I’d like to offer Konstantin Kisin a dose of optimism. As Kisin feels his high hopes for the era of new media slipping away, the predictable costs of democratizing journalism are still firmly outweighed by the benefits.
Writing this week on the debate Joe Rogan hosted between Douglas Murray and Dave Smith, Kisin reflected on his own excitement about the dissolving power of legacy media.
“After all, what could go wrong with ‘democratizing information’?” he asked. “Well, as it turns out, quite a lot.”
Kisin argued that “incentive structures and thought patterns we typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we expect to see in journalism or academia.”
“Just as the assumptions of the elite class were proved wrong by the actions of their fellow citizens during the era of Trump, Brexit, and Covid-19, the assumptions some of us held about the future of the media are now crumbling before our very eyes,” he said of “Podcastistan,” the land we critics of legacy gatekeepers hath wrought.
Finally, Kisin concluded, “The world of entertainment is not driven by truth-seeking, and the claim that someone’s ideas are false is no longer an effective critique. Podcastistan is a place where people scold the mainstream media for failing to live up to their standards on honesty and accuracy while having none of their own.”
While I disagree totally with Kisin on the validity of Murray’s argument against Smith — and I’m not sure I agree with his assessment of Darryl Cooper — it’s clearly true that our democratized media landscape is a messier one, in which a rational distrust of experts has driven audiences to some bad actors more interested in entertainment than truth. Those bad actors also have tools that allow them to compete on a more even playing field with the Old Guard. You can do the trick with a cheap USB microphone and some TikTok know-how, or a small budget for audio equipment, or a knack for exploiting the X algorithm.
The central source of Kisin’s disappointment with new media seems to be that “incentive structures and thought patterns we typically associate with the entertainment business are not the same as those we expect to see in journalism or academia.” As Anchorman 2 ably reminded us, this sentiment has been leveled, with varying degrees of validity, throughout the history of modern journalism.
So what’s different now in the world of the “podcast election”? It’s absolutely true that the line is blurrier than it ever has been, and it’s more difficult for people outside the media to discern who’s serious and who’s not. To Kisin’s point, this is great for people who wish to exploit institutional distrust by turning comedy careers into political podcasts or history obsessions into amateur YouTube channels.
However, Kisin assumed people blindly accept every word uttered by Cooper and Ian Carroll or even accept the thrusts of their arguments. I’d rather live in a world in which people who don’t trust mainstream historians can listen to Cooper and Murray, read their criticisms, and weigh the evidence. Some people seek out Cooper because they’re bigots, but some people seek him out because they’re entertained by history and curious about alternative perspectives. They listen to a lot, and they read a lot.
Listening to Cooper sent me back into the long-running debate about Winston Churchill. I emerged with a fuller, more dimensional appreciation for him, not a deep hatred of the West. Listeners are capable of and interested in weighing the perspectives of legitimate experts, such as Andrew Roberts, with the perspectives of comedians. Sometimes people might side with the comedians, and sometimes they may be correct. However, while the economic incentive structures in new media may further decrease the volume of experts, it’s not silencing them or stripping away their credentials. It’s just allowing for more comparisons.
I’m not sure that’s ideal, but neither was the status quo. Now, people have to work hard to weigh competing reports and arguments rather than relying on the evening news or morning paper to present both sides and reliable experts. So, while today that means we sometimes take ideas too seriously when they deserve less weight, in the past, we often failed to question the prevailing narratives because they were presented with utter confidence.
TRUMP’S CHAOTIC EUROPEAN DEFENSE SPENDING MESSAGING
There is no perfect system, and new media will create plenty of additional problems for consumers and society at large. However, it’s forcing the old guard to compete, and if journalists and academics are worthy of earning back the public’s trust, they ultimately will win in the marketplace. People like entertainment, but if they want the truth from sources who aren’t providing it, they’ll move right along. We know because it’s happened before.
No matter how entertaining Don Lemon was in 2018, we eventually tuned him out. His YouTube channel could double its meager views, and he wouldn’t have the influence he once wielded.
