March 25, 2008
Does the Fault, Dear Reader, Lie Not in the Media Stars But In Ourselves?
Via Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber, Alex Tabarrok offers a reason as to why those who were right about the financial crisis and the Iraq war from the beginning get so little media attention, over at Marginal Revolution.
The answer is media incentives. It wasn't just the experts who were wrong, the majority of the American people got Iraq and housing wrong. The war was popular in the beginning and people continued to buy houses even as prices rose ever higher. So what does the American public want to hear now?
The public wants to hear why they weren't idiots. And who better to explain to the public why they weren't idiots than experts who also got it wrong?
Posted by Robin Varghese at 11:55 PM | Permalink
Comments
Steve Jobs once said:
"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards!"
Posted by: saifedean | Mar 26, 2008 4:26:39 AM
What a load of revisionist crap. The polls before the war began were fifty/fifty if anything and the majority quickly went against the war if the question asked about would it be worth it if a single u.s. soldier was killed. Millions of people were against the war and MSNBC cut Donahue, despite his favorable ratings, because they didn't want to be seen as a venue for antiwar thoughts. I am so sick of this bullshit narrative that is like "we were ALL wrong." Manhattan got shut down by the millions of people in the street who were against the war. The corporate media is in cahoots with the war makers and the sooner you acknowledge that, the clearer it becomes and the less you have to rely on masturbatory "oh, the bewildered herd" goldfish thought pieces.
Posted by: history is a weapon | Mar 26, 2008 2:20:57 PM
if we're reading this to determine a better path for ourselves, then it seems useful to suggest that the public and the media create each other. I sometimes wonder if the critiques of the corporate media system serve, in the end, to strengthen that system by drawing attention to it: the media machine's first wish is our attention: how else could we know what to buy? Critique becomes just another way to play the media's game.
Emerson wrote of the power of enthusiasm and affirmation. I don't deny the terrible power of corporate media over our lives, the way it mediates and implicates itself so totally in our relations with each other. But our enthusiasm and energy seem better spent on creating systems beyond the corporate beast's reach. Let's starve the beast. Or, as Einstein described Gandhi's political philosophy, "do not participate in anything you believe to be evil" -- and then celebrate what you do participate within.
just some rambling thoughts
Posted by: another | Mar 27, 2008 12:24:34 AM
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