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      The Media’s Love of Pseudoscience

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      One inevitable consequence of the rise of the consumer society and the ever more sophisticated technology it requires to survive and expand is the progressive replacement of every aspect of natural human culture by consumable simulacra. When the process involves linking the increasing variety of simulacra together into the semblance of a coherent whole that can be treated as a system, the result is hyperreality. The scientist Alfred Korzybski remarked that “the map is not the territory.” Hyperreality exists as a kind of map that so completely covers the territory that it finds a way of replacing all its original features.

      Like the map, everything hyperreality contains is artificial, made to facilitate our understanding but also to deceive us into believing we may rationally account for all the details. But in contrast with maps, hyperreality carries the illusion of having more than two dimensions. The illusion owes its impact in part to the sophisticated methods of fabrication, but even more so to the fact that we collectively want to believe in the coherence of the three dimensions.

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      What we fail to notice, however, is that in contrast with Einsteinian space-time — which scientists recognize as the fundamental structure of the universe — hyperreality lacks the fourth dimension, time. Reality is always becoming itself. Hyperreality has already become what it is. It exists as a static prop, like a Hollywood movie set. Its various elements sit alongside each other to prop up the world we are invited to believe in.

      Much of the belief depends on the production of canned ideas that become a convenient substitute for perception. In our technology-orientated world, pseudoscience plays a key role. While scientists struggle with the structural uncertainty of quantum mechanics or their frustrating quest to understand dark matter and dark energy, humanity relies on its media to consume pseudo-science and build its faith in hyperreality.

      Pseudoscience enters our lives every day through the innumerable studies our various media present as “news.” By the time any body of research takes the form of a media-friendly story, it will undergo a hyperreal transformation. One glaring example is a piece of manipulated research that has in recent weeks made the rounds of the right-wing media in the US. On April 26, it even featured in the discourse of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson. Newsmax covered it in an article with the title: “White Liberals More Likely to Have Mental Health Problems, Study Shows.”

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      White liberal:

      A mythical being invented by the media in the US to found the hyperreal idea that US society is composed of a pair of diametrically opposed camps distinguished on the basis of two artificially defined value systems, apparently designed with the specific purpose of preventing the majority of citizens from becoming aware of the wide range of serious political issues that any complex democracy will be permanently faced with

      Contextual Note

      In a remarkable performance on Monday focused on the burning question of the enforced wearing of masks, Carlson managed to demonstrate how devoted he is to pseudo-scientific distortion as he claimed that “a Pew survey from last month found that 64% of white Americans who classify themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘very liberal’ have been diagnosed with an actual mental health condition.” Not only was the Pew survey published in March 2020, making it at best old news, but the figure he cited was significantly higher than what reported by other right-wing news outlets. And there was no diagnosis but self-reporting: “34 percent of liberals reported having mental health problems,” according to The Washington Free Beacon.

      Embed from Getty Images

      But the problem isn’t in the details. It is much broader, affecting the entire culture. It stems from three combined sources of hyperreal distortion.

      The first is the survey itself. Because it produces statistics that can be displayed in a graph, people attribute to it the status of science. An enterprising PhD candidate with a personal political agenda and a Twitter account, hoping for a career in either statistics or politics (or both), can then step up and make it look even more scientific by “breaking down” the statistics, correlating them with other statistics and using terms proper to specialized language such as “aggregate indexes” and “dispositively.” The young man in question, Zach Goldberg, has defined for himself the mission of reporting on the status of whiteness and wokeness in the US.

      The second source of distortion is the propensity of the media to use both the primary source (the Pew survey) and the secondary source (Goldberg’s tweets) to announce some deep truth about society itself. With the aim of attracting readers and viewers, the media jump at the opportunity to reveal a deep, disturbing truth. Most articles about climate change, health, diet, economic trends, the cosmos and UFOs fall into this pattern. They all begin with something rooted in reality and based in either scientific fact, social observation or polling. But they quickly transform that basis into the illusion of a new and troubling feature of our everyday hyperreality.

      The third source of distortion is the need in the US to reduce everything to an oppositional binary choice. Even as the idea of gender diversity has now displaced the obvious and very real binary division between male and female, most Americans believe there are two subsets of humanity called “liberal” and “conservative.” Even the analysis of subtle social scientists such as George Lakoff feeds into this requirement of hyperreal belief in US society. Americans are conditioned to believe that they themselves are, or at least should be, in their essence, either a liberal or conservative. This is an amazing ideological accomplishment.

      The surveys themselves sometimes undermine the dominant binary thesis by highlighting the inconsistencies within the categories. But the hyperreal binary distinction remains as the ultimate buttress of a political system that requires the belief in oppositional thinking. It underpins an electoral system designed to create the conviction that the two parties authorized to govern represent the dual essence of the American electorate.

      Historical Note

      The binary meme has been both complicated and reinforced by the reemergence in recent years of Americans’ awareness of the racial divide. This awareness, to some extent, lay dormant following the legal gains and cultural shifts associated with the 1960s civil rights movement. In an article published by Tablet magazine last August, during protests over the murder of George Floyd, Zach Goldberg documented the rise of this new sensitivity to the abiding racial question in the US as reflected in the news. He traced statistics from the media over the past 50 years to demonstrate the rise of the phenomenon he identifies with the “wokeness” that has infected the minds of white liberals.

      To make his point, Goldberg presents two dubious assertions as if they were truisms. He begins by citing “the absence of legal discrimination in the post-affirmative-action era.” This is technically true but culturally false. One prominent feature of hyperreality consists of using the formality of the explicit to hide the implicit. In this case, the inert text of the law obfuscates the informal, organic reality of culture. 

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      Goldberg then claims that, thanks to their media, white liberals are guilty of “concept creep” when they claim that racial injustice is real. He cites “the immense absolute improvements in the quality of life of the average Black person over the past half century” as if it was a documented fact. The key word here is “absolute.” Although he offers no details, Goldberg is almost certainly thinking of the statistics — his unique source of absolute truth — that demonstrate some measurable progress in material wealth within the black community.

      Goldberg’s hopes to find and punish the culprits who have led white liberals to adopt a belief system predicated on the defense of blacks. He affirms that “publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that ‘color’ is the defining attribute of other human beings.” He wants us to “de-emphasize these categories and unite in pursuit of common interests.”

      This abstract advice has some merit, but it is at odds with social reality. Zach Goldberg, Tucker Carlson and many others on the right have been contributing with their own “concept creep” to instill a belief in what is truly a hyperreal category, their designated enemy: the white liberal.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in World Politics

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

      by

      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in World Politics

      Texas Politician Dan Patrick Is No Longer Pro-Life

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      Fox News’ Tucker Carlson has interviewed Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick twice since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Patrick, a Republican, wants the American people to understand a simple fact: that the economy is far more important than human life. He has affirmed once again his unequivocal belief: “There are more important things than […] More