America's mental softening

It feels as if nowadays most news reporting and commentary is mostly shallow surface scratching and fluff. Is America really being dumbed down, maybe largely because people have been taught or somehow learned intolerance toward either much nuance or cognitive dissonance? Are we being worn down mentally by constant demagoguery, deceptive propaganda and way too much secrecy? Maybe.

Some rummaging around turns up solid evidence of a structural shift to shallow, low-friction output. For example, local and investigative reporting have really collapsed. The US has lost over 2,000 newspapers and tens of thousands of journalists. The share of investigative pieces in local papers has dropped notably since around 2018. That’s the kind of coverage that supplies depth, institutional memory, nuance, and sometimes cognitive dissonance. 

Impacts on the brain-mind and society

Social science says that when local and investigative reporting collapses, democratic and community health suffer across multiple dimensions. Lower civic knowledge apparently correlates with decreased civic engagement and lower voter turnout. When local newspapers disappear, civic engagement and voter participation drop, while voting becomes more polarized. That endangers democracy.

Some research indicates that the presence of local newspapers correlates with higher voter turnout, better assessment of candidates, less polarization and corruption, and greater government transparency.

When a local newspaper dies, civic engagement decreases, elected officials are less accountable, corruption is more pervasive and voter participation drops and becomes more polarized.

Authoritarianism is inherently hostile to independent news reporting because it undermines core weapons that authoritarians rely heavily on to battle democracy and the rule of law, e.g., secrecy, impunity, narrative control, etc. Authoritarians try to gain monopoly control of all major means of persuasion. In true dictatorships, the media are state‑controlled and dissenting speech is censored or criminalized. In dictatorships what is mostly reported is “official truth”. That is usually mostly lies, slanders, crackpot reasoning and irrational emotional manipulation to whip up unwarranted fear, anger, resentment, bigotry, distrust, etc., i.e., bad faith demagoguery.

By default or circumstance, capitalism tends to operate primarily on the side of the authoritarians. In the US right now, capitalism doesn’t directly impose censorship. However, censorship is subtly imposed by subjecting news to the profit motive. The profit motive treats news information as a commodity for sale, not something needed to support the public interest or democracy. That is a part of what is reshaping the mainstream news media from a major source of support for the public interest, democracy and the rule of law, to a major source of support for authoritarianism or tyranny and the corruption that usually accompanies it. In this way capitalism's overriding profit motive is destroying the MSM. 

In short, for-profit capitalist media systems are structurally aligned with authoritarianism and dictatorship or oligarchy. Along the way, we're getting used to and coming to expect shallow, fluffy "news", i.e., infotainment. Hard core news is becoming heavily disfavored in American society.