Episode 195: David Leonhard and the Elite Consensus Manufacturing Machine.
The quote (from Jacob Bacharach) goes: Yeah, one of the effects, it’s to transform the news from being a precursor to political action into being merely social commodity, which is to say that what strikes me about these newsletters for the majority of their consumers is that what I think they’re really designed to do is to turn current events into a kind of social currency that can be used for conversation, that can be used to position oneself as sort of being in the know, understanding what’s going on, being relatively savvy about, you know, what’s happening within politics. But by reinforcing the sense that politics is a distinct and professional domain of politicians and maybe some media people that is sort of, like, separate from life/work management, personal economy, etc. And so one of the things that it does is it takes that sort of that self-flattering, centrist self-image of a lot of the people who consume these products, and it says politics is a profession. It is a thing that exists siloed from the rest of society, and those who attempt to act politically, outside of the professionalized realm of politics, and outside of occasionally, you know, voting, I guess, are disrupting a sort of natural order of things like why can’t they just take their ration of news that they get each morning and do what normal people do with it, which is exchange it with other people over dinner at a restaurant.
I feel like this is a sort of Baader-Meinhof syndrome situation where now that I have this as a lens I can't not see it. It's like a Rosetta Stone of liberalism.
A counter to this would be to create something specifically aimed at disrupting it. A new kind of media that is intent on being action-based. Call it a "political journal" instead of "newspaper" and have its articles all end with suggested political actions that people can take.
Print this quote in an "about" section of the publication along with an explanation for the "political journal" label as opposed to just being a newspaper. Build an audience of people that want to break away from news consumption as commodity.
If you frame it right I guarantee that you can drag some of these people away from it, even the particularly snooty ones, specifically because they get to be snooty about news consumption itself so it offers an outlet to be even snootier.
It doesn't even stop the use of news as cultural commodity either. So it takes nothing away from them, it just augments it with potential action while also providing a way to be even snootier.
Maybe it's out of style now but opinion pieces used to end with a direct appeal to some politician, or else the grave consequences mentioned above will occur. It gave the veneer that you were reading a letter directed to the president or some CEO.
I think that achieved the effect of being snooty while accomplishing nothing.