Who Influences Who?

Whenever I get worried about the “influence” of social media and the mainstream media on popular opinion and on government, I find it useful to think about what sources and groups most influence all of us in deciding what to believe and do. The diagram above is a perhaps-cynical attempt to visualize these “spheres of influence”. The thicker the line, the greater the influence on the five groups to which the arrows point. You can think of them kind of like five enormous echo chambers, since mostly their influence is on others within their “chamber”.

To test the veracity of this diagram, I made the following chart of some of the issues that the media and others have weighed in on over the last half-century, and where I think these five groups have ultimately come done on each of these issues, and who influenced them in doing so. I think it pretty much supports the diagram above, and, at least in my case, has alleviated my concerns about the influence of social and other media on the course of our collapsing civilization (you can click on the chart to view it full-size):

A few observations on this diagram and chart:

1. It suggests that neither the media nor governments have much impact on what people believe or do, and vice versa. In fact, the media often tend to adjust their positions when they sense a change in popular opinion, and so they are, most of the time, the tail, not the dog. As for governments, the politicians don’t give a shit about what the voters think. They know that since Reagan/Thatcher, most governments have been systematically trying to undermine the credibility of all governments so that (except for military and ‘security’ spending of course) they can be gutted and disempowered. That way they can reward their buddies in the private sector for their generous campaign donations, by deregulating, selling off and privatizing everything. All they care about when it comes to the citizenry is ensuring that ‘their’ voters remain more outraged by the antics of their opponents than by their own. Corporate lawyers now write a lot of government laws and regulations on behalf of lobbyists, and pass them along (with their campaign cheques attached) for the politicians to dutifully sign. As for the civil servants, they, like middle managers in the private sector, are completely clueless, and just do what they’re told, to keep their jobs until the next election.
2. The mainstream media, including the so-called social media, are in the entertainment industry, not the information industry. Since their business is to sell customers’ eyeballs to advertisers, not to inform, they will do and say anything that will attract and retain these eyeballs.
3. Governments are completely uninterested in the views of scientists and historians on any subject. That’s why absolutely nothing is being done (except make-work pie-in-the-sky plans) to address climate collapse. That’s why they were so flabbergasted to have to pay attention to health scientists when the pandemic struck, and when they still screwed up their response, they of course blamed the health professionals for not being able to do their jobs after decades of annual budget cuts, and for not being able to predict the future. They surely won’t make that mistake again.
4. As the chart suggests, progressives tend to be more influenced by the mainstream media, and by scientists and historians, than conservatives, but that’s not saying much. While we all want to be reassured that what we believe is true, and the right-wing media make it their job to provide that reassurance to conservatives, they are almost entirely telling conservatives what they already believe. That hardly counts as influence. Progressives are influenced occasionally by the mainstream media — eg they bought the complete hoax about Iraq’s brutality in Kuwait, and Saddam’s WMD, and so the “intelligence community” (ie the warmongers in the DOD and the megalithic corporate defense industry hungry for a new fight after the abandonment of Afghanistan) had no trouble “selling” progressives on the need to fight proxy wars against the evil Russians and Chinese in this decade, using the identical propaganda techniques that worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. But part of the reason for progressives’ dimwitted gullibility in these ruses is that they were anxious to find common cause with conservatives in their polarized nations, and demonizing Russia and China was just too easy to pass up. No matter that those ‘evil’ countries are surrounded by over 750 US/NATO military bases, many of them with missiles aimed right at Moscow and Beijing. The military industrial complex (and man is it complex) wants to tighten the screws by adding more bases and missiles in the few ‘neutral’ countries left — Georgia, Ukraine, Hong Kong and Taiwan. It’s distressing that progressives have bought the complex’s propaganda so completely, but then this might be the mainstream media’s last hurrah — its influence over the past five decades has dwindled to a shadow of what it once was, along with the media’s budgets for real journalism, their credibility, and their profits.
5. And so the conservatives, who prior to Reagan/Thatcher tended to watch and read the same mainstream media as most progressives, have now drifted politically further and further right, untethered from any common sources of understanding. When they turned off Walter Cronkite in favour of talk radio, then polarization, and QAnon, became pretty much inevitable.

Bottom line, there is no reason to be terribly concerned about undue influence over our public and private discourse. That ship sailed fifty years ago. Now the government is free to focus all its attention on its corporate and military donors and intelligence agencies, and need not worry about being unduly influenced by actual citizens. Scientists and historians can rest easy knowing that they did their best to explain the complex truth about the subjects they know well, and that no one — not the governments, not the media, and not the citizenry — was the least bit interested in their gloomy and overwhelming predictions and counsel.

Progressives and conservatives can each take comfort in the endless reassurances they get from their own kind, safely insulated from the other’s inconvenient truths, how they arose, and what they mean for the future of their fractured countries.

And the media, once critical and much-attended content providers, reduced to the role of hawkers of sensationalism and stenographers for the war industry’s intelligence spooks and propagandists, can do whatever they want, with the knowledge that they have squandered their credibility in the desperate and futile attempt to keep the fourth estate afloat, and their absence will not be noticed.