Boxing Genius Says Being Knocked Out Means He Is Winning
Why the news media helps us make disastrous choices
Broadly speaking, there are two generic narratives about the state of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and both are eagerly promulgated by naïve commentators and by journalists whose job is to create a perpetual stream of empty sensationalism while avoiding the presentation of any information that would upset their audience and thus reduce the value of the ad slots upon which their income depends.
Ordinary people tend to forget that the “news” is just a sub-division of the entertainment industry, competing for monetizable eyeballs against all the TikTok content and transiently fashionable must-watch streaming video series that clamor for people’s attention. But this truth shapes what we are told, and what we are told shapes what our “leaders” do. As the incentives for the “news” media are so distorted, we can hardly be surprised that our politics are so dysfunctional. This is a very broad topic, but here we’re only going to consider the impact on the Western (non)response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of its peaceful neighbor Ukraine.
Generic narrative number one, assiduously promoted by pro-Russian elements in a wide variety of ways, is that Ukraine is doomed to lose and so the West is wasting its money by providing…
