‘If I Saw It, Everybody Saw It’ is the Fallacy of Our Time
It's July 4th weekend while our government remains under antivaxx occupation. Also: see an illustrated true story about RFK Jr.
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Contents:
Introduction
Americans Have Been Here Before (kind of)
Courtwatch News
America Founder James Madison on the “right to know”
Write for the 8th-Grade Reading Level & What Donald Trump Knows
RFK Jr. is Not Just an Antivaxxer (illustrated true story)
Introduction: People have been conversing more lately, congregating, comparing notes, and it’s astounding how much we falsely assume people in one’s own bubble have seen the same information we’ve seen. It has something to do with these phone and tablet devices that Steve Jobs said he designed to be the “bicycles of the mind” or extensions of ourselves. Also the a-la-carte news we see plays a part in this, the stray articles detached from their masthead makes it less of a bundle which we can stop at in our mental schema, to locate information that entered & altered our mindsets “the Daily News, two days ago, back section” type of flowchart node. Now it’s “did you see this stray video of this person talking fly by?” Specifically, people in my own tribe who have not seen the Elon Musk Nazi salute video clip and tell me what I saw surely was a generative AI deepfake continue to surprise me.
This week it was “did you see Alexandria Ocacio Cortez damning as a ‘deal with the devil’ the proposed federal budget, what Trump calls his ‘big beautiful bill?” No, my companions say, why are you asking me this. It’s because I tend to assume people have seen what I have seen, and we’re all tuning our OODA loops all the time. “You know, I do that too, I assume if I saw something everybody saw it,” they say back to me.
Some news sites conduct pre-publication vetting, they review every letter to the editor, every ad, picture, illustration before it goes up under their name. As they should, to protect their brand but also to avoid libel and slander and lawsuits for any false advertising. These sites are for the most part starving for ad revenue now, you can tell because more are diving behind paywalls. Who could blame them, as vetting is human labor which costs money. News producers have to grow and sustain an audience, so many would rather sell ads to bring in revenue to press down the subscription costs, to get more viewers, more readers. Other sites – which meet the definition of internet “platform” and are thus shielded by a law called Section 2302 – perform post-publication vetting, i.e. they only take down fake or false information *after* people have called it to their attention, complained, sent multiple emails over 30 days to no response. Platforms earn mucho ad revenue when people load pages of false offending content. And right now platforms control ad monopolies – Facebook parent Meta corporation just announced they were bringing something called ad holding or “holdco” companies under their control, which could be another antitrust violation that will take time for people to decipher and prosecute through courts. Ad laws and norms influence the content quality that enters our field of vision and culture, and these norms and laws have been changed before by citizen demand at various intervals in the history of our country.
Refresh, load, to see the offending content is money in the platform’s bank account. It seems the tax credit people get for buying ads to promote their small business could be adjusted down for ad-buying on platforms, on post-publication vetting sites. And that might defang the motivation to post lowest-common-denominator short-form outrage-bait. But that would require people demanding this from Congress loudly enough to overcome the platform companies’ lobbyists. That’s a mighty, and worthy, challenge.
Microtargeted content harbors ad fraud, and ad fraud drives disinformation. I want to see more macro-targeted content and ads, and fewer micro-targeted ads.
Which is why I was excited to see C-Span is trying desperately to stay in production and be offered through the Roku and AppleTV streaming devices. C-Span viewed that way is macro-targeted content. This miracle network, around since the early 1980s, which films congress in action, is *not* funded by taxpayers, but rather by cable subscribers. But cable subscribers are dwindling as more people cut the chord in favor of streaming subscriptions. And that chord-cutting starves C-Span’s production budget. Now C-Span *might* soon be offered in a bundle with Hulu and Disney, if they’ll agree to it, and *might* be offered on Google’s subscription-tier YouTube TV, if they’ll agree to it, which they haven’t been. That’s suspicious. But if these streamers carry C-Span, it might bring me on as a loyal paying subscriber who doesn’t fickly unsubscribe when my show is over. Which is what I do now.
Americans Have Been Here Before (kind of)
The amateur and misinformation-clogged wires of the young telegraph system in 1912 led to the Titanic ocean liner’s distress calls – that it had hit an iceberg and was sinking with passengers in need of rescue – to many message misfires: it was received by sleeping wire station agents on nearby ships; it was missed entirely by even closer ships with no wire message receivers; and the distress calls were intercepted and supplanted by amateur attention-seeking fake news purveyors that the ship was sailing safely towards Halifax, England.
Victims’ relatives were appalled to read this in the newspapers1. Enough citizens prompted Congress to action, which passed a Radio Act of 1912 into law. The first communications act assured a vibrant consumer base for the ocean liner business by standardizing the distress call protocols and required passenger ships to maintain and man their telegraphs at all times. Congress followed this by passing a more comprehensive Radio Act of 1927 and Communications Act of 1934 which created the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to coerce “localism” “diversity” and “competition” in news and broadcast media.
The Titanic sank just as years of corruption from the Robber baron era fueled the rise of a progressivism wave, a demand for agile and vibrant government intervention.
Again in the 1960s when television had saturated every home, the screen medium incentivized commercial-laden children’s programs and content increasingly tended toward slapstick violence, as that’s what drew viewers (and ads.) That led to the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, the requirement that trustees of public airwaves produce a minimal amount of journalism serving the local public interest, and the funding of quality content like Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and Sesame Street on PBS. Other broadcast regulations created then were the target of deregulatory Republicans in the 1980s who pressed to increase the number of commercials per hour in prime time television.
Whether the same citizen response will erupt from the conspiracy myth, antivaxx misinformation plague of our time is hard to know as we fight to keep from losing all reading culture to short video reels. Alexis de Toqueville was a French sociologist from the upper class when he travelled in 1831-2 to the young United States to study why ours was such a stabilized democracy, whereas France swung from wild beheading revolutions to democracy back to autocratic empire under Napolean. Toqueville noted the Americans were self-starters who formed spontaneous associations to make their local governments work, and circulated their demands back to Washington D.C.
Toqueville also said in his second volume from that trip, “Democracy in America Vol. II” that “I am far from denying that newspapers in democratic countries lead citizens to do very ill-considered things in common; but without newspapers there would be hardly any common action at all. So they mend many more ills than they cause.“
=> Courtwatch News Shames the Internet (as they should)
The June 23 article from Courtwatch News titled “Shaming the Internet” shows how the news media distribution systems today favor machine-plagiarizing outlets such as Hoodline.com and Instagram influencers who don’t cite or credit their sources over original ethically-conducted and quality investigations written in an engaging way. I highly recommend people read it. The article is titled Shaming the Internet and can be found here.
America Founder James Madison on the “right to know”
Before James Madison served as the fourth president of the United States, he wrote much of what became our First Amendment to the United States Constitution, in short hand known as the “right to free speech”. It confers more than that, and reads as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
James Madison also wrote that citizens had a right to sound information and information circulation. That government had an obligation to properly steward the systems that protect free thought, free debate and harvest organic public opinion which guides government action. He and Alexander Hamilton took for granted the variegated free press, funded by classified advertisements, would always exist. Little could he foresee that classified ads peeled away from newspapers with the advent of the internet and Craigslist. Still, his writings of the time can guide us to search for a way to keep quality journalism funded.
In England every television owner pays a license fee which funds the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC.) I was flabbergasted to learn this, but if you look it up you’ll find it to be true. If we use our imagination, and work together, we can create ways to fund quality content that supersedes AI slop and short video reels. Madison wrote that without a variety of informed public opinion, liberty would vanish.
Jul 16 2024 The Right to Know | A case for a federal public trust for media (Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University) - “In his later writings, [James] Madison argued that in a representative republic in which citizens elect their leaders, care of the public opinion is a paramount concern. ‘Without the rule of public opinion, government cannot rightfully be considered free,’ wrote historian Colleen A. Sheehan of Madison’s ideology, noting that he and other founders took it as a given that there would be a vibrant, diverse, privately owned American press and that the government had a proactive obligation to ensure that it remained so; “ . . Because public opinion is sovereign in a free society, the republican statesman is obliged to advance its formation and expression.”
Write for the 8th-Grade Reading Level & What Donald Trump Knows
My journalism textbook instructs us to write in a way that is both understandable by readers with an eighth-grade education, but engaging enough for the Master’s student in English literature. No problem!
But Donald Trump knows this, the first part. He plays to the video camera. He knows people who are tuned out to news won’t see that he isn’t supposed to put a campaign message on their social security mailings, which he just did. People say Trump lacks empathy. But there’s a subcategory of empathy some call “tactical empathy” that means honing your ability to glean how others think.
Kurt Vonnegut reminded writers to “pity the reader”:
“Readers have to identify thousands of little marks on paper and make sense of them immediately. They have to read, an art so difficult that most people don’t really master it even after having studied it all through grade school and high-school — twelve long years.”
This story “Jury convicts thief who stole golden toilet from English palace” is an example of fun, engaging news writing and it’s by the Associated Press, which tends to produce quality content decipherable by the 8th-grader engaging to the Master’s student. It’s about an art heist and it plays to the sophisticate and the lay person at the same time and manages to write in some facts about American history.
RFK Jr. is Not Just an Antivaxxer
RFK Jr. is recycling the thimerosal-causes-autism myth, which fooled many people. As such we at TracingVRL decided to pity the reader by producing visual aids to this true story about RFK Jr.’s shocking “facts” about nuclear power. Enjoy.
Once upon a time, Rory Kennedy, niece of admired President John F. Kennedy, daughter of admired Robert F. Kennedy and sister of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.) pitched to HBO a documentary3. This was shortly after the 9/11 attacks, and the film was to be about the risks of a terrorist strike on a nuclear power plant in upstate New York.
The executives at HBO gave her the greenlight and budget to produce the film with a condition:
She had to include in the film, executives told Rory, her more famous brother RFK Jr.
He looked more like his admired uncle and father than all his siblings and cousins. HBO wanted “more RFK Jr., not less” in the film, sources told Vanity Fair magazine.
Executives surely reasoned the no-longer scion, not-quite failson RFK Jr. would draw viewers. And he should be featured on camera.
Rory Kennedy alerted to HBO and crew that RFK Jr. had a habit of fabricating, and would need be fact-checked.
Eventually filming and editing wrapped. The documentary was “in the can” as they say. Executives and crew rejoiced.
Then Rory Kennedy previewed the “final cut” of the film to see how it played in full.
Oh, no.
RFK Jr.’s signature pseudoscience fabrications made it into the movie.
It was apparently too late in production to re-edit the film. What could they do?
Record over the sound where RFK Jr. said things that weren’t true.
With the re-edited documentary back “in the can” they were ready to screen the film at an invitation-only premiere before it broadcast on HBO.
It’s hard to know how they pulled this off. If the camera captured RFK Jr’s lips moving during the parts HBO had to later delete from the soundtrack, it must have looked weird.
Maybe they played soaring music while RFK Jr. was talking to muffle what he was saying. Swaying violins would buttress what Americans percieved as that RFK Jr. “gravitas”.
Rory Kennedy and HBO screened the film to some very important people (VIPs.) Beforehand, RFK Jr. succumbed to calls that he speak on the topic of the film. He valiantly took to the podium.
Oh, no.
Again, RFK Jr. spoke extemporaneously, impressing the audience by recalling a study’s facts and figures about nuclear dangers. Dangers *beyond* what most people knew about.
As RFK Jr. often does, he cited a real study. But the real study didn’t have those facts. Or those figures. He put words into the authors’ mouths.
But at least RFK Jr’s error-ridden claims weren’t captured on film or any permanent record.
That must have been a relief.
The VIPs in the audience, after watching the film, approached Rory Kennedy with a suggestion.
Couldn’t her documentary feature *more* RFK Jr., not *less*? Or at least include his *shocking facts*, the ones people *don’t hear anywhere else.*
Rory Kennedy demurred, reportedly. And the documentary proceeded to air on HBO to middling reviews. They both moved on. Rory was nominated for awards, and RFK Jr. soon embarked on a notorious antivaxx evangelism career.
Notes
1 📘 Jan 1 2008 Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media by Eric Klinenberg (Fighting for Air) -
2 Feb 21 2023 What you should know about Section 230, the rule that shaped today’s internet (PBS Newshour) - “If a news site falsely calls you a swindler, you can sue the publisher for libel. But if someone posts that on Facebook, you can’t sue the company — just the person who posted it.
That’s thanks to Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that ‘no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.’”
3 Jul 02 2024 Exclusive: RFK Jr.’s Family Doesn’t Want Him to Run. Even They May Not Know His Darkest Secrets. (Vanity Fair) - “Twenty years ago Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared in an HBO documentary about the dangers of a nuclear plant on the Hudson River. Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, directed by his sister Rory Kennedy, pits the crusading Kennedys, pictured flying in a helicopter over the nuclear facility, against Entergy, the power company. … ”