John Kenneth Galbraith coined the phrase "the conventional wisdom" back in the 1950s, and for awhile it became a conventional description, until it mostly faded away. Too bad. It's even more necessary now. The conventional wisdom is always powerful, and is made more powerful by the echo chamber of news media and social media. The problem is that while it becomes conventional, it does not always reflect wisdom. Hence the 2022 elections.
In the early 1970s, journalist Timothy Crouse came up with the phrase "pack journalism." (This in turn was a play on the earlier phrase, "hack journalism," popular in his father's day.) Tim observed its manifestation aboard press buses during the 1972 election campaign. In those days, the wire services were very powerful--their news stories were published in hundreds of newspapers around the world. Reporters who didn't file the basic story that the wire services did on a given campaign day had to justify their different story to their editors. Most simply found out what the wire service reporters were saying the story of the day was, and they more or less parroted it.
That was the most obvious form of pack journalism. But just a busload of reporters, together all day and every day, talking about the campaign, tended to form the news into a conventional wisdom. They wrote the stories, and politicians etc. had to react to it; editorial writers and other reporters picked up on it, and so on. Pack Journalism.
Today there's no leader of the pack--nobody has that authority--but there is pack journalism nonetheless. The busload of journalists is now called the Internet plus cable news. The conventional wisdom can form fast and is sped around the world mostly by social media. In this sense, the conventional wisdom becomes an algorithm. It is self-enforced, and self-reinforced. Everybody is their own editor--they are afraid to be wrong, so they amplify the echo.
Several columnists analyzed why the media was so wrong; Dana Milbank in the Washington Post was especially specific. But those who blame only the punditry have it half right: the same conventional wisdom that the pundits push markedly influenced news headlines and coverage. That's one reason I stopped reading the news a week or more before the election. They clearly had a story and they were sticking to it. There would be nothing new to learn.
Last week's conventional wisdom was the coming Red Tide of Republican victories. This week's conventional wisdom is that Democrats did amazingly better than expected. In between, voters voted, with quite possibly no reference to either story.
The overall outcomes of this election are still unknown, since many elections--including key ones--are not yet tallied. The initial fallout suggests however that things have calmed down. The elections worked well, candidates who lost mostly conceded, there was no appreciable violence during or after Election Day. Most of the offices that handle elections will still be run by people who respect the results.
A parallel story this week involves the chaos at Twitter. Facebook seems to be a primary conduit for right wing craziness at the grassroots, but Twitter has been the chief social media enabler of pack journalism and the moment-to-moment conventional wisdom. (At least that's how it seems to me. All I know about social media is what I read in the paper.) A wounded (and hence less fashionable) Twitter might help calm the info waters at that level as well. It may be that particular fever has broken, too. Who knows?
It may not be more than a momentary lull, time enough for a deep breath, and maybe a subtle reset or two. Meanwhile, the fate of the Earth is being addressed at the COP27 Climate Conference. Serious people have made a serious proposal for nations that enriched themselves with carbon-producing industries to start taking responsibility to help the poorer nations that are already victims of catastrophic climate disruptions. It's good to know that American democracy can still basically function (a low bar in other years.) It's even better if there really are serious people at work on the world's critical problems.
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