Re: Global War on Terror 8 - Winter is Coming
1. Deconflicting is always good. Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.
2. The opposition to the rush to war for corporate profits, or to deflect from domestic problems, is likewise always good.
3. Contrarian voices that challenge the official line on enemies, the need for arms buildup, the need for domestic surveillance and abridgment of rights, are always good.
On the other hand, InfoWars seems to play into the RT/Sputnik Putin line on many, many issues, and like Wikileaks I think they are probably getting a lot of assistance from them. I don't mean they are actually collaborating with Putin or even that they share any ideological aim with Putin. I do mean that these outlets crave access and legitimacy, and the FSK is feeding them both through selective leaks.
Our own intelligence community is certainly trying to do the same thing, but Infowars and the other Weekly World News crank sites, with a GOP incumbent, know what side their audience is on and they thrive by reinforcing their opinions. I don't think Jones is a traitor. I think he's a businessman and he's found his product. He is selling his conservative audience to his sponsors, so he has to keep that audience, and the way he keeps that audience is by caressing their assumptions and thumping their tubs.
True, if there was more money on the other side Alex Jones would flip in a heartbeat, but there will probably never be given the different ways in which liberals and conservatives apply skepticism to new information. Liberals put consequences first and evaluate information and institutions by instrumentalist criteria. Conservatives place revealed truths first: "My Country / My Faith / My Tribe is the Greatest Ever", theocratic dicta, economic-cultural axioms. Then they accept or reject empirical data based on whether it conflicts with those truths.
That is indeed what makes media like InfoWars, Fox News and Talk Radio so effective in reaching a conservative mind, but why an equivalent liberal delivery mechanism would be rejected. The liberal test of informational validity is an iterative outcome and has too much gradation and self-criticism to be funneled through media less comprehensive than at least a book and typically 6 years of endless grad school discussion. The conservative test is a declarative outcome that comes from a parent's or pastor's authority, and that is easy to ape and exploit. So InfoWars et al will remain the province of the right, and the Russians know how to play that fiddle.