Extract:
Since the start of the Trump years, we’ve been introduced to a new kind of news story, which assumes adults can’t handle multiple ideas at once, and has reporters frantically wrapping facts deemed dangerous, unorthodox, or even just insufficiently obvious in layers of disclaimers. The fear of uncontrolled audience brain-drift is now so great that even offhand references must come swaddled in these journalistic Surgeon General’s warnings, which is why whenever we read anything now, we almost always end up fighting through nests of phrases like “the debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was created in a lab” in order to get to whatever the author’s main point might be.
[…]
As a student in the Soviet Union I noticed subscribers to what Russians called the sovok mindset talked in interminable strings of pogovorki, i.e goofball proverbs or aphorisms you’d heard a million times before (“He who takes no risk, drinks no champagne,” or “Work isn’t a wolf, it won’t run off into the woods,” etc). This was a learned defense mechanism, adopted by a people who’d found out the hard way that anyone caught not speaking nonstop nonsense could be suspected of harboring original thoughts. Voluble stupidity is a great disguise in a society where silence is suspect.
We’re similarly becoming a nation of totalitarian nitwits, speaking in a borrowed lexicon of mandatory phrases and smelling heresy in anyone who doesn’t. This cult reflex was bad during the Russiagate years, but it’s gone into overdrive since the arrival of COVID. The CNN writer who thinks it’s necessary to put a disclaimer in the lede of a story about molnupiravir, of all things, is basically claiming he or she is afraid a theoretical unvaccinated person might otherwise read the story and be encouraged to not take the vaccine.
There are an awful lot of comments (and for all I know, a lot of awful comments). I didn’t read them, but I did read the comments on this repost of the article, and I’ve quoted one of them:
Adam Gorelick
The infantilization of Americans is not just evident in the “news” we ingest from an acquiescent propaganda machine, but the entire media landscape. Most Hollywood films – at least the most successful ones – are basically kids movies. What used to be marketed as kids cereals are now enthusiastically consumed by ( mostly male) adults. Literacy, as it used to be defined, is a relic in a museum. All of this aggressive dumbing down dovetails neatly with The National Security State – a system of power as anti-democratic and contemptuous of it’s citizenry as Nazi Germany or the Soviets. The fear that increasingly grips a society in an inexorable economic and cultural nosedive welcomes a reductive cliffs notes version of the world.
