Links to Consider, 4/25

Martin Gurri on the young leaker; and Gurri hails journalism on substack; Matt Taibbi slams legacy journalism; Walter Russell Mead on the plight of legacy Midwits; FAIR decries government racialism

On UnHerd’s podcast, Freddie Sayers interviews Martin Gurri. The organizing topic is the leak of secret documents by a young member of the National Guard. Gurri pours scorn over the way that agencies promiscuously classify documents as “secret” and yet fail to secure them. He describes the Zoomer generation as unable to distinguish between the real world and online roles. For them, one’s reputation among fellow members of an online community is more real than an oath of allegiance to a country. Overall, this relatively short podcast (35 minutes) is perhaps the best distillation you can find of Gurri’s thought on the revolution wrought by the Internet. Listen to the whole thing before commenting.

In an essay about Substack but not on Substack, Gurri writes,

Yet even in the heyday of the newspaper, the relationship of journalism to power was closer to the opposite of that cherished ideal. Reporters were minor players in the games elites played. The news business as a whole reflected a narrow range of elite interests and cultural signaling. Misdeeds at the top were exposed when it suited other elites, never otherwise. John F. Kennedy’s sexual predations were apparently astronomical in number, but we never heard about them—at least while he was alive. He was a protected man. Nixon, a dark and troubled soul, committed the political equivalent of suicide by cop. The media played a small part in his execution—Woodward and Bernstein, an insignificant one.Substack has attracted the most independent-minded observers of the American political scene.

In any case, the fantasy of the relentless muckraker has been quietly discarded in the digital age. Journalists are now meek handmaidens to the elites and bland deniers of scandal.

…The wounded news media is now condemned to parrot its master’s voice, but the public knows there’s another side of the story—and the likes of Weiss, Taibbi and Shellenberger are making a good living providing that perspective. That may change tomorrow. A golden age can be discerned only in the hindsight of history. But for the moment, it’s something.

There is a culture war between mainstream elites and dissident elites. Some of the dissidents have decamped to Substack. One of those is Matt Taibbi, who writes,

By any marker, this is an enormous news story. If we go by the usual measuring stick of American scandal, the Watergate story, this potentially meets or exceed that, on almost every level. Does it reach into the current White House? Check. Was it a craven attempt to subvert the electoral process? Check again. Did a presidential candidate engineer a massive public deception? Yes, resoundingly. Did it involve intelligence agencies? Yes, and these weren’t amateurs like Nixon’s plumbers. These were 50 of the most powerful people in the intelligence world — including five former heads or acting heads of the Agency in Morell, John Brennan, Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, and John McLaughlin — conspiring to meddle in domestic politics on a grand scale.

The story is about the apparent exposure of a coverup of a scandal involving Hunter Biden. Taibbi complains about its lack of coverage in mainstream media. Although I believe that subsequently it made the NYT.

Walter Russell Mead writes,

The overproduction of Ph.D.s mixed with the declining growth in student enrollments means that fewer and fewer young academics can hope to attain the status and security of reasonably paid, tenured jobs in their fields.

…given both the proliferation of internet publications and the decline in public confidence in the media, journalism is a less prestigious occupation than it once was. Anchors and prominent columnists can no longer count on the kind of authority their exclusive and prestigious platforms formerly gave them.

…the gloomy tone of so much of today’s academic and journalistic commentary reflects the diminished circumstances in which so many of the chattering classes now live.

The Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism writes,

n response to the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) proposed update to the standards that U.S. government agencies use to collect and publish data on race and ethnicity. The update would consist of three significant changes: 

1. U.S. agencies would begin to collect race and ethnicity data with one combined question, rather than separate questions asking for race and ethnicity. 

2. Add “Middle Eastern or North African (MENA)” as a new racial category and edit the “white” category to remove MENA from its definition.

3. Redefine “Hispanic” as a racial category.

FAIR strongly opposes each of these changes, and we urged the OMB to reconsider them. Our primary suggestion to the OMB is to fully and completely cease collecting data on individuals’ race and ethnicity altogether.

As far as I am concerned, FAIR’s position deserves to be the consensus.

Substacks referenced above:

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News Blackout in Effect

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FAIR News: a Public Comment on OMB's Proposed Directive