Our human proclivity for tribal behavior is strong, and it is very easy to engage in the speculative fun of evolutionary story-telling to explain exactly how that feature makes good adaptive sense. For instance, our ancestors who were good at social collaboration at the tribal level had advantages over their contemporaries who lacked such proclivities, and the former could use their advantages to rub out the latter.
Look out, Darwin! Coming through!
Wherever it came from, this tribal tendency often underlies a lot of conspiracy-looking group-think. For instance, the traditional media. Sometimes it looks as if all the individuals in traditional news media were working from a shared script or playbook: from a common set of instructions about how to describe things that exist in the world, and which things in the world bear mentioning, as well as which things should be stubbornly ignored lest news consumers start drawing the wrong conclusions about how the world works.
Does this behavior amount to a conspiracy?
It’s easy enough to believe conspiracy is at work. It certainly has been at various times in the past—with actual evidence of journalists conspiring on weaving a bespoke narrative tapestry to give advantage to specific political actors. The “JournoList” event was one such case. If you reckon conspiracies can work if everyone manages to keep quiet, you can speculate wildly on how coordination has been at work in the background of much slanted and tendentious coverage.
Is there a way to distinguish between people coordinating their efforts explicitly and people simply arriving at similar conclusions based on a shared set of beliefs and values? What’s the difference between people verbally coordinating their efforts and simply harmonizing wordlessly to achieve a shared goal?
If you come together with a group of friends to help someone move furniture, you can confer beforehand to coordinate who takes what and which order things should be handled. Or you can step inside and play it by ear, as the saying goes, where you and your acquaintances wordlessly coordinate because, well, it’s just obvious, you know? Does one method for achieving the common objective seem more sinister?
It’s a naive way to look at it, of course. The sinister traits come in when the coordination is verbal and is meant to give one person or group of people an unfair advantage over another. The sinister stuff is when the coordination is meant to circumvent the law, to evade the constraints of ethical behavior for unfair advantage.
So does media bias, whether or not coordinated, constitute a sinister conspiracy?
I think this here very media site is part of a conspiracy. Just look at the fact that the guy who writes it uses one pseudonym in the mast head and a different one to post his own comments.
Pretty darned suspicious, if you ask me (twirls end of handlebar moustache between fingertips). But that's the great thing about conspiracies...nobody has to ask me (or any of you). Just toss one out there and watch it take off...
Like I'll bet this rag just might be really published from a basement under a pizzeria somewhere...
Hi all. The week has gotten away from me already. I have more things to do, but I wanted to check in.
On the mothership, I won an argument with J-C J, even if he won't admit it.
I am still thinking about posting a "Liz Report" but I've realized it now encompasses some things other than Liz, because I've been developing a grand unified theory of efforts to stop Trump. I'll maybe have to do it in instalments by topic, and I'm trying to think of a catchy umbrella name. Meanwhile I'm encouraged by Nikki Haley's "I don't want anything from him and that means he has no power over me" attitude. This has now created room for things to happen that conventional wisdom assumed to be impossible.
Oh, and I almost forgot: I posted a comment on Capitolism ("Unfrozen") today (in reply to Mr. V. O. Grumpy Guy) and Mr. Lincicome gave it a like: "I dunno, maybe if somebody posts Scott's brilliant summary paragraph on the social medias, it might seize an opportunity to jump up and make an impression on the retinas of the actual dumb ones before they can avoid it."