The Media is at War with Itself

Media is now "a continuation of war by other means."

As you might have noticed, The Burning Telegraph is dedicated to looking at the wide effects of media in a state of crisis. Part of the premise of this endeavor (a big part) is that media plays a greater, more impactful role in our lives than any other institution. I call this the Lebowitz Effect, after the famous writer-comedian who once noted that “Media has replaced all institutions.”

One of the most striking outcomes of this is the rise of media personas, even celebrities, as world leaders. This is nearly unheard-of in the history of politics. Can we imagine a Roman emperor being drawn from the ranks of court minstrels? Impossible.

Donald Trump was the first major example of this new phenomenon. As we heard endlessly from the media itself, a reality-star-as-president was a uniquely weird spectacle. But Trump was a celebrity long before he was a TV star.

In the case of the latest global-center-of-attention, Vladimir Zelensky, that is not true. Zelensky rose to prominence as a comedian, a Ukrainian TV star. He was not the son of vast wealth, like Trump. He came up through the media, using that infinite lever to rise to the very top of the government.

But even more importantly, the media has once again transformed Zelensky, this time from the president of a corruption-riddled country into a global leader of (potentially) historic importance. Zelensky is likely going to be Time magazine’s Person of the Year (head to the digital betting markets to get odds on that). Even if he’s not, he has been catapulted from nameless official of minor importance to a global superstar in the span of weeks.

As much as we can talk about “disintermediation,” or media fragmentation or the decline of the business model that used to underpin the media, the reality is the media is still a kingmaker. But even this understates the case.

Consider the flip-side of the Zelensky coin: Russia. For the past four years, the US news media waged a relentless campaign against Russia, alleging that the country has been a greater threat to American democracy than any other country.

Think about that last statement—any other country. It simply doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when we consider that next to China, whose economy is three times the size of the Russian economy by GDP. Factor in China’s immense technological advantage over Russia, its centralized command structure, and the almost complete lack of any countervailing forces, strategic or political, to its government and it’s clear that China can do and does more damage to the US and the existing world order than Putin could dream of.

And yet media coverage of China over the past few years has sometimes bordered on the sycophantic. During the pandemic, liberal American media outlets virtually pantomimed the CCP’s core message that its “draconian” (a term used by both the CCP and the US media) methods were more effective than America’s chaotic democracy. China was hailed for “conquering” the pandemic, a message the American media achieved by completely ignoring the fact that China likely fabricated all of its data on case counts and deaths from Covid-19.

But it took only a few weeks for the media to spread a message about Russia powerful enough to deplatform the entire country, ripping it from the global finance infrastructure, canceling its culture, and making its citizenry persona non grata en masse.

Since books like Ender’s Game, the sci-fi classic in which a giant intergalactic war is fought against aliens via drones, we have long imagined the wars of the future to be waged by robot proxy. The advent of advanced UAVs, followed by USV (unmanned surface vehicles that navigate the seas) seemed to confirm that this brave new world is upon us.

What we failed to understand is that these wars will and already are being fought by media proxy. The great military theoretician Clausewitz once observed that “War is nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means.” In this sense, media has become a continuation of war by others means.

Given all this, it’s not wonder that the battle once fought over proverbial “eyeballs” (advertising audience or what we call impressions) is now being fought for hearts and minds. Our take-no-prisoner media is a result of this.

When a media figure, such as “The View”’s Sunny Hostin, concedes she overstated a point on her show, she more closely resembles a battlefield colonel retreating a few yards after a bold but ultimately unsuccessful foray to capture ground than an intellectual debating a point. Her subsequent apology-tweet is less a moral correction than it is a signal of tactical retreat. She wants to regroup, re-supply and reorient so she’s better prepared for the next advance.

Media commentators have long noted that the news cycle, or the rate at which the group of stories dominating coverage turns over, has grown increasingly fast. Today it’s frenetic. We often attribute this to format—24-hour cable news or social media—but that’s a more superficial read.

In reality, the speed of the news cycle is just as much about maneuverability. John Boyd, the greatAir Force maverick responsible for developing the F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, understood before almost anyone that maneuverability, the ability to change speed and direction more nimbly than others, creates incredible tactical advantages.

Out of this observation, Boyd created a conceptual framework called the OODA loop, by which a pilot (or any actor in any field) goes through a circular process of Observing, Orienting, Deciding Acting. The actor who can more quickly process his OODA cycles is the one who wins the engagement.

This is exactly the case in our media warfare environment. Whoever churns through the coverage cycle more quickly gets to set the news agenda. We don’t break stories any more, we break issues. And issues are what win hearts and minds.

People often ask me, “Where is this all going?” They are anxious, much as they would be in a physical war. Where’s the end of it? In the case of a physical war, like that being waged by Russia against Ukraine, the war is depletive—it saps the strength of each, which is what makes attrition an operative concept in war.

In the media war, however, the fighting is additive—the more the owners of media engage in warfare, the higher their audience numbers go, the more money they make. It is a vicious cycle.

The one big advantage individuals like you and me have in this form of warfare is that we can simply turn it off. We don’t have to flee our homes, abandoning our possessions and pets to leave the battlefield.

On the contrary, by giving more attention to the actual, physical, real things in our lives—our families, homes, even our bodies—we can effectively turn off the war.

Media companies, including social media, have spent billions and billions of dollars convincing us that we need their content to survive as modern humans. But a germ of idea, like the one Cal Newport has developed in digital minimalism, can spore into a kind of fungus with the power to at least slow the growth of the media war.

Like in physical war, the most important concept in the new media war is asymmetry. We don’t have the billions of dollars to convince people that self-interested, agenda-driven media warfare is hurting them. But we do have ideas—good ideas, lots of them—and a greater ability to disseminate and germinate these ideas than ever before.

And that’s what the media, with its hatred for “unfettered conversations,” fears more than anything.

The media is in crisis. We can help put out the flames. Support The Burning Telegraph so I can keep doing what I’m doing. Just click here.