Not only is Berny Belvedere a great editor, as I learned when I wrote a few posts for his budding site Arc Digital that made me look far smarter than I am, but he is an honest man and is willing to pay the price for it, even if it costs him followers and readers born of tribal allegiance.
Embodying measuredness or thoughtfulness doesn’t necessarily mean taking a middle position between opposing views, or disarming yourself of rhetorical verve.
Rather, it means that both your epistemic processes (belief-formation) and discourse posture (belief-expression) are characterized by intellectual virtues like reasonableness, openness to evidence, and an uncompromising commitment to the truth.
I’ve never been a fan of the work “truth,” as it implies that anyone who disagrees is lying rather than merely disagreeing or even just being honestly wrong, but that shouldn’t distract from Berny’s point, that one should be intellectually principled, even if it means that the end result is contrary to the “side” you would otherwise prefer.
The problem, as Berny recognizes, is that people who appreciate a principled view that follows the facts and logic regardless of where it takes one doesn’t play well with most people.
Being “balanced” is very often not a commodity in the discourse these days (“both-sides-ism” and all that). As a matter of fact, being fiercely antitribal has been a continuous source of “unfollows” and an active inhibitor of success. For every account that tells me it’s refreshing to see someone who doesn’t fit neatly into a discourse-standard box, there are two or three or 10 that unfollow likely due to feeling betrayed over a particular take. Sometimes they’re even kind enough to tell me so in a parting note on their way out the door.
If one is trying to build a book of loyal readers, willing to put up hard-earned money to see what you have to say, losing followers is not the way to accomplish it. As business practices go, it’s decidedly counterproductive.
There are costs to alienating, at different times and in various ways, basically everyone on my followers list. It would be professionally advantageous to cast my lot with one group or other. But that would weaken, not strengthen, my love for truth—or, rather, it would reveal that it’s already been weakened to the point where something other than a desire to get things right is now driving my creative output.
But what’s the alternative? Audience capture.
The last trait is crucial. Consider what its opposite—a contempt for truth—does to a person. Here’s what I wrote about Tucker Carlson, who suppresses his true beliefs about Trump every single day.
Not to pick on Carlson, per se, as he’s not significantly different than his colleagues, save the right’s response to Joy Reid, Jeanine Pirro, who’s just dumber than dirt, but given his emails asserting his loathing of Trump, his on-air adoration seems rather disingenuous.
This was the case with the underlying presentation of the Big Lie that cost Fox News $787.5 million, but is still dictating that they air and awe the passe old man who had worn out his welcome, but is now being treated with seriousness. For a network built upon catering to an audience that seeks more conservative stories of interest and more conservative views of those stories, with a couple of upstart networks nipping at their heels, this is a recipe for disaster.
Berny’s efforts to reach honest and accurate views, which he calls “truth,” reflect his personal integrity. Much as he wants Arc Digital to gain a huge audience and be an important voice, he’s unwilling to sell himself out to get there. I feel his pain. Remember Fault Lines, anyone? But neither Tucker Carlson nor Fox News are willing to take the risk of losing audience share in the name of integrity.
The solution is to avoid putting yourself in a situation where the makeup of your audience is so incongruous with who you are as a thinker, so unrepresentative of where you actually land on the issues, that it disinclines you from sharing what you actually think. The reality is that if you know most of your followers would disapprove of a tweet or post, that can create remarkable pressure to withhold it—or, worse, to assert its opposite.
As a for-profit enterprise, Fox and the rest of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire need to generate revenue, and profit, to exist. To do this, they are prepared to become the network their audience wants them to be, even if that means a putative news organization with the “highest journalistic standards” forsakes integrity, facts and logic to spew what their customers want to hear. If Carlson went on air tonight and said that Trump was a lying narcissistic ignoramus, would he still have a show tomorrow? It may be what he believes to be true, but he likes that public admiration and Murdock paycheck too much to risk telling the truth.
And so the audience, both MAGA and conservative, has determine that they would rather be lied to than be given news that’s accurate even if it doesn’t tell the story they desperately desire it to tell. There is nothing inherently wrong with being conservative and seeking stories of interest to conservatives and views that align with conservative values. Whether I share them or not, it’s entirely fair to hold views to the right of center.
But does that justify being lied to? Does that means a network should knowingly serve up hot lies to its audience because the audience wants to hear it’s “truth” rather than the truth? And lest this be missed, it’s not as if MSNBC, for example, doesn’t do something similar, even if not as flagrant. We’ve become a nation that prefers desirable lies to uncomfortable truths.
When that happens, when you see yourself there, on that sad height, as Dylan Thomas once wrote, hyperventilating like the rest of them, the alarmism starting to earn the impressions that now matter to you so much more than speaking the truth ever did, then you’ll know your time as a free thinker is over, and that you are ready for fame.
Trying your best to be honest and principled is a recipe to be hated by both right and left. It’s no way to run a business in this atmosphere where the reward isn’t for integrity, but for feeding the audience the red meat it so desperately craves. I feel it. Berny feels it. Carlson, not so much. Is that really all you want out of the news?
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