The reason for Alex Jones’ rise and arguably the rise of Trump, AOC, Sanders, and other non-mainstream candidates like Majorie T Greene (to put it lightly) is the continued dying trust in public institutions like mainstream media. Why? The masses on both sides of the spectrum aren’t happy with revelations such as “catch and kill” or lying by omission or delay with the most recent example being stories on Hunter’s laptop. It doesn’t help that the only mainstream media outlet to look at the ties between the Wuhan Virology Institute, the EcoHealth Alliance, and NIAID is Newsweek; while others like The Intercept or Vanity Faire & Rolling Stone are either not mainstream or are primarily entertainment industry periodicals, or just straight up tabloids like the NY Post.
Occupy Wall Street and their successors, the meme stock clans, are other symptoms of diving public trust in public institutions, and so is the #EpsteinDidntKillHimself meme. It will only continue to get worse unless something changes, which is highly unlikely when various entities can just pay to kill or influence stories.
I would say the public trust is not so much dying as actively being killed.
Also the word mainstream has lost its meaning. If that term is to apply based on audience size, sites like InfoWars were bigger than some of the traditional outlets.
The idea of leaving "mainstream" outlets to seek truth on sites like InfoWars is more about people just wanting to hear their biases and not really interested in news per se.
> I would say the public trust is not so much dying as actively being killed.
I feel that we agree aside from semantics. I still would choose dying over killed because it looks like a gradual year over year trend rather than a giant, sudden change.
> Also the word mainstream has lost its meaning.
To be clear, I wanted to differentiate sane & plausible media outlets from the fringe outlets like Infowars or upstarts like The Intercept
> The idea of leaving "mainstream" outlets to seek truth on sites like InfoWars is more about people just wanting to hear their biases and not really interested in news per se.
This was true in decades prior. However, it's starting to snowball with continued polarization of the both left and right, eventually resulting in political moderates being a minority. Isn't it strange that Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone are now covering stories on both COVID-19 and Wall Street? imo it's out of necessity because the media outlets, who traditionally cover these topics, refuse to cover the stories with the same depth.
That's a good illustration of my point. Something is very wrong when Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair are publishing the stories that should have been in the NYT, Time or CNN. Arguably, The Intercept and The Conversation wouldn't exist either if trust in the traditional mainstream outlets were still high.
I agree with you on the issue with trust. The Atlantic compares the US developments from the last 10 years with what happened to the tower of Babel:
"Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech."
The main thing that I find wrong with this article is that it lays all the blame on social media. While it is a valid point, the mainstream media is also culpable for the public's growing lack of trust. It's disingenuous when it's not part of the conversation.
I think part of the problem is BOTH political parties demonize their opponents rather than make intellectual arguments on policy. This makes politics feel existential at the federal level, because it's framed as being about good vs. evil rather than the substance of the policy.
The public's trust in institutions will continue to erode until there is no trust remaining soley because every eight years or so BOTH political parties equate losing to the end of the world.
The path we're on leads to radical defederalization of the government.
Honestly I feel like the failing is one of media literacy and critical thinking, as opposed to trust in institutions, as you propose. On the side of the media, it's a sortof cynical appraisal of their readers/viewers ("It's too complicated").
Take the Hunter Biden laptop thing, for example. I don't know too much about it, but my understanding is that it revealed nepotism/influence peddling, which I totally agree should be prohibited. I mean most people are in favor of preventing members of Congress from trading stocks, for example. It's something pretty much all of us can agree on.
But instead of the story of the laptop being used as a jumping off point to talk about these issues, the news organizations decided to squash the story, thinking its readers/viewers were not sophisticated enough to be able to digest it, and that it would simply be used as a weapon by the Republicans (sad to say with, I agree).
Personally I feel like they should have fully covered the story. I also believe that Trump would have been re-elected, and that this would have been a bad thing for the entire world. Squashing the story might have led to a short-term win, but maybe perpetuate the problem longer.
I really hope things turn around. I want to have hope for the future. It's pretty hard though, I don't have much trust that we are up to the challenge.
The laptop story was so way out there it was only fit for tabloid publication. It wasn’t squashed so much that it was the story about a blind computer repairman who thought he recognized the former Vice President’s son in Delaware who is somehow so renowned that he attracts business all the way from Los Angeles. Even the Republicans didn’t feel comfortable seriously running with it.
I don't think anybody is claiming Hunter went all the way to Delaware to repair his laptop. The Bidens have a house in Delaware so it is reasonable to suspect that Hunter was already in the state.
If that’s what they were going with sure. I guess it could have been any random computer repair shop in any state, but how often do you take your MacBooks to get repaired at some random place when visiting your parents, and leave them there since you live in LA anyways?
On the other hand, it’s such a shoddy setup I doubt any half way decent intelligence agency would plant the laptop there. But maybe blind computer repair people just aren’t that common?
Is it so unreasonable to believe that Hunter Biden, who grew up in Delaware and whose father has to live in delaware, since he has been the senator from delaware for almost fifty years, ended up with a laptop in need of repair in Delaware?
It is unreasonable to think that he left it at the computer store with someone legally blind, and left no contact information.
It is unreasonable to think that this legally person recognized the customer as Hunter Biden.
It is unreasonable to think that Hunter Biden then completely forgot about it.
And that the owner of the store, who apparently has political connections including Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani, could not figure out how to reach out to Hunter Biden.
And then, three years after it had been left with him, decided to snoop on it.
And then was able to reach out to Rudy Giuliani to tell him all about it.
And that Rudy Giuliani was "protecting his life" from the Clinton campaign, to stop them "killing him, too" (referencing Seth Rich).
And then that despite the owner of the store saying he backed up a copy of the drive, delivered it to Steve Bannon, who delivered another copy to the media... when it came time to handing over the laptop, it was put in a USPS mail envelope - no tracking, no certification, no insurance. Where it was then lost.
You make several good points, but I'll address the few that are not very good
> It is unreasonable to think that Hunter Biden then completely forgot about it.
Hunter Biden is a known drug addict. It is reasonable to assume that he can forget something as crucial as his personal laptop given his history of abuse.
> Where it was then lost.
At this point, everyone has accepted that it is Hunter's laptop. Most people have also accepted that the contents are also genuine. It was also never contested by either Hunter or President Biden.
"There could be a laptop out there that was stolen from me. It could be that I was hacked. It could be that it was the — that it was Russian intelligence."
In the grand picture, the narrative of how they acquired the laptop doesn't matter, though I agree with you that it's likely from theft. It's akin to computer thieves encountering child pornography in one of their "scores". What matters more are the contents, which are disturbing. The drug abuse and sex are banal. However, the evidence of corruption is disturbing. To be fair, I'm confident both you and I can find documented instances of corruption in the Trump administration. The difference is that the mainstream media is only going to actively protect Biden during election season, which lends credence to the far right's accusation that the mainstream media is biased.
No one sees the Bidens disputing it. The Bidens just want the story to go away. Like it or not, it is Hunter’s data. How the opposing side gathered it is near pointless. Corruption is corruption.
There are plenty of stories in the New York Post about celebrities having sex with aliens, and you don't see those celebrities disputing those stories either.
1. It's not only the NY Post reporting on it. Yes, it's a tabloid, but has been grudgingly vindicated by mainstream media outlets for this story.
2. It's not something ridiculous like "celebrities having sex with aliens". That's a bad comparison.
3. There is proof of corruption. Selectively ignoring it just because it's your side ie claiming it's "fake news" doesn't help society as a whole. It also adds credence to the far right's claims of selective and biased reporting. It furthers their narrative of persecution.
It's how we go to this mess in the 1st place. If the mainstream media wasn't corrupted through the 1990s consolidation circus, I highly doubt Trump would have risen to power. He rose to power because of fallen public trust in public institutions like mainstream media.
I'm not entirely sure what 'media literacy' means when you can get more accurate reporting from a late night TV comedian than from "the newspaper of record".
Too many people have been shaken out of their gell-mann amnesia by experiencing some respected media outlet telling something they personally know to be a lie, or worse-- seeing the hierarchy inverted by seeing the reputable place lie while an obvious tabloid tells the truth.
The laptop is a great example-- the google-sent messages to hunter pass DKIM validation: they're cryptographically signed by google, so anyone with appropriate technical skill can verify their veracity beyond reasonable dispute. But a tabloid published it and not only did the reputable places not do so, but there was widespread collusion to suppress any discussion of it.
> revealed nepotism/influence peddling
Well, it was strongly indicative of hunter involved in that stuff. It's a little more complicated because he's a known-and-admitted screwup. If hunter was going around selling his father's influence without his father's knowledge, that shouldn't necessarily reflect negatively on Biden Sr. The material from the laptop made available actually connecting Sr. to any of it appears to be extremely tenuous. That said, it's not an unreasonable heuristic to assume from the fact that its all been so aggressively suppressed that there is a smoking gun there, so I can't fault people for doing so. As you note, the broader issue is one that's worthwhile to discuss.
It's hard to get the contents from an MSM outlet since most if not all the centrist mainstream outlets barely mention it, which makes the optics seem partisan. At best, they're just covering the controversy of their own decision to do a news blackout before the 2020 elections, barely mentioning the laptop contents. (Some people on HN may disagree, but a 2nd consecutive Trump term would have been disastrous.) Meanwhile, the overtly partisan outlets on the right give lurid details... but they're partisan which also makes the optics look bad. However, given the recent news articles they've also been vindicated, especially the NY Post.
This is probably the best, seemingly non-partisan summary of the contents. (It's still partisan because it's so vague, when it doesn't need to be.)
"The Post and other conservative media outlets’ coverage of Hunter’s files partly involved lurid material about Hunter’s personal life. Hunter’s struggles with drug addiction were already a matter of public record, but the files contained further embarrassing details, as well as sexual material. The other focus of coverage was Hunter’s lucrative foreign work, most notably with a Ukrainian gas company and Chinese business interests. Trump allies had long claimed this work proved not just Hunter’s but Joe Biden’s corruption, and they combed through Hunter’s emails to try to make that case."
Here's another mainstream instance of late coverage
One infamous email purportedly detailed a business arrangement between a Chinese company and the Biden family.
Tony Bobulinski, who is listed as a recipient of the email first published by the New York Post, offered further detail last year in a statement to Fox News on the correspondence in October 2020, which references a proposed equity split: “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” “The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much-publicized May 13, 2017, email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden,” said Bobulinski, who says he was brought on as CEO of Sinohawk Holdings by Hunter Biden and James Gilliar, the sender of the email.
This is from a tabloid style publication with published screenshots from media found on the laptop.
"It also reportedly contains a 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images."
In light of this, I predict that impartial, objective media outlets will continue to be replaced by overtly partisan news outlets at a faster pace. When I think about it, I'm not sure an impartial media outlet has existed for years now given that it's so difficult for human beings to be fully objective.
> are also not solely "entertainment industry" publications
Historically, Vanity Fair and Rolling Stone covered the TV & movie industries and the music industry respectively. However, you're correct now because both Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair cover stories and topics that traditional mainstream outlets won't touch. The Matt Taibbi op-eds are good examples. Think about it. People are getting hard hitting news from Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair instead of ABC, CBS, NBC, Time, CNN, FOX, NY Times or WSJ; to name a few mainstream outlets.
Occupy Wall Street and their successors, the meme stock clans, are other symptoms of diving public trust in public institutions, and so is the #EpsteinDidntKillHimself meme. It will only continue to get worse unless something changes, which is highly unlikely when various entities can just pay to kill or influence stories.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-...
http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
(I'm just the messenger.)