The divergence between legacy media reporting of the Depp-Heard case and the views of American viewers is a canary in the coal mine

From "There is, so far, only one proven fact in digital publishing: The more you publish the more successful you are...." a post by Ann Althouse.  

I have little interest in celebrity folderols and spent virtually no time following the Depp-Heard trial.  I have been more interested in the media response than in the facts of the case.

From the top-rated comment over there: "The 'mainstream media' coverage seemed to start with the assumption that Heard was 100% truthful, Depp was as good as a convicted abuser, and that all cases of women accusing men of abuse should be taken at face value without any effort of proof or consistency.... Tiktokkers covering it while potentially coming from their own subjective positions seemed to understand the trial better than the mainstream media which decided from the beginning that Heard was 100% the victim and continues to see anything other than that as somehow setting back the Me Too cause rather than strengthening it by sorting through false or seriously questionable accusations with care and focusing on clearer cut cases of pattern abuse."

Althouse is getting at a larger phenomenon.  

"The most effective of the influencers turned commentators, like @houseinhabit’s Jessica Reed Kraus, know this. Kraus is a San Clemente, California, mother who got her start in the content mines as a lifestyle blogger (picture lots of wavy-haired sons, surfboards, pools, and exposed ceiling beams). Over the past year or so, she morphed into a trial-obsessed Instagrammer.

"Her gossipy roller-coaster ride through evidence and pop culture has earned her almost 1 million Instagram followers and apparently thousands of paid Substack subscribers.... Kraus folds together her own commentary, court evidence, trial video, and professional photos to which she surely cannot claim copyright. ('Photoshoot in The Bahamas day after claiming she was "beaten within an inch of her life,"' Kraus posted over a skin-baring image of Heard.) She also has a clever natural sense for cheering on a surprising side: Just as she was strongly, disturbingly sympathetic to Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a chief instigator of the anti-Heard story line.... Kraus is just one of hundreds who racked up huge numbers and built followers during the trial.... Now that the trial is over, these creators and many more are left with huge audiences.... If the innovators stay in the game, they’ll find out just how lousy the media business can be."

With the arrival of smart phones and universal internet, the mainstream media business model has been in a tailspin and with no clear pathway to financial salvation.  For whatever reason, we have seen a de facto alignment between legacy mainstream media companies and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.  It has seemed to be a mysterious article of faith among journalists that the financial viability of legacy mainstream media is somehow dependent upon the political fortunes of the political hard left.

It seems a mysterious belief system to me but perhaps there is a rational story to be told at some point why this scenario has emerged.

But the more totalitarian the legacy mainstream media becomes, the more vengeful they are against critics, the more the more insistent they are that there is only one narrative to be reported, and the more eager they are to abridge freedom of speech for citizens, the greater is the dynamism among emerging non-traditional media.

As Althouse hints at, it is not the case that there is new and improved, more accurate reporting occurring.  What has happened is that the volume of reporting has increased and is coming from more non-traditional sources. Which does not bode well for the entrenched business defenders regardless of their particular ideological biases.

With that increasing volume of non-traditional reporting, there are more perspectives.  More critically, it is also revealing 1) just how poor the legacy mainstream reporting quality has become, 2) that some non-traditional sources of reporting are doing a better job of accurate reporting than legacy media, 3) just how divergent legacy mainstream media has become from the views and world views of average Americans, and 4) just how incompatible ideological reporting is with accurate reporting.

This divergence between legacy establishment views and public views can also be seen in film reviews.   

A new analysis has revealed that the gap between what film critics think of movies — compared to the opinion of the general public — has grown in recent years.

In a blog post entitled "Are film critics losing sync with audiences?", cinema data analyst and film producer Stephen Follows looked into the critical response to 10,449 films released in US cinemas between 2000 and 2019 (via Metacritic), and compared the reviews to the audience scores on IMDb.

The analysis revealed that although critics and audiences broadly agree for most of the time, critical opinion has diverged from audience reactions more and more since the turn of the millennium.

[snip]

Films that have enjoyed stronger audience reactions compared to critical reviews recently include Tom Hardy's Venom (29% on Rotten Tomatoes' Tomatometer vs 81% audience approval) and Gerard Butler's 2019 action romp Angel Has Fallen (38% critical rating vs 93 audience score).

Conversely, recent critical darlings that audiences shrugged at include Brad Pitt space drama Ad Astra (83% approval from critics vs 40% from audiences) and heist reboot Ocean's 8 (69% approval by critics, but just 45% approval from audiences).

Where it all goes from here, who knows?  We are watching evolutionary forces working on social, commercial, and epistemic levels.  It is interesting to see.  I am most struck, though, by just how divergent are the opinions and world views of the chattering class from those of their fellow Americans and from objectively measured reality.