The Peter Zeihan Podcast Series - Why Can't We Trust the Media? (AKA Propaganda) || Peter Zeihan

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Before I answer the question about what news sources I use, we must understand how our society became so uninformed... Full Newsletter: https://mailchi.mp/zeihan/why-cant-we-trust-the-media

Hey, everybody, Peter Zion here coming to you from about 13,800 feet on, where am I? Square top mountain. Behind me, you've got the Continental to divide with, let's see if I get this right, Sullivan Peak, Santa Fe Peak, Silver Peak, Revenue Peak, and Decatur Peak. Project for another day. Anywho, today we're talk about media and why we're all so uninformed and why propaganda is doing so well. Propaganda only works when you do not have a well-informed population. And for a population to be well-informed, you need multiple sources of information that are credible.

You know, sure, maybe everyone has their own political view, of course. But we all have to agree on what the basic facts are. And media has to work from that. And that no longer exists in the United States. The problem started back in the 1980s with the fax machine. It used to be that every newspaper of size, so basically like Des Moines Register on Up, had a number of roving reporters, several of which were stationed abroad. And the larger papers, and of course most the TV stations, had fewer foreign bureaus. And when you've got a system like that, you have people who are capable of seeing what's going on, writing stories, interpreting things.

You have copy editors who are doing checks there. We have editors who are stationed abroad who are doing things. And you get multiple eyes on every story before it comes back to the home printing or the home viewing. And it goes through another round of fact checks and basically bullshit detection. Well, with the fax machine, we no longer needed that degree of staffing abroad. Things like copy editors run away. And by the time we got to the 1990s, we had email on attachments. And with that, we thin down the numbers even more.

time we got to the 2000s, most of those fewer foreign bureaus were gone. You just had a few roving reporters. And as we got into coughs cutting because the internet was rising, we got rid of most of those roving reporters as well, and we just started using local stringers. So people were getting local insights still, but it was no longer getting fact-checked. It was being blinded by whatever the proclivities of the people who were collecting the information was, and there was never a backstop. Well, you fast forward today and we now have algorithms that are writing our newspaper stories for us and that are investigating and scraping the web for things. And the fact-checking has largely gone. And in this sort of environment, it is very, very, very, very easy for a

charismatic politician to say, you know, that's not true at all. That's just fake news. What I say is real. And you get entire political movements built around a person. In that sort of environment, news has a hard time playing bullshit detector, because the factfulness that is necessary for an educated populace to call bullshit itself is largely gone, and people start putting their trust in a person rather than an institution or set of information venues. Now, where does that take us next? Still on square top, but this is now Mount Evans and Mount Beresda behind me, a couple 14ers.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Now, this sort of information desert, if you will, is not exactly a new experience, just new to the United States. In places like the Middle East where you've got, call it charitably single-party rule, you basically have everyone living in an information vacuum,

and so the rumor mill becomes the news. And that's one of the reasons why the American experience in the Middle East over the last 20 years was so frustrating because it was so hard to convince people what basic truths were. People would hear something from a rumor. It would get spread via email and Twitter, and that was the truth of the day. In Russia, you got something even worse because the rumor mill is augmented by state monopoly on

information. And so basically, if you get your information from radio to TV, you're drinking 100% Russian propaganda. It's not nearly that bad here, but it's not great. with the higher capital stretcher of the United States, media is a business. And it's all about how many people you can get to watch your show. So it's all about making sure people hear what they want to hear

as opposed to what is true or what they might need it to hear. So Fox and MSNBC, of course, are basically opinion programs now with very little news. Companies like Newsmax are 100% opinion. And basically, they'd be very, very much at home in the Middle East. And then, of course, Twitter has gone its own way that has gotten, well, let's just call it colorful. If you're over 50, you might still be watching the nightly news. But as you notice, it's like two-thirds drug commercials now.

If you are between 25 and 45, you're probably getting your news from Facebook, which is probably the worst of them all. If you're under 25, you're probably getting from TikTok, and all I can say about TikTok is at least it's better than Facebook. So the question now is, where do you get it from? Still on square top, that's Argentine Peak behind me, another 14er. So where can you get news from? I think that the most reliable international news source out there overall is now Al Jazeera out of the United Arab Emirates. They're heavily biased when it comes to all things Middle East, so I'd skip that section completely. But they've got this idea that we're new to news.

And because of that, we should like interview multiple people with multiple viewpoints and just present it to you. You know, we used to call that journalism. France 24 is definitely in second place. They are one of the few entities remaining that still have global bureaus. BBC is probably the one that has descended the most over the course of the last 20 years. And Canadian broadcasting is definitely the bottom of the barrel. 100% opinion, 100% party line. to be seen there. Beyond that, you can always look to local news sources throughout the world.

They will be biased, but it will give you a view that you don't get other than this. One more bit as I descend square top mountain towards Guadalapasso. That is that big open area. That's South Park. Like that South Park, like Kenny and Cartman and Stan and Kyle. South Park. Anyway, if you're looking for something a little closer to home, there are really only three national news entities that I think that are kind of worthy of consideration. The first one is the Wall Street Journal, but obviously they focus almost exclusively on financial news, but what they do they're good at. Number two is Bloomberg. Not as good as it used to be, but they do throw a pretty white net, and their coverage is even-handed.

And then third, there's something called Straight Arrow News, which is a new project that is trying to bring contributors from across the political spectrum to provide nonpartisan. views on everything from finance to international stuff. And if you go there, you will find a number of contributors, and one of which looks a little bit like yours truly. So it's free, just like all these others. Well, I guess the journal is not free. Anyways, if you're looking for something in the United States, those three are probably your best bet.

All right, now I'm going for real. Bye.