How many of these faces do you know? In a boundless internet with infinite possibilities, why do these ones stand out? Are they new media? New elites? Has the mainstream fallen?

This is a story about stories. Who gets to tell them? What shapes them? Do they help or hinder us? This is the most significant story of our time. It’s about that word – ‘significance’.

We too often think of the news, the media, our information diet, as moving from controlled, old, censored – in the age of Kings, dictators, and the mainstream media (MSM) – towards a freer, more independent, more rational, media.

We think the internet has freed information – citizen journalism, truth to power, a new era. But what’s fascinating is that people have thought that since the dawn of the media. That in being part of a new way of doing journalism, people were on the side of good, the side of progress, the side of history. It’s part of a larger assumption – that we inevitably move from controlled to freer societies.

How many of these faces do you know? What’s happening, when the radically infinite globe-spanning and interest-diverse possibilities of the internet seem to coalesce around recognisable figures with common interests that almost seem to be friends?

Eerily, this isn’t new. Maybe history does repeat itself.

This is why to understand this new era – whatever you want to call it – new media, alternative media, new elites – we have to understand old media, legacy media, corporate  media, mainstream media. Where did they come from? What motivated them? How did they begin to fall? What patterns can we learn? Understanding one might give us some clues to the future of the other.

Is this really new media vs old elites? Are the MSM decent, noble, fourth estate journalists holding the powerful to account? Or are they stooges? Puppets? Too close to power? Too self-interested?

We’re going through a historical shift. I think it’s important to understand this moment in the longest view possible.

The media are a set of institutions which represent, in many ways, public opinion. They shape the world. And now, that happens as much through Rogan as through the BBC, as much through Daily Wire as through National Review, as much through Jordan Peterson as through CBC.

All of these people are institutions that have ideas about what’s significant in the world, what to talk about, how to talk about it. And those sets of ideas have always changed – from the beginning of the press, through to radio, television, to today.

What is the truth? Who gets closer to it? Tucker Carlson or the NYT? Russell Brand or The Telegraph? Me or another channel? What I want to describe is how the truth gets shaped in the first place. Because the truth is a complex irreducible thing. There are so many issues. Which ones get picked as significant? In what ways? I want to lay out a way of judging them – not as right or wrong – but as how they’re made, why, so that we can be critical ourselves.

 

Contents:

• Becoming Mainstream
• The Television Revolution
• Manufacturing (PC) Consent
• The Internet’s First Media
• The Ideology of the New Elites
• New Elites, Assemble!
• Who’s Right? Who’s Biased?
• Sensationalism
• Free Speech
• Beware the Guru
• The Market Always Wins
• A Better Media (What To Do?!)

 

Becoming Mainstream

We think of the media as a vast established set of loosely similar institutions, but a look at the history of the media illustrates how these institutions have changed over time. To understand, say, a US newspaper in the early 19th century or a Youtube channel in the 21st, we have to understand the relevant context, relationships, ideas, norms, laws, cultures, technology, and economic circumstances – all of which shape the information in very specific ways.

And despite this constellational context varying from place to place, period to period, there are some identifiable strands that run through.

Since Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in Germany in 1440, individuals and groups sought to mobilise this radical powerful technology for different purposes.

This revolution changed the world. It changed religion, giving people a chance to read for themselves, it gave a boost to national languages over Latin, to state bureaucracy, it weakened the church and made the renaissance and the Enlightenment possible, it aided commerce and exploration and created imagined national communities with shared identities – it gives credence to Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase that it’s not so much what’s said, but the medium itself that’s the message.

Printers boomed everywhere. In London, across the 16th century the numbers went from 1 or 2, to 100. But censorship was the norm. The Vatican granted licences, the French government granted monopolies, the Tudors gave out licences for monopolies on different types of news. Arrests, executions, and control were the water within which printers swam. The first real newspapers were printed at the beginning of the 17th century.

We could even go back further. But as the historian John Nerone argues, the ‘media’ really became interesting when the state started to lose control of its grip on news, creating an ostensibly separate ‘fourth estate.’ This began happening during the English Civil War.

During the war, censorship collapsed and printing flourished. Then during its final act – the Glorious Revolution of 1689 – parliament passed the Bill of Rights that prevented the monarch from infringing on parliament’s freedom to speak.

By the middle of the 18th century, around 13 million were reading newspapers across Britain alone. This was the age of discovery, of science, of Enlightenment, of globalisation, and arguments for freedom of speech grew out of arguments for religious toleration from philosophers like John Locke.

The American Revolution and the US Constitution’s first amendment made the press a truly independent force for the first time. Slowly, a confident, separate, and increasingly powerful ‘fourth estate’ emerged across America and Europe.

But this initial media was really dominated by pamphleteering rather than reporting – partnerships between printers and philosophers, politicians and public figures. Pamphleteering was at the root of the drive towards American independence.

By the French Revolution and the early 19th century, there was an admirable diversity of opinion – federalists, anarchists, communists, utopian socialists, theologians, liberals, monarchists, conservatives all debated the nature of what the best society would like through Europe and America-wide networks of correspondence, books and pamphlets.

I say admirable because this was truly diverse and truly influential. To take one example, Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man (1791) sold 200,000 copies in its first few years. Many others had a similar readership. The population of Britain at the time was just 10m. That 1 in 50 bought copies (bearing in mind most couldn’t read and books would be read aloud to groups and passed around) demonstrates the extent of passionate and engaged, widespread and diverse debate. The US population was only 2.5 million at the time.

Hundreds of newspapers were published at the beginning of the 19th century in Britain alone, despite the government trying to crack down on radical dissent. The British government passed notorious stamp acts, taxing cheap publications out of existence. Across the 18th century taxes on printing rose by 800%.

These have been called the ‘taxes on knowledge’ and had an affect on the type of news printed. That original diversity started to be quite literally stamped out.

This original diversity of opinion was slowly transformed into the large media corporations we know today. This happened for several reasons.

Initially, it was cheap to start a newspaper. Hand presses could only print 500-5000 copies at a time, so there was a limit on the reach and size. This meant it was quite easy to start a newspaper. In the UK, the Northern Star – a big newspaper that advocated for parliamentary reform and democracy in Britain – was started with donations from the public. As we’ve seen, cheap, simple pamphlets were everywhere.

Then, in the 1810s, the steam powered printing press was invented, making it cheaper to print larger runs at greater cost but cheaper cost per print. These new machines could print 4000 impressions per hour, meaning that for the first time a national daily newspaper could be printed and distributed. But it was too costly to be affordable to all. That meant including advertising.

Advertisers went with middle-class bourgeois newspapers for obvious reasons. One advertising executive wrote at the time that certain publications should be avoided because, ‘their readers are not purchasers, and any money thrown upon them is so much thrown away’.

These ‘bourgeois’ newspapers quickly became larger institutions that made use of technology like the telegraph, railway, reporters, linograph images, electricity, industrialisation, then photography and new printing techniques – all of which made them more efficient and eye-catching.

All of this made it expensive and difficult to compete with the large newspapers who also spent time and money lobbying parliament to reduce taxes on them so that they could, as one editor said ‘instruct the masses’ and ‘put the unions down.’

They included more ‘human interest’ stories, sensationalism, consumerism, ballads, murder mysteries, and folk tales that were easy to read and entertaining.

This was a reasonably simple formula: commercialisation + industrialisation + populism = sales. Any working class press just couldn’t keep up. It was no longer cheap and easy to start a paper that might be successful.

The Sunday Express in Britain, for example, launched in 1918 and spent £2m and had to acquire a circulation of 250,000 before it even broke even.

In the US, media moguls Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst got into a competition investing in more expensive journalists, more technology, more sensationalist headlines, and more scary and fake news stories – what came to be called ‘yellow journalism’. Front page headlines with words like GUILTY, GLORY, TREACHORY, and SLAUGHTER became the norm.

In both the UK and US, crime, sexual violence, and sensationalist topics – murders, elopers, robbery – all became more profitable to report on. In 1886, murder stories made up 50% of the pages of London’s Lloyds Weekly, despite the rate in violent crime decreasing across the century.

This didn’t matter to publishers. Sales did. Their newspapers increasingly contained ‘entertaining’ titbits like ‘What does the queen eat? Why don’t Jews ride bicycles? What’s the color of the prime minister’s socks? Stories about a man-woman discovered in Birmingham and whether dogs can commit murder.’

Critics began to complain that the press was pandering to the worst in its reader’s tastes. Norman Angell labelled them ‘the worst of all the menaces to modern democracy.’ The Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin said that press lords had ‘power without responsibility.’ He said they were ‘engines of propaganda for their constantly changing policies, desires, personal wishes, personal likes and dislikes.’

By the 20th century commissions were being setup to investigate their monopoly powers, a press council was setup in the UK that aimed to act as the industry’s ‘conscience’.

As powerful influential businessmen with advertising interests and a fear of an organised working class they even, in some cases, became cheerleaders for fascism. Lord Rothermere supported the BUF, his Mirror had headlines like ‘Hurrah for the blackshirts’ and ‘Give the blackshirts a helping hand.’

Even larger working class papers like The Daily Herald in Britain struggled to compete. In 1956 it was the fourth biggest newspaper in the country. And the most popular amongst working class readers. Despite this it only had a 3.5% share of advertising across the industry. Who would want to advertise to people who couldn’t afford products? Its fortunes declined, the paper was sold and became the tabloid The Sun.

This is the story of the press. From diversity to populism. From many smaller publications to a few corporate ones. To an interest in political ideas to an interest in entertaining ones. But the media had to at least give the appearance of being politically decent. Which is why they were drawn to attention grabbing, exaggerated, sensationalist moral panics.

In 1972, the criminologist Stanley Cohen noted while surveying the history of the press that during moral panics, ‘A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media’.

What seemed obvious and urgent to many, was that the press should be focusing on what was important – improving people’s lives, holding the powerful to account, searching out the issues and threat and dangers that affected the most people, their health, their bank accounts, their homes.

In the 70s, the sociologist Stuart Hall and his colleagues argued that the moral panic was a way for the ruling class to distract away from the real problems facing British society. Oil shocks, poverty, business leaving Britain, nuclear war – there are so many important things to focus on, yet the front pages of the press focused their attention on superficial scare stories.

The tabloid newspapers targeted everything from sexuality, family values, hooligans and gangs, paedophilia, aids, pornography, drugs, abortion, video games, violent films, witches, the youth of today – all of which in some way argued that the fabric of society was being eroded by an element within, and reporting that societal collapse through stories of good vs evil, emotion and drama, threat-entertainment with popular appeal.

As sociologist Kenneth Thompson writes, ‘Whilst professional groups with an interest in making claims for more resources, ranging from social workers and teachers to the police and probation officers, are often prepared to provide evidence of a crisis, sections of the mass media, subjected to market pressures, have responded by presenting dramatic narratives with a strong moral content. The result has been an almost bewildering succession of moral panics.’

These moral panics began as far back as witch trials, but in the 19th century adorned the front pages and spread fears of garrotting, for example, in London. Again, violent crime was decreasing, but in the late 19th century, a glance at the front pages of the press would have led a reader to believe that there was a pandemical threat. Harsh, reactionary, ill-conceived legislation was even passed by parliament. Historians now describe this as a classic ‘moral panic.’ Your biggest concern at the time wouldn’t be being garrotted but the factory you worked in.

By the twentieth century, there were moral panics about jazz, the beatniks, hippies, gay lifestyles, aids, and the rave scene.

Take one more recent example that Thompson discusses in his book. In the 90s, the British media ran with a panic over ecstasy. The death of one girl at a rave was covered ad Infinium.

‘It could be your child,’ the Daily Mail wrote. Today wrote: ‘Leah’s Last Words: She named Ecstasy pill pusher then pleaded “Help me mum, help me”’. MPs called for clubs to be closed. Reading the press at the time you’d be led to believe the rave scene was a demonic nightmare. Studies have shown how to the contrary, raves were safe, friendly, egalitarian spaces. Others pointed out that while any drug could be dangerous, it wasn’t ecstasy as much as the combination with high intensity dancing. In the US, only two ecstasy deaths had ever been reported.

But it was the sort of story the press loved. A hidden danger, limbically appealing, a counterculture, a threat to society, to family values. As Thompson points out, counterculture groups like raves, hippies, or LGBTQ or trans people, supposedly reject mainstream cultural values. He writes, ‘It is when these values seem to be being flouted that the media are likely to resort to discursive strategies that amplify the threat and generate a moral panic about the risks to the moral and social order, not just to the young people themselves.’

As the Observer newspaper warned in 1996, ‘Beware moral crusades. It is true that the British are alarmed and frightened by social fragmentation and growing violence. It is also true that the moral compasses by which to steer are increasingly uncertain. That does not mean the answer is a crusade led by party politicians or conservative newspapers — down that route leads a Dutch auction in repression. Worse, the real dynamics of social breakdown are left unaddressed.’

The moral panic is the likely consequence of a market-driven commercial populist press. Unable or unwilling to focus on economic issues – by the structure of ownership or by advertiser pressure – the press are drawn to stories that will boost sales by emphasising emotion, by selecting facts based on sensationalism, by exaggerating and distorting reality – a ‘discourse of the edges’ that ignored real substantive issues.

Ultimately, there was a transatlantic exchange. In his history of journalist, Martin Conboy writes there was an ‘Americanization of the British press between 1830 and 1914. Gossip, display advertising, sports news, human interest, fast stories transmitted by telegraph, cheap and increasingly visual newspapers, summary leads and front page news were all introduced in England in the 1890s.’

Ultimately, what we see is a history from complexity to simplicity, long pamphlets to quick summaries, nuance to populist appeal.

 

The Television Revolution

Something similar happened with television. This new powerful medium was never as diverse as the original press – the fifties were a famously conformist period – but in the early days of broadcasting, some tried to carve out a more ethical role for the media.

This was the corporate media at its peak. The BBC dominated radio and television in the UK, and almost everyone read a newspaper. In 1950 the total readership of daily newspapers in the US was 54 million. That was between one and two newspapers for every household across the country. Walter Cronkite anchored CBS for almost 20 years and was regularly voted the most trusted man in America.

Radio and television though were also conformist for another reason. There were a limited number of airwaves and so the FCC had to mandate that to acquire a broadcast license, some programmes had to be in the public interest.

To the early television broadcasters – CBS and NBS – news was unprofitable. People preferred entertainment. However, the FCC forced them to spend some money on news and documentaries.

Some took this responsibility seriously. Ed Murrow produced documentaries like See it Now that tried to shine a light on serious topics. It essentially invented the documentary and took aim at topics like the Red Scare, the Korean War, and Oppenheimer’s protests against nuclear weapons. But See it Now was cancelled after its advertisers dropped out and CBS became the focus of political pressure. Despite the show being popular, the head of CBS said the controversy was a ‘constant stomach ache’.

As with the press, commercial and economic pressures forced out a potential plurality of ethical discussion.

A softer approach was taken by shows like the Today Show which aimed to be a populist birds eye view of the day that, as one producer said, should distract people from the long day they had ahead of them.

Like the press, the trend was towards popular appeal, bigger audiences, and away from difficult topics. The same happened at the BBC, as the more serious programmes and John Reith’s hope that the BBC would ‘inform, educate, and entertain’, in that order, gave way to entertainment first. To many the Reith approach was elitist, but to him, entertainment was meant to be the dessert and now it was the main course.

In his history, Ponce de Leon writes: ‘television’s pioneering, wide-open phase was over. In the future, news and public-affairs programming like See It Now would struggle to find a place on network TV’.

Many bemoaned the media landscape. After See it Now was cancelled, Murrow said that the TV was a depressing spectacle of ‘decadence, escapism, and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live’. He continued: ‘This instrument can teach. It can illuminate; yes, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that human beings are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it’s nothing but wires and lights in a box’.

Head of the FCC Newton Minow argued that television had become a ‘vast wasteland’.

But this was only critique. To some, the news that was being broadcast was elitist and snobbish anyway. It was urban and coastal and Washington or London-centric and looked down on ordinary people. Television, critics began to argue, had become part of the powerful establishment elite.

To a young Roger Ailes, working in television, the NYTs and CBSs of America liked to tell the rest of the country they were racist, sexist, and needed social security programs. He and the head of Coors beer, Joseph Coors, dreamed of a real conservative media, one that didn’t hold back.

At the same time, cable and satellite made the FCC regulation on licences obsolete, as anyone could make use of the expanded bandwidth. If anyone could broadcast, what was the purpose of the fairness doctrine, that forced the few stations to give opposing view points airtime? By the 80s, Reagan repealed the regulation and a new range of stations proliferated. ESPN, Nickelodeon, CNN, Rush Limbaugh – specialist channels and stations, partisan politics, and more populism. Unlike the early press, starting a television station was extraordinarily expensive, and relied on big business and advertising even more.

But like the newspapers before, Ailes and Murdoch in particular knew that the trick to popular news wasn’t just the news, it was all the trimmings – crime, gossip, good vs bad storylines, good-looking presenters, chemistry, sound and flashy visual effects, sensationalism, and moral panics.

De Leon writes, ‘In previous decades, most well-educated Americans, including many of the corporate elite, would have rejected market populism as a cynical and potentially dangerous excuse to exploit the public’s poor taste and most primitive yearnings. In this view, merely satisfying consumer demand without considering what you were selling was unseemly and amoral’.

By the 90s, Dan Rather said in a speech, ‘They’ve got us putting more and more fuzz and wuzz on the air, cop-shop stuff, so as to compete not with other news programs but with entertainment programs, including those posing as news programs’.

The OJ Simpson trial, America’s Talking, and A Current Affair all relied on new techniques inherited from the press – gossip, storylines, celebrity, flashy text and images – and Murdoch brought all of this together in the launch of Fox News in 1996.

In 2010, looking back, journalist Ted Koppel wrote: ‘The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic… Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it.’

And at the same time, the internet was slowly beginning to creep into our homes, adding to the disillusion with traditional media.

Nerone writes that, ‘By the 1980s, then, and certainly by the 1990s, the professional press had come to seem a vulnerable institution. The people didn’t trust it. The powers that be were able to manipulate it. Journalism no longer seemed the institution of public intelligence that it wanted to be.’

The complaints in some sense seemed contradictory, though; on the one hand the media was a ‘vast wasteland’ of populist nonsense, on the other they were manufacturing political consent. And even here there was a disagreement. To someone like Ailes that consent was liberal, to Noam Chomsky, it was capitalist propaganda.

 

Manufacturing (PC) Consent

Most think that the critique of the media goes back to Chomsky and Herman’s book, but as far back as America’s founding, newspaper editor Hezekiah Niles was noticing that the press was moving closer to the political parties and were ‘manufacturing public opinion’.

He complained how the press arranged to, ‘act together as if with the soul of one man, subservient to gangs of managers, dividing the spoils of victory, of which these editors also liberally partake – more than one hundred and fifteen of them being rewarded with offices, or fat jobs of printing, &c. This is a new state of things’.

As the media commercialised, industrialised, and grew into gargantuan conglomerates, moguls like Hearst and Pulitzer expanded into new mediums – radio, film, then television.

As they did, many questioned how much these tentacled institutions represented public opinion. The most famous intellectual of the early 20th century, Walter Lippman, criticised the idea of ‘public opinion’ itself, lamenting how the public could be manipulated with propaganda, before propaganda was a dirty word. He saw the propaganda spread during the First World War, and presciently worried about the future. He called the picture painted by the press a ‘pseudoenvironment.’

The novelist Upton Sinclaire wrote an influential book in 1919 called The Brass Check in which he criticised the ‘yellow journalism’ of the period. He wrote, ‘In every newspaper-office in America the same struggle between the business-office and the news-department is going on all the time’.

He quoted the editor of the San Fransico Star, who had been quoted as saying, ‘You wish to know my “confidential opinion as to the honesty of the Associated Press.” My opinion, not confidential, is that it is the damndest, meanest monopoly on the face of the earth – the wet-nurse for all other monopolies. It lies by day, it lies by night, and it lies for the very lust of lying. Its news-gatherers, I sincerely believe, only obey orders’.

There was a feeling that the media conglomerates were the same large corporations dominating the gilded age of America – railroad barons, oil barons, and now press barons.

Nerone describes how the press responded by taking a more active, responsible, and ethical role in its own affairs, promising to be better, essentially becoming their own regulators.

He writes: ‘The motion picture industry obviously would do anything to make money, including glamorizing crime and transgressive sexuality. In contrast, the press took on the responsibility of informing the public to reinforce morality and public order. Adopting this exalted position meant that the press had to repress its own dark side. The superego of the press would be public affairs reporting. It hoped that its performance in this high-value enterprise would obscure or excuse its id: crime reporting, celebrity gossip, advertising, and trivialities like sports and amusements, where the bulk of its income was earned.’

What this meant was a bit more serious journalism. This happened in many countries at the beginning of the 20th century. Professionalisation meant starting journalism courses, an education in ethics, codes of conduct, regulation, more training – Pulitzer was an advocate of journalist courses in universities – arguing that students should study a bit of everything before entering into the workforce.

The criticisms of the press were enough for the US government to pass the 1912 Newspaper Publicity Act – ownership now had to be published, and content funded by advertisers had to made transparent. The act read, ‘editorial or other reading material… for the publication of which money or other valuable consideration is paid… shall be plainly marked as ‘advertisement’.

Some believed that the press could be a force for good. Nerone points out that the idea of objectivity in journalism didn’t really exist as an idea prior to the 1920s. The first appearance of ‘objectivity’ and ‘journalism’ in the NYT archive appears in 1924.

Journalists until then had what’s been called a ‘naive realism’ – reporting the facts of what happened but not much else, without any pushback, analysis, or investigation into whether what they’d been told by a source was the truth.

This had changed somewhat with the rise of muckraking, when journalists like Ida Tarbell had investigated the corruption, price-rigging and predatory tactics of monopolies like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. Seeing the popularity of these sorts of investigations, they became more common.

When up against corporate power in an age of propaganda, marketing, advertising and PR, just reporting the naive facts was no longer enough. It would take some work to uncover the truth.

However, during the Cold War, it was hard to argue that capitalism itself was an issue. Exposés tended to focus on political intrigue, sensationalism, as we’ve seen got even more popular, and anti-communism and McCarthyism was the dominant mood.

Marxists and academics may have argued to varying degrees that the press were part of the capitalist superstructure, legitimising the social system they were a part of and benefited from, but for the most part these arguments were confined to the halls of academia rather than written about in the wider public sphere.

But the argument was there. At the beginning of the 20th century Antonio Gramsci had argued from his imprisonment in Fascist Italy that capitalist hegemony is perpetuated by the ruling class through culture. The Overton window, or what Henrik Ekengren Oscarsson has called the “opinion corridor”, sets the tone of the conversation, subtly directs it, perpetuates it. Oscarsson called the opinion corridor the “the buffer zone where you can still voice your opinion without immediately having to receive a diagnosis of your mental condition”.

Thomas Bates writes that, ‘intellectuals succeed in creating hegemony to the extent that they extend the worldview of the rulers to the ruled, and thereby secure the “free” consent of the masses to the law and order of the land.’

It took until the end of the 20th century for this view to approach the mainstream.

In 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman published Manufacturing Consent, arguing that the news was essentially propaganda for ‘powerful societal interests that control and finance them’.

They didn’t do this through blunt intervention, but by ‘the selection of right thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy’.

The big news conglomerates like Time Warner and Viacom kept dissenting voices at the margins, picked the right experts, and filtered out critical topics.

Chomsky said: ‘they are way up at the top of the power structure of the private economy which is a very tyrannical structure. Corporations are basically tyrannies, hierarchic, controlled from above. If you don’t like what they are doing you get out. The major media are just part of that system. What about their institutional setting? Well, that’s more or less the same. What they interact with and relate to is other major power centers – the government, other corporations, or the universities. Because the media are a doctrinal system they interact closely with the universities.’

The news corporations distract with sensationalism, side with Western crusades and ‘worthy’ victims, selectively using language, and are aggressively anti-communist.

Chomsky and Hermann laid out five filters through which information passed. The first is that the size, profit, and ownership of the mass media by itself filters out certain views and incentivised others. Market views are more acceptable than non-market views. The revolving door between politicians and media executives, between corporations and the state power.

The second filter is that the driving incentive is, ultimately, advertising and profit – the customer is the advertiser as much as the reader. They point to an NBC documentary on environmental issues that couldn’t get made because of a lack of advertisers.

The third filter is that they are dependent on a finite number of sources that are embedded in institutions like the White House or police departments or trade groups or embassies. The Pentagon, for example, spends billions on PR, the US Chamber of Commerce – a pro business lobby – spent $65 million in the year they were writing, and today that figure is over $200 million.

These groups, they write, ‘provide the media organizations with facilities in which to gather; they give journalists advance copies of speeches and forthcoming reports; they schedule press conferences at hours well-geared to news deadlines; they write press releases in usable language; and they carefully organize their press conferences and “photo opportunity” sessions.’

Fourth, that media is bombarded with what they called flak – ‘letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits, speeches and bills before Congress, and other modes of complaint, threat, and punitive action’ – which nudges views away from criticisms of special interests.

And fifth, anti-communism is the ultimate dominant ideology. They write: ‘This ideology helps mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left and labor movements and serves as a political-control mechanism.’

Ultimately, ‘The filters narrow the range of news that passes through the gates, and even more sharply limit what can become “big news”.’

But Chomsky’s wasn’t the only critique of the media, nor the most influential. As conservative talk radio shows like Limbaugh’s and Fox News grew, Murdoch, Ailes – the founders of Fox – and the wider conservative critique was that yes, the media were manufacturing consent, but liberal consent. Ailes called CNN the Clinton News Network.

So while the left were criticising the media for being propagandists for capitalism, the right were criticising them for having a socially liberal agenda on race, gender, and social security. That the media were ‘politically correct’ and wanted to tell you how to think, what to say, and who to support.

In 2004, the novelist Dorris Lessing called political correctness, “the most powerful mental tyranny in what we call the free world”.

In his history, Geoffrey Hughes says that, ‘linguistically it started as a basically idealistic, decent-minded, but slightly Puritanical intervention to sanitize the language by suppressing some of its uglier prejudicial features’. It meant not using certain words, or “It means showing respect to all,” or “It means accepting and promoting diversity.”

Where had this mental tyranny – to use Lessing’s phrase – emerged from? Some argued it came from the campuses protesting about race relations, gay rights, and feminism.

Lessing saw it as inspired by Mao’s Little Red Book, towing the party line, being politically in the right. She wrote that ‘Political Correctness is the natural continuum of the party line. What we are seeing once again is a self-appointed group of vigilantes imposing their views on others. It is a heritage of communism, but they don’t seem to see this’.

Hughes saw it as different because, ‘unlike previous forms of orthodoxy, both religious and political, it is not imposed by some recognized authority like the Papacy, the Politburo, or the Crown, but is a form of semantic engineering and censorship not derivable from one recognized or definable source, but a variety.’

But PC was nothing new: the Victorians’ idea of ‘being proper’, the French Revolutionaries’ battles of language, the Puritans – in fact, all societies have their forms of cultural and linguistic persuasions.

It was only a new form of cultural persuasion by a more active, engaged, socially liberal media. And rather than springing from one powerful little red book, the impulse more likely arose out of the cultural, linguistic, and postmodern turn in universities that more closely examined the power of language and culture in shaping people’s views.

Others argued the entire thing was made up. Clare Short wrote in the Guardian in 1995: ‘Political Correctness is a concept invented by hard-rightwing forces to defend their right to be racist, to treat women in a degrading way and to be truly vile about gay people. They invent these people who are Politically Correct, with a rigid, monstrous attitude to life so they can attack them. But we have all had to learn to modify our language. That’s all part of being a human being.’

What’s more interesting for the shift towards the internet is how both of these critiques arose around the same time and have both carried over into this new era.

The question posed by Chomsky and Ailes was really: can we see a monolithic ideology despite the appearance of diversity? Or do people see what they want to see? Are people driven by their own biases in interpreting the media as much as the media is driven by their own? Because by this point, as journalist Sandrine Boudana writes, ‘Journalism long ago abandoned the idea of seeking only neutrality and objectivity in pursuit of creating a more committed journalism, which makes it more difficult to differentiate between opinion and bias.’

This question – who is biased and who is right, and how these opposing critiques fed internet culture – is something we’ll return to. For now it’s worth pointing out that in fact, the critiques aren’t mutually exclusive. The media could be, to generalise, elitist, urban, socially and culturally liberal, close to politicians, driven by market forces and advertising, and biased by all of them, all at the same time.

But as we move into a new era it’s important to keep that dominant trend in mind, from both the early press and early television, that diversity, ethics, working class ideas, maybe high-mindedness, gets overwhelmed by the powerful forces of capital, of technology, of flashy frontpages and expensive studios, good looking presenters, and sensationalist, catchy, populist storylines.

 

The Internet’s First Media

On the surface, the internet is defined by pluralism, diversity, possibility. Anyone can post anything, anyone can start a podcast, anyone can build a YouTube channel, post on forums, on TikTok and Instagram.

Why then does it seem like this diverse digital landscape has coalesced slowly around specific individuals, groups, and talking points? If you’re interested in politics online, you’re unlikely to get through the day without seeing Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, or a Weinstein brother use the word woke.

The early years of the internet was much more like those early years of newspapers. There was a great diversity of ideas, a lot of techno-optimism, a strange unwieldy plurality of ideas. An early book on the internet – Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody – illustrates the outlook of the early years – the subtitle was the power of organising without organisations.

This optimism in digital progress in some way confirmed that whiggish view of journalism – that the media, throughout history, gets freer and freer. Censorship, control and tyranny inevitably give way to free speech, the march of reason, a free press.

But as we’ve seen, and as many historians now argue, that is an old myth; a lazy, naive, triumphalist one. That original plurality in the press was centralised by commercial and industrial conglomerates. And the twentieth century proved that, in many countries, the media can go the direction of authoritarian control – towards Pravda or ministries of propaganda – rather than inevitably towards freedom. Early idealistic pioneers making programs like See it Now can be elbowed out of studios for lack of advertisers, and difficult stories can be replaced by ones with populist appeal. Could the internet be going the same way?

The internet is still, of course, much more diverse than any other medium. Costs are significantly reduced, accessibility increased. You can find videos and podcasts and reels on pretty much anything. Yet despite this, a kind of cohesive culture forms. A constellation of talking points, guests, ideas, and groups. What drives this? Human nature? Social dynamics? Economics? Culture? Politics? Let’s take a look at how this shift towards a cohesive culture happened.

Before around 2017, there were many alternative media outlets online beginning to make a name for themselves. The Drudge Report and Breitbart were loosely libertarian nationalist websites with the same kind of views as Fox News and Rodger Ailes. In 2010, Andrew Breitbart said he was “committed to the destruction of the old media guard.”

On the left, the Young Turks moved from radio to the web in 2006. The British left wing blog Another Angry Voice started in 2010. Joe Rogan started his podcast in 2009.

But while there were channels, blogs, and podcasts growing in prominence, the nascency of the internet put most on an equal footing. Plurality reigned. The internet was a DIY, amateur, botched together jumble of mouths all doing different things.

But around 2016 a shift began. This was the year of Trump and Brexit, both rebellions against the elite establishment of which the mainstream media was a part.

This was the year of Pizzagate, a year after Gamergate. It was the year of the Charlottesville rally and a similar march in Gothenburg, Sweden, which according to the organisers was the second most streamed video on YouTube around the world that day. It was the year that Eric Weinstein officially baptised the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) as a group rebelling against the establishment status quo. It was a year, in short, of a revolt.

In that year, Vox reported that Infowars – Alex Jones’ conservative conspiracy-laden talk show – was getting 10 million visits a month, more than most mainstream media websites at the time.

Infowars themselves said that, ‘Government and the mainstream media have lost all credibility, leaving opportunity for the alternative media to swoop in and expose the truth, waking up people across the globe.’

Alternative Für Deutschland (AfD) – a Eurosceptic anti-immigration party in Germany – called the media the “Pinocchio-press”.

Two things were happening: certain topics, ideas, groups, and individuals were becoming dominant, and second, most of them were defined by their distrust, critique, or outright condemnation of the traditional media. They were all, to use a loose term, anti-establishment.

In his book on right-wing alternative media, professor Kristoffer Holt describes the process by which alternative media become anti-system media: ‘Alternative news media can publish different voices (alternative content creators) trying to influence public opinion according to an agenda that is perceived by their promoters and/or audiences as underrepresented, ostracized or otherwise marginalized in main stream news media. Alternative accounts and interpretations of political and social events (alternative news content), rely on alternative publishing routines via alternative media organizations and/or through channels outside and unsupported by the major networks and newspapers in an alternative media system.’

What’s interesting though, is how the plurality or diversity or independence turns into something relational. The new media or alternative media defined themselves in part by what they’re not.

He writes, ‘the alternative quality of any news medium is derived from claims to its counter-or complementary position to certain hegemony, since this must be construed as the organizing principle behind alternative media enterprises.’

To these critics, the MSM were defined in the same way Ailes defined them: as urban, elitist, snobbish, socially liberal, globalists. They were feminists, pro-immigration, anti- white.

As Holt writes, ‘The claim is that hegemonic mainstream media withhold or thwart the reporting on information that can be sensitive in light of a politically correct agenda.’

In picking talking points or ideas or guests, they aren’t independent in the sense that they pick them completely freely, but they’re picked through the lens of being ‘anti-system.’

This is not to make any moral judgement about the position, about any specific claim or opinion being right or wrong, only to note how it began to emerge. It is, of course, significant that the IDW, Pizzagate, Brexit, Trump, Gamergate, and the rise of Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein’s suing Evergreen and resigning, happened at around the same time. Despite the diversity of opinion on many topics, there was conformity on a central one – they were all, in some way, anti-system, anti-establishment, anti-mainstream media.

The IDW moment was notable because they seemed to able to define themselves by something they had in common despite claiming to have significant disagreements on other issues.

Holt writes of the IDW that, ‘what they have in common, according to their own descriptions (and the famous article by Weiss in NYT), is that they see themselves as “renegades” who have been ousted from mainstream platforms as a consequence of stating uncomfortable facts and opinions.’

Diversity was starting to come very loosely together, but only in opposition – not via specific common ideas but by what they defined themselves against.

 

The Ideology of the New Elites

Today, Joe Rogan has over 14 million listeners. Jordan Peterson videos get millions of views per video. The Daily Wire revealed in 2022 that it had 600,000 subscribers. Ben Shapiro has 7 million subscribers and each video gets watched hundreds of thousands of times. Lex Fridman has 4 million subscribers and gets millions of views per video.

But in some senses, the death of the MSM has been largely exaggerated. Where as CNN, Fox News, and the BBC ‘viewing’ figures, for example, are in decline, it’s because more people visit their websites rather than watch television. The decline of the MSM depends on the organisation and the metric. BBC News website figures are increasing. In April 2021, it had 1b visits. Musk pointed to the decline in website views on Bloomberg as evidence of the demise of legacy media. However, by other metrics – profit or Instagram followers, for example, Bloomberg is actually growing. And according to PressGazette, the Daily Wire’s traffic is declining more than Bloomberg. And Brietbart is down by 87%.

Similarly, the NYT website visits are growing, with around half a billion visits per month. Other traditional organisations like People, USA today, Forbes, Newsweek, and Politico are doing quite well, with all of their figures rising. In the UK, the old newspapers are declining, but there is some change; the Telegraph is seeing a month on month increase at the moment. Some like the Financial Times are growing. It’s a complex story with many ‘down’ by traditional measures but ‘up’ by new measures like subs, followers, and, importantly, profit. So while the Washington Post is not doing well, Newsmax is surging.

What is true is that trust in old media is at an all time low. However, with more choice, more narratives, diverse opinion, and more accountability, is this surprising?

Two trends are at least notable – the death knell of Mainstream Media is yet to be rung. No-one else is close to the sorts of views the BBC or NYT get. On the hand, the figures of Rogan and the appeal, book sales, and reach of someone like Peterson are at least very significant. These are, after all, individuals not organisations, and their influence is undeniable. Numbers aside, they are a cultural force. They are a new type of elite figure.

These new elite figures that have grown up on the internet – Peterson, Rogan, Shapiro, Russell Brand, the Weinsteins, Dave Rubin, Lex Fridman, Tim Pool, Triggernometry, and many others – all, in some part, are driven by their opposition to old media. That is, first and foremost, the base cultural water they swim in.

Culture is a strange thing. In some sense it’s like a common tree that we pluck language, ideas, art, jokes, music, or hobbies from. It’s a constellation – it shifts and moves but is loosely identifiable.

If culture is a tree, and anti-mainstream media is the trunk of the new elite, what sorts of other branches will likely grow from it? Branches are loose. They are not all the same. Some snap off. Some change. But they are loosely, often there.

The first is populism.

The idea that an establishment media system has failed lends itself to populism, which is less about who’s right or wrong, what’s driven the failures, or what to do them about, and more about the framing of an issue as being one defined by the people vs the elites.

Populism is a difficult term. On the surface, it’s just an appeal to what’s popular, what the people want, what ordinary Americans or average Brits are saying. The French philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff described populism as “the appeal to the people, at the same time as demos and as ethnos, against the elites, and against the foreigners”.

Populism frames in terms of an us and a them. Political scientists Casse Mudde defines populism as appealing to a ‘pure people’ vs ‘corrupt elite’, for example.

This is why populism often uses language like the ‘heartland’ or middle America – average, ordinary, hardworking, honest, people, just trying to get along. And the elites in the swamp are lazy, corrupt, enemies of the people.

The problem with populism is there is rarely an us and a them. The so-called ‘people’ are always fractured, have a diverse set of views, and vary from group to group, time to time.

To say the MSM is corrupt and ordinary people just want honest reporting is a populist statement. It might be true in certain instances, but it’s a generalisation that becomes quite meaningless when we ask what corruption means, which journalists we are talking about, and which ‘people’ we’re referencing.

However, the populist frame is enticing to a new elite figure outside the mainstream media. Look at how Russell Brand and Jordan Peterson talk about farmers. The farmers are pure, salt of the earth, decent, hardworking and honest. They’re against the elite globalists.

The reality is that, first, there are many different farmers – left, right, poor, rich, corporate, family, struggling, profitable. And the issues are usually not farmers vs the elite, but different interest groups’ influence on regulation, climate change, subsidies, and other issues.

To populists, instead, it all gets subsumed under the framing of ordinary vs elite. Ordinary is attractive. It appeals to more people. If you are statistically speaking an ordinary person, why shouldn’t I address you – the millions – against the elite. It’s a rhetorical numbers game because the people always outnumber the elite. If I can frame an issue that way, it’s going to be appealing to more people. There is a strong linguistic magnetic incentive to talk in this way.

Peterson consistently rallies against elites at universities, professional psychological associations and bodies, woke institutions and media – his Twitter timeline is full of condemnation of the elite. While Peterson, Brand, Rubin, and the Weinsteins are all themselves elites.

I’m not pointing to any instance of being right or wrong about any particular issue. Only how the conversation is framed. Anti-media establishment very often becomes populism.

The second tenet is anti-wokeism.

Why do almost every one of these figures tend to define themselves in terms of, or at least often refer back to, anti-wokeism?

Anti-wokeism seems to be the natural result of being anti-establishment, outside the mainstream, and populist. After all, it’s the liberal elites that are woke. Like the PC moment, urbane, middle-class, educated academics, politicians, and journalists want to tell the ordinary people how to think, what to believe, and who to vote for. They like to impose their ethical worldview on the rest of the world. They are, in short, snobs.

The critique here is very much a continuation of Roger Ailes and Fox News. Anyone anti-system naturally doesn’t like to conform. So anti-wokeism is natural to disgruntled academics like the Weinsteins and Peterson.

Someone like Critical Drinker can pop up on many of these channels because his film reviews follow this same anti-establishment, populist, anti-woke pattern – Hollywood is woke, the elites are ruining movies, and people just want X from their films.

The third tenet is freedom of speech.

Any system of authority imposes its rules, norms, ideas on the society and people it seeks to convince, propagandise, educate, inform, control – whatever you want to call it. This happens to varying degrees. Sometimes it can be good – as in education or maybe regulating the fringes of speech in, say, regulating pharmaceutical advertising. Sometimes it can be bad in the form of tyranny and propaganda or even just slight overreach.

But being anti-establishment naturally lends itself to being very pro-freedom of speech, in its different guises.

Holt writes, for example, that, ‘What unites [the IDW] is not primarily a common political or ideological agenda, but rather a sense that academic and intellectual freedom is seriously under threat because universities and the media are so influenced by left-wing identity politics and political correctness.’

When figures like Rogan, Peterson, the Weinsteins, or Shapiro get together, they might disagree on many things, but those things are less likely to come up. What they’re united by is their opposition to the establishment, the idea that wokeism has gotten out of hand and the government or the media are censorious – in other words, freedom of speech is fundamental.

Rogan says, for example, that he voted for Bernie Sanders, wants higher taxes, but that’s unlikely to come up when he talks to Musk, Peterson or James Lindsay – freedom of speech and wokeism will.

What’s of note is not that they might disagree on issues, but that they agree enough on certain issues to have that conversation around them and it not get acrimonious. This of course isn’t always the case, but it is the norm.

Their discussion is tailored to the person and revolves around the new elite talking points. Anti-establishment, anti-wokeism, freedom of speech. Tucker Carlson and Russell Brand’s conversations are a masterclass in this dynamic.

But we could broaden this out from freedom of speech to freedom more broadly. Vaccine hesitancy, for example, is common to all of these figures and is driven by the same distrust in the establishment.

Again, none of this is a moral judgement – we all shape our topics of conversation depending on who we’re with and where we are and what shared interests we have – we’re just trying to work out the logic of how these conversations are formed.

The fourth tenet is the mix of popular and political cultures.

For much of history, especially in Europe, there was a now pretentious idea of high and low culture. Theatre and politics and grand tours for the aristocracy and drinking and ballads and sports for the working class.

Politicians would keep outsiders at bay with complex cultural practices demarcating what’s proper. References to opera or Sophocles in debates about policy, for example.

The 20th century modern and postmodern artistic and literary movements were known for mixing high and low culture. Andy Warhol using consumer images in art, novels and films more about everyday life. There’s an entire fascinating literature on this.

Desperate to distinguish themselves from pompous metropolitan elites, new elite figures have a tendency to draw from popular culture and present themselves as ordinary. Carlson for example presents from a shed as if he’s a regular American in his garden.

Often, clearly with Carlson, it’s a cynical ploy. Politicians do it all the time – they’re desperate to appear normal.

But with internet culture it’s often genuine too. Bill Maher smoking weed in his basement on his podcast. Rogan alternates between serious ‘intellectual’ conversations and getting drunk with comedians and doing MMA shows.

What’s interesting, I think, is how this new expression of everyday experience on the internet – vlogging, chatting with friends, doing normal things outside of television studios – gets coopted and used by new elite figures.

Comedy is often naturally anti-establishment, so Peterson, Carlson, and Robert F. Kennedy can fit quite comfortably on someone like Theo Von’s podcast. In fact, RFK talks to a lot of comedians. The Triggernometry hosts, Russell Brand and anti-woke UK pundit Andrew Doyle – the voice behind Titiana McGrath – are all comedians.

Comedy is the perfect vehicle for conspiracy theories about vaccines, the World Economic Forum, the elites who are all covering up secrets. Alex Jones and Rogan can jump naturally from UFOs to vaccines. For Graham Hancock, the critique of archaeology as a discipline is fed through an entertaining narrative of a ‘lost civilization’. The memeification of politics turns complex issues into shareable soundbites.

These tenets – this constellation, these branches – act as incentives, impulses, the cultural water of the new elites; they’re branches that keep the tree together, acting as a social glue, and it’s around them that new elite social groups start to form.

 

New Elites, Assemble!

There is a large literature of studies on social groups. Social groups are, of course, a fundamental part of human life, and a group needs some principles in common. Clubs form around shared interests, political parties around ideas, friendship groups around hobbies or shared humour, media organisations out of a set of beliefs.

Being part of a group – whether that group is geographic or cultural – a Midwesterner, a banker, a leftist, an impressionist artist – provides a set of cultural norms, social expectations, dominant ideas, informal rules and methods – provide a grounding for identity. Being part of a group – officially or informally – is rewarding. Being in some groups confers status and social capital, connections, and a platform.

Bret Weinstein would not have been so known to us if he didn’t have a group affinity with other new elite figures like Peterson, Rogan, and Alex Jones.

There is a powerful incentive to agree with Joe Rogan on his podcast, to get an invite to dinner with him, to perform at his comedy club, to get him to put you in touch with Jordan Peterson.

These are the same incentives that playout in the mainstream media, as Chomsky and Herman pointed out. What’s interesting is how they’re also playing out in the transition from a diverse internet to a more homogenous internet.

Many studies show how people in groups mimic the behaviour of others in the group, conform their beliefs to the group to get accepted, and tend to point out the problems with other groups while ignoring their own.

In one famous study on conformity in 1951, psychologist Stanley Schachter studied a group discussing a trial. He found that most of the communication was directed towards bringing dissident voices into line. Furthermore, when asked to rate each person, the dissident was voted as most disliked.

Soloman Asch’s influential experiment showed participants lines of slightly different lengths. Each person had to call out whether each line was longer or shorter than the others. But Asch included actors who called out the wrong answer. When all of the actors in a group said a shorter line was the longest, the participant tended to conform to the group. Only a quarter never conformed. And 5% of people conformed 12 out of 12 times. While three quarters did at least once.

A similar experiment was conducted with pictures of a lineup. If other actors in the group gave the wrong answer, the participants were more likely to conform and follow.

Studies like this show not that people want to conform to fit in – although that is often true – but that they do so often without even knowing it. The social group we’re in directs our opinions before they’re even formed. Those individuals actually saw that line as longer.

Psychologist Charles Stangor writes, ‘conformity occurs not so much from the pursuit of valid knowledge, but rather to gain social rewards, such as the pleasure of belonging and being accepted by a group that we care about, and to avoid social costs or punishments, such as being ostracized, embarrassed, or ridiculed by others’.

In another study, researchers gave people cards with different traits on. They were then asked to put them into piles for different groups – women, young people, old people, students, etc.

They found that people perceive out-groups – groups other than their own – as more homogenous than their own group.

Men judging women included fewer traits, the young judging old included fewer traits.

In other words, there is an incentive to label the out-group – the mainstream media, the establishment, the old elites – by a homogenous label like corrupt, elitist, tyrannical, and people in the in-group as more diverse, plural, and decent.

New elite figures often describe themselves as diverse – Lex Fridman that he talks to all sides, Joe that he’s on the left, Brand that he’s talking across the divide – while describing the MSM as a corrupt homogenous out-group.

When you add the powerful incentive to form a group into our constellation of tenets, the magnetic effect of the social glue is compounded.

Texas is even becoming a bit of a hub. Rogan moved there from California. Lex Fridman moved there. I believe Musk is based there. Comedians like Gillis and Von have moved or are thinking of moving there. The Triggernometry bros spent time there.

Some hosts like Chris Williamson of Modern Wisdom even moved from the UK to the area, become friends with new elite figures like Michael Malice and Eric Weinstein, and become physically integrated in the circuit.

Konstantin Kisin reflected on his Oxford Union wokeism speech that it opened doors for him in America to people like Eric Weinstein.

Group formation psychology, anti-establishment talking points, populism, anti-wokeism, free speech, and comedy/conspiracy, all hang together in a constellation defining and shaping the views of the new elites. They act as a honey pot, a temptation, a powerful incentive to get views.

If you wanted to start a YouTube channel, there’s no better roadmap to follow. The gamut of low grade copycat channels that are popping up are a testament to this. None of them have any real qualification, are specialists in any area of expertise, or have anything new to say – but channels like RattleSnakeTV use shorts to piggyback on new media clips using sensationalist titles to get millions of views. Or take this guy’s top viewed – Tate, Peterson, and David Icke (and if you’re lucky enough to not know who any of those three are please, I beg you, you’ve won. Stop this video, log off, throw your laptop into the sea, and retire to a nice coastal village.)

Ok, so just to illustrate all of this let’s finish this section with a quick case study: Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom. As we do, bear in mind there are millions of experts that could provide ‘modern wisdom’ from around the world. Philosophers, historians, politicians from other countries. If you scroll through and listen to a few episodes of the Rest is History or the Ezra Klein show or Stuff You Should Know or whatever interests you. What I want to focus on is how a show ostensibly about modern wisdom gets shaped by new elite discourse.

Williamson was a reality TV dating show contestant in the UK who says he had a crisis of confidence about the sort of party boy lifestyle he was leading and started Modern Wisdom to search out modern wisdom. The early show included clips about life hacks, relationships, and fitness, before starting to get a few guest interviews from a range of psychologists, fitness experts, professors in politics. There was a decent range.

There were also some anti-woke populist figures too – people like Dave Rubin and Douglas Murray. But it’s securing an interview with Jordan Peterson in 2021 that gives the channel its first small shot in the arm. Even then views continued at a low pace. He interviews Peterson again in a video that has 4.8 million views.

From then, the channel starts shifting to new elite guests, talking points, and titles. The collapse of mainstream media, cancellation, critiques of Black Lives Matter, the legacy media is lying to you, more cancellation, why does Hollywood hate men, Tucker Carlson destroys mainstream media, and a lot of Peterson, Eric Weinstein, and Douglas Murray.

This is not to say that Williamson isn’t a decent, honest, well-intentioned guy who genuinely believes these things – I don’t know. It’s only to lay out the logic of how moving towards these individuals and beliefs is very rewarding. Williamson is particularly interested in the end of the mainstream media, the tyranny of the woke, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – all of the branches we laid out.

William’s interviews with Eric Weinstein are almost perfect examples of the ideological constellation that drives these conversations and the group formation around them.

From the very beginning they’re onto woke DEI, that you apparently ‘can’t talk about it’, the secret establishment rules, and how outsiders are punished.

They discuss Claudine Gay’s resignation from the presidency of Harvard University after it was discovered she plagiarised several snippets of text without proper attribution. Gay acknowledged mistakes but claimed they were accidents, not substantive, and stepped down from her role. Many academics defended her, including one that she had plagiarised, saying, ‘ From my perspective, what she did was trivial—wholly inconsequential.’ She had, it turned out, included a technical description from someone without the proper reference.

This arguably is still bad, not to the standard acceptable for a president of major university, that she should step down. However, Williamson’s take on it is to quote the novelist Howard Jacobson who said he hoped the incident, ‘would be the start of people who knew nothing losing their jobs.’ With a wry smile, Williamson and Weinstein frame it in the usual anti-woke, DEI, anti-establishment liberal elite constellation.

Gay is clearly a respected academic who’s published many social science papers on race in America. One, for example, is a study on the link between having black representatives and political engagement more broadly. It’s been cited over 500 times.

Yet Williamson – a club organiser and reality TV contestant – with Weinstein, can confidently say with a cocky smirk that this is ‘someone who knows nothing’ and hope it’s the start of people like her losing their jobs.

This type of conversation is only explainable by applying the constellation of new elite ideology that incentives the direction of podcasts like Modern Wisdom. What you get are a relatively constrained set of parameters through which attention is directed. We can, after all, only focus on a finite set of ideas at a time.

It’s the sort of conversational frame repeated across the new elites. The titles of Brand’s videos are all Elon WARNED, Tucker REVEALS, Rogan BLASTS. Dave Rubin’s are the same. It’s why someone like Graham Hancock can do the rounds – a man who claims to be ostracised by the establishment because he challenges their lazy group think. Hancock doesn’t just believe there are lost advanced civilisations in the past, that they are the key to history, but that not finding them is a failure of the academic establishment.

In fact, it’s illustrative how much Hancock’s epistemic populism aligns with other figures. Peterson, Weinstein, Hancock – they’re all populist because they have an exciting theory of everything (literally in Weinstein’s case) that could help humanity that’s being supressed by the elites.

Economic ideas? Policy? Sociologists or any historian that’s not Niall Ferguson? Scientists and engineers that aren’t Musk? No, if you look through the Triggernometry, Modern Wisdom, or Dave Rubin it’s this stuff that gets the most views.

These are all political conversations. Yet if you look at polls of issues people think are the most important, the responses will be the economy, healthcare, education, housing, transport, immigration, welfare. And out of all the interesting academics, experts, countries, historical periods, philosophical ideas, political alternatives, novelists, poets, filmmakers and artists in the world, this is what these figures get drawn towards. This is the shape of new elite discourse.

 

Who’s Right? Who’s Biased?

I am trying my best to be in some sense neutral. It’s perfectly reasonable for Gay to step down. It’s reasonable to have discussions about university reading lists. People and institutions can, of course, be overly censorious, and free speech is fundamental. What I am pointing to is the framing. The incentive is to turn from reasonable debate to culture war, from a question about policy to populism vs the elites, from a question of justice to the woke being religious fanatics. Of course, the left have their biases too. And the MSM, as we’ve seen, have their own frames of biases. So how do we make sense of any of this?

Studies of biases have tended to find lots of different types of bias. In one review, scholars laid out seventeen, including confirmation bias, spinning and loaded language, choosing what to cover, exclusion, ideological bias, placement bias, sensationalism, the size or length of coverage, and so on. Bias can appear at the sentence level or the organisation level. But as we’ve seen it also changes from period to period, place to place. The early press had one set of ideas, the industrialists, the new elites, and the BBC another.

The biggest problem is that most of the time, supposed ‘bias’ or ‘propaganda’ is indistinguishable from what a person just really thinks. What’s the difference between bias and opinion, for example?

There are many clear cases of deceit or manipulation, on all sides. CNN doctoring a photo of Rogan to make him look more unwell. But more often than not, ‘bias’ is less about deceit and more about framing.

Konstantin Kisin of Triggernometry points to the MSM taking Trump quotes out of context as an example of biased media, while allowing themselves a lot more latitude in the sensationalist titling of their own videos – like ‘Critical Race Theory Made Me Suicidal’, ‘BLM Stands With Hamas,’ ‘This is why THEY lied about our history,’ and many others. Is this any better?

Similarly, Chomsky and Herman’s use of the word propaganda has been criticised for giving the impression that the bias is purposeful manipulation. The truth is, the topics they raised in Manufacturing Consent – the press being overly patriotic, anti-communist, pro-business, selective condemnation – was just how most Americans thought at the time.

Similarly, the filter model they adopt doesn’t explain how anti-capitalist news ever gets through the filter at all. Anti-monopoly investigations in companies like Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in the 19th century, the coverage of climate change, support for social services – this kind of journalism occasionally gets through. To pick two examples from recently, ITV broadcast a hugely influential drama on a Post Office scandal here in the UK and Channel Four often broadcasts programmes like one that looked at why our water companies are paying shareholders dividends while polluting our rivers.

The reason stories like this do get covered is because they’ll be popular and so producers, executives, and owners are likely to support them.

That said, it’s clear that there are limits to what will fit in the frame. This explains why the media prefer socially liberal topics that support popular progressive ideas without having to do much criticism of the capitalist economy that pays their not insubstantial wages. Is it propaganda to be in favour of the status quo? Or you just more likely to be pretty happy with the system if you’re a journalist at the NYT living more than comfortably?

I’ve been reading and watching a lot of different media in making this and it is difficult to generalise. The BBC is different to CNN, Fox News to the NYT, Chris Williamson different to Joe Rogan. Living in the UK, I don’t have much familiarity with the American channels, other than the clips I see, and I seem to get most of my news from lots of different places.

Ultimately, it is one big ecosystem. Ultimately, maybe the MSM was right to be mostly sceptical of Brexit – after all most of the ‘experts’, studies, rhetoric, polling, and so on, supported that scepticism. However, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t miss something. And that something like GB News isn’t, in fact, the child of that failure.

If everyone has biases, then it makes little sense to criticise all of them with the same broad brush, and it’s those generalisations – elite mainstream vs the people, woke/anti-woke, free speech/anti-free speech – that do the most generalisation and are likely to be least useful. We need less rhetoric and more granular, specific, rational conversations.

Maybe then instead of bias per se we should look at those trends that run through both the old MSM and the new elites, trying to work out why new media seems to be going in the same direction.

 

Sensationalism

There is an inevitable emotional incentive to sensationalise, to point to moral panics, to lean on outrage. Moral panics – whether about garrotting, gay rights, drag shows, or conspiracies – have the benefit of being targeted to a small minority of supposed deviants who can be blamed for the problems society is facing.

Is there much difference between the moralising of Aids in the 80s and the scapegoating of trans people today? Take these headlines from the 80s. The Sunday Express asked, ‘If AIDS is not an Act of God with consequences just as frightful as fire and brimstone, then just what is it?’. A Sun headline read, ‘AIDS is the wrath of God, says vicar’. Another Daily Express headline: ‘AIDS: Why must the innocent suffer?’, about using animals to test a potential cure. It was commonly called the ‘gay plague’. In 1986, the Star said it was a scandal that there were ‘GAY LOVERS ON ROYAL YACHT.’ Another Sun story said, ‘I’D SHOOT MY SON IF HE HAD AIDS, Says Vicar! He would pull trigger on rest of his family’.

Sociologist Jeffrey Weeks describes the moral panic like this: ‘the definition of a threat to a particular event (a youthful ‘riot’, a sexual scandal); the stereotyping of the main characters in the mass media as particular species of monsters (the prostitute as ‘fallen woman’, the paedophile as ‘child molester’); a spiralling escalation of the perceived threat, leading to a taking up of absolutist positions and the manning of moral barricades; the emergence of an imaginary solution—in tougher laws, moral isolation, a symbolic court action; followed by the subsidence of the anxiety, with its victims left to endure the new proscription, social climate and legal penalties.’

Again, there may be rational conversations to have on the details of certain issues, but the frame is that a woke elite is forcing their moral worldview on ordinary people. Could it not have been said that the1967 act to decriminalize homosexuality in Britain was the act of a woke establishment and academics? Could not almost all of the headlines about AIDs be reworked to include the words trans and be indistinguishable from new elite talking points today?

Some subjects are about personal taste. Literature, film, culture, poetry, art podcast – talk about what you want. But with politics, economics, the future of countries, the news, standards of evidence have to be applied more rigorously. What really affects people’s lives? What do people really want addressing? What are the most important issues?

Take this recent study that found that fewer than 1 in 1000 university courses in America contain references to critical race theory or ‘woke’ topics like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. Is this represented proportionally in new media discussions? No.

 

Free Speech

The same applies to free speech. Obviously both the old media and the new elites will always claim to be fighting for the truth, fighting for freedom. A Daily Mail headline could be a Dave Rubin title.

In 2012, there was an investigation into phone hacking by the tabloid press in the UK, including the answer phone of a murdered 13-year-old girl. In response, The Sun protested that ‘this witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on Press freedom’.

Free speech is too important an issue to be used as an excuse for bad behaviour. But it always has been. The entire discussion on free speech gets reduced to a populist narrative of good vs evil – the people who deserve to speak freely vs the elites who want to shut them up. However, to the Sun and many new elites speaking freely apparently means speaking without consequence, rebuttal, or rules.

Free speech is not black and white. There is no such thing as free speech absolutism, even in the US with a first amendment. We have copyright, libel, slander, and advertising standards and regulation. We have etiquette, codes of ethics, responsibility, spam, and moderation on social media platforms. So free speech is not a woke elite vs ordinary people issue. It’s an issue that often has to be decided by careful discussion about the particular issue.

 

Beware the Guru

I’ve borrowed guru from the Decoding the Gurus podcast here, which unpacks some of the talking points in this space.

But take a look at this event: Dissident Dialogues – “The World’s Leading Thinkers”. Some of these people might appropriately sit under that subheading, but to apply it to the Triggernometry hosts, Chris Williamson – even if you enjoy their interviews – seems a disservice to the millions of experts and scholars and leaders around the world that have published books and studies. The selection mechanism is not expertise but influence.

Chomsky and Herman pointed to how a Soviet defector became the US media’s favourite expert on USSR weapons and intelligence because he was, of course, pro-US policy.

Which reminded me of how the North Korean defector Yeonmi Park became a guest favourite of the new elite circuit not just because of her insights into life in North Korea, but because she was anti-woke, saying for example that, “that ‘cancel culture’ at U.S. colleges is the first step toward North Korean-style firing squads”.

Organisations – online and off – pick experts in a way that suits the wider ideological constellation of their worldview. If someone is popping up talking about a lot of issues, whether on the BBC or across YouTube, be sceptical.

 

The Market Always Wins

Underlying all of this is the worst incentive of all. The incentive for profit instead of the incentive for truth. From the early press, through to television, through to YouTube today, the trend in political content is away from diversity towards conglomerates that put flashy sets, sensationalist titles, and populist topics first.

This trend puts the plurality of smaller blogs, channels, and podcasts out of business because they take up all the air. Expensive and professional fancy sets by nature look more trustworthy and professional. Diary of a CEO and Modern Wisdom look better than any niche podcasts. They get the big guests, big advertisers, and the resulting big money.

Diary of a CEO and Daily Wire spend fortunes on Facebook advertising, testing thumbnails, investing in studios. This is exactly what happened to the radical press in the nineteenth century. Television went down this route too. The diversity of the Enlightenment was replaced by tabloid newspapers, and the early idealism of television gets replaced with easily consumable infotainment.

In 1958 there was a famous scandal when an American quiz show was fixed so that the most popular contestants could stay on to boost ratings. When this was discovered, it caused an outrage. To some, it was symbolic of the superficial direction television was going in – popularity over truth.

Why does Chris Williamson think modern wisdom is to be found in Eric Weinstein’s head? Because he’s a fixed quiz show contestant, giving popular answers to popular questions, fitting in perfectly with the new elite circuit.

If you want success then popularity will always trump truth. You will always give in to the temptation towards more clickbait sensationalist headlines, thumbnails, talking points, and guests.

Because underneath it all, none of them are anti-elite – all of them are or are becoming elites. And so the temptation will always be to avoid criticising the market forces, the advertisers, the system that they benefit from.

The real divide then isn’t between old media and new – it’s diverse, honest, broad, plural, truthful, reasonable conversation vs sensationalism, populism, clickbait, and moral panics.

There’s always, as we’ve seen, been cross-over. In fact, the market logic that incentivises and rewards grabbing eyeballs, distracting from the real issues, and stoking up fear, is a subtle logic that ultimately underlies both. It’s why someone like Douglas Murray can smoothly alternate between the two while claiming not to trust mainstream media. Ugh – you’ve just been on Fox News, Sky News Australia, and written a column in the New York Post, Douglas.

Piers Morgan was editor of The Mirror when they hacked the murdered girl’s phone – he knows how to whip up the crowd and has moved quite frictionlessly from the MSM to new media, piggy backing off new media figures with all of the predictable titling, topic, and guest strategies that now makes him indistinguishable from a youtuber.

Peterson similarly rallies against the elites while writing for their newspapers, appearing on television, and talking at conservative conferences.

None of them, despite what they say, are anti-elite. They’re just anti-left. And what’s most interesting is not the divide between old and new media, but that the rules of the game between old media and new are so similar.

 

A Better Media (What To Do?!)

We need three things – awareness, organisation, and people powered media.

First, I’m a critical person. But I think it’s optimistic to point out that right now, the media landscape is as diverse as its ever been. The range of content and mediums available to us has never been better. Amongst all the bias, on all sides, there’s great journalism going on – Pulitzer prize winners in the mainstream, five hour interviews on podcasts, niche subjects on YouTube.

But the monster in the room is the profit incentive – the incentive to be popular over truth – which incentivises the big sensationalist clickbait guests with the next big theory of everything. Everyone has to play the game a little bit – make eye-catching thumbnails and cover popular talking points – but when that takes you away from what’s important, what should be significant, what’s truthful, decent, and honest, then you become, to use an overused word, a grifter.

Sometimes a grifter is honest, sometimes, like a broken clock, a grifter can be right, but a grifter isn’t trustworthy over time. You can tell a grifter by the titles used by people like Rubin and Brand – the yellow journalists of our day. They advertise that they’re motivated by popularity over truth in their titles – it’s all ‘chilling warnings’, ‘IT’S HAPPENING’, and ‘Terrifying Truths’.

Strategies like this are ancient and inevitable, so there’s no better first defence against them than awareness. These titles and tactics should be mocked. They should be embarrassing. They should invite criticism. And they often, thankfully, do.

Second, we need organisations. There’s a common new elite talking point that we no longer need the mainstream, that they’re dying, redundant, dinosaurs. Musk talks about ‘citizen journalism’ and how he only gets his news from X. That uploading vlogs, tweeting about protests, having debates in the ‘marketplace of ideas’, is all you need.

But I don’t think the big media institutions are going anywhere. As we’ve many of them are doing better than is usually acknowledged. Furthermore, we need them. We need well-paid journalists, with competent editors, colleagues, and fact-checkers. We need networks of experts to call on, specialists, and analysts. We need organisations that have foreign correspondents, that can quickly and effectively get to another country for an unfolding story. Journalism is expensive work. Cameras, studios, archival access, travel, the clout to attract specialists are all costly.

This is revealed in the way new media figures often rely on old media to do the hard work of reporting. All of these figures criticise the legacy media establishment while relying on them to provide stories which they then sit and comment on.

Furthermore, I can say what I want, the only real check is myself, my reputation and accountability to you. However, within an organisation there are some extra constraints on hasty mistakes, foolish misjudgements, and white lies. There are benefits to being independent and benefits to being in an organisation. I’ve already seen the benefit of working with an editor who has sometimes pointed out something I should check, rethink, or reword. We all need to be held to account.

In The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the ways in which scientific, social, and journalistic knowledge is usually the result of group dynamics rather than simple individual pursuit. Experiments are carried out, facts are gathered, ideas are shared, and editors, boards, journals, professors, and peer-reviewers all give advice, feedback, and guidance. The group shapes the ideas and outcomes collaboratively. Traditional media and universities have codes of conduct and rules for practice for this reason – to coordinate individuals in a group.

New elite figures have to do this much less. And so much more comes through that filter. False news, silly takes, UFO discourse, sensationalism, extreme points of view, personal attacks are all more likely in the more individualistic new media environment. It’s the equivalent of not having that friend who might urge you to reconsider something, or read an email for you, or talk you out of something.

There are exceptions – Daily Wire have group dynamics that make them more like an old media institution, Rogan has Jamie to ‘pull that up’, and YouTube channels are getting big enough to expand into groups. But ultimately, these are still just powerful individuals rather than institutions.

And unlike, say the BBC newsroom, which have their point of view, and make plenty of mistakes, individuals reporting on current events – especially in foreign countries – are much more likely to be unable to separate fact from fiction. Especially when countries like Russia spend millions spreading misinformation online purposefully designed to flood the information landscape and confuse.

So, that’s why organisations are important. But that’s not to say that individuals aren’t. There are benefits to being an individual or a small organisation – individuals are nimble, have few overheads, or constraints, and sometimes might be able to quickly poke holes in a story through commentary before a cumbersome organisation has time to deliberate, and equivocate, and do thorough research. They can also be more individualistic, creative, unique, or specific about what they personally think.

In some ways I think the future might belong to these middling organisations that are doing well – Daily Wire, Novara Media, TLDR news – some of these channels have the benefits of both being both small enough to be nimble and big enough to have budget and reach.

But finally, organisations of any size, individuals too, are all subject to the temptations towards populism and profit.

It’s not enough to think that people watch and listen to what they want to. That it’s just the coherence or truthfulness of ideas that determines who wins and loses in the new media marketplace. No, the market rewards figures like Peterson, Brand, and Triggernometry – it rewards populist rhetoric, anti-woke talking points, sensationalism, moral panics – it rewards scary talking points and it rewards articulate, charismatic, enticing personalities over careful, thoughtful, honest ones. It rewards those with good looks and good looking sets. Want to start a podcast? Do you have a Hollywood CGI set like Chris Williamson? No? Really? You’re not cinematic? You must not be credible.

Which is why – and yes, I know I would say this – which is why you should support the channels and podcasts that you stand by, and why those channels should be thinking about ways to attract your support. Without the corrective of people powered, community supported, diverse and plural media, we’ll get nowhere. Diversity of opinion produced the American and French Revolutions. Without them, we’d still be serfs and subjects.

The greatest trick the elites play is in convincing the public that they are not elites at all. Everywhere, elites tell you that they are being silenced, that they are marginalised, that they are speaking for the people, speaking truth to power. What they won’t tell you is that they are the powerful; that they have the market forces of populism and business interests on their side.

Claiming to be marginalised will always be popular, while the actual marginalised remain marginal. The New Elites, despite claiming to be ostracised from the mainstream, often end up being featured on them, and have far more power than they claim to.

What we need really from a media are a focus on issues than effect people’s daily lives. There’s room for other stuff, of course, but fulfilling that basic requirement is how journalists, commentators, and media should be judged.

And often, new media fulfils that promise. Joe Rogan has interesting guests on, Lex Fridman hosts an interesting conversation, and Peterson is right about something. However, what I think is identifiable is a shape, an archetype, a constellation that tempts and pulls towards these ideas, talking points, this ideology. And I think for the most part it is just that – an ideological fantasy divorced from reality.

In 1987, Watney wrote, ‘It is the central ideological business of the communications industry to retail ready-made pictures of ‘human’ identity, and thus recruit individual consumers to identify with them in a fantasy’.

It’s so easy to assume that the messages, ideas, and conversations we see online are individual opinions in the great marketplace of ideas and reason. It’s easy to forget that the reach, the volume, the selection, the social connections have forces behind them, forces that support some message while delegitimising others.

The status quo is broken, and polling always shows what people want to focus on – the economy, schooling, healthcare, infrastructure – then ask yourself this: who’s really focusing on those things, and who is choosing to continually talk about a few students, the censorious woke, the idea that bureaucrats are tyrannical? Who is actually talking to experts, academics, people with fresh ideas? And who is actually pretty successful in this new online media space?

The new media fantasy image is the noble warrior, fit and strong, with atomic habits, selling AG1, defending civilisation with one media podcast empire at a time, with a few exciting stories of success, entertainment, conspiracy theory, heroism, and evil along the way.

Unfortunately, the truth about political ideas, good history, studies, and discussion just doesn’t get the clicks.

 

Sources

Kevin Williams, Get Me a Murder a Day! A History of Mass Communications in Britain

Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics

Kenneth Thompson, Moral Panics

James Curran and Jean Seaton, Power without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain

Kristoffer Holt, Right-Wing Alternative Media

Lee Mcintyre, Post-Truth

Geoffrey Hughes, Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture

John Nerone, The Media and Public Life: A History

Charles Stangor, Social Groups in Action and Interaction, 2nd edition

Francisco-Javier Rodrigo-Ginés, Jorge Carrillo-de-Albornoz, Laura Plaza, A systematic review on media bias detection: What is media bias, how it is expressed, and how to detect it, Expert Systems with Applications

Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media

Gabriel Sherman, The Loudest Voice in the Room

Tobin Smith, Foxocracy

Charles L. Ponce de Leon, That’s the Way it is, A History of Television News in American

David Brock and Ari Rabin-Havt, The Fox Effect

Bruce Bartlett, How Fox News Changed American Media & Political Dynamics

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