The Purpose of this Substack
The first rule of Fallacy Fight Club is …
But no, seriously. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard was one of the earliest critics of mass (print) media. He wrote "It is frightful that someone who is no one ... can set any error into circulation with no thought of responsibility and with the aid of this dreadful disproportioned means of communication.”
Today’s media landscape is a thousand-lane superhighway, but a relatively small number of long-standing companies still have an outsized influence.
There is tremendous power in the ability to craft headlines, to write the scrolling chyrons, to shape narratives. This has not escaped tyrannical types. Vladimir Lenin famously said, “The press should be not only a collective propagandist and agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses.”
So how is our media doing with this great responsibility? My answer is that in many ways they are worse than ever. Thomas Jefferson once said “Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” That was a moment of overstatement, but he did believe that mass media had become a “polluted vehicle.”
The point of this substack is to examine with critical discernment daily offerings of news and opinion in mainstream, influential sources. My method is to summarize the key points, draw out and state the argument (if there is one), ask critical questions, and evaluate truth-claims.
Sometimes I might offer something more general and universal based on trends or address some common misconception that has taken hold in a given week or month.
People may have more access to more information and opinion than ever before, but they’re also less able to discern or think like sane, responsible adults, it seems, than ever before.
