I've recently been saying that causal explanations that simplistically invoke "interest" as a motivation are a big ongoing problem for the left, but there's another version of this that isn't so much "economic self-interest" or "rational interest in the pursuit of power" but "a belief in the righteousness and superior utility of your own authority". That's not interest in the conventionally tedious economistic sense--in fact, it leads elites and rulers into serious trouble time and time again because those beliefs are so misaligned with their practical capacity to mobilize power in defense of their belief. It is a belief that is often the opposite of maximizing your interest.
It is also a belief that the blue-chip, top-of-the-pyramid American journalistic platforms have in spades. I think more than anything that's what produces the weird gyrations of analysis and perspective that some folks call "both sides-ism" or "whataboutery". That's not about objectivity, it is about producing a kind of legible subject who *ought to listen to them*. It's not that far off of how consultancies stalk their prey, a kind of up-sold con-man patter. The gyrations of the ideology are more obvious when it's not working (generally true of all ideologies: they become more transparent upon failure and frustration than they do when they are smoothly aligned with institutions and collectivities).
You can really see with Nate Cohn at the NYT, who fucking freaks out every time something happens that he didn't predict, control or shape. I don't think that's an individual failing, I think that's what a courtier does when the king comes out dressed totally contrary to what the courtier has been telling everyone the king should look like. First the courtier (discreetly) lets it be known the king is unfashionable, then the courtier attacks the people who dressed the king, then the courtier announces that of course all along they were the ones who said the king should be so adorned. That sounds like "self-interest", but the ideology is "The world needs courtiers". That's the creme de la creme of American journalism: it is divine to whisper in the ears of the powerful, and awful when they fail to listen.
Hey Tim, I think I agree, if I can take "producing a kind of legible subject" as the key phrase here. That object of journalistic address, which is itself a product of existing discourse, validates the subject position of the journalist, right? So that as this relation dissolves because one or the other term is gradually, then suddenly, beyond the reach of explanatory adequacy (Cohn is a good example), incoherence or panic sets in. The courtier scrambles.
Yeah, exactly--they try to manage the subject back into prebuilt narratives. The NYT is especially transparent in the ways that they constantly want to re-encompass Trump as an 'ordinary' partisan political figure who is potentially open to their guidance, to produce a sense that both sides can be evaluated by the same yardstick (their own) and both sides can be expected to respond coherently to that evaluation. They keep doing it even when plainly we are in another kind of political moment. Which might be their audition to be the official mouthpiece of the Maximum Leader should that come to pass, which would never happen no matter how bent their knees might be, simply because Trump's got his money in other outlets.
I've recently been saying that causal explanations that simplistically invoke "interest" as a motivation are a big ongoing problem for the left, but there's another version of this that isn't so much "economic self-interest" or "rational interest in the pursuit of power" but "a belief in the righteousness and superior utility of your own authority". That's not interest in the conventionally tedious economistic sense--in fact, it leads elites and rulers into serious trouble time and time again because those beliefs are so misaligned with their practical capacity to mobilize power in defense of their belief. It is a belief that is often the opposite of maximizing your interest.
It is also a belief that the blue-chip, top-of-the-pyramid American journalistic platforms have in spades. I think more than anything that's what produces the weird gyrations of analysis and perspective that some folks call "both sides-ism" or "whataboutery". That's not about objectivity, it is about producing a kind of legible subject who *ought to listen to them*. It's not that far off of how consultancies stalk their prey, a kind of up-sold con-man patter. The gyrations of the ideology are more obvious when it's not working (generally true of all ideologies: they become more transparent upon failure and frustration than they do when they are smoothly aligned with institutions and collectivities).
You can really see with Nate Cohn at the NYT, who fucking freaks out every time something happens that he didn't predict, control or shape. I don't think that's an individual failing, I think that's what a courtier does when the king comes out dressed totally contrary to what the courtier has been telling everyone the king should look like. First the courtier (discreetly) lets it be known the king is unfashionable, then the courtier attacks the people who dressed the king, then the courtier announces that of course all along they were the ones who said the king should be so adorned. That sounds like "self-interest", but the ideology is "The world needs courtiers". That's the creme de la creme of American journalism: it is divine to whisper in the ears of the powerful, and awful when they fail to listen.
Hey Tim, I think I agree, if I can take "producing a kind of legible subject" as the key phrase here. That object of journalistic address, which is itself a product of existing discourse, validates the subject position of the journalist, right? So that as this relation dissolves because one or the other term is gradually, then suddenly, beyond the reach of explanatory adequacy (Cohn is a good example), incoherence or panic sets in. The courtier scrambles.
Yeah, exactly--they try to manage the subject back into prebuilt narratives. The NYT is especially transparent in the ways that they constantly want to re-encompass Trump as an 'ordinary' partisan political figure who is potentially open to their guidance, to produce a sense that both sides can be evaluated by the same yardstick (their own) and both sides can be expected to respond coherently to that evaluation. They keep doing it even when plainly we are in another kind of political moment. Which might be their audition to be the official mouthpiece of the Maximum Leader should that come to pass, which would never happen no matter how bent their knees might be, simply because Trump's got his money in other outlets.