Of Media Bias and Technological Reportage

When most of us speak of "media bias," I think, we have in mind the "Big" mainstream, media--the national-level operations that tend toward a "centrist" perspective.

The "political economy" of that media colors its coverage of every issue, of course.

The particular issue that interests me at the moment is its attitude toward technology.

As it happens this media seems to me utterly technophiliac when it comes to pushing the garbage business wants to sell the consumer--a pack of claqueurs when it comes to something like, for instance, "the Internet of Things" they wanted us all to be so excited about a little while ago.

By contrast they turn into a pack of sneering technophobes when it comes to technologies that might actually solve problems--like, for instance, anything at all that might help with a problem such as climate change, from cellular agriculture to renewable energy.

This can seem contradictory. But really it isn't. It is a natural outcome of a business that lives on selling fear, not selling hope; which is deferential to industries and their spokespersons that love to talk about "disruption" when singing "the market" but do everything possible to resist disruption in real life whenever it threatens their speculation and rent-seeking (sometimes because they actually own said media); and, with all a centrist's fearfulness of calls for change (and perhaps also their equation of pessimism with wisdom), committed to a narrative of apathy-inducing doomism precisely because it is apathy-inducing. Michael Mann rightly speaks of "inactivism" in this area--which seems their default mode toward everything in life, and toward technology ever making any change in it for the better.