The BBC – British Broadcasting Corporation – as a news source is, ostensibly, a paragon of quality, delivered relentlessly with appropriately unadorned bland precision, a bastion for everything that clings to yesterday’s buttoned-down factuality and traditions with the dogged and soggy enthusiasm of a rainy day. The Beeb sits there like a rock, born in grey, designed to be neither swayed nor impressed with cultural piffle. It has its own Royal Charter, the constitutional basis for the BBC. Per the British National Archives, ‘It was felt that establishing a body under a royal charter…would allow the creation of a body that acted “as a trustee for the national interest” and would “endow the [BBC] with a prestige and influence which will be of special value to it.” ’
Park that in the back of your mind for a second. The other day I went to the BBC site in search of Formula 1 news. The BBC home page is the news page, and greeting me were the following three headlines, comprising the News, I repeat, the News, as in ‘everything in the world worthy of mention’, section:
- Inside notorious Atlanta jail where Trump will surrender
- Drunken US tourists stay in Eiffel Tower overnight
- Harrison Ford has a snake species named after him
This was BBC.com. The news section. To test if it was just an awkward moment, I refreshed half an hour later and was greeted by this handsome new trio:
- Texas woman awarded $1.2 bn in revenge porn case
- North Korea says US soldier blamed discrimination [the solder oddly dashed into N Korea while on a guided S Korea tour]
- How undercover sting outwitted pangolin traffickers
The world has lost its mind. These examples are frantic claw marks of desperation like a cat trying to get out of a box it does not like being in, a once-glorious news service wearing clown clothes, shouting silly things out in the street in a desperate bid for attention in a street full of the same.
We’ve been accustomed to junk media for almost as long as there has been media. But the junk part was always the outlier, the buffoon-chronicles in the grocery checkout line. Now it has taken over the Establishment, right from the very top.
Trash news used to be isolated, as was politics. There was an old maxim – never debate religion or politics at the dinner table. Now, everything is politics. And it’s worse than that: any comment either for or against (even mildly) any topic of substance is now a permanent tattoo on your forehead. Is a woman a woman? Boom – if I offer an answer, seven percent of the population on either side of the aisle will hate me for all eternity. Are you an environmentalist? Yes? Good lord, you’re a pinko commie woke activist business hating freak. Do you loathe Trump? You better! If you want to have any social acceptance at all. Can Trump have ever uttered a good idea? What? Are you openly admitting that you’re a fascist nazi?
I may get slandered, trashed, and pigeon-holed for admitting this, but the other week I watched a fascinating and excellent Twitter conversation between Tucker Carlson and RFK Jr that I HIGHLY encourage you to watch. Sorry for the shouty all caps, but I’m not kidding.
For the record, according to the rules of politicization, I’m supposed to hate RFK Jr. and love Tucker Carlson. RFK Jr is a climate activist that hates nuclear power; he favours government control and intervention. Those are things that I am not. Carlson and I share a common disdain for the media, I agree with his views on the establishment, and he’s in general a pro-business, pro-freedom kind of guy. I clearly align with the latter more than the former.
And yet the conversation was a masterclass in thoughtfulness, intelligence, wisdom, and good judgement – from RFK Jr, mostly. Carlson’s performance was fascinating. Naturally, he has a tendency to rush words into his interviewee’s mouths to try to buttress a position he holds dear, whether it is a logical product of the conversation or not.
In this instance however, RFK Jr.’s depth of knowledge and clarity of thought precluded Carlson from straying into caustic theatrics. Carlson simply couldn’t or he would have looked like a complete idiot. To Carlson’s credit, he did up his game, I thought, and the conversation was, in certain parts, wonderful and inspiring and shocking.
Here’s the curious part though. RFK Jr is loathed by elements of the political spectrum that ought (in normal times) to support him, if for no other reason than the fact he’s a Democrat. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. He may be a Democrat, but he’s not the right kind of Democrat. He thinks, rather than parrots. The same problem holds for the right, which is why Tucker found himself kicked to the curb by Fox News.
Another example: A friend recommended I watch a “debate” between yet another “fascist” – Jordan Peterson – and a real life honest to God commie, no quotation marks needed, communist Slavoj Zizek (his views are actually far more complex, but for purposes of this discussion, suffice to say that, as one reviewer put it, Zizek “consistently seeks to discredit, mock, and disprove capitalist theory.”). They are true ideological polar opposites, not the confused ideology-less mess that we call Left vs. Right. (For the record, haters, I own one Peterson book that was so unappealing I couldn’t even be bothered to finish, and I think communism is as beneficial to society as syphilis.)
But the three-hour conversation was awesome, and bore none of the hallmarks of the preposterous modern “debate” rules. It was, I think, what society craves – a rational debate of ideas, where one comes away mentally stimulated.
Current typical political discussions do the opposite, leaving one mentally exhausted and either enraged or disengaged. A closed mind is now a requirement to join the public media fray. It’s consistent with the need for eyeballs, likes, shares.
Stupid stuff gets amplified. If it’s political, which almost everything is now, the extremists make the cut, either as straw men to be knocked down or as activists doing the knocking down. (I suck at Twitter (it is some sort of odd skill); most things I post get less than a hundred views. I once posted something critical of a politician in a fit of disgraceful pique, and it garnered 30,000.)
The news industry will never say “There’s not much newsworthy today” even if that’s the case. Look what the hallowed BBC does in such a vacuum.
But even that is forgivable compared to the choice to minimize the participation and impact of rational voices, of ones that seek calmness and civility and objectivity.
The media creates this mess to shock and engage, even though human interaction tends the other way. Try it sometime. Have a personal one-to-one discussion with anyone with a modicum of rationality but that disagrees with you vehemently on some relevant topic. Within minutes you will find, more often than not, common ground and the glimmerings or even real shoots of a constructive conversation. I’ve had dozens of attack emails that have turned into peaceful conversations that both parties have been happy to engage in, and learned something. Not all, but most.
How often do we see that on the big media stage? How hard would it be to have moderators that promote and insist on those qualities?
They tend to do the opposite – they pick at scabs, they pour salt in wounds, they present guests with what is likely to rile them up so that the guests, who normally align philosophically with the program’s slant, can gleefully tear down the other side.
Into this mess falls, tragically, energy debates. Our life-and-death fuel supplies are now thrashed out in these pits of idiocy. Weather is now a political weapon, because nothing draws eyeballs like a good old fashioned tragedy, a picture of a floating or burning house. The public’s view of energy policy is now the tragically deficient and malformed offspring of policies of desperation combined with BBC-style trash reporting. It’s circular as well; the more and faster climate action is deemed required, the more the media amps up the clown show.
But it’s actually far worse than just the resulting desensitization. We have zero sense of community in terms of a systematic backbone to raise everyone’s standard of living; instead we have power cells with agendas that seek villains and overly simplistic solutions to wildly complicated and challenging problems. We take the work of real scientists and real builders and sort it via the media into a modern staged combat not unlike The Hunger Games.
We wonder why things are so polarized. It’s because we actively polarize everything.
It doesn’t have to be that way. Yes it’s true that one reason Tucker and RFK Jr had such a civil conversation is because they share many common viewpoints. But there are many on which they would vehemently disagree – but they set those aside to have a discussion. You could see Tucker lapse into his bad side periodically with provocative insertions (“This smells like a scam.”) but RFK Jr. would not take the bait. He went back to a discussion of the facts as he understood them. (Although RFK Jr. also takes a sip of hyperbole kool-aid here and there such as when he claims that “there are “36,000 ‘death scientists’ who are now employed full time in developing microbes that can be used to kill people.”)
RFK Jr. laid out a series of arguments that, with the exception of minor dramatic flourishes like above, can be independently evaluated. I did not check if they are all correct; however I could if I wasn’t so lazy. His sentences, even if he were to march into the energy debate, would most certainly have none of the sheer stupidity of those like Biden’s when he said he would put fossil fuel executives in jail (a year later he was urging them to produce more fossil fuels; make of that what you will in terms of a sequence of constructive or destructive narratives).
The upcoming US election deserves some sort of award for expanding the boundaries of how insane staid institutions can become without implosion. Two elderly men are vying for the opportunity to run the world’s most powerful economy. One of them is facing more than 90 felony counts and up to 700 years in federal prison; he is leading in the polls. The other appears to be headed for troubled legal waters courtesy of some familial influence peddling, but even if he dodges that bullet, he remains within spitting distance of senility (drooling distance?) and provides a catalogue of public gaffes at an accelerating rate (like recently wrapping up a CNN interview by wandering off the stage before the interviewer had finished talking).
As Matt Taibbi chronicled on Substack, the election campaign itself is unfolding in such a bizarre manner that pundits don’t really know how to pundit about it. The more crimes Trump is charged with, the higher his approval rating goes, because these charges bring proof to suspicious minds of how corrupt everything is. The more Biden appears disoriented and fragile, the more the party encircles him in protection from the likes of fallen outcasts like RFK Jr, whose well-reasoned positions and eloquence are to Joe Biden’s what a Ferrari is to a three-wheeled shopping cart.
One final interesting example is a new American political outlier named Vivek Ramaswamy, running for the Republican leadership. His campaign reminds me of one reason why, long ago and for some mysterious reason, I actually thought that Trump might shake up the political system in a good way (drain the swamp): Both Trump and Ramaswamy are wealthy, and in theory have not sold their soul to anyone. Trump of course turned out to be Trump, but Ramaswamy thus far seems to be principled, focused, and somewhat revolutionary, but in the sense that he really wants to drag the US back to founding principles. He is truly refreshing to listen to. (Interestingly enough, Carlson interviewed him also, and his innate snarkiness tried to pull Ramaswamy into silliness, this from Carlson: ““Is there a single neocon with a happy personal life?” he mused, pointlessly, adding that their desire for war is “psycho-sexual”. Ramaswamy simply moved right past.) I don’t agree with all his positions; it is irrelevant even if I did, but the point is that disagreements based on sound principles have a way of achieving mass commonality, as opposed to disagreements based on rhetoric, fear-mongering, and sensationalism.
(As a Canadian you might wonder what’s with the focus on US politics and not our own; to that I would answer: Have you seen Canadian politics? Have you seen our recent policies? Have you heard our question periods? If not, go to a feedlot at feeding time and you’ll understand, smell and all. Plus, the US largely drives our fate whether we like it or not, and the US’s choice of leader can actually impact western Canadian concerns in a way Canadian politics routinely does not.)
If you are of an ideologically barbaric stripe such that you can’t bear listen to any of Carlson/Zizek/Peterson/Ramaswamy engage in rational discussion, I hope you bump into an ideological enemy’s car in a parking lot and take each other down in a magnificent rage-fest fireball so epic that it makes the front page of the BBC.
Well, would you look at that; I’m no better than anyone else. Gotta try though, right?
(Edit: Initial version of this article made reference to the BBC news section as “not being US specific” because it included feeds from other global regions, however, I did not test that by trying to ascertain from different countries, so it could have been specific to the US or North American market. I removed the reference since I can’t say either way for sure.)
Energy conversations should be positive and, most of all, grounded in reality. Life depends on it. Find out more in “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com. Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.