Matt Lech is a sharp/bright/thoughtful person who produces the Majority Report (MR) and co-hosts Left Reckoning. MR is a great show that does substantive interviews with scholars whose work you wouldn’t necessarily hear about without MR—the show spotlights these scholars and brings their work to light. MR is central to progressive media, along with Democracy Now!.
I just want to use this mini-piece to gather my key questions that I want to ask people about progressive media.
I think that Matt Lech is the best person to address these questions, so I hope that he’ll be able to address these questions one day.
1: How much value is there in the idea of “editorial transparency” where a show will explain to viewers each day the editorial basis/logic/justification behind what’s being covered, how it’s being covered, who’s being interviewed, what questions they’re being asked, how they’re being interviewed, etc.? Maybe the genuine/honest reason for a lot of editorial decisions is: “We’ll cover UFOs today because we want to get clicks.” You can make up BS, but “editorial transparency” might make it evident to people that your justifications don’t add up and don’t make sense.
2: To what extent is “editorial transparency” central to honesty? There’s no such thing as “objectivity”—even chemists have a perspective—so maybe the issue is to be clear about your perspective and put your cards on the table.
3: What principles should guide editorial decisions? Maybe the “sweet spot” is to find things that are high-magnitude, solid, and neglected—whatever’s in the middle of that three-way Venn-diagram.
4: How does MR pick guests? What’s the whole process like behind the scenes?
5: What could I do to make the pitch to MR about having some particular guests on the show?
6: Would MR have Dean Baker on the show? I argue in this piece that he should be the bread-and-butter of any progressive commentary—Noam Chomsky will tell you the same thing if you contact Chomsky. See also my short piece where Baker lays out an urgent game-plan for Democrats.
7: Would MR have David Ellerman on the show? Ellerman is to institutional critique what Baker is to policy-critique—once again, Chomsky will tell you how important Ellerman is if you contact Chomsky. Nathan J. Robinson intends to review Ellerman’s new book that I published a short piece about, so that’s good news.
8: Would MR interview Gilbert Achcar? Achcar has a book with Chomsky. I have a piece where I argue that nobody knows anything about Syria because people like Achcar aren’t interviewed, so we get no informative commentary and instead we get a silly mud-fight. The result is that nobody knows anything about the Syrian Civil War—I certainly don’t know the first thing about it. See Achcar’s piece in The Nation on the problems about the Syria-discussion.
9: To what extent do we want to get people to think for themselves, and to what extent do we want to persuade people? My understanding is that scientists at a graduate seminar will present data and won’t try to persuade their colleagues, but I could be wrong about that. I have a piece that discusses the painful reality that persuasion is necessary and that you can’t simply give people information—it’s not clear what’s urgent enough to require persuasion and you might argue that every single political issue is urgent enough to require persuasion.
10: What are the key questions with any progressive show? Maybe the key questions are these. First, who’s the audience and how can we quantify/monitor who the audience is? Second, what’s the goal that we’re trying to move the needle on—do we want people to join activism when they otherwise wouldn’t have, or vote differently in general elections than they currently do, or vote differently in Democratic primaries than they currently do, or talk to their friends/relatives differently than they currently do, or…? Third, how can we quantify/monitor how much we’re actually moving the needle on each of these goals?
11: What if saying the wrong thing harms your effort to move the needle on a certain goal? Should you “self-censor” in that case? Is that dishonest or is that OK?
12: How can you compare talking to a small activist-group with getting millions of YouTube-views? In the latter case, maybe zero of the millions of viewers will lift a finger to join activism. Chomsky talks to small activist-groups all the time, and he doesn’t value YouTube-views.
13: How much does a “YouTube-view” even mean, even on the narrowest possible grounds? Isn’t a 10-second look at a two-hour video considered a “view”, which makes the whole metric largely meaningless?
14: What about the issue of “preaching to the choir”?
15: Isn’t the issue of “choirs” independent of audience-size and independent of audience-type? Chomsky’s small activist-audiences can be “choirs” whose actions his words don’t alter, and YouTube-audiences can also be “choirs”.
16: What are the biggest weaknesses/blindspots/suicidalities in progressive messaging, in your view? You can discuss Democratic-Party messaging, and then you can discuss progressive shows’ messaging. Some obvious ideas. First, focus on how X/Y/Z will impact someone specifically (on climate and on everything else): “Imagine going to the hospital and taking out your blue M4A card, and you show it to them, and there’s no payment or anything—imagine what it would be like to do that. And what it would be like to not have to go through all of these stupid medical bills at the kitchen-table, so that you can read your kids a bedtime-story instead of dealing with these stupid medical bills.” Second, frame everything in terms of patriotism: “We need M4A—we don’t leave our fellow Americans behind on the battlefield, so why should we leave them behind in our medical system?” Third, imitate right-wing tactics where they will deliberately insert zingers/jokes/clickbait—and deliberately insert provocative statements—to gain the spotlight, and where they will get people to see others as the enemy. Fourth, make climate all about jobs/economy, and never make it remotely about morality, and never engage for a second with climate-deniers (you don’t want to defend/justify/explain climate-science for even a second or else they’ve already won), and just mock/attack climate-deniers and paint them as psychotic/psychopathic lepers until they’re politically extinct.
17: What are the biggest weaknesses/blindspots/suicidalities in progressive media, in your view?
18: How serious should progressive media be? I have a piece where I quote Vaush saying that he doesn’t intend to be serious. I look at progressive shows and think: “This isn’t serious. Noam Chomsky wouldn’t watch this show. Noam Chomsky would turn this off.” But maybe being unserious will move the needle with people who wouldn’t be interested in serious content—and “moving the needle” doesn’t always need to mean that they become activists, but instead it can mean that they (e.g.) yell at their climate-denier uncle at Thanksgiving. And maybe people don’t want serious content when they want to unwind after a long workday. And maybe “infotainment” has a lot of value that (e.g.) a sitcom doesn’t have, though I feel like politics should be serious and that people should watch (e.g.) a sitcom if they want to unwind.
19: What do you think about my comments in this piece on “infotainment” and on debate?
20: Do you find the non-serious stuff that progressive shows do genuinely hilarious/awesome/entertaining? Maybe my issue is just that I don’t think that progressive shows are good at the non-serious stuff. And “infotainment” informs, so maybe it’s not fair to conflate “infotainment” with entertainment.
21: Why do progressive shows often focus on non-serious things—and if it’s because these things get more clicks, then why are audiences so attracted to non-serious things? I heard that right-wing media also focuses on a lot on gossip. I’m not sure if the shows drive it or if the audiences drive it, so there’s a “chicken and egg” problem where maybe serious content would induce audiences to have different tastes.
22: To what extent is it possible to find out who watches a show, who comments on things, who’s in the chatroom for a given show, and so on? You sometimes wonder if there are literally 13-year-olds online saying certain things. Someone commented to me about this: “Mentality is 13 years old. Chronological age not. Yes, very depressing.”
23: How valuable would it be to get FAIR to do an annual report that quantifies how much of each progressive YouTube-show is serious content as opposed to non-serious things (gossip, “beef”, whatever)? Take a look at this stunning quantification that really blew my mind and really put things in perspective. Maybe FAIR could give each show a “score” in terms of the ratio of serious content to non-serious content—the “score” might pressure people to improve that ratio and to self-reflect.
24: Do you know any audio/video experts who are Chomsky-fans? I would love for audio/video experts to contact me so that I can upload my never-before-seen Chomsky footage to my YouTube-channel. I’ve been trying to get this footage online for years, and it’s really embarrassing that I’ve failed to get it online.