case was that second part. Here are the changes we’re going to make in our organization. The right people did not get fired or let go, as had happened quite frequently in the past. I’m not saying it happened every time. It doesn’t have to happen every time. The importance of the signal is, well, here’s a news organization making up a story about a political person they don’t like, and knowingly making up a story, and knowingly publishing that story, and then getting caught, and not admitting to doing this knowingly, and then not getting punished, or at least the right people aren’t getting punished. They give up their sacrificial person, Dan Rather, who’s the head. It’s easy, although he’s the guy on the screen. He must be the one responsible. He made up all these stories, which had never surfaced before then, about him being tyrannical, and forcing news stories to go a certain way. He may have done that. I’m not saying he didn’t, but a little late to complain now. Maybe do something about a problem when you see it, and not after. It’s convenient to get on the train with everybody else. It’s suspicious behavior all around, and I’m not saying it’s invalid, or you should never believe that. I’m just saying somebody didn’t speak up before. How important was it to them, and what did they get out of not speaking up earlier? What did they get out of that? This sends a signal to these people inside the media that says, we can make up stories, and we’re not going to get held accountable. There’s no downside to this. Now, it just so happens coincidentally, and maybe they don’t even know this or realize it at the moment. Look, this is some time ago, so fair enough. Making up stories is a way to get attention, because you can be rather bombastic and make outrageous claims, and that gets more viewers, or more clicks, or whatever. The field of affordance for people making up stories becomes open in a way it was not before, because the news media used to hold itself accountable. If one outlet did something bad, the other outlets would report on it and say, hey, there’s a scandal here. Now, these are friendly people because they get together, and they all know each other, and there’s friendly rivalry for sure, but they’re basically a brotherhood, and they talk about it that way, or at least they used to. They wouldn’t unnecessarily throw their fellow journalists under the bus, or even appropriately. Sometimes they’d protect their own, because people make mistakes, and I know this guy, so I believe it was an honest mistake, even though maybe it wasn’t. Maybe you don’t have a way to determine that. Fair enough. They see this behavior, they see this pattern, and they say, oh, well, we can participate in this new pattern, this new pattern of we don’t have to worry about being punished. When we make up stories out of whole cloth, we can just retract them, and no one’s the wiser. In the meantime, we give viewership, or we get clicks, or we get attention, whatever. This is good for our industry. I think that accelerated bad journalism, because there was no barrier for bad people to fabricate stories knowingly and deliberately for purposes outside of those of the values and virtues of journalism. The idea of the fourth estate, which is, I believe, from England, from the UK, is that it is this institution that is checking on the other institutions. It’s like in the center of everything, being critical of politics, being critical of government, because those are two different things, being critical of the economy, critical in terms of putting an eye on these things. You’re reporting on things. Being critical of social issues, because reporters report on society. Looking at all these things, pointing these things out. It played a role. The virtues and values were, well, we’re going to try and at least state our biases and try to steer away from them as best we can, and try to give at least two sides to the story. Now, I would argue that there’s more than two sides to every story. That’s a different argument. I won’t make it here. I’ll just state it and move on. That there is some use in doing that, in at least not showing one side of the story. But if you think about it, not questioning the documents up front is not showing two sides of the story. Not engaging with, did this happen, interviewing people who were there, which they didn’t do in the piece to counter the narrative of the documents. These are all bad faith. These are all bad faith attempts, because they didn’t really do the research that the virtues and values of journalism before this period, although they weren’t always followed because they’re ideals and were not perfect, would dictate. It would dictate, you’ve got to get some interviews going. You’ve got to get people who have a different view and let them at least give them some airtime. You’ve got to make accusations to people who can defend against them or at least have the opportunity to do so. If people are given the opportunity to decline, you should report that, for sure. But you should not give people the opportunity and let them decline. And I’m not saying that happened in this case. I’m not talking about that. I’m just talking about the virtues and values that weren’t at play here. And the reason why they weren’t at play is, again, they knew the documents were forged. So they knew they were crafting a narrative that was wrong, that was factually incorrect, that conformed to their beliefs. And they knew they were delivering it in the form of, Dan, rather, a person you could trust. So that’s a problem. They knew they were lies. They knew they were lying. They knew that. They were aware. They did it anyway. That’s a loss of virtues and values. Now, does that mean overnight everything changes in the media? No, it doesn’t. But I think an incident like that starts a slow rot where the people who still have a sense for virtues and values, but also have a sense that, well, the rules have changed because I’m really not going to get in trouble. They start doing that. And then the newer people come in, and maybe they’re ideologues. Or maybe they’re virtuous and they see this behavior and that the scales fall from their eyes. They suddenly become open to the fact that journalism thing is all a scam anyway. So why am I here? Well, I mean, it gives me money. So maybe I should make as much money as I can. These virtues and values are not being upheld anyway. So why am I here if it’s not for virtues and values? This happens to people all the time. They go into something. They have this idyllic view. They want to instantiate the virtues and values of whatever industry they’re in, whatever thing they’re doing. And then they get there and the world is not what they thought. Things are not working the way they thought that they ought to work. This happens. This happens to people. And then as people leave and new people come in and they see this pattern, they push the boundaries on it. And the next thing you know, everyone’s lying all the time about everything. And that’s pretty much what happened to the news media. Now, this trend is visible in the numbers in terms of viewers. If you want to go look, you can go look at the news media in the United States and how many viewers it had. So cable news in particular, I think I brought this up before, was a shrinking pot. The total number of 24-7 cable news viewers is going down, but there’s one cable news outlet growing, which is Fox. Now, you can think what you want about Fox. I really don’t care. I have my own ideas. I don’t think it’s what anybody thinks. I think people are misreading it. But the fact that one news organization is growing in a sector where the overall sector is shrinking is an extremely important and significant data point. People talk about using averages. Averages are dangerous, especially with high variance and high change rate numbers because averages smooth out outliers. And outliers are more important. And Nassim Taleb talks about this. Read all his books. They’re really great. So what you end up with is you end up with a situation where when you have an outlier that’s growing in a shrinking industry, that tells you something about the industry. And it should tell you something about the outlier too. Where are people fleeing on the sinking ship? What’s the highest point? Where’s the most virtue and value that they’re looking for? That’s what it tells you. It tells you that this is the area that the viewers think has the most closest ideal to what it is they’re looking for. And again, you can think what you want about Fox, but that’s what the data shows. And if you look, it’s a 20 year decline, at least, maybe at this point. It’s a 25 year decline in engagement with cable news. So you have the dawn of cable news, 24 seven cable news. That’s Ted Turner. He starts CNN and builds it into a business. Now there’s some question to whether or not it was ever profitable on its own or ever would have been. And maybe it was for quite some time. I don’t know. People do funny things with accounting. We’ve got companies like Amazon that’s never been profitable and continues to thrive despite that through investment. Ted Turner, TNT Networks had a crash. They broke up. There was a lot of problems. So was he a great businessman? Maybe. He certainly pioneered a few businesses. Did he overextend? Maybe. Don’t know. Is that the full extent of what happened? Maybe. Or maybe he had a profitable business that was only going to be profitable for a few years and maybe he didn’t know that, to be fair. I don’t know. Or maybe without him, it could never be profitable or without all the pieces working, it can never be profitable. I don’t know. But I do know that that entire industry shrank. So there was an industry that was built up and in less than a generation, it shrank and kind of went away. And that’s what you saw. So that’s what happened. And the question is, well, why? And again, I think it was a loss of aiming at purchasing values due to this incident with George Bush and this political partisanism that happened. There’s no reason for a news organization to not do their homework and not do their research or do their research and quite frankly, go forward with the story they know is untrue. There’s no reason for that. But when it happens, there is a signal sent to everybody, everybody watching. Oh, these people lie and they know they’re lying. Okay. And maybe they don’t put that together. Maybe they can’t articulate that. But I think they sense it. And I think that shows up in participation, which is why you see more and more people leaving the 24-7 news cycle at a certain period of time as it becomes more and more corrupt. And I would argue that for a long time, and this is published, I don’t remember when I last read it. It’s not true anymore, by the way, but it was true. The newspapers and the news organizations had doubled the number of corrections they were publishing. Doubled. That’s pretty interesting. So they themselves know that they were making twice as many mistakes as before. And you can say, look, Mark, it might not have been, maybe they got more stringent. No, they didn’t. They didn’t. That didn’t happen for sure. I was writing to ombudsman of papers and news organizations and saying, hey, you know, I noticed this and this is a little inconsistent and what do you have to say for yourself? And that I had been doing that for years on and off, not something like every month, nothing like that. And what I saw was a shift. Eventually they just didn’t care. They would say, yeah, well, you know, we feel that the story was okay anyway. And I’m like, okay. But two years ago I would have gotten a response with some references. And now you’re not even giving me references. You’re just saying, yeah, we feel it’s okay. So it must be okay. And that’s acceptable to you because it’s not acceptable to me. Not when it’s a change from giving me references. Here’s why we backed up our story. Right? And, you know, sometimes those references were bogus or they were the opposite of what they said. Fair enough. Like people make mistakes and people have different interpretations and I’m okay with that. But to not even give references, to not even justify yourself with anything outside of, eh, we felt like the story was good, that’s a problem. That’s a shift away from virtues and values. It’s a shift away from personal integrity. It’s a shift away from these important things. And I saw that. That happened. It’s measurable. They’re not printing as many retractions as they used to from what I can understand or corrections, errors and omissions, however they call them. And that was noted. But it did double for a while. And that was notable. So these are all indications to back up my thesis that over time, because of the signal, it got more and more corrupt. Things don’t corrupt right away. Like I said, this stuff takes time. But it seems to have happened and it seems to have happened in pretty steady rate. And if you go in and look at viewership for mainstream media, whether it’s newspapers or 24-7 news cycle or whatever, yeah, there’s this 20 or 25 year downturn. And it happened. And you can measure it. You can just look and people vote with their feet, right? And they’re saying, we don’t trust the news media anymore. So we’re not going to watch your stuff anymore. And who do they trust the most? Fox. Why? Well, there used to be evidence that Fox was actually fair and balanced. And you can argue with the measures that University of Michigan used to use if you want. But at least they had some. And one measure is better than no measures. Unless you can prove it’s completely bogus. But I mean, I could never prove that there were some measures University of Michigan used to measure the state of the media that I didn’t think were all that interesting. But at least they were consistent. So you could see a difference between CNN, MSNBC, Fox, and CBS, ABC and NBC. And CBS was a close second to Fox for trustworthiness in terms of the measurements that Michigan was using. And a lot of people agreed with that. So I think there’s something there. And when we think that things happen instantly, we tend to look back too short at timeframe and we misunderstand. Oh, well, it was the internet. It wasn’t the internet. Not that the internet didn’t play a role. The internet did not destroy the Fourth Estate. That didn’t happen. The Fourth Estate destroyed itself. The internet, which was already there, came rushing in to fill that void. When people don’t trust you anymore, they’re looking for information elsewhere. And if you’re looking for information elsewhere, you’re going online going, I don’t know, is there something in here? People start doing searches on things. And little known fact, Google keeps track of the searches you do on things. And you can use that tracking to figure out what to do YouTube videos on. YouTube tells you this, by the way. I’ve watched three videos within the past year talking about this phenomenon. This is how to grow your YouTube channel. Look for what people are searching for and do a video on it. So the act of searching changes what’s out in the space. So it’s not necessarily that people can now search and then they… If they’re searching, they’re unsatisfied. That makes creators go, ha, I can create off of this. And you can look at the revival of the Fourth Estate. I talked about the fall of the Fourth Estate. You’re going to look at what rushed in. And I would argue that what rushed in was Ben Shapiro, Carl Benjamin, Sargon Avakad, and Tim Pool. Tim Pool did something very, very clever. He was following Sargon Avakad’s footsteps to something, Carl Benjamin’s footsteps. But he did something very clever. He realized, I can do better, more accurate news reporting without having any reporters or any people on the ground, just by using the news and the inconsistencies between the news reporting, inconsistencies in the same CNN reporting afternoon to morning or the next day or the next week on the same issue. And give you better news than you can get by watching CNN. Because he’s compressing this by time. He’s using their reports and their reporters. He doesn’t need to get his own facts on the ground. So he does a very clever thing and he bootstraps his business that way. Now, whether he did that intentionally or not, I have no freaking idea. It doesn’t really matter. The fact is it happened. Sometimes things happen unconsciously. We participate our way into these things. We’re not really sure what we’re involved in, but it ends up to be advantageous. I think that’s what happened to Tim Pool to some extent, although he’s a very smart guy. I used to listen to him. I don’t anymore. I used to listen to Carl Benjamin. I don’t anymore. Carl Benjamin took a different route, but he became trustworthy because he made a bunch of predictions, particularly around Gamergate 2014. If you’ve never seen Sargon Avakad’s Gamergate playlist, highly recommend. You’re going to see a bunch of patterns that he warned everybody about. This happened to us in the gamer community. It’s all going to happen to you. And what did it include? It included corrupted media. That was the start of Gamergate was people on a listserv or a forum or whatever who are all in the same industry, actively colluding to put forth certain video games as four-star video games or whatever, top-rated video games and certain others as not so top-rated. And they got caught. And rather than going, yep, you’re right. We did a bad thing. They doubled down and attacked the people that caught them. And that’s what Gamergate really spawned from. Now it went places from there for sure, but the essence of Gamergate was revealing the incestuous relationship of these, quote, journalists, gaming journalists, some of whom didn’t care about games, didn’t play games, and many of whom couldn’t write very well either, incidentally. My personal opinion there, sorry. They got caught in this web of lies and deception and manipulation. And now we just see that everywhere. But Carl Benjamin warned everybody in 2014, this is coming for you. I mean, it was 2015. He said, this is coming for you. This is going to spread. This isn’t just about the gamers. And he said it back then, and he was right. And so he has a lot of credibility. That’s how you build credibility. You just be right. Give people information that can give them good predictions about what’s to come. Make good predictions where appropriate. Try to avoid making predictions as much as possible. And you’ll do good journalism, as long as you stick to the values and virtues of what you’re trying to engender, which is a balanced, fair approach, well researched. Right? So you’re not just sort of throwing that out there. Unless you state, this is just my opinion, and you’ll notice I try to do that. This is my opinion. This is stuff you can look up without my help. Right? Those are the virtues and values. Right? Hold systems to account. Because if there is no system for holding other systems to account, we all lose. And in the past, maybe the king had the court jester, told him to account. Brady had the council, told him to account to some extent. Right? That’s better than nothing. I know it’s not perfect. I know we can all complain about things forever. Very easy to do. But I prefer not to. I prefer to think about, well, what’s the best possible outcome that isn’t idealistic? Because I’m a pragmatist. Right? So I think that story of Dan Rather, that story where he basically got punished for something that probably wasn’t entirely or maybe even at all his fault. And then the other people in the industry seeing that rot in the system, seeing that lack of corrective behavior, and they didn’t correct it either. Right? They didn’t do their due diligence and say these producers need to be fired immediately and should never be allowed in journalism. That really didn’t happen. And I’m not saying no one did that. I’m saying that there should have been an outcry of the industry to protect itself. And it didn’t do that. Right? I would argue the same thing happened in the legal industry years ago, too. Right? They know there are bad actors and they’re not getting rid of them. And when you’re in the fourth estate and you know there’s a bad actor and you’re not just screaming, get rid of them, you’re encouraging the bad apples in your own barrel. You deserve what happens to you. So if the fourth estate fell, and I think it did, that’s too bad. They did it to themselves. They should have stuck to the virtues and values. They didn’t. So that’s my thesis. That’s my story. I hope you found it helpful in understanding, if nothing else, how I think about these things and how they unfolded in the moment for me. This was another one that was clear when it happened. You know, I was like, hey, I don’t buy it. I didn’t buy the story when I first saw it. I knew there was something wrong with it. It was probably something to do with the lack of balance. I don’t remember off the top of my head exactly, but I knew it was BS from day one. And I’m very good at spotting BS stories. It’s pretty easy to do for me now. But I have a lot of practice. I’ve practiced for decades, and that counts for something. So hopefully that gives you some sense of why I think the fourth estate fell, where I think the new fourth estate is, and why that happened. And it’s not just the internet killed my business. I don’t think that’s an accurate and fair way to think about it. And maybe you disagree. If we leave some comments. If you want me to do more of this sort of video, let me know. If you want me to do less of this sort of video, let me know. If you want me to cover this in more detail or something, I suppose I could do an enormous amount of research, some of which you can do for yourself, and cover it differently. Or if you want me to do more detail or something, or a different time span or something like that, let me know in the comments. I’m happy to engage. And I really appreciate that you’re watching my videos and that these videos are important enough for people to watch and interesting enough for them to watch. And I hope you watch them all to the end. And I just want to thank you for your time and attention.