That era is not happening.

I wrote about this last year, but I reposted the piece here. The Ivory Tower is no salvation, even if those in those powers worked as journalists.

Why?

They didn’t go into the profession empirically, and their theories have no ecological validity. Most people in academia are uni-literate, and that single literacy is anaytical literacy.

And they somehow think being one third literate is superior to being fully literate. Journalism is one of those professions where, unless you have all three core literacies in play, your perceptions can’t align with reality, and you keep giving people distorted and inaccurate tripe.

Journalists tried to hide this fact by appealing to authority — using a logical fallacy to prop up shoddy reporting. That’s why they always use phrases as “experts say,” “experts warns,” and “scientists say” as if this is a deific decree. This isn’t science, but scientism.

I created four models for journalism, based on core literacy: empirical (analytical), therapeutic (emotional), organic (primal), and radial (harmonized). I have written four textbooks on each since 2020, but my work began long before then. I became a journalist to gain ecological validity for my research.

I didn’t just become a journalist. I my studies that I conducted from Day One, and that included being a j-school student.

There should be more than one model of journalism, and even more than four. We have different kinds of psychology; so this is not some sort of big deal, but when you see faulty models being bandied about with airs as if something is new and innovative, and not just repackaged defective goods, you shouldn’t kept quiet.

I read this journal article in the periodical Journalism and had a really good laugh.

If you don’t know what “Inferential causal explanatory journalism” is (let’s shorten this word salad to ICEJ), let the AI-search engine tell you all about it.

It’s not all that impressive or new. What ICEJ happens to be is repackaged defective uni-literate journalism that collapsed.

This is an attempt for analytical thinkers to put a fresh coat of jargon in order to stop citizen journalism (i.e. primal-based journalism) from gaining traction.

The model itself is just a slobbering love letter to Appeal to Authority.

From top to bottom.

Let us count the ways.

1. The entire premise ICEJ is to take control of the product out of the hands of the grassroots and right into so-called “scientists” and academics. This is uni-sourcing, which is something you never do. We live in organic plurality. This also assumes that news happens with canned events, but canned events, such as press conferences and photo ops, aren’t actual news. Scientists deal with theories. They deal with hyopotheticals. They are inefficient because their way of finding things takes too long. People need to know things as they happen.
2. The entire scaffolding hinges on a public sector model, which is absurd. Academia is dependent on government funding. There is no bootstrapping here. The public sector is an artificial ecosystem which does not have to align with reality. It is isolated and impervious to the realities the private sector has to deal with constantly. If there is poisoned drinking water or terrorist recruitment at high schools, or even a mass murderer out on the street, you know, real news, you are not going to sit around and wait for those in the Ivory Tower to give their little decrees. News consumers do not have all the time in the world as well-paid academics. This is childish fantasy.
3. The entire model tries to force the journalist into cognitive outsourcing: having to not only be dependent on academia and its scaffolding, but then rely on AI — plagiarism-based software that cannot generate new information — to do their thinking for them. Who created the software? What authority controls its content? What stolen information slumbers there? How can software that is necessarily based in psychopathy be helpful here? What about the lies, inaccuracies, and propaganda it swallowed up in training? The bigotry? The archaic assumptions? What about those little things?

I could make a much longer list, but those three elements alone are fatal to this model. Journalism absolutely requires reporters to get out into the world and deal with other people. Why citizen journalism doesn’t have legs is that those people don’t actually conduct real interviews with the front line. They may interview their partisan friends with clout to give their World According to Me opinions, but what is their ratio of going out to observe up close, and writing in the safety of their homes?

This is the crux of the problem. Legacy media started to chase after elites and forgot about regular citizens. They started trying to emulate elites by telling people what to think and how to think about it, and citizen journalism has followed in those same footsteps.

The point isn’t to tell people how to think about information. Their reality is not the same as yours. Their life requirements are not the same as yours, and in organic plurality, information does not hold universal meaning. What works for the billionaire doesn’t work for the homeless man. Any given fact has multiple meanings depending on the time, place, players, circumstances, and core literacy.

Its rigs is to discourage alternative ways of thinking about information and form a static narrative from the onset, but try to use new jargon and trinkets in order to salvage the status quo.

This is not raw information, the very currency of journalistic value. This is the ultra-processed version of it where one group of uni-literate people trying to impose their cognitive scaffolding on others with the tacit assumption that in a world of infinity, there is only one way of seeing things because it is the superior way of seeing them.

This is greed, jealousy and hubris getting together and trying to leverage getting information and having an audience. People without emotional literacy (whether it be primal or analytical thinkers) do not want to give away facts to people. It is not enough for people to pay for the product. They want to leverage more out of it. So they bundle facts with opinion, spin, narrative, and propaganda so that your thinking is rigged to their benefit. They want to squeeze as much as they can so they can be on top of the pcking order and you are led to believe you cannot live without their analysis because heaven forbid you get something out of those facts and do better for yourself than the person giving you that information.

You can’t do journalism without have all three core literacies in play, and that means giving people…

THE FACTS.

That’s it. How you gather facts depends on a variety of factors. My textbooks go over each of these factors separately, and then together.

This does not require AI. This does not require academia. This does require someone who is multi-literate, humble, and has their perceptions aligned with reality.

And someone who observes things for themselves and does their own thinking for themselves even if they are being bullied by a mob or an elite.

So this isn’t a “new” model of journalism. This is elites trying to trick people into relinquishing their free will and believing someone “smarter” than they are will benevolently do their thinking for them.

ICEJ is not journalism. It’s self-serving covert propaganda dissemination trying to uphold a now archaic cognitive scaffolding, and the world doesn’t need to enable another generation of know-it-alls, thank you very much.