On this episode of Thick & Thin, Alex Blumbergberg joins me to talk about the current state of the news media and the influence of social media on the way we get our news and information. Alex and I have been friends for a long time and have always shared a love of conspiracy theories and conspiracy theories.
00:00:36.900You know, if Walter Cronkite had a Twitter account, all the mystique of it would go away because you know what he thinks about when he's going to the back.
00:00:48.740You know his opinion on, you know, things he's, he'd be too tempted to be way out of his depth on everything.
00:00:54.360but it's like we these are the most trollish people of all and i had to bring you in specifically
00:01:00.300um for this interesting i i wouldn't have seen it unless you put it on my timeline
00:01:05.720from axios where it's they're saying it's the terminally online news junkies who are detached
00:01:11.680from the actual reality this is the weirdest like retconning i think i've seen in a long time coming
00:01:16.660from axios of all people you said you're a news agency posting this online telling us we're
00:01:21.320detached from reality for reading you. So I had to bring you in to talk about this specifically
00:01:25.680and this, I guess, like ethos that these journos have these days that, you know, it's the right
00:01:31.020wing chuds that are really the ones stirring the pot and everything. I was wondering what
00:01:35.500your thoughts were on all of this. This really started in the 2016 era when Trump won initially
00:01:44.560on the back of social media. And it was really kind of the first election in which social media
00:01:52.020was dispositive over legacy media in terms of influence. And that caused, I think, not just
00:02:00.460financial shocks in the news industry, but also psychological ones. And there has been this kind
00:02:09.060of idea that, you know, social media is not as, it's still not as important, still not where
00:02:18.240reality is really made. I happen to think, frankly, it's kind of the opposite. I think
00:02:23.880actually social media is even more real and scales with much more impact. Frankly, I think
00:02:35.980unless something trends on social media, regular media almost doesn't matter. But what they cite
00:02:45.220are statistics like only 21% of the US population uses X and only 10% uses it every day. Well,
00:02:55.340okay, well, what percent of the population reads the New York Times every day? And frankly,
00:03:03.260when you say reads the new york times um just because you order it and shows up uh you know
00:03:11.420at your doorstep doesn't mean that you've really been hit by it uh i think when you
00:03:17.120you know the feed on something like x and instagram tiktok whatever it is uh it just
00:03:26.640hits you right away whatever's trending yeah yeah well i mean i mean to your point i mean
00:03:32.060the majority of people ordering the newspaper nowadays are just doing the crossword chunking
00:03:35.980it so i mean like um i actually read somewhere that that is true like the majority of the new
00:03:40.680york times readership is subscribed for the crossword which is really funny um very salient
00:03:44.960but yeah i mean to your point you know the majority of americans i think are tapped out from
00:03:49.920the actual zeitgeist but the zeitgeist is being developed on x for the most part nowadays and
00:03:54.680the proof for that is literally everything that comes out of the trump admin and like the senate
00:03:58.500democrats it's literally just like the timeline being regurgitated by these figures so you know
00:04:04.800again people point that out all the time and they say well the majority of americans aren't even on
00:04:08.160x but the reality is that's where the discourse is being formed and for the 80 or so of americans
00:04:13.560that aren't on x the talking points they're using that they're throwing at each other were developed
00:04:18.100on x whether they like it or not there's very rarely are we seeing stories narratives discourse
00:04:22.980again that's developed independently outside of the online space for lack of a better word
00:04:27.660I think it was who was who I forget who it was. There's a there's a famous neoconservative who I think back in the 1980s was in a debate and there was an argument that your ideas are unpopular.
00:04:45.740your magazine only has 2,000, a circulation of 2,000 people.
00:04:52.460And gosh, I forget who it was who said it,
00:04:55.060but I remember the person quiped back and said,
00:07:51.940My motivation has been pretty not insignificantly hit just because you don't necessarily want to post into a cycle where there might be an amazing story about NGO corruption or some censorship event in Spain.
00:08:17.500And you put that against what's happening here and you go, is this really what I consider to be the most important thing in the world right now?
00:08:30.600And I think that a lot of people are feeling things like that, that there were so many other issues, for example, before the past two weeks, whether that's immigration,
00:08:39.380whether that's the cost of housing, whether that's anything happening in the homeland,
00:08:46.680whether that's a number of other foreign policy issues, it all gets swallowed in the face of war.
00:08:54.140And then there are other things, I think, that have been happening around just certain
00:09:00.100developments within MAGA that leave a lot of the MAGA faithful a little bit disenchanted.
00:09:11.380I mean, if you look at this rally right now against Thomas Massey, who I think a lot of
00:09:16.480people in the MAGA base consider to be a hero, he's the one who got us the Epstein files.
00:09:21.440and in the middle of the iran war uh president is camp stopping everything to
00:09:29.060fly to kentucky to personally campaign against him and yeah it's like make it make it make sense
00:09:35.900in a way that we can live with yeah it's it's really frustrating to your point for the mag
00:09:44.200of faithful because we're the only ones here that don't really have like like there's not really one
00:09:50.560strong way that we're leaning i mean it's because you you have your neocons who are like over the
00:09:55.600moon about all this and then of course you have what's been dubbed the retard right now plus the
00:10:00.240left who are just going to counter signal every single thing trump does and it kind of leaves the
00:10:04.220mag of faithful in a weird spot because again i think the number and i i talked about this you
00:10:08.860know at length on the show is the number one issue i think with this war is that it's a gift
00:10:12.020for like some of these like the worst people in politics and there's just very little in it for
00:10:16.960the MAGA faithful and so that's why I think a lot of us kind of feel a bit rudderless right now
00:10:20.460um I wanted to ask you because I mean you would be you know one of the guys that would be in the
00:10:25.800know on this I mean in regards to wartime propaganda these these sorts of things these
00:10:30.320sorts of elements I mean there's so many accusations right now um of oh well this person's you know
00:10:35.960acting on behalf of a foreign country or this person and like it's everyone on either side of
00:10:40.640the work. How much of that is legitimate? How much of that is real? How does international
00:10:47.540influence operations, how do they work in a moment like this? Because this kind of feels like a big
00:10:52.660flashpoint. And again, these accusations are flying left and right. In general, I think state
00:11:00.060sponsored influence operations tend to be vastly overstated. You do have mostly organic affinity
00:11:09.600networks that certainly pile up very, very strong. And you see that, for example, even within MAGA.
00:11:21.280You don't really have the Trump campaign going out and paying influencers to promote
00:11:28.080Trump. That was never really a thing. You have a few of these kind of influenceable type
00:11:33.820sure uh you know things are in a couple of these like agencies but that's that's a tiny little
00:11:40.960pinky finger there but there is a kind of almost organic commercial base in terms of people build
00:11:49.360their brand as influencers or as journalists covering stories on certain beats and uh and
00:11:58.060it's the same thing when it comes to state level affinities, whether that's the pro-Israel side
00:12:04.660or the pro-Palestinian side. And now we're seeing this new emergence. I just saw this in I think
00:12:14.780the Wall Street Journal earlier, the Iranian disinformation, they're kicking up. This is the
00:12:22.600whole thing with Russian disinformation was all this kind of state-sponsored internet research
00:12:27.260agency type stuff. And, you know, now I'm seeing the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which is
00:12:33.020this big CIA cutout that was, you know, funded by the State Department and USAID, and I think even
00:12:41.740the Justice Department. And they just came out with this new study about Iran. Oh, here's what
00:12:48.820it was uh it said that the attempt to dub operation epic fury operation epstein fury was was an iranian
00:12:59.640disinformation campaign that americans are unwittingly falling for so basically
00:13:06.920you're almost threatening yeah you know that if you dare say that this has anything to do with
00:13:15.040epstein and i'm not even making that accusation but the fact is like for example i mean trump
00:13:20.940flying to kentucky in the middle of this yeah commander-in-chief doesn't have anything better
00:13:26.020to do than to campaign in a local house race right a local district uh in what was massey's crime it
00:13:55.480I agree that it seems like people completely overstate foreign influence, whether, again, it's people on the right, left, et cetera.
00:14:02.500because and kind of to the point with the Axios article where they're kind of outsourcing all the
00:14:06.540blame to like these nefarious algorithms that sort of thing is because I think for the majority of
00:14:11.020people and this goes into the conspiracy world and these sorts of things is they just need to feel
00:14:15.600like there's an explanation something is in control like there's something controlling this
00:14:19.020that this isn't just kind of a random you know ever-changing situation but I think the reality
00:14:25.200is with this course certainly a lot of these people I know that are fervently like pro-Israel
00:14:30.360for example and you know they're getting all these accusations being paid i'm like i've talked to
00:14:34.120these people off camera that's all they talk about that's like their thing trust me they don't need
00:14:38.500any payment to talk about these things um and so but you know i think it's just it's easier for
00:14:43.600people to explain as they say well this person's being paid by iran you know it's a spread this
00:14:47.020propaganda these sorts of things because it kind of gives people a sense of okay well no one could
00:14:51.680actually hold that position it's just someone's in control that's what's going on things people
00:14:55.500are being paid when i'm like the reality is you know again with the internet information has been
00:15:00.000democratize people are going to have a wide range of disagreements on a variety of topics and
00:15:05.460i mean i'm sure it does exist to some degree to your point i mean it's just i think it's
00:15:08.940overstated to say the least it's a cope that yeah gives you something easier to deal with
00:15:17.220than the truth yeah it's if you can contextualize your opinion being unpopular as being this kind
00:15:26.660temporary glitch. Right. That's, that's only, that's artificial. You didn't really lose in
00:15:32.720the marketplace of ideas. You didn't really, you know, you're not really sitting alone at the
00:15:38.700lunch table. It's only that the cool kids have synthetically generated 12 of their friends.
00:15:45.360Yeah. You know, that makes me feel a lot less alone. And it's, I think you have a lot of that
00:15:53.580going on. And also the fact it does just straight up delegitimize the other school of it. So it's
00:16:02.760a way to try to use kind of a dirty trick to argue that the entirety of the argumentative framework
00:16:14.300against what you want is illegitimate because it's synthetically produced because of state
00:16:21.680propaganda or something. And what's so funny is, you know, these will be the same people who tell
00:16:26.780you that USAID needs to spend $10 billion a year on propaganda because journalism, you know,
00:16:35.140journalism saves lives. And so we need, we need our state sponsored propaganda.
00:16:40.560Yeah, I know. And people are just like blaming the wrong things for situations where, okay,
00:16:45.460maybe there is a thumb put on the scale and like a situation on like a certain side of discourse.
00:16:50.500they refuse to say the issue which i primarily see on x which is the entire third world now has
00:16:55.880smartphones and they're like weighing in on american topics and so they're again like you
00:17:00.220have a billion and a half indians and they're generally in agreement on everything regarding
00:17:04.800american politics and so yeah they're gonna like weigh in on one side or like the entire like a
00:17:09.740country like indonesia they're all on x now like but no one ever talks about that they're like
00:17:14.140because i guess that would be like mean or xenophobic so they'd rather just again blame like
00:17:18.040oh they're botting like no these are real people they're just like not americans
00:17:22.420yeah i don't think anyone i mean have you ever had the experience of having this
00:17:31.560months-long colloquy with an account right you later discovered it was a bot i mean this would
00:17:38.240be like dating a girl and finding out she's a robot uh you know six months into the relationship
00:17:43.300literally you know the bots when you see them yeah they are like it'll like appear instantly
00:17:50.220after you because they're all like do a tweet and there will be like a stock you know account
00:17:57.580that'll be like this post makes makes the point that sunshine and rainbows are really you know
00:18:06.180it's not really raining today it's this and and it's like okay you was you managed to do this
00:18:12.340like 279 character tweet within a microsecond you're the first comment uh your avatar is like
00:18:20.480some japanese you know like i don't know it's it's these things are obvious this attempt to
00:18:30.180delegitimize people by saying that they're they're bots and and the the fact that they even conflate
00:18:36.180that with trolls they'll say bots and trolls yeah i know right yeah well it's like wait well
00:18:40.940one of these things is not like the other uh everybody's a little bit of a troll yeah if you
00:18:48.160have you ever seen a professionally journalist when i mean this was a big mistake when all the
00:18:52.580all the big journalists got on twitter and they you know because we got to see who they are yeah
00:18:57.460You know, if Walter Cronkite had a Twitter account, all the mystique of it would go away because you know what he thinks about when he's going to the – you know his opinion on things he's – he'd be too tempted to be way out of his depth on everything.
00:19:16.060But it's like we – these are the most trollish people of all.