Checking the headlines this morning, I saw this fucking gem:
That’s not the message that McConnell was sending- the message was “I am impotent as fuck and my 40 years in office meant not a god damned thing when it came to persuading my peers.” The media, as a collective, still is not up to the challenge and has not shifted their approach one iota. It’s just business as usual.
In science, there are these things called “paradigm shifts”- a great book I read many many moons ago as a much younger man called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I don’t have the book here as it is at home on the bookshelf, but basically his premise was that most of the time, normal science operates within an accepted paradigm, but there are things called paradigm shifts that upend the normal way of doing things, and over time the new paradigm becomes the new normal. I’m not going to go into all the old readings of the received view and the philosophy of science and Wittgenstein and all the other stuff- there is a fellow named Tom Levenson who writes here who is much smarter and versed on the topic and I know he can explain things to us without the anxiety and drug and alcohol induced haze that clouds my memory.
Basically, what I am saying, is that things have changed so profoundly in the last few decades that the media’s old approach not only does not accurately cover or represent what is actually happening, and applying their paradigm of politics and news coverage structurally no longer works. They no longer know or understand what they are seeing and are, because of their refusal to shift their approach, and as such can no longer accurately provide information to the public.
Basically, what is happening is if a doctor walked into a normal operating room and started talking about bleeding and leeches and ill humours while everyone else is practicing modern medicine. Or a physicist still talking about phlogiston.
So not only is this going on, with the practitioners in the media completely oblivious to the fact they are doing damage and not accurately reflecting the world anymore, but they are also consumed by an obscene arrogance, and react violently to anyone who points out the error of their ways. Add to it that many of the members of the media are not subject matter experts or, to be brutally honest, the smartest people in the room (those j school students bouncing across campus are not Rhodes Scholars or future Nobel winners), and you have a bunch of people who have no idea what is going on, no recognition of reality or their role in it, with a heightened arrogance that pushes them to not only look down on anyone who questions them and their status, but also a petulance to punish anyone who refuses to not act in accordance to the old media landscape that no longer exists but in their own fucking heads.
It’s depressing as fuck to watch.