I can't help but ask...surely we are in danger here of apotheosing what was, in fact, a fairly short period in the history of the media in America? The notion that the media were ever "unbiased" or even "just a trifle biased" seems...off...to me. If you go back to the 19th century, every town had its own newspaper; every city had multiple papers; and every one of those papers had a point of view, and none of them were trying to hide it.
When I lived in New Hampshire in the 1970s, the paper with the widest circulation, the Manchester Union-Leader, made no bones about being...well, pretty right-wing. And the editorials were mostly if not exclusively penned by the Union-Leader's publisher, William Loeb, and they appeared on the front page.
As late as the newspaper strike in 1965, New York City had around a dozen and a half daily papers, including some that were published in and primarily for the outer boroughs, such as the Brooklyn Eagle. TV was already eroding the papers as the primary source of news, but that wasn't the papers' fault.
Point being...diversity and uniformity of opinion are largely a product of competition...or the lack thereof. As Roger Ailes famously explained Fox's meteoric rise under his aegis, "We discovered and pursued an underserved demographic...half the country."
That's what the internet brought on: competition. And I'd be very, very leery of any form of "gatekeeping," for the same reason I'm opposed to, oh, say, price controls. Both price controls and "gatekeeping" are based on the planted axiom that the general public is incapable of rational action in response to a competitive and chaotic open market.
If so, well...our problem runs a lot deeper than "gatekeeping" can fix.
This is not to say that the problems Peterson identifies aren't very real. But if we can't trust individual people to weigh what they read and hear with what one of my friends called "the Baloney Factor," it suggests that we do not have the courage of our convictions.
I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I'd also add this is a deep and complicated subject. I'm sure we could both provide lots of examples and counter-examples, but, I would still argue that most of what was thought as the mainstream media viewed themselves as serving both sides of spectrum and trying to cut it right down the middle for quite a long while. Did they succeed in that? No, but I do think for a long time they tried.
As to Fox, keep in mind that they really came into their own about the time that bloggers were coming in hot in the 2000s to the early 2010s. So, the media had already moved too far to the Left by the point, although they got immeasurably worse as the Internet ate a bigger and bigger share of the mainstream media's ad revenue.
Lastly, I think a good gatekeeping system is much, much better than the alternative. I don't think the average person is capable of "doing their own research" and coming to smart conclusions on a lot of complicated subjects, especially when so much of the source material that all of us work with today is garbage. Some people just aren't that smart to begin with and even if you are smart, there are only so many hours in a day. Like, if someone wanted to know about the intricacies of advanced jiu-Jitsu, brain surgery, quantum physics and the best practices for surviving a month long overland trek in the Amazon, I couldn't tell you any more than I could get from ChatGPT, but there are people who are experts in those fields who could give you outstanding answers. In other words, good gatekeeping leads to much better information overall on most subjects. Emphasis on the word "good."
In any case, I stayed away from media examples on gatekeeping because that is the most prominent example we have of it in recent times and it was a mess, although I think we're also starting to see how the lack of gatekeeping can also produce just as big of a mess...
Anyway, glad to see the comment! Hope to see more of them in the future.
You make excellent points but I do think there's space between "doing your own research" on any given topic and figuring out who's talking sense and who's talking smack. Surely even an ordinary person is capable of distinguishing between (to use your Jiu Jitsu example) a successful practitioner and someone who's just watched martial arts movies ?!?
And I'd still absolutely oppose any attempt to formalize those differences, which is what I think you're suggesting (please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you). We've been watching the slow death of "expertise" for at least five decades by now and I find it hard to believe that we can somehow reinvent any sort of system for sorting those who say stuff in public into "expert" versus "non-expert" buckets...the more so that it's mostly the "non-experts" who've been doing the heavy lifting.
So I am not on board with such a system, the more so that even you seem to implicitly admit it wouldn't work if it isn't "good gatekeeping." I mean...who gets to decide what's "good"? Isn't that the very problem we're trying to get away from in terms of the de facto censorship efforts of the previous administration...to say nothing of ongoing efforts in EuroLand to suppress anyone and anything that even hints at problems with the massive influx of non-inculturated foreigners?
Not wanting to beat the media issue to death but I really think your understanding of the mid-century media environment is incorrect. The only reason it seems benign from the remove of a half century or more is for the same reason we are nostalgic for any other aspect of the post-War era...we only remember the good parts.
Speaking for myself, I can tell you for a fact that the only way I ever even became aware that there was another viewpoint besides the liberal one--which I didn't even realize was ideological, I accepted it as normative--was accidentally stumbling across Bill Buckley and NR in my teens.
So my perception is that there was never a truly "objective" phase in the US media, just a smothering liberal consensus.
"Surely even an ordinary person is capable of distinguishing between (to use your Jiu Jitsu example) a successful practitioner and someone who's just watched martial arts movies ?!?" Can they? I'm not so sure -- and that's one of the points Peterson was making. In the real world if some rando and Royce Gracie got on the mat together, you could pretty easily see who's real and who's not. In a virtual world, where people can claim anything, it's not so easy.
"We've been watching the slow death of "expertise" for at least five decades by now and I find it hard to believe that we can somehow reinvent any sort of system for sorting those who say stuff in public into "expert" versus "non-expert" buckets...the more so that it's mostly the "non-experts" who've been doing the heavy lifting."
I think that also very much depends on the area. As discussed in the column, in the media, yes. In some other areas, yes. We still rely on experts all day long, in all sorts of areas, we just don't think about it very much. Also, the vast majority of regular people don't know much about much. For example, if you looked at the topics people are discussing on Twitter and asked people to pass a really basic, not tricky quiz that showed they knew what they were talking about, 90% of them would fail because they don't know anything about the subject they're talking about that goes beyond memes, headlines and, "this person I like said this." So, I don't think expertise is dead so much as an awful lot of people online have been flattered into thinking they know 10 times more than they do because it's what they want to hear.
PS: That goes for me, too. If you asked me if I understood how electricity works, I'd say "yes" -- and I do in the most general sense -- but if I tried to wire my own house, chances are I'd burn it to the ground. We're just creating a world where everyone thinks they can wire their own house because they prefer hearing that instead of, "We should listen to a real expert on the topic."
Well, I dunno. Maybe this is a generational thing. I don't use any form of social media--unless you consider SubStack, which I don't--so I don't see this stuff. And I rely on the expertise of people I know who know stuff, not random anons on the interweb. As I always say to people about Wikipedia--itself a compendium of broadly-sourced knowledge from people who are mostly "non-experts"--you can't rely on Wikipedia for anything but core factual knowledge...and even there you have to be careful.
Let me suggest you look up the controversy regarding the Michael Bellesiles book, Arming America. That's an early example of the "non-experts" absolutely demolishing a certified, degreed American historian for gundecking his research and then dismissing his critics because they were non-historians. But even five years earlier that would have been impossible: the historical profession would have circled the wagons and we'd never have known the truth.
Beyond that, though...I've heard all these arguments before. I remember having this discussion in the early days of the web, when pricing was being "disintermediated" as the term had it. I knew an awful lot of people who made very similar arguments...people are lazy, they won't want to scour the web for the best prices, they'll get scammed, yada yada. These folks in effect wanted to suppress shout-out prices and make them unavailable on the web. Well...nobody pays list price for anything anymore. Nobody. Even if all you do is buy off Amazon you get a better deal than you would have if you bought in a big store. Would that still be true if we'd allowed third parties to manage the pricing of items sold online? I beg leave to doubt it.
Let me ask you...do YOU want YOUR access to information to be managed and curated by third parties over whom you have no control and who have agendas of their own? Because I don't...plain and simple. And I will fight you or Jordan Peterson or anyone else to the death to prevent that from happening.
I think you're wrong on multiple points and at least two levels.
There is some sort of connotative difference between gatekeeping and trust relationships that is hard to define exactly but is obvious to everyone. "Gatekeepers" keep a gate. They stand guard. They stop unauthorized people. They are close to censors, if they are not explicitly censors.
Not to say there aren't gates that need keeping. Countries need to defend their borders. Banks need to defend their vaults. Companies need to defend their IT systems.
And fair enough I need to defend my mind. The issue is, these gatekeepers don't want to defend -their- minds, they want to defend mine. They don't want to defend my mind from ideas that are dangerous to me, they want to defend my mind from ideas that would be dangerous to them.
And it's a bit hyperbolic, but not way too so, to say the reason they think they should be able to gatekeep my mind is because to some extent they consider my mind to be their property. They think we are serfs.
Every authoritarian everywhere wants to gatekeep information. The most obvious example is the USSR with Izvestia and Pravda. But one only needs to look a few years back at the C19 debacle for examples of domestic gatekeepers deciding what you could and could not read. They don't want you to decide for yourself. They want to decide for you.
Lets not forget that Trump was banned from Twitter by gatekeepers.
Lets also not forget that none less than the authors of the Federalist papers needed to conceal their identities from gatekeepers - to avoid being hanged for treason.
I get what you're saying, but the flip side of having no gatekeepers ultimately ends up being people who have minimal understanding of topics having to make decisions based on garbage information put out by bad actors who have no idea what they're talking about. Are we all the way to that side of the scale yet? No, but are we headed there? Yes, we are.
PS: Gatekeeping doesn't have to be formalized or involve censorship. For example, for a long time, Rush Limbaugh was a gatekeeper on the right and William F. Buckley rather famously torpedoed the wacky John Birchers. When he did that, he was functioning as a gatekeeper. It was good that happened. It was also a good thing that were people who were knowledgeable and trusted enough to be able to give definitive answers that people accepted.
I can't help but ask...surely we are in danger here of apotheosing what was, in fact, a fairly short period in the history of the media in America? The notion that the media were ever "unbiased" or even "just a trifle biased" seems...off...to me. If you go back to the 19th century, every town had its own newspaper; every city had multiple papers; and every one of those papers had a point of view, and none of them were trying to hide it.
When I lived in New Hampshire in the 1970s, the paper with the widest circulation, the Manchester Union-Leader, made no bones about being...well, pretty right-wing. And the editorials were mostly if not exclusively penned by the Union-Leader's publisher, William Loeb, and they appeared on the front page.
As late as the newspaper strike in 1965, New York City had around a dozen and a half daily papers, including some that were published in and primarily for the outer boroughs, such as the Brooklyn Eagle. TV was already eroding the papers as the primary source of news, but that wasn't the papers' fault.
Point being...diversity and uniformity of opinion are largely a product of competition...or the lack thereof. As Roger Ailes famously explained Fox's meteoric rise under his aegis, "We discovered and pursued an underserved demographic...half the country."
That's what the internet brought on: competition. And I'd be very, very leery of any form of "gatekeeping," for the same reason I'm opposed to, oh, say, price controls. Both price controls and "gatekeeping" are based on the planted axiom that the general public is incapable of rational action in response to a competitive and chaotic open market.
If so, well...our problem runs a lot deeper than "gatekeeping" can fix.
This is not to say that the problems Peterson identifies aren't very real. But if we can't trust individual people to weigh what they read and hear with what one of my friends called "the Baloney Factor," it suggests that we do not have the courage of our convictions.
I think there's a lot of truth to what you're saying, but I'd also add this is a deep and complicated subject. I'm sure we could both provide lots of examples and counter-examples, but, I would still argue that most of what was thought as the mainstream media viewed themselves as serving both sides of spectrum and trying to cut it right down the middle for quite a long while. Did they succeed in that? No, but I do think for a long time they tried.
As to Fox, keep in mind that they really came into their own about the time that bloggers were coming in hot in the 2000s to the early 2010s. So, the media had already moved too far to the Left by the point, although they got immeasurably worse as the Internet ate a bigger and bigger share of the mainstream media's ad revenue.
Lastly, I think a good gatekeeping system is much, much better than the alternative. I don't think the average person is capable of "doing their own research" and coming to smart conclusions on a lot of complicated subjects, especially when so much of the source material that all of us work with today is garbage. Some people just aren't that smart to begin with and even if you are smart, there are only so many hours in a day. Like, if someone wanted to know about the intricacies of advanced jiu-Jitsu, brain surgery, quantum physics and the best practices for surviving a month long overland trek in the Amazon, I couldn't tell you any more than I could get from ChatGPT, but there are people who are experts in those fields who could give you outstanding answers. In other words, good gatekeeping leads to much better information overall on most subjects. Emphasis on the word "good."
In any case, I stayed away from media examples on gatekeeping because that is the most prominent example we have of it in recent times and it was a mess, although I think we're also starting to see how the lack of gatekeeping can also produce just as big of a mess...
Anyway, glad to see the comment! Hope to see more of them in the future.
You make excellent points but I do think there's space between "doing your own research" on any given topic and figuring out who's talking sense and who's talking smack. Surely even an ordinary person is capable of distinguishing between (to use your Jiu Jitsu example) a successful practitioner and someone who's just watched martial arts movies ?!?
And I'd still absolutely oppose any attempt to formalize those differences, which is what I think you're suggesting (please correct me if I'm misunderstanding you). We've been watching the slow death of "expertise" for at least five decades by now and I find it hard to believe that we can somehow reinvent any sort of system for sorting those who say stuff in public into "expert" versus "non-expert" buckets...the more so that it's mostly the "non-experts" who've been doing the heavy lifting.
So I am not on board with such a system, the more so that even you seem to implicitly admit it wouldn't work if it isn't "good gatekeeping." I mean...who gets to decide what's "good"? Isn't that the very problem we're trying to get away from in terms of the de facto censorship efforts of the previous administration...to say nothing of ongoing efforts in EuroLand to suppress anyone and anything that even hints at problems with the massive influx of non-inculturated foreigners?
Not wanting to beat the media issue to death but I really think your understanding of the mid-century media environment is incorrect. The only reason it seems benign from the remove of a half century or more is for the same reason we are nostalgic for any other aspect of the post-War era...we only remember the good parts.
Speaking for myself, I can tell you for a fact that the only way I ever even became aware that there was another viewpoint besides the liberal one--which I didn't even realize was ideological, I accepted it as normative--was accidentally stumbling across Bill Buckley and NR in my teens.
So my perception is that there was never a truly "objective" phase in the US media, just a smothering liberal consensus.
"Surely even an ordinary person is capable of distinguishing between (to use your Jiu Jitsu example) a successful practitioner and someone who's just watched martial arts movies ?!?" Can they? I'm not so sure -- and that's one of the points Peterson was making. In the real world if some rando and Royce Gracie got on the mat together, you could pretty easily see who's real and who's not. In a virtual world, where people can claim anything, it's not so easy.
"We've been watching the slow death of "expertise" for at least five decades by now and I find it hard to believe that we can somehow reinvent any sort of system for sorting those who say stuff in public into "expert" versus "non-expert" buckets...the more so that it's mostly the "non-experts" who've been doing the heavy lifting."
I think that also very much depends on the area. As discussed in the column, in the media, yes. In some other areas, yes. We still rely on experts all day long, in all sorts of areas, we just don't think about it very much. Also, the vast majority of regular people don't know much about much. For example, if you looked at the topics people are discussing on Twitter and asked people to pass a really basic, not tricky quiz that showed they knew what they were talking about, 90% of them would fail because they don't know anything about the subject they're talking about that goes beyond memes, headlines and, "this person I like said this." So, I don't think expertise is dead so much as an awful lot of people online have been flattered into thinking they know 10 times more than they do because it's what they want to hear.
PS: That goes for me, too. If you asked me if I understood how electricity works, I'd say "yes" -- and I do in the most general sense -- but if I tried to wire my own house, chances are I'd burn it to the ground. We're just creating a world where everyone thinks they can wire their own house because they prefer hearing that instead of, "We should listen to a real expert on the topic."
Well, I dunno. Maybe this is a generational thing. I don't use any form of social media--unless you consider SubStack, which I don't--so I don't see this stuff. And I rely on the expertise of people I know who know stuff, not random anons on the interweb. As I always say to people about Wikipedia--itself a compendium of broadly-sourced knowledge from people who are mostly "non-experts"--you can't rely on Wikipedia for anything but core factual knowledge...and even there you have to be careful.
Let me suggest you look up the controversy regarding the Michael Bellesiles book, Arming America. That's an early example of the "non-experts" absolutely demolishing a certified, degreed American historian for gundecking his research and then dismissing his critics because they were non-historians. But even five years earlier that would have been impossible: the historical profession would have circled the wagons and we'd never have known the truth.
Beyond that, though...I've heard all these arguments before. I remember having this discussion in the early days of the web, when pricing was being "disintermediated" as the term had it. I knew an awful lot of people who made very similar arguments...people are lazy, they won't want to scour the web for the best prices, they'll get scammed, yada yada. These folks in effect wanted to suppress shout-out prices and make them unavailable on the web. Well...nobody pays list price for anything anymore. Nobody. Even if all you do is buy off Amazon you get a better deal than you would have if you bought in a big store. Would that still be true if we'd allowed third parties to manage the pricing of items sold online? I beg leave to doubt it.
Let me ask you...do YOU want YOUR access to information to be managed and curated by third parties over whom you have no control and who have agendas of their own? Because I don't...plain and simple. And I will fight you or Jordan Peterson or anyone else to the death to prevent that from happening.
I think you're wrong on multiple points and at least two levels.
There is some sort of connotative difference between gatekeeping and trust relationships that is hard to define exactly but is obvious to everyone. "Gatekeepers" keep a gate. They stand guard. They stop unauthorized people. They are close to censors, if they are not explicitly censors.
Not to say there aren't gates that need keeping. Countries need to defend their borders. Banks need to defend their vaults. Companies need to defend their IT systems.
And fair enough I need to defend my mind. The issue is, these gatekeepers don't want to defend -their- minds, they want to defend mine. They don't want to defend my mind from ideas that are dangerous to me, they want to defend my mind from ideas that would be dangerous to them.
And it's a bit hyperbolic, but not way too so, to say the reason they think they should be able to gatekeep my mind is because to some extent they consider my mind to be their property. They think we are serfs.
Every authoritarian everywhere wants to gatekeep information. The most obvious example is the USSR with Izvestia and Pravda. But one only needs to look a few years back at the C19 debacle for examples of domestic gatekeepers deciding what you could and could not read. They don't want you to decide for yourself. They want to decide for you.
Lets not forget that Trump was banned from Twitter by gatekeepers.
Lets also not forget that none less than the authors of the Federalist papers needed to conceal their identities from gatekeepers - to avoid being hanged for treason.
I get what you're saying, but the flip side of having no gatekeepers ultimately ends up being people who have minimal understanding of topics having to make decisions based on garbage information put out by bad actors who have no idea what they're talking about. Are we all the way to that side of the scale yet? No, but are we headed there? Yes, we are.
PS: Gatekeeping doesn't have to be formalized or involve censorship. For example, for a long time, Rush Limbaugh was a gatekeeper on the right and William F. Buckley rather famously torpedoed the wacky John Birchers. When he did that, he was functioning as a gatekeeper. It was good that happened. It was also a good thing that were people who were knowledgeable and trusted enough to be able to give definitive answers that people accepted.
Well said, and you’re 100% right and NOT full of crap.