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Comment by rcxdude | Hacker News Reader

The difference between questioning everything and rejecting everything from the mainstream is an important one which Brand and many others seem not to understand.

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Oh, I think he understands. Constantly criticizing mainstream media for low standards while having far lower standards yourself is the kind of thing that you have to put significant ongoing effort into rationalizing.

Consumers of alt media can do it thoughtlessly. Producers? I'm not convinced.

> ... having far lower standards yourself ...

How are we measuring that? Firstly, as a nitpick, the mainstream media these days is Russel Brand. He has an audience comparable to a group like CNN. Possibly slightly larger.

Secondly, the quality of the podcasters is generally better on net than the big media companies. They tend not to be gung-ho all-weather war supporters for example. People like Brand might get a lot of details wrong but have more coherent takes on big issues.

Thirdly, and related to secondly, the podcasters tend to take less money from big entrenched interests in the military-industrial complex or big pharma. They rely less on being spoon fed access to powerful people. It is easier to follow their incentives and style than work out what a media company is trying to push this week.

Journalism. Reaching out to involved parties for comment, boots on the ground, making retractions, reserving judgement, citing sources, seeking and contextualizing opposition and/or expertise, making an attempt to prefer observation over interpretation, pushing back on wild claims, etc etc etc.

I was acutely aware of partisan bias in MSM but I didn't appreciate just how much they actually did get right until the deluge of "MSM sux, here's what THEY don't want you to know" replaced it.

You do realise he has a large team of journalist behind him?

If they are doing any of the above, it would be a 180 degree change from the Russel Brand that I blocked from my feeds a few years ago.

So you’re making assumptions of Brand’s content that you haven’t seen in years? What are you basing your assumptions on? What the journalists tell you? Seems like a pretty disingenuous take.

This is a good summary of the threads I'm seeing here.

Just in terms of viewership do you have a specific source for saying his audience is comparable?

I am having trouble finding something reasonable. e.g.

6.58M youtube subscribers 80 million television households as subscribers for CNN

Although these numbers are not really comparable

~700k daily watchers for CNN: https://www.adweek.com/tvnewser/here-are-cable-news-ratings-... 800k video views for Russel: https://socialblade.com/youtube/user/russellbrand

Although of course video views != daily watchers (one person can watch multiple ones & that number can be juiced)

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/02/business/media/cnn-profit... or https://www.forbes.com/sites/markjoyella/2023/03/14/cnns-rat... for example - CNN is pulling a viewership of ~400k people and you can see Brand's videos generally averaging above that on YouTube.

I agree this points to a somewhat similar level of reach, but you can't actually compare views to viewership

> People like Brand might get a lot of details wrong but have more coherent takes on big issues.

The dude has a video titled Hawaii Wildfire: Climate Change or Blackrock?

His views are only coherent in the sense that he thinks everything is a shadowy conspiracy, which morons gobble up

I would question your third point in the spirit of doubting narratives. This is the podcasters' narrative, but intuitively a podcaster has less scale and therefore is much cheaper to be incentivised towards specific narratives.

Oh, sure. It costs nothing to buy off a single podcaster. There are blatant shills all over the place.

Still better than cable news. CNN literally hired Clapper as a presenter - you couldn't pull a stunt like that the way most podcasts are structured. There'd have to many opportunities for people to press him on the Orwellean spy system that he helped set up. I don't recall any support for domestic mass surveillance among the US voting public.

Compare that to someone in the CIA buying off Joe Rogan - he might sell out some day, but if he got so bad he was offering softball interviews to the likes of Clapper then he's not going to be able to keep the same pull he does now. People have a distaste for that level of blatant propaganda.

Don't buy into the bad faith arguments. They aren't genuinely "asking questions," they're trying to bring what they already believe into the mainstream.

I forget where I read/saw it, but someone once made the point that because there are an infinite number of questions that can be asked, someone is always making some kind of statement based on a conscious decision about which questions to ask, and which not to ask.

I think this is especially true when someone is repeatedly ask the same kinds of questions while simultaneously ignoring lots of other really good questions.

How are you determining what people (strangers) "already believe"?

Epistemologically you can't be completely sure, but when someone's discourse is habitually interwoven with rhetorical gambits and logical fallacies it's not unreasonable to conclude that they're actually a bullshit artist.

Talking to them on the internet/real life over the past ten years

To me, that feels like a broad brush and lazy way to shut down any uncomfortable conversation. If you find it works for you, more power to you

AKA https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/JAQ_off

>Don't buy into the bad faith arguments.

the little known super-power : spotting bad-faith arguments flawlessly.

A very good concise insight

if you have a modern bar for accuracy, you require evidence. when you require evidence, because you've spotted a ton of lies in the media, most of it gets rejected.

we did not ask for untrustworthy media, algorithms, exploitation and bribery dictate that.

It's amusing they recognize NPCs that uncritically repeat the establishment narrative and question nothing, but don't recognize they are doing the same thing in reverse.

"I Support The Current Thing" vs "I Oppose The Current Thing"

sure, but one does not get clicks for telling people that "the current thing" is nuanced.

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