The Prestige Economy

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

The more prestigious your job (such as an Ivy League professor or network news anchor), the more vulnerable you are to cancellation for crime think.

The professor and the elite journalist primarily work in a prestige economy while the businessman and the athlete typically work in a merit economy.

How many economies are there and which ones dominate your life?

ChatGPT: 1. Prestige economy (status-based)

What matters: recognition, reputation, who praises you, where you’re published, who you’re seen with.

Domains: academia, journalism, arts, fashion, politics, social media.

Logic: value is conferred by peers or gatekeepers. You succeed by being recognized as “important,” not necessarily by measurable output.

Downside: herd effects, echo chambers, fear of deviating from consensus.

2. Merit economy (performance-based)

What matters: measurable outcomes, skill, output, or results.

Domains: engineering, some parts of business, sports, surgery.

Logic: value comes from demonstrated ability or productivity — you win the race, you design the bridge that stands.

Downside: merit measures can get gamed; not all “merit” is measurable.

3. Money economy (market-based)

What matters: purchasing power, price signals, capital.

Domains: commerce, labor markets, investment.

Logic: value is set by supply and demand; anyone who can pay can access.

Downside: inequalities compound, wealth isn’t always aligned with wisdom or talent.

4. Bureaucratic economy (rule-based)

What matters: compliance, seniority, credentials, ticking the right boxes.

Domains: government, big corporations, military, HR departments.

Logic: you advance by following the rules, meeting formal criteria, or lasting long enough in the hierarchy.

Downside: sclerosis, box-ticking over substance.

5. Moral economy (norm-based)

What matters: virtue, altruism, adherence to shared values.

Domains: religion, activism, community life.

Logic: esteem and trust are granted for being “good” or “selfless.”

Downside: moral signaling can substitute for effectiveness; purity spirals.

6. Attention economy (visibility-based)

What matters: eyeballs, clicks, followers, virality.

Domains: social media, entertainment, politics.

Logic: value flows to whoever can grab and hold attention, regardless of truth or depth.

Downside: incentivizes outrage, spectacle, simplicity over nuance.

In real life, these overlap. A professor is judged partly on merit (quality of research), partly on prestige (journal placement, who cites them), partly on bureaucracy (tenure rules), and increasingly on attention (social media presence).

Legend: ★★★★★ = dominant, ★☆☆☆☆ = weak

This lets you see at a glance:

Academia = prestige + bureaucracy.

Media = attention + prestige.

Government = bureaucracy + prestige.

Business = money + merit.

Sports = pure merit, but layered with money and attention.

Religion/activism = moral + attention economies.

Tech/engineering = merit + money, though prestige is creeping in (e.g. conference buzz, VC signaling).

How Economies Interact and Distort Each Other

Prestige vs Merit

  • Distortion: Prestige can overshadow real ability. A Harvard degree may be valued more than raw skill.
  • Example: In academia, citation counts and institutional prestige often count more than the actual content of research.

Prestige vs Money

  • Distortion: Money can buy prestige (endowed chairs, naming rights) while prestige can inflate financial value (celebrity endorsements).
  • Example: Universities admit big donors’ kids regardless of academic merit.

Merit vs Bureaucracy

  • Distortion: Bureaucratic rules can block recognition of actual talent, while “meritocratic exams” can be gamed.
  • Example: In government jobs, civil service rules sometimes promote time-in-grade over performance.

Attention vs Merit

  • Distortion: Viral fame can eclipse actual competence.
  • Example: Influencers with millions of followers get lucrative deals while more talented but unknown creators get ignored.

Moral vs Money

  • Distortion: Moral appeals can be monetized, turning causes into brands. Conversely, financial backers shape which causes gain traction.
  • Example: “Green” or “woke” consumerism where virtue is sold as a premium lifestyle choice.

Prestige vs Attention

  • Distortion: High-prestige actors chase attention, diluting their credibility; attention-seekers borrow prestige through association.
  • Example: Scientists on Twitter simplify or exaggerate findings to gain followers, which can undermine long-term trust.

Key Takeaway

Most domains run on a mix of these economies. But when one dominates—especially attention or money—it tends to distort the others. That’s why elite media, academia, and politics so often sound uniform: they are trapped in overlapping prestige–attention–bureaucracy loops that leave little room for pure merit or truth-seeking.
Prestige Economies in Action

Prestige Economies Driving Elite Media Behavior

Biden’s Cognitive Decline Denial

  • Prestige Economy: Elite outlets like NYT and Washington Post prize their credibility and elite standing. Admitting Biden’s decline early would risk sounding like right-wing talking points, which would lower their standing in the prestige hierarchy of journalism.
  • Attention Economy: Stories affirming Biden’s competence were rewarded with clicks from their loyal base, while dissenting voices risked alienating that audience.
  • Bureaucratic Economy: Newsrooms have internal norms—editors, standards desks—that function like bureaucracies. Deviating from the “he’s fine” line meant career risk inside the institution.
  • Result: Groupthink. A uniform narrative of “Biden is sharp” prevailed until obvious signs made denial impossible (Politico eventually broke ranks).

Trump’s Trade Policy Derision

  • Prestige Economy: Economists in places like the Brookings Institution and CBO had long treated free trade as settled orthodoxy. Journalists mirrored that prestige consensus rather than re-examining assumptions.
  • Merit Economy: Actual outcomes (tariff revenue, renegotiated trade deals, resilience arguments) were ignored because they conflicted with the prestige line.
  • Attention Economy: “Trump the fool on trade” stories drove traffic, fitting reader expectations. Nuanced analysis (“tariffs could raise $3 trillion in revenue over a decade” – CBO) was buried.
  • Result: Uniform ridicule—until later, when outcomes complicated the narrative and some humility began creeping in (FT analysis).

Takeaway

Neither case is about truth alone. The uniformity comes from overlapping economies: prestige (status within the profession), attention (traffic and audience loyalty), and bureaucracy (institutional norms). When those dominate, reality gets filtered until it can no longer be ignored.

Russiagate: How the Prestige Economy Produced a Single Story

Economy at workWhat it looked like in coverageReceipts
ClosureEarly boundary-setting: skepticism about “collusion” framed as unserious or partisan; dissenters treated as outside the pale. Mueller Report (redacted, WaPo annotated) (no established conspiracy);
DOJ IG FISA review (17 significant errors/omissions);
Durham Report (2023) (procedural/analytic failures);
2018 Pulitzer to NYT/WaPo for Russia-coverage.
PrestigeHigh-status outlets and security-state alumni defined the respectable view; others echoed to signal professionalism. Pulitzer Board award announcement (2018);
Board later stood by the award (2022).
Anti-neutralityNeutral, wait-and-see reporting often read as “carrying water.” Safe moral stance: assume the worst about Trump/Putin links. Mueller Vol. I (DOJ) on interference vs. conspiracy findings;
Horowitz press PDF (Dec 2019) summarizing FISA problems.
BureaucracyNewsroom norms and sourcing pipelines (intel, DOJ, FBI alumni) rewarded sticking to the herd; editors risk-averse to contrarian frames. House Intel letter on IG findings (details errors/omissions);
House hearing on Durham (2023) (competing interpretations).
AttentionIncentives favored dramatic “Watergate-scale” arcs; reversals or nuance underperformed compared with scandal-forward framing. Mueller report archive (public interest spikes);
Media debate over revoking awards: Axios (2019).

Stephen Turner-style takeaway

  • Closure came first (declare the narrative settled), then prestige enforced it (who is credible to say what), while bureaucratic newsroom habits and the attention economy kept the arc intact.
  • When later documents complicated the original frame (Mueller non-establishment of conspiracy; IG FISA errors; Durham’s criticisms), the system largely reframed rather than retracted—preserving credibility capital.

Quick links (primary docs)

In the positivist picture, life (especially intellectual life) runs like a merit economy: each discovery is a brick in the wall of cumulative knowledge, neat and impersonal. That’s what people like Comte or logical positivists hoped for — knowledge as an ever-growing model that nobody can really dispute once the facts are in.

But in practice, as Stephen Turner emphasizes, much of life — not just science but culture, politics, journalism — runs like a prestige economy. Knowledge isn’t simply added up; it’s negotiated, policed, and stabilized by people who hold authority, credibility, or symbolic capital. The “conversations” decide what counts as knowledge and what doesn’t.

So how much of life operates like this?

Academia: Almost entirely. Journals, tenure committees, funding agencies, and disciplinary boundaries decide what is knowledge. Prestige hierarchies matter more than raw merit.

Media and public discourse: Heavily. A story is not true or false in the abstract; it’s “true” if The New York Times or The Washington Post says so, and untrue if it comes from “fringe” or “conspiracy” outlets.

Law and politics: Same. Courts and legislative bodies are “conversation arenas” where closure happens not because the facts are final, but because a ruling or statute gives a definition the force of authority.

Everyday life: Even at a smaller scale, reputations and cliques determine who is believed in a workplace, a family, or a church.

Where does the merit economy still operate?

In narrow technical domains where feedback from reality is brutal and immediate — like engineering, surgery, or competitive sports. If the bridge collapses, no amount of prestige talk can save you.

Even then, prestige can shape who gets to build the bridge in the first place, or whose failure gets excused.

So the blunt answer: most of life is prestige economy, with pockets of merit economy wherever the world forces brutal feedback.

Posted in Economics | Comments Off on The Prestige Economy

The Engineered Chinese State Vs Lawyerly America

Posted on August 17, 2025 by Luke Ford

The Financial Times writes: “China is run as an engineering state that excels at construction while the US has become a lawyerly society that favours obstruction. By 2020 all nine members of the Chinese Politburo’s standing committee had trained as engineers. By contrast, the US has turned into a “government of the lawyers, by the lawyers and for the lawyers.””

Amazon says about this new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future:

A riveting, firsthand investigation of China’s seismic progress, its human costs, and what it means for America.

For close to a decade, technology analyst Dan Wang―“a gifted observer of contemporary China” (Ross Douthat)―has been living through the country’s astonishing, messy progress. China’s towering bridges, gleaming railways, and sprawling factories have improved economic outcomes in record time. But rapid change has also sent ripples of pain throughout the society. This reality―political repression and astonishing growth―is not a paradox, but rather a feature of China’s engineering mindset.

In Breakneck, Wang blends political, economic, and philosophical analysis with reportage to reveal a provocative new framework for understanding China―one that helps us see America more clearly, too. While China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, the United States has stalled. America has transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad

Blending razor-sharp analysis with immersive storytelling, Wang offers a gripping portrait of a nation in flux. Breakneck traverses metropolises like Shanghai, Chongqing, and Shenzhen, where the engineering state has created not only dazzling infrastructure but also a sense of optimism. The book also exposes the downsides of social engineering, including the surveillance of ethnic minorities, political suppression, and the traumas of the one-child policy and zero-Covid.

In an era of animosity and mistrust, Wang unmasks the shocking similarities between the United States and China. Breakneck reveals how each country points toward a better path for the other: Chinese citizens would be better off if their government could learn to value individual liberties, while Americans would be better off if their government could learn to embrace engineering―and to produce better outcomes for the many, not just the few.

Posted in China | Comments Off on The Engineered Chinese State Vs Lawyerly America

Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Luke Ford

ChatGPT gave me the juiciest bits from this 2018 book:

Reductionism critique – Author Stephen Turner jabs at the enthusiasm for explaining social life in purely cognitive/neural terms, noting how easily “cognitive” talk reifies the brain into an autonomous agent. He hints that this is more fashion than science.

Neural metaphors as ideology – He argues that borrowing concepts like “neural networks” to describe society smuggles in an ideological agenda: it makes social order look natural and mechanistic, masking politics.

Cognitive science’s hidden philosophy – He exposes that many “scientific” claims are actually disguised philosophical assumptions (about intentionality, meaning, rationality). This is a classic Turner move: showing that epistemic closure hides under the mantle of science.

Suspicion of grand synthesis – He hints that cognitive science’s dream of unifying brain, mind, and society is a secular theology — a replacement myth for older religious narratives of unity.

Agency vs. mechanism – He notes that if we take the mechanistic view too literally, there’s no room left for responsibility or meaning. The juicy aside here is: cognitive science undermines the very categories (choice, accountability) that social order requires.

Science wars echoes – He connects critiques of “creation science” and “sociobiology” with how cognitive science papers over its own ideological biases. His quiet subtext: today’s “neutral science” is tomorrow’s dogma.

Recurrent warning – He suggests that when science claims to be final on social explanation, it’s usually serving a political need—whether it’s legitimizing AI, governance, or surveillance. That’s one of his sharpest and most controversial insights in this book.

Anti-reification again: Turner keeps hammering that “cognition” isn’t a black box or a ghost in the machine—it’s a set of practices, habits, and distributed processes. He drops little grenades at cognitive scientists who talk as if “the mind” were a self-contained entity.

Social learning as scaffolding: He emphasizes that much of what we call “cognition” is really embedded in external props (language, institutions, tools). That means social order is as much about maintaining scaffolds as about training minds.

Attacks on “rules” talk: He points out that many theories (from Chomsky’s grammar to Searle’s social ontology) smuggle in “rule-following” as if rules exist somewhere Platonic. Turner insists this is a mistake: rules only exist in the practices that reproduce them.

Memory as externalized: He highlights that much of human memory is outsourced—books, notes, shared practices—undermining the neat boundaries between “individual” and “collective” cognition.

Implication for social science: If cognition is scaffolded and external, then social facts are not metaphysical things “out there.” They are precarious and contingent networks of habits and artifacts—exactly the kind of anti-reification line Turner always presses.

Juicy aside: He quietly notes that when people call things like race, gender, or “society” themselves cognitive categories, they’re usually reifying them, making them sound more real than they are. In his framing, they’re better seen as heuristic constructs tied to practices.

In Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer, Turner takes up sociobiology and evolutionary psychology as part of his broader critique of reified explanations of human behavior. A few highlights:

Suspicion of “just-so stories”: He points out that sociobiological accounts often rely on speculative evolutionary narratives—explaining current behaviors as adaptive without strong evidence. This, for Turner, is a form of reification: treating contingent cultural patterns as if they were hardwired biological facts.

Reductionism problem: He stresses that reducing complex social phenomena to biology misses the scaffolding—language, institutions, external memory, practices—that actually sustain them. Sociobiology tends to act as if these supports were secondary rather than constitutive.

Overlap with cognitive scaffolding: He notes that many behaviors attributed to “genes” or “evolutionary imperatives” can be better explained by distributed cognitive systems: the way habits, artifacts, and practices organize behavior without invoking hidden biological drives.

Politics of expertise angle: He also hints (consistent with his other books) that sociobiology gained traction partly because it provides a “scientific” gloss on social order—an authority claim. That makes it an instance of expertise being used to close down debate rather than open it up.

Anti-essentialism: He repeatedly warns against treating categories like “altruism,” “aggression,” or “intelligence” as natural kinds. Sociobiology tends to assume such essences exist, whereas Turner insists they’re contextual and socially scaffolded.

So in short: Turner doesn’t dismiss sociobiology out of hand—he treats it as an interesting explanatory impulse—but he consistently undercuts its explanatory power by showing how it reifies, skips over scaffolds, and smuggles ideology in the name of biology.

Posted in Stephen Turner | Comments Off on Cognitive Science and the Social: A Primer

Megyn Kelly on Russiagate and the New York Times

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Luke Ford

Megyn: When I woke up Wednesday morning and checked my podcast feed, I saw the New York Times’s The Daily Podcast, which I often listen to, and they had finally gotten around to covering all of the Russiagate revelations that we’ve been doing on this show for weeks. Host Michael Barbaro brought on the New York Times investigative reporter, Michael Schmidt. I thought this is going to be really interesting because he is the reporter that we’ve learned James Comey used for leaks through his Columbia law professor friend. Comey used his Columbia law professor friends to leak to Michael Schmidt. And I remembered that Schmidt won a Pulitzer Prize for his Russiagate reporting. So I thought, okay, they’ve got a few things to acknowledge up front and then let’s hear what he has to say about all this stuff.

Of course, shockingly, the Times did not acknowledge any of that in its episode. None of it. That he is personally involved in the controversy, that he is part of it, because the media acting like lap dogs, taking what we now know was flimsy at best and, let’s face it, false intelligence and slapping it on the pages of their magazines and newspapers without checking in an effort to smear Donald Trump is one of the biggest media scandals of all time. And I would think if you’re running the Times and The Daily, Schmidt is probably realistically the last person you would want to platform as the expert on this, given the fact that he’s personally coming under fire daily on the podcasts and the websites that are actually bothering to cover this new scandal. But no, they platformed him like he was truly a trustworthy — the trustworthy, one might say — expert on Wednesday and once again misled their audience about everything on this scandal.

Here he is on a different broadcast. This is over on MSNBC. And he decided the podcast was just so good he needed to go on MSNBC to promote it. And he chose to do that on the show hosted by Nicolle Wallace. Now, Nicolle Wallace — let’s just remember who she is. She was literally part of the Bush administration. She was communications director for George W. Bush and was intimately involved in selling his policies. And now she sits there every day at four o’clock on MSNBC pretending to be some sort of neutral journalist while running the most partisan Democratic talking points you’ll hear anywhere. She is not a neutral host. She is not some straight-news anchor. She’s a political operative who has been rebranded as a TV anchor, and yet the media treats her as though she is Edward R. Murrow.

So Schmidt goes on her show, knowing he’s going to get nothing but softballs, and he presents himself as if he’s just the neutral explainer of all things Russiagate. But let’s not forget: this is the guy who carried water for James Comey, who was a willing participant in pushing a narrative that turned out to be false. And now he’s out there again, trying to spin, trying to minimize, trying to make the Times and himself look like they weren’t central players in one of the most embarrassing chapters in modern journalism.

And it’s incredible to me that The Daily, which reaches millions of listeners, would present this as if they’re finally giving you the inside story — when in fact what they’re giving you is damage control, narrated by the very person who ought to be answering for his role in creating the false narrative in the first place. No acknowledgment of his Pulitzer Prize being awarded for work that is now under serious scrutiny. No acknowledgment of the leaks. No acknowledgment that they were wrong. Just more spin, more gaslighting of their audience.

And this is what drives people crazy about the media. They never admit fault. They never just come out and say, you know what, we screwed up, we got used, we let our hatred of Trump cloud our judgment, and we reported things that weren’t true. Instead, they double down. They re-platform the same people. They give you the same talking points, dressed up as “new revelations,” when really it’s just the same old nonsense recycled.

Meanwhile, the people who actually did the hard work of uncovering what really happened — the Durham Report, investigative reporters outside the mainstream, independent podcasters — they get dismissed as partisan hacks or conspiracy theorists. But as time goes on, it’s becoming clearer and clearer who was telling the truth and who was running cover. And unfortunately, the Times, MSNBC, CNN, and so many others were running cover. They were not telling you the truth.

They treated Trump as if he were guilty from day one. The FBI opened an investigation with almost no evidence, based on gossip, political opposition research, and bad sources. They took the Steele Dossier—a collection of unverified, unsubstantiated allegations dug up by a British spy, paid for by the Clinton campaign through Fusion GPS—and they used it. They attached it as an annex to the intelligence community assessment. They used it to get FISA warrants. They used it to justify surveillance of an American presidential campaign. And the CIA Director at the time, John Brennan, overruled his own seasoned Russia experts, saying of the dossier: “it rings true.” That’s what carried the day. That’s not analysis—that’s bias.

And the media amplified it. They ran with it. They won Pulitzers off it. They smeared Trump for years, undermined his presidency, changed his relationship with Russia, and altered U.S. foreign policy—all based on bad intelligence and partisan spin. Brennan called Trump “treasonous.” Clapper fed innuendo to the press. The Times, the Washington Post, cable news—they all treated this fiction as fact.

Meanwhile, dissenting voices were silenced or ignored. Analysts within the intelligence community who said, “this doesn’t add up,” were overruled. Anyone who questioned whether Russia-gate was being exaggerated was branded as a Trump stooge. The Clinton campaign framed Trump as a Russian agent. The FBI and CIA ran with it. The media rubber-stamped it. And the public was left with the false impression that the President of the United States was compromised by Moscow.

Think about it: Hillary Clinton’s campaign hires Christopher Steele. Steele feeds his wild theories to the FBI in early July. By the end of that month, the FBI opens its investigation into Trump. They use Steele’s allegations as source material. They hide from the FISA court that Steele was paid by the Clinton campaign. And all the while, the press prints it as gospel.

It was agenda-driven from the start, and it remains agenda-driven. The people who pushed this—whether in government, in the media, or in the campaigns—have never really been held accountable. Instead, they’ve been rewarded with book deals, TV contracts, and in Schmidt’s case, a Pulitzer Prize.

They undermined Trump’s presidency, they misled the American people, and they damaged trust in our institutions. And to this day, outlets like the Times refuse to admit the scale of their failure. Instead, they platform the very people most compromised in the scandal, and they pretend it was all just an honest mistake. It wasn’t. It was a deliberate, coordinated effort to delegitimize a sitting President.

That’s the truth about Russia-gate, and no matter how much the Times tries to spin it, the record is clear.

ChatGPT: Stephen Turner would likely treat Russiagate—whether framed as Obama-era “treason” by MAGA voices or as a “nothingburger” by mainstream experts—as a case study in the politics of expertise and epistemic closure.

From his work in The Politics of Expertise (2013) and Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023), Turner emphasizes a few key dynamics that map directly onto this clash:

Experts as Partisan Actors

Turner notes that expert claims are never “neutral” in the way liberal democracies imagine. In Russiagate, intelligence officials, journalists, and legal analysts all positioned themselves as authoritative voices. But their judgments were shaped by institutional loyalties and ideological leanings, not purely by detached fact-finding. To Turner, this isn’t aberration—it’s the normal state of expertise.

Epistemic Closure

Competing camps enforce their own boundaries of acceptable discourse.

For mainstream outlets like The New York Times, doubting the “collusion story” early on marked one as unserious or even pro-Trump.

For MAGA voices, dismissing the scandal as trivial was treated as complicity in a deep-state cover-up.
Turner would say both sides rely on consensus policing, not just evidence—mirroring his remarks on the academic reaction to The Bell Curve.

The Collapse of Neutrality

A liberal democratic state is supposed to adjudicate between knowledge and ideology. Russiagate illustrates Turner’s warning that when knowledge itself is politicized, neutrality collapses. Government bodies (DOJ, FBI) and media institutions could no longer appear as neutral arbiters—they became combatants.

Credibility as a Scarce Resource

Turner stresses that public trust in experts is a fragile, depletable resource. Russiagate’s conflicting narratives burned through enormous reserves of credibility. Intelligence agencies, the press, and political elites all came out with diminished authority. From a Turnerian angle, this is the long-term cost of weaponizing expertise for partisan ends.

If he were commenting directly, Turner wouldn’t resolve the empirical truth of Russiagate. Instead, he’d highlight the structural lesson: when rival expert communities lock into mutually exclusive “truths,” what matters is not which side is right, but how the system of expertise itself loses legitimacy.

The Politics of Expertise

He has a sustained argument that there are no Archimedean points of neutrality. That’s where he makes the “creation science / race & IQ” asides you flagged — showing that credibility judgments about knowledge vs. ideology are socially enforced, not neutral.

He also talks about the way professional and governmental bodies use consensus as closure to decide who counts as an expert. That’s a direct analogue to how Russiagate “experts” were credentialed in MSM vs. discredited in MAGA outlets.

Making Democratic Theory Democratic

He doubles down on credibility as a political resource. Experts don’t just bring facts; they also impose frames of legitimacy that foreclose rival interpretations.

He argues democratic theory needs to recognize this dynamic: expert claims are never purely epistemic, they are political moves embedded in institutions.

That maps perfectly onto Russiagate: MSM leaned on “expert consensus” to foreclose MAGA interpretations, while MAGA built an alternative credibility network (e.g., Barr, Durham, independent journalists) that Turner would see as a counter-closure.

Posted in Russiagate, Stephen Turner | Comments Off on Megyn Kelly on Russiagate and the New York Times

Why Do Smart News Operations Sound So Uniformly Dumb So Often?

Posted on August 16, 2025 by Luke Ford

I love the news. I subscribe to Apple News Plus, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times and numerous book reviews (such as the New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Claremont Review of Books, etc). Most of the time, I get my money’s worth. I typically get an hour of pleasure a day from reading the smartest reporting. Sometimes, however, I’m disappointed by the group think. For example, today I notice that the high-brow MSM is singing from the same hymnal with regard to Trump’s summit with Putin. How could the reaction be so uniform with regard to such a complicated topic?

In college I read a book on this topic by Irving L. Janis that has stayed with me: Victims of Groupthink: A Psychological Study of Foreign-Policy Decisions and Fiascoes.

This thesis matches my experience of life — that the cool kids often arrive at a consensus and the social pressure to conform to maintain one’s seat at the cool kids table tends to overwhelm independent thought.

Another dominant life experience of mine is that people usually hate it when you change. We all like predictability in our relationships. Bosses and peers want you to be predictable. If you are predictable, you cause other people less stress.

Peter Baker of the New York Times: Trump Bows to Putin’s Approach on Ukraine: No Cease-Fire, Deadlines or Sanctions
The net effect of the Alaska summit was to give President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia a free pass to continue his war against his neighbor indefinitely without further penalty, pending talks on a broader peace deal.

FT: No concessions, no ceasefire: how Putin outplayed Trump in Anchorage

WP: Trump’s pursuit of a quick deal makes it easier for Putin to dictate the terms

WP: Russia sees victory as Trump adopts Putin’s approach to ending Ukraine war

WSJ: Putin Returns to Moscow With Air of Triumph After Summit
The meeting with Trump helped give the Kremlin leader much of what he wanted, including putting Russia on an equal footing with the U.S.

NYT: Ukrainians Fleeing Russia’s Attacks Say the Alaska Summit Was an Insult
Evacuees at a shelter in eastern Ukraine reacted angrily to talk that land that has long been theirs could be given to Russia in exchange for peace.

Are there any elite journos saying anything different about this summit?

ChatGPT and the work of Stephen Turner helped me with this post:

They’re uniform for the same reason they were on Biden’s senility, the lab-leak, Russiagate, etc.: elite journalism isn’t primarily a contest of scoops anymore, it’s a prestige economy. The safest way to maintain status is to align with the consensus line, especially on “big stakes” foreign policy where deviation risks being branded naïve, soft on dictators, or unpatriotic.

Here’s why you’re seeing the hymnal effect on Trump–Putin Anchorage summit coverage:

Shared frame from wire services and the “cathedral” papers. Once the New York Times and Washington Post fix a frame (“Trump bows, Putin triumphs”), others echo it. It signals professionalism and shields editors from accusations of going off-script.

Pack journalism under time pressure. Major outlets lean on the same pool of analysts, ex-diplomats, and think-tank voices. Their talking points get laundered into nearly identical ledes.

Foreign policy priesthood. The U.S. foreign policy establishment (State Dept., NATO think tanks, Atlantic Council, etc.) sets the “respectable” range of opinion. Journalists amplify it because dissent risks loss of access.

Prestige mimicry. Reporters read each other more than they read events on the ground. If the FT and NYT say “Putin outplayed Trump,” you look unserious if you write “Trump gained leverage.”

Audience capture. The readership of these outlets largely expects a critical-of-Trump stance. Editors know stories framed otherwise would alienate their base and invite internal newsroom pushback.

So the result: five different mastheads, one narrative — Putin won, Trump lost. Not because every fact forces that conclusion, but because the institutional incentives all point toward uniformity.

How does this happen?

1. Closure

Stephen Turner argues that expert communities (including journalists) achieve closure by narrowing the range of acceptable positions. Once a dominant interpretation is established—“Putin outplayed Trump”—alternative framings (“Trump shifted the negotiating field” or “Trump extracted concessions”) are effectively excluded. Closure isn’t about truth, but about agreement, which provides stability and authority.

Anchorage example: NYT, FT, WP, WSJ all closed around the line that Trump “bowed” and “Putin triumphed,” foreclosing debate about U.S. strategic interests or alternative measures of success.

2. Prestige Economy

For Turner, academia (and by extension elite journalism) isn’t a neutral marketplace of ideas but a prestige economy: credibility flows from status, not empirical competition. Reporters and outlets gain legitimacy by echoing the consensus of the “serious” press and foreign policy establishment.

Anchorage example: By mirroring the Times and Post’s framing, the FT and WSJ ensure they’re inside the “serious” club. Stray too far (say, writing that Trump had leverage), and you risk being seen as unserious or even dangerous.

3. Anti-Neutrality

Turner stresses that expertise today isn’t just knowledge—it’s moralized. To appear neutral in a polarized climate can itself be seen as bias. The “correct” stance for elite outlets is skeptical of Trump, wary of Putin.

Anchorage example: A neutral frame like “Talks produced no deal, further negotiations planned” would be attacked as whitewashing Putin. So the moralized consensus—that Trump’s eagerness for a deal empowered Putin—was the only safe stance.

4. Institutional Peer Pressure

Turner notes that expert credibility is fragile—it depends on shared trust within a community. For journalists, deviating from the pack risks professional isolation.

Anchorage example: If one major reporter had written “Trump’s gambit could pressure Putin later”, they’d face ridicule from peers and editors. Safer to harmonize with the chorus.

5. Esoteric vs. Exoteric (Straussian Layer)

Exoterically, the public-facing story is simple: Putin triumphed, Trump blundered.
Esoterically, insiders may recognize more nuance (Trump’s disruptive diplomacy could unsettle old NATO patterns, or create bargaining chips). But these subtler takes don’t make print, because they risk undermining closure and prestige.

Bottom line:

Turner might say the Anchorage summit coverage isn’t an accidental chorus but a textbook case of how a prestige economy with built-in closure mechanisms produces uniform narratives. What looks like “dumb groupthink” is, in his sociology, the rational outcome of institutions trying to maintain credibility, neutrality-as-moral-stance, and professional status.

According to Stephen Turner’s The Politics of Expertise and Making Democratic Theory Democratic, three ideas are central for understanding things like Russiagate and elite journalism’s “singing from the same hymnal”: closure, neutrality, and credibility.

Closure: Turner describes how expert communities attempt to “close off” debate by defining certain questions as already settled. Once consensus is declared, dissenters are painted as cranks, extremists, or ideologues. This is visible in Russiagate: mainstream experts quickly moved to frame skepticism of collusion claims as irresponsible or partisan, while MAGA-aligned experts framed belief in collusion as a partisan hoax. Both sides attempted closure, but with different “communities of credibility” policing the boundary .

Neutrality: Turner repeatedly notes that the liberal state and expert communities claim neutrality, yet are inevitably accused of ideology. On race and intelligence, for example, critics denounce the research as inherently racist; defenders insist it is neutral science. In politics, Russiagate plays out similarly—MSM journalists frame their reporting as neutral truth-seeking, while opponents see it as partisan warfare in disguise. Turner’s point is that neutrality itself is a contested claim, not a secure foundation .

Credibility and the Prestige Economy: Turner emphasizes that academia and expert culture operate less like free markets of ideas and more like prestige economies, where credibility is distributed through networks of status and institutional authority rather than open contestation. In Russiagate, the prestige media (NYT, WP, CNN) and security-state veterans (CIA, FBI) carried enormous authority, allowing their claims to dominate—even when later walked back. Meanwhile, outsider experts or dissenters were dismissed as lacking standing, regardless of their arguments .

In short: Turner might say Russiagate is a perfect case of dueling closures. Each side claimed neutrality but was accused of ideology. Each side policed credibility by appealing to its own prestige economy—mainstream institutions on one side, alternative media and political figures on the other. What looked like a clash of facts was really a clash of authorities.

The media is a prestige economy, not a truth economy. Journalists at the top outlets don’t compete for accuracy, they compete for status inside their professional subculture. That means their real audience is colleagues, editors, and Twitter peers, not you.

Here are the dominant dumb ways of thinking that reinforce this sameness:

Pack journalism (herd instinct)

Reporters fear being “the odd one out.” If everyone calls something a “conspiracy theory,” you’d risk career death challenging that—even if it’s true. They’d rather be wrong together than right alone.

Narrative over fact

Stories must fit a moral arc—heroes, villains, progress, reactionaries. Anything that breaks the story structure (like Biden’s decline) gets downplayed because it’s “off-script.”

Deference to authority

Elite outlets outsource judgment to credentialed experts, government officials, or “studies.” This absolves them of personal responsibility—“we just reported what the experts said.”

Fear of audience offense

Elite news brands sell a lifestyle to a demographic (college-educated, urban, liberal). Anything that jars that identity is filtered out. Truth that offends the subscriber base is “bad business.”

Performative neutrality

They confuse neutrality with repetition of consensus. Saying “both sides” on safe issues while parroting elite cues on taboo issues allows them to look “professional” while avoiding real risk.

Prestige mimicry

Just as in academia, prestige flows from being cited by the right peers. Journalists mimic the New York Times or Washington Post, because deviating risks being labeled fringe.

So: they’re not dumb in the literal sense—many are clever—but they’re trapped in a cognitive monoculture where independence is punished. The result sounds dumb from the outside, because they’re really performing loyalty to the guild rather than truth-seeking.

Why elite news sounds the same — Turner-style diagnosis with examples

Why elite news sounds the same — Turner-style

Think “prestige economy,” not “marketplace of ideas.” Careers track loyalty to the guild’s consensus, not accuracy.

Dominant dumb ways of thinking in elite news (with examples)

  1. Pack journalism (herd instinct). If the pack frames an idea as “conspiracy,” few will break ranks.
    Example: Early dismissal of the COVID lab-leak hypothesis, followed by quiet walk-backs when official assessments shifted. See PolitiFact’s editor’s note retracting a 2020 “debunked conspiracy” ruling and later coverage noting DOE/FBI views (editor’s note; later update). For the pack effect in general, see research on conformity in newsrooms (Kellogg paper) and ethical critiques of pack reporting (Global Media Journal).
  2. Narrative discipline (“off-script” facts get sanded down). Stories are written to reinforce a moral arc; dissonant facts are minimized until the dam bursts.
    Example: Concerns about Biden’s age were soft-pedaled for years, then flipped after the June 27, 2024 debate when even the NYT editorial board urged him to step aside (WaPo on NYT editorial; timeline roundups: Guardian; Le Monde). Nicolle Wallace’s on-air post-debate line captured the moment: “It is not our job to tell people what to see and hear…” (clip).
  3. Deference to credentialed authority (outsourcing judgment). “We just followed the experts” is used as a shield even when authority is contested or political.
    Example: The 2020 letter from 51 former intel officials suggesting the Hunter Biden laptop had the “classic earmarks” of a Russian operation shaped coverage; later forensic work and court testimony validated large portions of the email cache (Washington Post forensics; explainer on the letter’s wording and impact: WaPo Fact Checker; background: wiki overview).
  4. Audience capture (don’t upset subscribers). National brands sell identity as much as information; pieces that jar the core audience get filtered out or reframed.
    Example: After years of confident framing, quick pivots (Biden age, lab-leak) coincided with noticeable audience pressure and reputational risk; the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2025 details how fragile business models intensify risk-aversion and sameness.
  5. Performative neutrality (“both-sides” where one side is noise). “Balance” becomes an excuse to repeat a consensus line while avoiding inconvenient facts.
    Example: Years of climate coverage wrestled with “false balance,” a well-documented pathology in mainstream outlets (CJR; Oxford Research Encyclopedia).
  6. Prestige mimicry (follow the cathedral). If the Times/Post frame it a certain way, everyone else copies the frame to signal professionalism and avoid isolation.
    Example: Coverage cascades on contested stories (lab-leak; laptop) show striking frame homogeneity up front, then a coordinated language shift later. See PolitiFact’s archived correction note (editor’s note) and later mainstream re-analyses (update).
  7. Moralized gatekeeping (credibility by accusation). Label dissent as disinformation, racist, or conspiratorial to pre-empt debate; prestige rewards the enforcers.
    Example: The 2020 intel-officials letter shaped newsroom judgments on the laptop story (WaPo Fact Checker; congressional follow-ups: Senate letter, House interim report).

Turner-style bottom line

Elite media is a prestige economy. The real competition is for status inside the guild, not for truth with the public. That’s why it sounds the same.

Sources (selection)

What about the universal media derision after liberation day? Then Trump made a bunch of trade deals that might be good. The CBO said trump’s tariffs might bring in about $3 trillion over the next decade. Did the MSM learn anything? Show any humility? I’m not claiming Trump is right about tariffs. I’m claiming the universal MSM derision greeting his trade policy was weird.

ChatGPT says: You’ve put your finger on something Stephen Turner would instantly recognize: the mismatch between uncertainty in reality and the certainty projected by elite media and expert discourse.

On Trump’s “liberation day” tariffs and trade policy, here’s what happened:

Universal derision at the start (2018): Nearly every prestige outlet mocked or dismissed Trump’s tariffs as ignorant or doomed. The NYT called them “economic folly,” the Washington Post “Trump’s trade war will backfire,” Financial Times “Trump risks wrecking the global system,” and so on. The consensus was nearly total: tariffs were “obviously” bad.

What actually unfolded: While Trump’s tariffs hurt some sectors and triggered retaliation (e.g. soybeans, steel inputs), they also shifted trade flows, forced renegotiations (USMCA replacing NAFTA), and increased tariff revenue. By 2023, the CBO projected tariff revenues could total roughly $3 trillion over a decade if policies continued. Even the Biden administration quietly kept many of Trump’s tariffs in place, suggesting they weren’t as absurd as initially portrayed.

MSM learning/humility? Very little. Coverage after the fact usually buried or downplayed the revenue and renegotiations, focusing instead on harm to farmers or global supply chains. When Biden retained the tariffs, the story was reframed as “strategic competition with China,” not “Trump might have had a point.” Instead of humility, most outlets re-narrated the policy as part of a different legitimacy frame.

This is classic Turner territory:

The media/elite experts engaged in closure early—declaring the tariff idea unserious and outside legitimate debate.

When facts complicated the narrative, instead of reopening the closure, they shifted the frame (China competition, Biden continuity) to preserve credibility.

Neutrality was compromised: the derision revealed ideological alignment with neoliberal free-trade orthodoxy rather than open assessment.

So to your question: no, the mainstream media didn’t show humility. The prestige economy Turner describes discourages backtracking—prestige is lost if you admit error, so better to re-narrate than to revise.

I am an anxious person. I am high-strung. When people approach me from behind, I jump and I swear and I lose my cool. So when I find things that decrease my anxiety, I embrace them. Two things that consistently reduce my anxiety are clarity and truth. I think I got these in creating this blog post, and as a result, my annoyance with reality diminished and my sense of mastery grew.

News isn’t the only sector of life where I’m disappointed by the uniformly dumb things coming from our social betters. A few years ago, however, I realized that singing from the same hymnal is a requirement for belonging. And if you want to be part of the cool kids club, there’s usually a stiff price to pay — you have to humiliate yourself by saying dumb things, such as that Biden’s obvious periodic senility is right-wing disinformation or that all immigrant groups assimilate equally well into America or that the 2020 election was stolen.

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