Facts get in the way
Facts get in the way
People with a lot of them aren't necessarily that bright
GB News is a right-wing British cable-style TV channel. It's easy to disparage for the unsophisticated content it serves.
My personal antipathy to the GB News-type outlets of this world stems from a dislike of relentless belief reinforcement, because I think that having only one way of parsing the world is just dull. Wherever you land on the political spectrum.
Lots of leftishist people think that GB News is harmful in some way, but they present no evidence of real-world harm caused. I suppose they would argue that it causes harm by making the people who watch a lot of it more entrenched in views they don't like.
The channel is often charged too with being 'wrong' in the sense that it deploys epistemically false information - a charge that is reasonable. And would be even more reasonable were it applied to all ideologically-driven media.
Being factually incorrect is a favourite line of attack by the leftish and rightish because we share an intuition that intentional spreading of falsehood is morally wrong. If you can't prove that the opinions spouted on GB News are actually hurting anyone you can always point out that it's not painting a truthful picture of the world on a factual level.
All in all, GB News seems to be a somewhat pathetically missed opportunity, as political economist Thomas Prosser has outlined.
In some ways, though, attitudes to GB News by the ideological leftish remind me of the inability to grasp why Donald Trump retains so much support.
It seems weird to me when educated people don't grasp things that a relative simpleton such as your writer sees quite easily. Or that they don't have any idea how to deal with the popularity of things like GB News and Donald Trump beyond handwaving and 'fact-checking'. As if their disapproval matters to the fans, who simply need to be schooled in what's true and what's untrue so that the scales will fall from their eyes.
Jesse Singal wrote this week about Gnostic leftishist messiah George Monbiot's attempt to account for Trump's enduring support by just pathologising his supporters. Apparently psychologists may be able to explain support for Donald, says George.
In Against Diner–Grilled Cheese Theories Of Donald Trump’s Popularity (Or Anything Else) Singal highlights the move that Monbiot is pulling; suggest that the people who don't like or think the same things as you are inferior in both cognitive and moral ways.
I often ponder whether I'd vote for Trump, were I eligible to.
On balance it's a no. But mostly because I draw the line at sore losers trying to stay in office. But it's pretty easy to see his general appeal. In a world dominated by a credentialed technocratic class that is demonstrably not as brilliant as it thinks it is he's a delightfully boorish entertainer who hasn't actually done or even said most of the bad things that leftishist people are furious with him for.
The more the leftish lie about Trump, the more I would be inclined to vote for him if I could. The relentless crushing of conservative dissent is palpable and worrisome. So I easily grasp why that drives people to like him even more. Even the rabidly reasonable Isaac Saul, of anti-partisan news organisation Tangle News, who clearly dislikes Trump, sees how this works.
The further behind we leave 2016 (which included Britain's Brexit moment) the less the leftish seems to grasp about what makes people support Donald Trump and watch GB News.
This is how certitude makes you blind. How you end up as daft as George Monbiot, who presumably thinks that the drivel he writes about antisocial Trump voters is at least 'directionally' true, even though the supposed science he quotes is of notoriously poor provenance.
You can be so sure that you're right (epistemically and morally) that it becomes impossible to grasp why not everyone sees what you're seeing.
Yes, but, FACTS !
One of the problems is a naive reliance on 'facts' for settling arguments. As if the only form of intelligence known to man is the identification of facts.
This is why Monbiot tries to find some kind of fact-based way of explaining Trump's support. If it's a fact that Trump voters are psychologically flawed then it saves us all the bother of thinking about it any more.
Everyone does this. It's the same inclination that drives conspiracy nuts to use facts too.
It's why Marxist ideas about who should get what share of material resources have to be underpinned by historicism instead of a 'hey, let's try this and see if it increases the well-being of a greater proportion of people than we have right now' approach.
It also accounts for why certain types who are obsessed with 'misinformation' believe that if we can all agree on the facts we'll automatically reach accord on what they signify about things we ought to do.
We're mostly so polarised because we're naive, lazy and afraid.
There's a cognitive overhead involved in seeing things from someone else's perspective, so it's easier to deny the truth value of the other side's interpretations and disparage their moral outlook.
Where fear comes in is with the risk that the other side turns out to be right about things. If you realise they are, what will that say about you? Who ever ‘fact checks’ themselves, really …
The GB News thing is as easy to understand as Trump's appeal.
In a world where we have a Pansexual and Panromantic Awareness and Visibility Day (it's May 24th, everyone !) and when balking at the influence of political Islam in a non-Muslim culture gets you branded as a bigot by the people in charge of most political and commercial institutions, GB News is inevitable.
Personally I crave discussion about the paradox of late stage liberalism's hyper individualism increasingly involving publicity drives to make everyone's sexual quirks or lifestyle choices a communal event. What is going on with that?
Sadly, GB News doesn't fulfil that need, defaulting as it does to basically describing everything that puzzles pensioners in provincial England as 'icky'.
But somewhere there needs to be intelligent and fearless media discussion of things like how Britain's parliament ended up with a mini constitutional crisis last week because MPs are scared of being murdered by Islamists and Hamas sympathisers. One MP recently announced that he won't stand for election again, due to death threats, so something significant is going on, but without quite being named.
People who are frustrated that such things aren't considered legitimate topics turn to GB News, unfortunately.
Frustration is what drives that audience. A similar frustration to my own, when I notice what counts as a legitimate media topic and what doesn't.
If those at the top of the cultural pile were less reluctant to chew these things over in an intelligent and understanding way in the public arena we wouldn't have been saddled with GB News and its low-rent approach to these conversations.
If people who wonder about 'society' atomising into 100+ gender and other identities which must all be accorded the widest possible recognition felt heard when they wonder about these things there would never have been a need for GB News and we'd be having more intelligent conversations about it all.
If we were all a bit more comfortable with understanding and accepting instead of prevailing at every turn it would be bad for the political parties, but good for everyone else.
If everyone listened more than they spoke ... imagine that.
The zealots of the leftish and rightish constantly drone on about how democracy is under threat because their side feels like it's losing to the other side's incomprehensible worldview. No one seems bothered about comprehending it.
Having the wrong facts doesn’t harm democracy. Not understanding the other side is what harms democracy. Taking your bat home instead of trying to see what the other side fears and wants is what harms democracy.
Let's not be all Kumbaya about this, with the traditional call for everyone to come together in a spirit of goodwill and understanding. The meta-picture is, after all, of a zero sum conflict between conserving certain social ways or radically changing them.
But let's not pretend either that it's any mystery why people will be voting for Donald Trump and watching GB News this year.
Postscript
It was fascinating to see last week that a Tory MP was kicked out of his parliamentary party for saying that the Lord Mayor of London is influenced by political Islam. In a country where political Islam is now a major force - especially in the party that will probably form the next government - this influence is the current thing that shall not be mentioned in polite society.
Whether or not you think that political Islam is a force for good or not isn't the point here.
The odd thing is that acknowledging that it exists at all and might account for some quite controversial things that happen in public life is now dangerous.
Sadly, I suspect that GB News will have had a lot to say about this while everyone else in British medialand keep their heads down.
It was also fascinating to see the fury among leftishists about the probable murder of a man who once described Muslims as cockroaches. But then, this is how it works in today’s student politics; Putin made Trump and Brexit happen in 2016 (he didn’t) and Aleksei Navalny was against Putin and the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Even if he was a vehement nationalist who once dressed up as a dentist to shoot a video likening Asian migrants to rotting teeth.
GB News is easy to dismiss precisely because it’s so low-rent. It looks like it’s filmed in a Ramada conference room. It’s Victor Meldrew in television form. In between ads for commemorative coins and stairlifts you get dimwits banging on about stuff they clearly don’t understand (I fell of my chair laughing when one of their pretentious fools spoke of “crossing the lexicon”). That’s not to say all their presenters are nitwits, but they are weighed down by them.
A few leather chairs and a William F. Buckley type to host and they could lift the vibe.
"I often ponder whether I'd vote for Trump, were I eligible to."
I keep thinking about this question. I keep coming to the same place you do, though perhaps with more passion: I can't vote for someone who schemed to overturn their election loss, especially when they have never owned up to it and continue to lie about it. Joe Biden could be in a coma and I wouldn't vote for Donald Trump.
However, I don't think his election would be the disaster the liberals imagine, at least from a policy perspective (though I suspect that our discourse spaces will be spitting toxins in all directions).