In Defence of the News Media

If someone wants you to stop reading the newspaper, what are they about to sell you?

"Joshua Dodson Interviews Governor O'Malley" by MDGovpics is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Slavery was abolished in Mauritania in 1981 and criminalized in 2007. Even so, around 1% of the population remain in servitude. Many of the slaves are illiterate. They are told that slavery is natural by their masters and imams. Without access to what conspiracy theorists often call “the lamestream media,” they have no way of exposing the lie. Cult leaders, con artists and abusive husbands are well aware of the principle behind this approach: If you want to mistreat someone, the first step should cut them off from the outside world.

Preventing people from receiving information that you can’t control is a necessary first step if you want to be cruel to them or sell them a dodgy worldview or a quack health product. You have to stop them from reading the newspaper, let alone multiple news sources! The reason is simple: We have seen that human beings aren’t good at handling contradictory information. Imagine what would happen if a slave in rural Mauritania saw a television news bulletin on slave owners being arrested. The new information would be troubling and explosive. It could set the slave’s life on a new course. If you can deny slaves access to the news, none of this will happen.

The same is true of conspiracy theories. We have already seen how these narratives are often generated by amateur researchers working backwards from an event to its supposed cause based on poor methodology and uninspired guesses. In other words, the stories tend to be very weak. Theorists encourage people to scoff at the news media and stop reading the newspaper. This should be seen as a way of protecting their speculative narratives from contradictory evidence until the new believer has absorbed them into his or her identity.

Anyone who has spent time researching conspiracy theories will probably find this post a little disturbing. This guy wants me to read the papers again? Really? Yes, really! To reinforce my argument, let us turn to Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen. He has found that there has never been a widespread famine in any country that has some kind of parliamentary representation and a more or less free press. Famines have been the scourge of humanity throughout the history of our species, so this is an absolutely extraordinary result. Letting reporters go around sticking their noses into other people’s business really does yield good results for society.

I dig deeper into the argument for reading several news stories in Chapter 13 of Sharpen Your Axe. The chapter discusses anarchist intellectual Noam Chomsky’s criticism of the press from a skeptical and probabilistic point of view. If you missed the beginning of the book, here are the links to Chapter One, Chapter Two, Chapter Three, Chapter Four, Chapter Five, Chapter Six, Chapter Seven, Chapter Eight, Chapter Nine, Chapter Ten, Chapter 11 and Chapter 12. I will see you next week for a discussion of skin in the game. And, finally, as always, if you can find a few seconds to share this content it would be greatly appreciated!

Update (25 April 2021)

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[Updated on 10 March 2022] Opinions expressed on Substack and Twitter are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.