I have mentioned this before—I have such a narrow and idiosyncratic news intake that I really have very little idea what sense other people get of ongoing news stories. Well, it’s not all that idiosyncratic, I suppose. Fairly typical for a liberal. I listen to a bit of NPR pretty nearly every day, although I don’t listen to the whole of any show these days. I go to the New York Times website every morning; I read the Arts section quite carefully, and I click on the occasional news story. I have several political news junkie blogs on my aggregator, in addition to the TPM site, which does some reporting along with pointing to news in other sources. All the blogs are from Left Blogovia, so there is a certain amount of what you might call epistemic closure.\n
Have y’all been following the epistemic closure talk? It’s kinda fun. Essentially, there is an argument about the extent to which various parts of the conservative movement (however defined) are cutting themselves off from news sources outside the conservative movement (however defined), and the extent to which that matters in various endeavors. And, of course, similar questions arise around my Party and its allies. It’s not a symmetrical problem, of course, as (f’r’ex) liberals tend to think that the New York Times<\/i> reporting is not liberal at all, but they read it anyway. I get the sense that many people with substantial influence in my Party read the Wall Street Journal<\/i>, and feel that it is run to be a conservative paper, although generally within the bounds of journalistic practice. More important, I want<\/i> the people of influence in my Party to read the WSJ<\/i>, and also to read books and articles by people of influence in the other Party. I don’t want to do much of that myself, though.\n
Also, another minor point about that is the observation I saw somewhere that plenty of people who vote with my Party listen to sports talk radio, and that many of the hosts of those programs listen to the likes of Michael Savage. While the shows are not, in the main, political, there is a certain amount of bleed-through, particularly on cultural issues. There are those who feel that WEEI was, in relation to the whole Martha Coakley business, straw, camel and so on. It’s unusual that the sports guys take a position on an election so obviously, but there is contact, if you follow me. I remember being amazed, in my San Francisco days, to hear some guys on KNBR react to the news of the Giants players participating in a charity fashion show with five solid minutes of outrageously homophobic nastiness. I mean, San Francisco. But there it is.\n
But my point is not that I am confined by epistemic closure to the point of misunderstanding the political and policy situation in the country. My point is that I have just enough news intake to know what the news is, but not to erase my fundamental cultural illiteracy. There are a lot of times when I know what happened<\/i>, but I don’t know the story of what happened<\/i>. Or, rather, I don’t know whether my story of what happened<\/i> matches what very many other people know. And often, then, I find myself listening to NPR or reading a newspaper article and thinking is that what people think is the story?<\/i> and being utterly perplexed, without actually knowing whether that really is a popular story, or whether it’s just something I have happened to hear.\n
The thing that brought this to my mind recently was the whole Goldman Sachs\/SEC\/Congress business, particularly listening to bits of Marketplace<\/a>. Somehow, the story seemed to be about how bits of Goldman Sachs had made a passel o’ dough off the housing collapse. And they clearly had; they are in the money-making business. And while there is an appropriate social stigma attached to profiting off foreclosures, it isn’t illegal, or even surprising.\n And the thing is—I had understood the story to be about one group within Goldman Sachs putting together an investment package that was designed to fail, and then selling it to investors without telling them it was designed to fail. You know, fraud<\/i>. The news stories didn’t seem to be talking about the profits as being profits specifically from the fraudulent investment packages. They just seemed to be about Goldman Sachs making money.\n Was it just Marketplace<\/i>? Was the story of what happened<\/i> about Goldman Sachs selling worthless securities or about their profit in the nation’s loss? I have to admit I didn’t read the Times<\/i> articles, because, you know, a trifle dull. I saw a few things, in the Gaurniad<\/a> and a couple of other places, that led me to think that Marketplace was telling the coalescing story of what happened<\/i>, but then, perhaps my story of what happened<\/i> was the result of too much TPM<\/i>.\n Do y’all get this feeling? Is this part of that epistemic closure? Is it a defense against it, or a symptom of it? I don’t just mean about Goldman Sachs, I mean about, oh, mine disasters and celebrity scandals, policy proposals and oil slicks, international relations and sports upsets and and school violence. It’s hard to have conversations about what happened<\/i> if the conversers have different stories about what happened.\n Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>, In Which even Your Humble Blogger does not believe that ‘profit’ and ‘fraud’ are synonyms. Although, you know, there is some correlation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19079,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13005\/revisions\/19079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"