The Cult of the Expert

Read this from Newsnight.

Here's a variant from a parallel dimension, a variant slightly closer to the reality of the situation:

The Cult of the Expert
How Today’s Mainstream Media is Killing Our Culture, Our Ability to Think and Assaulting Our Intellect

“If we are all experts, there is nothing left to be learnt.”

The Antagonist’s new post, The Cult of the Expert is the latest addition to the Antagonista reading list. In it, the author expresses his concern for the profligacy of mainstream media 'experts' who profess to know everything and yet convey nothing, spawned by archaic technologies such as newspaper and television and for too long in the control of too few hands. This, he feels, has had a destructive impact on our culture, ability to think, intellect and understanding of the world.

He says, “[They] can use their mass produced media to publish everything from uninformed 'expert' political commentary, to unseemly pornographic videos, to embarrassingly mindless repetitive music, to the same old unreadable, unwatchable and unpalatable rubbish that we've read for years in the form of reviews, essays, novels and even news”.

He complains that the mainstream media are “collectively deliberately corrupting and confusing their own middle-class values about everything from politics, to commerce, to arts and culture for popular opinion.”

He claims that Newnsight perpetuates a cycle of misinformation and ignorance, and labels the myopic Murdoch media empire inane and absurd, “showing poor fools dancing, singing, eating, washing, shopping, driving, cleaning, sleeping, all in the name of becoming celebrities who want to be worshipped by idiots with nothing better to do because this is the rubbish to which they have become accustomed.”

He warns that new media is just taking hold in earnest – “say goodbye to middle-class idiots and cultural gatekeepers of the old media – old style reporting from inside the cage of small elitest and self-interested circles, news anchors with fake smiles who only do it for the money, editors who can't discern facts from personal opinions unless it is to include the latter over the former, music companies who pump out repetitive manufactured mechanical drivel for huge profits, and Hollywood movie studios producing films about how America is going to save the world from everything but itself.”

What do you think? – is The Antagonist being alarmist about the effects of the mainstream media, or raising genuine concerns? Are we at the mercy of the self-professed and overpaid 'expert' regurgitating the same old opinions for profit and personal gain? Can kids tell the difference between credible news sources and the endless stream of middle-class opinion in the mainstream media? What, in any case, can be done?

The Antagonist is not yet finished with Andrew Keen and his elitest claptrap. More later.