Go broke, go woke
The latest essay in my Worshipping the Future series at Helen Dale’s Substack is on the Pravda media model.
There is a common meme of “go woke, go broke”, pointing to loss of sales from subordinating other considerations (such as story, faithfulness to a franchise, characterisation, coverage, accuracy, etc.) to affirm the tropes of Post-Enlightenment Progressivism (“wokery”).
These claims are often over-blown. Yes, often you can reasonably argue that there was a hit to sales and/or viewership. But it is also often not enough to stop an enterprise still being profitable (though it sometimes is).
Independent journalist Jesse Singal has powerfully made a reverse claim about the evolution of mainstream media. That it is more of a case of “go broke, go woke”. That the collapse of ad revenues, due to the internet, has led newspapers and other media companies to replace (expensive) older journalists with (cheaper) recent university graduates.
It is these new, young graduates, steeped in the increasingly dominant “dissent is evil” views learnt in academe, who are driving the “wokification” of media. Along with mainstream media shifting towards a new business model, where one seeks to grab a loyal audience by leaning into their presuppositions.
There is clearly quite a deal of truth to this analysis. Though it does rather take the turn in the universities for granted. After all, it is not their “wokeness” that makes new graduates cheaper. It does, however, make them difficult in other ways, with their virulent intolerances.
But, as Martin Gurri points out, that cognitive intolerance is also useful. By de-legitimising dissent, the online “woke” mobs can be a very useful mechanism for elite dominance.
Moreover, identity politics are made for divisive elite favour-and-dominate games. After all, to racialise is to divide. And elite racialisation is always a favour-and-dominate game.
It is also clear that, while the nomination and election of Donald Trump was a galvanising moment, aggravating existing trends, such trends were already building in media coverage prior to his nomination. Trump did not, after all, cause the collapse in ad revenues.
On the contrary, obsessing over Trump’s wickedness turned out to be a boon to subscriptions and viewership. One that mainstream media was only too willing to betray basic journalistic scruples to pander to. Hence, the Russiagate nonsense. (The audience effect wore off once he lost office.)
The shift to “dissent is evil” patterns in academe is the latest way that universities have been corrupting media. The more fundamental corruption came from journalism increasingly shifting to a profession for university graduates. Particularly elite university graduates. Because that meant journalism became dominated by folk who identified as and with elites, not the general populace.
Even more than training professionals, the central role of modern universities is to train and socialise the Anywhere elites. (Anywheres being typically highly educated folk whose networks are not based in specific localities.)
That academe is prone to seeing most of their fellow citizens as clay to be moulded by their moral and intellectual betters magnifies the elite-identification effect. The politics of the transformational future magnifies it even more.
The consequence has been to accelerate popular distrust of media that increasingly does not speak for them, or even really to them. It speaks much more at them. (In the US, trust in the media among Republican and Independent voters has essentially collapsed.)
There has been massive expansion in other forms of media. But legacy media retains its legacy role purveying what it is that the smart-and-the-good affirm. So, even as it loses audience, and its revenues come under further strain, it still performs elite coordination functions.
Indeed, corporate interests find that providing ad revenue allows them to tap into such elite coordination for their own benefit.
Pravda translates as “approved truth”. With the implication that it is often not so true.
Universities being full of disciplines of activist (therefore degraded-by-politics) scholarship that build mountains of bullshit out of molehills of truth are why the shift to cheap recent graduates have been so disastrous for the quality of journalism.
Especially as greater credibility is often what the exploding new media is trading on.
So, read about the status dynamics of the Pravda media model in my latest essay.
References
Harry Frankfurt, ‘On Bullshit,’ Raritan Quarterly Review, 1986, Vol.6, No.2.
https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf.
Jeff Gerth, ‘The press versus the president,’ Columbia Journalism Review, January 30, 2023.
https://www.cjr.org/special_report/trumped-up-press-versus-president-part-1.php.
Zach Goldberg, ‘How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening,’ Tablet, August 05, 2020
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/media-great-racial-awakening.
David Goodhart, The Road to Somewhere: The New Tribes Shaping British Politics, Penguin, 2017.
Martin Gurri, ‘The Fifth Wave: Twittermania: A twisted drama of faith, politics and media, in five acts,’ Discourse, January 18, 2023.
https://www.discoursemagazine.com/culture-and-society/2023/01/18/the-fifth-wave-twittermania/.
D. Rozado. R. Hughes, J. Halberstadt, ‘Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models,’ PLoS ONE, 2022, 17(10): e0276367.