The Bell Riots Review is a bit late to this party—but has one newish, hopefully useful thing to contribute, which is an overview focusing on the egregious way the New York Times in particular misreported the lab leak theory between February of 2020 and March of 2021.
While I most definitely agree with your clever observation that, were the NYT a government agency, we would all "recognize it as one of the most powerful departments of government," we would also probably be talking about its decline in authority and prestige over the last few years. Compare, for example, the loss of prestige the FBI and Justice Department have undergone in the last 10 or 12 years.
Martin Gurri, writing about the way that the internet has destroyed the lock institutions like the NYT once had as "information gatekeepers," claims to have no notion of where all this is going. Will civic and social authority splinter into little federated pieces? Is anarchy marching towards us? Will some yet-to-be-conceived form of crowd sourced mediation replace top-down structures? No one has any idea.
Even so, interesting things are happening. Nicholas Wade's self-published article in Medium on the lab leak theory, later republished by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was my first exposure to an informed, scientifically literate consideration of the proposal. I remember being amazed at its quality, rigor and balance. In fairness, Wade, now retired, had been a science editor at the Times for many years. But still, there it was: an individual had produced - a full year into the pandemic - a piece of journalism higher in quality and more valuable than anything the paper of record has published to date. Because the _idea_ of a journalist - the prophetic mythical archetype, that is! - still resonates with the public, it seems to me possible to imagine that slowly authority and respect will congeal around individual journalists. Podcasts probably led the way a few years ago, and now it may be happening on Substack and other similar platforms. I hope so, anyway. Keep writing!
Thanks for the comment! Yes, it's been quite a few months since the last BRR post. I think that's because most of the instances of elite-amplified consensus settling on some blatantly incorrect thing date from the Trump era and were due to elite institutions' leveraging everything they possibly could, including quite a lot of stuff which made no sense in logical or empirical terms, against Trump. Now that Trump's gone, there's less of that, and what there is, is basically leftover detritus from the Trump era. So, with that dynamic having shifted, there's less of this blog, for now. I'm a professor, and when I started the blog, I was also anticipating a top-down institutional push against faculty freedom of inquiry, because that was something under discussion in 2020, and I planned to use this blog to document and resist that push, should it happen. But so far it hasn't happened.
Thank you too. I've been working through your older posts. It's been very enjoyable.
I'm close to a Temple student who graduated this spring. I can see from our conversations that ideological conformity presses in on an academic institution from above (administrators), below (students) and the side (professors and their professional or social peers). The force from below is stronger than I realized. Diversity is such a shopworn term, and its variant - "viewpoint diversity" - always sounds so labored to me, but I don't see how you can get a decent liberal arts education without it.
It always surprises me when a student, or anybody really, isn't hungry for the most effective and sophisticated expression they can find for ideas with which the person doesn't already agree. When I was an undergraduate I remember the excitement I felt when a position surprised me and left me unsure. That's when actual thinking starts. That's the good stuff.
While I most definitely agree with your clever observation that, were the NYT a government agency, we would all "recognize it as one of the most powerful departments of government," we would also probably be talking about its decline in authority and prestige over the last few years. Compare, for example, the loss of prestige the FBI and Justice Department have undergone in the last 10 or 12 years.
Martin Gurri, writing about the way that the internet has destroyed the lock institutions like the NYT once had as "information gatekeepers," claims to have no notion of where all this is going. Will civic and social authority splinter into little federated pieces? Is anarchy marching towards us? Will some yet-to-be-conceived form of crowd sourced mediation replace top-down structures? No one has any idea.
Even so, interesting things are happening. Nicholas Wade's self-published article in Medium on the lab leak theory, later republished by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, was my first exposure to an informed, scientifically literate consideration of the proposal. I remember being amazed at its quality, rigor and balance. In fairness, Wade, now retired, had been a science editor at the Times for many years. But still, there it was: an individual had produced - a full year into the pandemic - a piece of journalism higher in quality and more valuable than anything the paper of record has published to date. Because the _idea_ of a journalist - the prophetic mythical archetype, that is! - still resonates with the public, it seems to me possible to imagine that slowly authority and respect will congeal around individual journalists. Podcasts probably led the way a few years ago, and now it may be happening on Substack and other similar platforms. I hope so, anyway. Keep writing!
Thanks for the comment! Yes, it's been quite a few months since the last BRR post. I think that's because most of the instances of elite-amplified consensus settling on some blatantly incorrect thing date from the Trump era and were due to elite institutions' leveraging everything they possibly could, including quite a lot of stuff which made no sense in logical or empirical terms, against Trump. Now that Trump's gone, there's less of that, and what there is, is basically leftover detritus from the Trump era. So, with that dynamic having shifted, there's less of this blog, for now. I'm a professor, and when I started the blog, I was also anticipating a top-down institutional push against faculty freedom of inquiry, because that was something under discussion in 2020, and I planned to use this blog to document and resist that push, should it happen. But so far it hasn't happened.
Thank you too. I've been working through your older posts. It's been very enjoyable.
I'm close to a Temple student who graduated this spring. I can see from our conversations that ideological conformity presses in on an academic institution from above (administrators), below (students) and the side (professors and their professional or social peers). The force from below is stronger than I realized. Diversity is such a shopworn term, and its variant - "viewpoint diversity" - always sounds so labored to me, but I don't see how you can get a decent liberal arts education without it.
It always surprises me when a student, or anybody really, isn't hungry for the most effective and sophisticated expression they can find for ideas with which the person doesn't already agree. When I was an undergraduate I remember the excitement I felt when a position surprised me and left me unsure. That's when actual thinking starts. That's the good stuff.