Deconstructing our dominant, elitist notions of "credibility"
We've been taught to value certain types of information more than others, but it's time to question these evaluations—which are rooted in institutional biases.
What if our dominant measures of “credibility” have just become a facade to mask our institutional biases and systemic injustices?
Here's an overview of what I cover in this thought piece deconstructing ‘credibility’:
How mass media filters skew public perceptions of reality;
The limitations of western science and the institutional biases behind what receives funding;
The sham of ‘objectivity’ and using the ‘neutral’ tone to signify trustworthiness;
The elitism of basing credibility on the ‘pedigreed and privileged intelligentsia’;
The illusion of political centrism as ‘least biased’ and ‘fact-based reporting’ as ultimate truths
It's my longest piece yet, but I promise I left the fluff out, so hopefully it'll also be among the most impactful you've received from me. Enjoy, and thank you for your ongoing support!
How mass media filters skew public perceptions of reality.
In their book Manufacturing Consent, Herman and Chomsky say, “A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public”. (Source)
Since the public's perceptions of the world are largely shaped by the mass media machine, it is critical to understand how it works. Here's a really helpful short video that breaks down the five filters that skew the narratives of what gets published across the media landscape.
In the U.S., just six corporations own over 90% of media companies. While this says nothing of the journalists whose work gets published across the outlets, the question it does raise is: What sorts of self-censorship may occur as the result of the majority of media being powered by the media-industrial-complex—under the control of mega-corporations whose financial and political interests are generally at odds with everyday people's?
“The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society. In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfil this role requires systematic propaganda.” — Noam Chomsky.
Most major media companies rely on corporate ad dollars to operate. This means that the general public's attention becomes the product sold to advertisers.
As I alluded to in my article sharing why I decided to move away from being an ‘influencer’ mostly sponsored by brands (and why getting direct readership support is critical!), the larger a media outlet, the more reliant it becomes on larger and larger corporate sponsors who can afford their increasing advertising rates. As such, the biggest media outlets today inevitably depend on some of the largest corporations’ ad dollars to function. They enter a mutualistic relationship which furthers the centralization of power.
But at their core, sustainability and social justice require a decentralization of power, rendering this dominant media business model at odds with those greater goals.
An example of what has manifested as a result of this is that even liberal media, which acknowledges the reality of the climate crisis, won't go beyond touting the ‘renewable’ energy transition as the solution.