The internet fourth wave is here: NAJ screen shot

The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –

WASHINGTON, D.C. — So I’ve been flying a little under the radar of late. For some very good reasons, and some not so great.

I’ve been burned out on the sensational clickbait traffic arms race, which as I predicted a long time ago was not the holy grail it was cracked up to be (since Google wants to keep all the money for itself). See the story that Buzzfeed, the star of sensational clickbait in the internet’s third wave, just announced it is going out of business.

Guess who is still standing? We are, the New American Journal, also a product of the third wave in the computer revolution and the web (which I plan to write about soon). One of the founding reporters for Buzzfeed, who worked with me briefly at Truthout.org out of Berkeley, California, once threatened to destroy me personally and put me out of business. Fuck him. Look who is out of business now!

I won’t name him here, but I knew his downfall would come. He was an admitted alcoholic and drug addict with substandard reporting and writing skills. He went on to lose a libel lawsuit against Hulk Hogan, proving that taking on professional wrestlers can be a dangerous proposition. Just ask Donald Trump.

How Wrestle­ Mania Trumped Intelligence in U.S. Politics

To tell you the absolute truth, it could be that I am going to remain below the radar, flying low, for the foreseeable future. I am literally considering retiring from the news business and taking a job with the National Park Service.

Don’t worry too much. They probably won’t hire me anyway, for reasons I don’t feel comfortable talking about openly (I’m too old for one thing).

But it is kind of interesting sitting here in the forest still hiding from Covid and stress to see other competitors going down in the internet’s third wave.

America’s favorite pollster, Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight, is also out at ABC News and the Disney corporation.

Here’s a guy who exploded on the scene into celebrity from “unusual beginnings,” as the Washington Post put it, starting out as a baseball statistician by day who began in political public opinion blogging anonymously at the liberal Daily Kos (in the internet’s second wave), who went on to be horribly wrong in 2016 by assuring everyone that Hillary Clinton was going to beat Donald Trump.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight origin story is unusual. Now he’s leaving.

Again, David Underhill and I got that right in the New American Journal, when everybody else got it wrong, except for us and Michael Moore.

But the American public doesn’t seem to care about who is right. They care about who is on TeeVee. Fame trumps wisdom every time in this country. Just ask Trump.

Scientists study the wise brain

Actually I should just stop mentioning Trump’s name at all, I guess, because the American people are so sick of him many are tuning out all media and social media so they don’t have to hear his name or see his face.

This was confirmed for me yesterday when I was talking to a woman from Oregon camping in a camper van like the woman in Nomadland on her way to see the sites in Washington, D.C.

Yes, she saw the movie, twice, and is tired of the crazy, expensive, lefty West Coast.

Nomadland Steals the Show at Socially Distanced Academy Awards

She said she is not paying much attention anymore, because she can’t stand even hearing Trump’s name or seeing his picture.

Enthusiasm Gap

I am going to go out on a limb here and predict that voter turnout will drop in the 2024 election from what it was in 2020 if this race is a rematch between Trump and Joe Biden, as it is shaping up to be.

I just coined a new term for what is about to happen. This will emerge over the next year and a half as an “enthusiasm gap” about politics and political participation and activism, simply because many people are not going to get excited about a Biden-Trump rematch.

President Joe Biden Announces Candidacy, Officially Kicking Off the 2024 Race for President

As I wrote in the inside analysis in the end of that story, I suspect Biden is going to have a hard time stoking the fear of an existential crisis that motivated Democrats in 2020, and Trump is going to have a hard time stoking the same level of anger that his Republican base felt in supporting him for reelection. Both of those factors led to one of the highest voter turnouts in any recent U.S. election.

According to the Brookings Institute, voter turnout in the 2020 election was exceptionally high, with 66.8 percent of eligible voters casting ballots, resulting in a victory for Joe Biden.

This was the biggest turnout in a presidential election since 1992, when 67.7 percent turned out to put Bill Clinton over the top in his race with George H.W. Bush, who was running for a second term under the cloud of the Iran-Contra scandal. It was also more than 5 points higher than turnout in the fateful 2016 election.

Recently released results from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey voting supplement indicate that 2020’s voting spike occurred across both Democratic-leaning demographic groups and Republican-leaning ones. In particular, there was a noticeable increase in voting among white adults who did not graduate from college (Trump’s base)

On the other hand, there was an accentuated turnout among young people and people of color, representing the increasing influence of voters who lean heavily toward Democratic presidential candidates. They provided the margin for Biden’s victory, along with independent voters who also expressed fears about another Trump term.

“This raises the question as to whether even greater turnout among white non-college voter groups — or Republican efforts to alter voting requirements in their favor — will be enough to counter the influence of young voters and voters of color in future presidential elections,” the institute asks.

A better question might be which groups will be more motivated in 2024, young and minority voters and independents for Biden, or Trump’s base. It could be a different race if voter turnout lags on either side, or both, which I suspect it will.

Third Party Opening?

A tottering old fool from the days before the internet, George Will, has another proposal. He is saying since polls show voters do not want a Biden-Trump rematch, that 2024 could be the year for a third party breakthrough.

Voters do not want a Biden-Trump rematch. A third option might appeal.

But, of course, he is a tottering old fool who should probably consider retirement himself. I mostly stopped reading him in 1988 anyway, when he made some other irresponsible prediction that I knew would not come true. It was so long ago that I can’t remember exactly what it was, although I do remember that he turned around a phrase he borrowed from Franklin Roosevelt, who said in his 1933 inaugural address, “We have nothing to fear except fear itself.”

If memory serves, I think he said, “All we have to fear is the absence of fear.”

Sorry George. That is just stupid. You know as well as I do that third party movements in this country rarely catch on. It might be nice if they did, but that’s not likely now.

The Gambler

Just as Nate Silver was being ousted at ABC (along with Tucker Carlson at Fox and Don Lemon at CNN), another rising star in political polling also just went down. You’ve probably not heard about this one on cable news or social media, although it is arguably more important than Fox losing Tucker or CNN losing its Lemon.

Sean McElwee, a young Democratic insider with friends in high places, was just ousted as the head of a political non-profit you’ve probably never heard of, Data for Progress. But this kid who got popular in D.C. by holding a poker night for political insiders and ended up doing polling for the Biden campaign just went down when a book was coming out exposing that he bet on the outcome of campaigns he was being paid to work on.

The Washington gambler

In one glaring example, he got a gig providing quick and cheap surveys for John Fetterman, running for the U.S. Senate in Pennsylvania “in what was shaping up to be biggest race of the 2022 midterms,” the Post reports. “And Sean would place a $3,000 bet that Fetterman would win his primary.”

He won that bet. But in the general election, he bet against Fetterman. In that, he lost big, because he missed the most important factor in the last two weeks of that election, and it was not a poll: The last minute endorsement of Oprah Winfrey.

I was in Pennsylvania covering that race, and it was true that the election was getting closer as Election Day approached.

Critical Pennsylvania Senate Race Tightens as Election Day Nears

But as sometimes happens in the heat of deadline in a campaign, I had a flash of an idea. I posted on Fetterman’s Twitter that an endorsement of the Democrat by Oprah over the Republican Dr. Oz, who got famous on the Oprah show, could clinch the deal for Fetterman by motivating especially Black women in Philadelphia and the surrounding suburbs to go ahead and show up to vote for Fetterman on Election Day.

That went viral, and sure enough, Oprah did make a statement that seemed to favor Fetterman. That went mega-viral, being shared all over every social media platform and covered by every news outlet in Pennsylvania, and the Black vote in the Philadelphia metro area swung for Fetterman.

Now who do you want on your side in the final months of an important election? Some kid who gambles and bets against his own candidates, or the guy who broke the Gadsden Mall story and helped get Doug Jones from Alabama elected to the U.S. Senate in 2017?

The Final Breach of Judge Roy Moore is At Hand

The Future

If I decide to continue practicing journalism, covering politics, science, the environment, the law and other things going forward, people are going to have to fund it more. That’s all there is to it.

I could make the decision to leave journalism and go full time into election consulting, if the kids at Data for Progress want to hire a real public opinion expert who won’t gamble against his clients. I sent them my resume, although part of my history of success in saving democracy and the planet so far has come from me being the one to frame the stories correctly.

After all, I do have a decade of academic research under my belt proving quantitatively how the press and media do have an impact on public opinion.

Public Attitudes and Press Coverage of the Environment, 1968-1996

But it is not clear that is going to hold up in the coming fourth wave of the internet, when it appears Artificial Intelligence and chat bot armies are supposedly to be putting together most of the stories going forward, at least if you listen to the prophets of doom.

Journalism as a business has been in crisis for some time, and it just keeps getting worse and worse. If we can’t make a decent living covering the news, how long do you think democracy can last? Those two things have been wrapped up together like hamburgers and buns since 1776.

There would not have been a republic called the United States without Ben Franklin’s newspapers and the writing of Thomas Paine and the authors of the Federalist Papers.

There would also not have been national parks without the writing and activism of John Muir.

Do you think some artificial bot could have envisioned that? I don’t think so.

Hacking Journalists

Another problem with journalism these days is the issue of hacking, so I found the story of Runa Sandvik in the Columbia Journalism Review quite fascinating.

Runa Sandvik has made it her life’s work to protect journalists against cyberattacks. Authoritarian regimes are keeping her in business.

Maybe she would like to hook up somehow with a guy who probably knows as much or more as anyone at the CIA about journalism, public opinion and the internet.

Plus, I hear she does a mean pole dance. That would not offend me in the least.

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