Letters to the Editor
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Dumb and dumber
My political awareness only goes back to the mid-70s, but I believe I've seen a clear deterioration in news reporting since the mid-90s. It is their normalization of idiocy, and their total lack of embarrassment, that seems different (and worse) than in the past. -- Holly McLachlan
Mine goes back to the mid-50s, but my sense of what is happening is essentially the same as yours. This may seem a bizarre sort of mental connection, but I'm reminded of Paul Rosenberg's numbered list of stages in the evolution of self-reflecting consciousness. As I remember, there were five levels or so, corresponding, in modern times, to how much an individual perceives of those meta-levels of cognition which have gradually been added to human consciousness since we were all hunter-gatherers.
When I look at the confluence of 24/7/365 news, lowered educational standards and pay scales, the industrialization of lowest-common-denominator manipulation tools developed originally by consumer marketing experts, and finally, the terminal consolidation of media ownership, it doesn't surprise me that journalism, and the people it claims to serve, have descended Paul Rosenberg's meta-consciousness scale en masse.
Yes, I do believe that the process is accelerating, but so also is the resistance to it, which appears first as irony, then as disgust, and finally as outright hostility. Check the tone of Glenn's posts on the subject over the past couple of years. He's become damned angry, and believe me, he's not alone.