The gap between Congressional action and public need reached abysmal proportions some time ago. The Supreme Court lost legitimacy with Citizens United. That made Congress a commodity and put law on the auction-block. They subsequently pre-exonerated the president and pre-criminalized the people.
The Presidency has functioned as a shock-absorber or lightning rod, diverting public accountability for most of my lifetime. If age were measured in in presidential terms I'm 14, or in presidents, 20. I don't think I can name them all in order off the top of my head.
In any case, all three of these institutions abandoned their original design function almost immediately after WWII, and went into business for themselves. Public impact was window-dressing. Now it's a toxic byproduct.
At the end of the Information Age focus shifted to momentary spectacle, easily steered with shock management. Readership, which is now scrollership, is compartmented (can't bring myself to say "compartmentalized") to the point where the remaining major newspapers can pick a reliable bone of contention and exchange blows.
The "news" media are of course wholly-owned subsidiaries of the various political factions, but this is merely market differentiation, for entertainment purposes. They don't actually drive the policies they purport to back, somebody else does that, thinktanks maybe. Stories that would have collided with explosive concussion around my third or fourth (37th-38th) president now continue on parallel tracks, as if in different periods of history. To induce this level of tunnel-vision today it's enough to divide the opposing story lines into subscriptions behind paywalls. It's hard not to buy into something after actually buying into it.
Now possibly seeing it as a scoop, the NYT has pivoted to coverage of Israeli government-sanctioned imprisonment, rape and torture of Palestinian people, including children. The WSJ has apparently riposted with "The Truth About Hamas", which appears to be part of a campaign to resurrect the thoroughly-debunked "ten-seven" atrocity stories that were supposed to justify the genocide that had already gone on for decades.
The timing is interesting. These reports were both presented as in-depth investigations. taking months. Both claims seem flimsy, but for different reasons, one a compilation of dogeared, long-ignored and suppressed citizen-journalism; the other a self-investigation by the accused entity. I'm not buying either rag's repackaging: one dipping a timid toe at the last moment, the other attempting to harness deja vu.
It makes no difference how stale or porous the story is when its half-life has been measured with the precision of a targeted drone operation. Effective propaganda builds on earlier lies that have been focus-grouped to work out what percentage of the public will buy into the next round. I'm saying that the NYT and WSJ are a complete waste of your time and attention, and your money, if you have a subscription. I'm just a member of the public here. Nobody thinks I'm an "influencer" of anything. I'm just a notch or two outside the bell-curve of "persuadables" being shown such contempt.
What I think is that these supposedly competing investigations are investor-driven. Together they are certain to enhance each other's "Likes" while canceling out effectiveness. A perfect cost-benefit profile for obsolete enterprise. With a little marketing this could become a weekly contest. There are plenty of opposing "narratives" if they coordinate them like this. Shock & awe won't breathe even a little life into such horror stories after what we've all been subjected to, but they anticipate profit in inflating the dried out husks one last time.
It's all that's left to these hollowed-out institutions, having long ago abandoned the very concept of an informed electorate. They don't want an informed electorate, they need a paying electorate. Maybe there is a lucrative market to be exploited by obsolete information venues with no factual inventory left on their shelves, actual reporters all driven out, and nothing in the pipeline. But they aren't in the newspaper business any more, they are the house, they get their cut, win or lose.
Investment is the sole measure of viability. It is the same standard by which colonialism is (not was, is) sustained. If you were colonized, you probably don't think so. We are hooked on this broken, poisoned system. We bought cable to get rid of commercials. They came back when there was no competing commercial-free network. Then the internet blossomed, and we began to learn some unpleasant truths, such as the actual price of stardom, but the new transparency threatened the very existence of both government and business. Profit is a cultural imperative. So they teamed up.
But the advertising model did not work online, except for the targeting, which turned the spotlight on the users. The commercial became a Trojan horse. The search engines were slammed into reverse. We became single-seat markets. Our formerly-common reality was fragmented.
Now there is AI, as intelligent as a thermostat. It is a predatory funhouse mirror that sucks our attention and the remaining water and energy resources, to power pervasive surveillance. AI apps with names like "Where's Daddy" trained on targeted mass assassinations in Gaza now provide its owners with leverage to manage your perceptions. The owners have boasted online that "everybody will be on their best behavior."
The new AI industry is the marriage of eugenics and market science that I suspect Edward Bernays came to fear toward the end of his life. He understood that humans still behave like apes, and Cultural selection outpaced natural kind before this failing could be selected out.
It is a monkey-trap. A coconut shell with a hole just the size of an open hand, but too small for a fistful of berries.
It is likely to cost us some skin to get free.
