Thinking about conspiracy theory theories
Help! tmatt needs URL for a tweetstorm on (accurate) conspiracy theories
Faithful Rational Sheep readers will not be surprised to learn that I am very concerned about the implosion of public trust in the mainstream news-media industry.
How bad is it? This Poynter.org look at Gallup Poll numbers offers a hint.
In a new Gallup poll, only 28% of Americans say they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the mass media. Compare that to 1972 when that number was at 68%.
Yes, note that 1972 would have been the Vietnam War era, which was not a time that offered calm political and cultural wars.
In my 2023 essay for the Religion & Liberty journal — “The Evolving Religion of Journalism” — I explained that news culture has evolved past old-school media bias issues (as covered for 20 years by GetReligion.org). We are now in an era in which Internet business models all but require newsroom executives (Bari Weiss explains this) to slant the news in ways that (a) please their paying readers and (b) fit with their own moral and cultural biases.
People who reject ordinary public media have tended to veer into conspiracy theories. As you would expect, my theory about conspiracy theories is that warped, inaccurate coverage of religion news has played a big role in sending lots of red ZIP code Americans over the edge.
Of course, I know that bad, inaccurate and blind news coverage affects lots of other issues (#DUH).
About two years ago, I saw a long X thread, a “tweetstorm,” in which someone went on and on listing important stories that the mainstream press called “conspiracy theories,” but they turned out to be true or, at the very least, topics worthy of informed debate. This X thread was a rare thing — a tirade full of actual information.
I filed the URL for that and, as often happens in my interactions with the Kingdom of Google, it vanished. I sent the link to a few journalist friends and they can’t find it either. Oh my. I am tempted to create a conspiracy theory about what may have happened to that great tweetstorm about conspiracy theories that turned out to be more than conspiracy theories.
Where am I going with this? I am working my way toward a short, interesting, weekend think piece by the Catholic conservative Phil Lawler which ran with this headline: “Why do conspiracy theories prosper?” I will get to that, I promise. There is material there that I think will interest pastors, parents, teachers and counselors.
But first, let me stress that the aforementioned tweetstorm was written by someone who, it appeared to me, was not a soldier in a conservative social-media army. To me, his commentary sounded like it was written by a centrist, maybe even a left-of-center scribe, who was sincerely attempting to grasp why public trust in the press has cratered to the degree that it has.
Yes, I really need to find that X link.
