THE ALGORITHM: The media’s new business model is propaganda.
The consequences of this business model in the real world can be summed up in a word: polarization. There’s a perfect alignment of interests between the media, its consumers, and professional political agitators in stoking fear, animosity, and mutual recrimination among the public. The media industry cultivates its only remaining revenue stream. News consumers see their ideological prejudices affirmed by brand name media outlets, and comfort themselves in the belief that the media is doing its job to ensure that their worldview prevails in the public debate. Activists get free PR. Everyone benefits as we all nurture our contempt for one another over the course of a news cycle. Then, once that news cycle is exhausted, media outlets, with the help of activists, make sure that a new outrage flares up to begin the cycle all over again. The survival of an entire industry depends on it.
In the case of the Wi Spa story, it didn’t take much time at all. Within a couple of weeks, there was another violent skirmish, this time in front of the Cedars-Sinai breast cancer clinic, also in L.A.. This flare-up was over a different hot button issue, but it followed the same script.
Like every health care facility I’ve been in post-vaccination, the Cedars-Sinai clinic still had a mask mandate in place. Maybe a dozen people showed up to protest this tyrannical infringement on their liberties, aware, I think it’s safe to assume, that the action was crack cocaine to the native propagandist-journalists of the left-of-center media world. To make it even more enticing, some of the protestors wore black t-shirts that read, “COVID IS A SCAM.” Predictably, counterprotesters showed up, including members of Antifa. In short order, fist fights erupted. Lots of smart phones were on hand to document the squabbles. The tabloids pounced, as readily as if they were following stage directions. It was kayfabe, all the way down.
On an episode of my favorite podcast, Red Scare, co-host Dasha Nekrasova, describing the Wi Spa protests, passingly referred to the whole affair as “the algorithm.” It’s an apt metaphor. Just as YouTube’s digital algorithm serves us up ever more extreme content to keep us glued to our screens, the human algorithm that governs the media’s new business model scours our newsfeeds for catalysts for outrage and amplifies them. Political provocateurs, from anti-maskers to Antifa LARPers, understand the algorithm and exploit it, performing their assigned roles in the streets, in front of their iPhone cameras. The rest of us consume it with glee, every bite reminding us that we stand on the right side of history, unlike the rest of those morons with whom we’re forced to share a country. It’s a perfectly functional dysfunctional system. Everybody wins while everybody loses.
Well worth a read, but note this:
This arrangement works particularly well, of course, for activists, in precisely the way that, 13 years ago, Fox News’ exploitation of the Tea Party story worked out beautifully for the Tea Party. Like Fox’s anchors and pundits, journalists of this type effectively serve the same purpose for the activists they cover that PR firms serve for corporate clients, though the economics break down a little differently.
But what happened before the Tea Party coalesced? Plenty of PR work by Democratic Party operatives with bylines: