Fake News: Part 2

The Legacy Media decries “Fake News” because they long for their lost status as “Gatekeepers”, not because they have any scruples about propagating falsehoods and propaganda even of the most Goebbels/Völkischer Beobachter sort (see Part 1).

What is a “Gatekeeper”? Well, another word for it would be “Middleman”, someone who inserts themselves into a transaction to profit from it, taking money from both sides for their supposed services as a “facilitator” while in fact contributing nothing. A non-Media exemplar would be Health Insurance, which is not at all the same thing as Health Care. The putative “service” they provide is mediating between you and the catastrophic cost of serious illness. They do this by charging you exorbitant fees, excluding large portions of minimal preventive care (high deductibles), and “sharing the risk” with a larger population which is not actively sick.

Under the Affordable Care Act (an oxymoron commonly known as Obamacare) they are granted a lucrative Government Monopoly codifying many of their worst practices. True they are no longer allowed to exclude people because of prior conditions, but they are still able to deny people needed care on the whims of an actuary and are guaranteed a 20% profit and delivered a captive clientele by the police power of the State.

Why do we need them?

In the “News” Media the bulk of money for traditional print outlets came from the sale of advertising, any “news” was merely attractive packaging. Their commercial Middleman role was delivering your eyeballs and thousands or millions of others for the blandishments of businesses. A little known fact is that the bulk of this revenue came not from big corporations with fancy graphics but from 140 character snippets of text called “Classified Ads”. Now we have Craig’s List, E-Bay, and Twitter. In “Broadcast” News you could deliver higher volumes of eyeballs and solicit fewer customers resulting in efficiencies of scale (instead of having a staff to handle hundreds of small accounts you only need 3 or 4 major sponsors).

Where did this money go? Into local beat reporters and investigative journalism? Hell no! It went into the pockets of Media Magnates and a small circle of Celebrity Pundit Personalities who’s primary qualification is that they can read from a Teleprompter and not look at the wrong camera too often.

They like to style themselves “journalists” because of their vanity but nothing could be further from the truth. They are stenographers and shills for the Neoliberal Consensus. You can call them professional liars and I frequently do, but I suspect that they just don’t care whether what they say is factual or not because they are lazy and indifferent. Their only real concern is if their Producers (because they are faaar to important for such mundane work) can deliver them a “get” of a popular figure that they will pander and suck up to on camera lest they ruin the incestuous relationship. Comfort the Afflicted an Afflict the Comfortable my Ass (and I’m not talking about a Donkey here).

They are collectively jealous that the real reporting is being done by underpaid and often anonymous people on the Internet and that more and more of their consumers are not bothering with their bullshit which diminshes their value as deliverers of eyeballs for their corporate clients. This is why they are attempting to construct their own Monopoly of Information guarded by Government Censorship.

And make no mistake, Censorship and Gatekeeping is precisely what the “Fake News” scandal is all about. This is why sites like Naked Capitalism, Truthout, Truthdig, and Common Dreams are lumped in with The Drudge Report. The difference between them is that the first 4 report the real news that is inconvenient for the Neoliberal Establishment because it exposes their lies and The Drudge Report is a compendium of falsehood that the Legacy Media is secretly ashamed of slavishly parroting because their own philosophy is so bankrupt of ideas and energy that they can hardly be bothered to do any work or have an original thought.

The Lies At The Heart Of Our Dying Order
by Ian Welsh
2016 December 16

One should understand why people have lost trust in experts, the media and politicians.

It is not difficult, it is the same reason people lost faith in Soviet Communism: promises were made that turned out to be lies. They were not kept.
…
The world order we live in was born in 1979 or 1980, with Thatcher and Reagan. It made a few core promises:

• If the rich have more money, they will create more jobs;
• Lower taxes will lead to more prosperity;
• Increases in housing and stock market prices will increase prosperity for everyone;
• Trade deals and globalization will make everyone better off.

These core promises all turned out to be lies. It’s that simple. For most of the population, the last 40-odd years were either an experience of stagnation, or an experience of decline.
…
Neoliberalism has discredited everyone who bought in to it. Who didn’t buy into it? Well, the hard left and what people are now calling the “alt-right”.

So people are turning in those directions, though more to the right. Because people are ideologically and identity driven, and most are not intellectuals, what they look for are signifiers that someone is not like the people who screwed them, who lied to them for 40 years.

Trump does not talk like those people. Farrage does not talk like those people. On the left, Corbyn does not talk like those people and to a large extent, neither did Sanders.

And so they are turning to people who don’t parse like the regular type of elite. Many of those people are also selling them a bill of goods (Trump, to a large extent), or are nasty pieces of work (Trump, Alt-Right), but that doesn’t matter to a lot of people: they can’t take the pain any more; the(y are) assured long decline and they will take a flyer on anyone who might shake things up.

Lying is bad policy. It may get you what you want in the short run, even the medium run, but it destroys the very basis of your power and legitimacy. That is what neoliberal politicians, journalists (yes, yes they are neoliberal) and experts have done to themselves and the order they supported. No one with sense trusts them: if you trust them, you have no sense, it is definitional. I always laugh when some idiot says “but 90% of economists think X is bad”.

FAIL. They also missed the housing bubble. They lied or were “mistaken” about trade deals. Their opinion means nothing.

All this screaming about fake news is something I will take seriously when the New York Times, who helped sell the Iraq war based on “fake news” is listed as fake.

The current order has very little credibility left, and they are losing more and more. Look at all the poll failures: somehow the polls almost always get it wrong against insurgents, not for them.

No, neoliberalism is dying, and its defenders are discredited, and both things deserve to be the case. That does not mean its death-throes will be pleasant (they won’t be) or that what replaces it has to be better, just that it has run its course.

Those who supported it took their rewards in their time: the top tier got filthy stinking rich, the courtiers received good jobs and money, when for their victims, the good jobs and money were going away. They will have to be satisfied with that, because posterity will be absolutely scathing to them, as it is to the generation leading up to World War I.

Lie repeatedly, fail to keep your promises, and things like Trump and Brexit will happen. It is that simple.