The media is broken

[Diebert van Rhijn]

Classic news media was built on the assumption we still, with minor differences, were discussing the same events and principles. From what can be gathered, this seems to be less and less the case. Even journalists start wondering about it more.

The Media Is Broken - And not for the reasons you think.
-- New York Times, opinion from David Brooks.

Events don’t seem to be driving politics. Increasingly, sociology is.

Geographic and psycho-sociological patterns now overshadow events in driving political loyalties and national electoral outcomes. Demography is destiny. There’s a more precise way to put this. An event is really two things. It’s the event itself and then it’s the process by which we make meaning of the event. As Aldous Huxley put it, “Experience is not what happens to you, it’s what you do with what happens to you.”

When a whole country sees events through a similar lens, then you don’t have to think a lot about the process people use to make meaning. It’s similar across the land. But when people in different regions and subcultures have nonoverlapping lenses, the process by which people make sense of events is more important than the event itself.

For reasons I don’t understand, we’ve had an epistemic explosion over the past few decades. Different American regions and subcultures now see reality through nonoverlapping lenses. They make meaning in radically different ways. Psycho-social categories have hardened.

[Diebert van Rhijn]

After looking through the NYT comment section for the article linked to above, some insights can be obtained on how at least some of the mostly liberal leaning readership viewed the issue. And it's not that surprising to me that most don't seem get the main point or try to demolish it with a simple negation. Like saying all the important facts are universal and true or just that the only problem is that stupidity, ignorance and falsehoods have taken over and have gained a massive audience. But is it really as simple as that?

While it's indeed tempting to think in those terms, as to solve it I suppose, the underlying logical problem with it should be clear: if so many people can be fooled on so many topics, most of the time, what makes you think that you're not one of them, even as collective? What kind of mechanism do you possess to verify your true comprehension of the situation as being "most accurate", fact or science based? If indeed so many people are capable to fail that hard, wouldn't it make you hesitate more before continuing instead of lashing out and ridiculing?

So I took one example to flesh out a bit to illustrate one way to deal with this. Some commented on the perhaps fictive reference in the article about the "man in rural Idaho who has lost a son to suicide and a brother to fentanyl" which then was used by the author as question on how the person's lens would operate on e.g. the impeachment hearings and how we would get access to his meaning? The comments mostly go like "his personal situation does not change the facts of the hearing and witnesses".

But this it really so easy? Lets look at suicide and fentanyl to understand what those references are representing.

Fentanyl alone caused 32,000 overdose deaths last year in the US alone, from the 47,600 opioid related ones. And in the period 1999-2018 it's 400,000 deaths, that's 130 a day. Most analysis seems to track the origins of this particular crisis to the availability, for example the dark web but especially the major supply chains through China and Mexico. It's staggering to even contemplate these numbers. Perhaps the presence of fentanyl is not the main factor but simply opioids and the increasing search for those? And where there's a market, suppliers move in.

Suicide in the US has been rising for years, since the 21st century and more distinctly so after the War on Terror started (the military campaigns for sure contributed). This increase of the white, non-Hispanic, overall death rate is largely accounted for by drug and alcohol poisonings, suicide, chronic liver diseases and cirrhosis. Some links to illustrate this all with data will follow although I don't claim the only, right interpretation. Just what I think is food for thought.

Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.

Link between “Depression Deaths” in White America & Trump Victory.

Want to decrease suicide? Raise the minimum wage, researchers suggest

When seen from this perspective, living in communities which were hit hardest by all of the above trends, meaning not just families affected but inside each community would be many examples over the last decade all stacked together and perceived as some epidemic scale. Then it's not hard to imagine how this would shape priority in the mind. We're talking about a scale like the AIDS epidemic and there was little sign of addressing it before 2016.

So when this Idaho sample individual watches TV and sees a 16 year old warning about her own future in Sweden (and yours too) being ruined as predicted by supercomputers running a simulation called general circulation model (GCM) using something called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) they might wonder if the world has gone mad. Or imagine this specimen watching some hearings on the president having a bad character, that he broke the rules, has a big mouth, walks over people, being racist and didn't pay his taxes.

Now imagine again the priorities in this sample mind and its larger context, the community. His community and all communities closely linked to, might start looking at their own hard realities which they were seeing every day: job loss, lower wages, suicides and cheaper more lethal drugs flowing in from abroad, though open borders, imports that kill the ones they love and all in numbers beyond belief.

And then one could ask: which program would seem more meaningful to them? Or would they really believe things would change with a new and improved president? Would she bring back stability in the community, work, wages, close illegal import, be tougher on China etc?

The question can be asked if they can expect anything to happen from a federal government with or without Trump that would help their communities. But that's not even really what's at stake here. The point is that they have valid as well as sound reasoning on "what is". And without them hearing something truthful or at least hopeful, something they believe could save their communities, towns, families --over time-- they simply won't value it. So this is what that means, this "lens" -- or how I read it.

Perhaps the truth is that many rural communities and smaller towns will simply die out, will collapse somehow foremost mentally and should indeed be abandoned. But even if so, no Democrat politician would ever dare to say, not even think about it out. And then we're back at the topic of accuracy, truth and lenses. What's the viable alternative on offer for the so-called "deplorable"?