By John Helmer, Moscow
@bears_with
When it comes to truth-telling at the standard of traditional investigative journalism, podcasting and podcasters don’t — not by a long chalk.
That’s an expression which appeared in British pubs long ago when darts players kept score by scratching it in chalk on an old slate tile. A long chalk was the large trailing margin between winners and losers.
Podcasting isn’t a pub game but a part of the audience wishes it was. They are the commenters who write out their comments after the podcast has wound up, usually to support with bouquets or attack with brickbats what was said. Brickbat is another pub expression, centuries older than long chalk, and not as neutral. It meant a piece of brick thrown for the purpose of hitting someone.
In podcasting, brickbats have turned into thumbs-down icons and up to a half-dozen lines of words, sometimes with insults, emojis, expletives.
A computer analysis of 4,000 comments for Andrew Napolitano’s pro-Russia, pro-Iran podcast, Judging Freedom, recently discovered that they amount to no more than one percent of the total podcast audience. In making their mark, scratch the chalk or toss their brickbat, they are also erratic. More than three-quarters of the commenters made their mark only once, and then disappeared from the podcast record. Just 17.1% of the commenters registered their comment on two or more of Napolitano’s podcasts; 5.5% commented on three or more. Only 0.15% of the commenters — that turns out to be just six individuals — commented on ten or more Napolitano’s videos. Nobody commented on more than fifteen in the sample.
Dogs are more loyal to trees than commenters to Judging Freedom.
The minority of this dwindling and disappearing stream want to set the record straight; that is, they aim to add something they know in order to clarify or correct something that was said on the podcast. In the time of print newspapers, they appeared in the Letters to the Editor column. In the old days that was better read than the news columns: so popular it was, in fact, that newspaper editors introduced a new page of signed opinions which came to be called the Op Ed page. It is still the tree which invites all breeds of dogs.
The majority of podcast commenters, however, want to see their names on the screen and appeal to the podcast producer to support the guest against rivals for ratings, or sack the guest with whom they disagree, and replace him with others they nominate for substitution. This is action gaming; it’s the intellectual equivalent of custom robos which blast away at each other until the commander’s robo has won all the hit points and destroyed the rivals.
Russian robos and Iranian robos versus American, Ukrainian, German, British, and Israeli robos. This isn’t journalism. It isn’t armchair warfighting. Maybe it’s fun, but it’s factless, feckless too, because the winner is always the commander’s robos, otherwise the game wouldn’t be worth playing. For gamers there’s no fun in losing. This is why in podcasting like Napolitano’s, the commander’s Russian and Iranian robos are always within hours or days or weeks of winning their wars, and always certain to win. Robos with recognisable podcast names are always winning their games, always wrong on the battlefield: if they weren’t robos, this would be a disqualification from the game. Watch Robo Mearsheimer play to win. And Robo Macgregor.
For the past month, when the Moscow office was closed for its annual summer holiday, there was time to compile a list of the main questions commenters have been asking of me in recent podcasts, or brickbats they have been throwing.
One thing this minority of a dwindling minority share in common with each other — they don’t read. If they do or did, they would have discovered that the answers they ask for and the facts they guess at have all been published before: they can be read in Dances with Bears or in the books listed on the home page. In just seconds, they can be retrieved with an AI machine. This is what the box or bar on the screen called SEARCH or PROMPT is for.
However, for podcast commenters and robo gamers who demand a quick-start manual, I have compiled the answers to the most frequently mentioned questions and allegations; and for a bonus, there is the AI machine answer to the most difficult question of all that has never been openly asked before.
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