[Peace-discuss] The futility & nihilism factory

[David Johnson]

 " The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the
information it needs to make enlightened political choices. "

I absolutely agree. The problem is that CORPORATE OWNED MEDIA does NOT sift
fact from fiction. It produces and repeats corporate propaganda fiction and
ignores and buries the facts.

" If you short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with
misinformation and overwhelm the media's ability to mediate, then you can
disrupt the democratic process. "

So they are saying that there is too much information, therefore anything
but corporate owned and financed media should be banned.

The corporate media does NOT " mediate " and in fact is one of the largest
impediments to REAL democracy in the U.S. and the rest of the world as well.

Why do you think so many people have been deserting corporate media as their
info source ( especially people under 40 ) for the last 15-20 years and
turning to REAL independent journalists on the internet and YouTube ?
...Weapons of mass destruction anyone ?

Journalists like ; Glen Greenwald, Abby Martin, Max Blumenthal, Jimmy Dore,
Aaron Matte, Chris Hedges, etc.. Who are banned from corporate media.

Lastly Ron.....Look at your source for this article ...." VOX " - The
corporate hipster magazine for Neo-Liberalism and the U.S. corporate empire.

David J.





-----Original Message-----
From: Peace-discuss [mailto:peace-discuss-bounces at lists.chambana.net] On
Behalf Of Szoke, Ron via Peace-discuss
Sent: Friday, January 17, 2020 1:40 PM
To: peace-discuss at anti-war.net
Cc: peace-discuss
Subject: [Peace-discuss] The futility & nihilism factory

"Flood the zone with shit": How misinformation overwhelmed our democracy
The impeachment trial probably won't change any minds. Here's why.

By Sean Illing  @seanilling  sean.illing at vox.com  Jan 16, 2020 

   No matter how President Trump's impeachment trial plays out in the
Senate, one thing is certain: Despite the incontrovertible facts at the
center of the story, the process will change very few minds.
   Regardless of how clear a case Democrats make, it seems likely that a
majority of voters will remain confused and unsure about the details of
Trump's transgressions. No single version of the truth will be accepted.
   This is a serious problem for our democratic culture. No amount of
evidence, on virtually any topic, is likely to move public opinion one way
or the other. We can attribute some of this to rank partisanship - some
people simply refuse to acknowledge inconvenient facts about their own side.
   But there's another, equally vexing problem. We live in a media ecosystem
that overwhelms people with information. Some of that information is
accurate, some of it is bogus, and much of it is intentionally misleading.
The result is a polity that has increasingly given up on finding out the
truth. As Sabrina Tavernise and Aidan Gardiner put it in a New York Times
piece, "people are numb and disoriented, struggling to discern what is real
in a sea of slant, fake, and fact."    This is partly why an
earth-shattering historical event like a president's impeachment has done
very little to move public opinion.
   The core challenge we're facing today is information saturation and a
hackable media system. If you follow politics at all, you know how
exhausting the environment is. The sheer volume of content, the dizzying
number of narratives and counternarratives, and the pace of the news cycle
are too much for anyone to process.
   One response to this situation is to walk away and tune everything out.
After all, it takes real effort to comb through the bullshit, and most
people have busy lives and limited bandwidth. Another reaction is to retreat
into tribal allegiances. There's Team Liberal and Team Conservative, and
pretty much everyone knows which side they're on. So you stick to the places
that feed you the information you most want to hear.
   My Vox colleague Dave Roberts calls this an "epistemic crisis." The
foundation for shared truth, he argues, has collapsed. I don't disagree with
that, but I'd frame the problem a little differently.
   We're in an age of manufactured nihilism.
   The issue for many people isn't exactly a denial of truth as such. It's
more a growing weariness over the process of finding the truth at all. And
that weariness leads more and more people to abandon the idea that the truth
is knowable.
   I call this "manufactured" because it's the consequence of a deliberate
strategy. It was distilled almost perfectly by Steve Bannon, the former head
of Breitbart News and chief strategist for Donald Trump. "The Democrats
don't matter," Bannon reportedly said in 2018. "The real opposition is the
media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit."
   This idea isn't new, but Bannon articulated it about as well as anyone
can. The press ideally should sift fact from fiction and give the public the
information it needs to make enlightened political choices. If you
short-circuit that process by saturating the ecosystem with misinformation
and overwhelm the media's ability to mediate, then you can disrupt the
democratic process.
   What we're facing is a new form of propaganda that wasn't really possible
until the digital age. And it works not by creating a consensus around any
particular narrative but by muddying the waters so that consensus isn't
achievable.
   Bannon's political objective is clear. As he explained in a 2017
Conservative Political Action Conference talk, he sees Trump as a stick of
dynamite with which to blow up the status quo. So "flooding the zone" is a
means to that end. But more generally, creating widespread cynicism about
the truth and the institutions charged with unearthing it erodes the very
foundation of liberal democracy. And the strategy is working.

<snip>
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