Black Helicopters Over Mac-Groveland

Laura Billings is either:

a) Joking, or
b) Losing it.

You have to wade through a bunch of the same old crap to find out.

Says Billings:

A reader called the other day to find out why the newspaper was burying the biggest news of the decade — that Jacob Wetterling was alive and well and working at Andersen Windows...The story the caller had on good authority, and heard repeated at both a brunch and a soccer game, was actually based on a television news report that ran on Sept. 30...If that story panned out, it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. That this caller assumed the paper had made a decision to bury it tells us how cynical some of us have become, reading and watching the news through sub rosa-colored glasses, convinced there's a secret world of reality that never makes its way to the light of day.

Right. Because who would ever be so cynical as to think the media are biased?

Deeply partisan politics tend to inflame this kind of thinking..."I've lost count of the times I've been told — always on excellent, but unnameable authority — that Osama bin Laden is already in American hands and that the Bush administration is waiting for the right moment to announce his capture,'' the British travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in The Guardian this summer..."If terrorists don't strike in the run-up to November 2 (as most people assume they will) the level of alert will be jigged up to red, arrests will be made, the country will be declared saved from an evil plot and mass casualties, and Bush will storm past Kerry in the polls.''

And these are only the liberal conspiracy theories. This week, theorists on the right are just as positive that John Kerry got all of last week's debate questions ahead of time and/or he brought a cheat sheet to the podium.

Or that CBS forged memos that Michael Moore originally turned down, or that the media will contort itself silly trying to get Kerry elected.

Oh, wait...

Here's where Billings hits the fork in the road:

What's troubling about these tidbits, entertaining or morbid as they may be, is that the mainstream media are no longer where people turn to confirm the rumors - or feel relief that everything is really OK.

She figured this out? It only took her, what, 30 years?

No, Laura - the mainstream media have been losing that role since their bias - your bias - because obvious to all but the most pollyannaish observer.

Many writers in military history have noted that men in the military in wartime - when news is severely curtailed, and men are left to their own imaginations - spawn rumors constantly; fanciful, optimistic, pessimistic, brutal, implausible. It's what happens when there's a perceived vaccuum of information.

Made the connection, yet?

To use a market analogy, people are voting with their feet, going with the news sources that provide them the best return on their investment (of time and credulity). Rumors are more entertaining than the news; Snopes and (an aggregation of) blogs are more factual and complete.

And less biased.

Psychologists say that in uncertain times it's human to indulge our imaginations in worst-case scenarios, secret plots and cover-up stories. This explains why we buy tickets to "The Manchurian Candidate," parse "The Da Vinci Code" and buy up copies of Philip Roth's "The Plot Against America.''

Of course, when Roth's dark fantasy about a fascist America jumps from the fiction to nonfiction best-seller lists, chances are still good that you'll read it here first.

More likely scenario: The mainstream media will ignore the signs that the "dark fantasy" is becoming reality, because none of the "editors and fact-checkers" will have any background in "dark fantasy", ergo it's not newsworthy. Nick Coleman and Laura Billings will bloviate at length about how Dark Fantasies are bad for the Big Cheeses. Blogs and talk radio will fact-check their assses, and embarass the big media yet again. The editors will let the story die quietly. Nick Coleman will whine about the "war against the media".

You'll read it everywhere first, and more accurately.

Posted by Mitch at October 6, 2004 07:02 AM | TrackBack