Losing Conspiratorial Thinking #3 - Understanding Agenda Behind Revealing Agenda

Short: There is agenda behind revealing agenda. The potentially everlasting meta-cycle of agenda has a simple exit. Understanding the agenda behin revealing agenda. This post gives a quick but solid read about the very thing. Read to have a more steady ground to explain and solve conspiratorial discrepancies.

Frequently something bad happens.
News sources have to be denied because of conflict of interests on the side of the news outlet. A conflict between content and way of the reporting, and linked benefits gained by the reporting entity cannot be ignored - the news has to be disregarded as a whole, because the belief in due interest to inform can no longer be maintained.
We will define the general motivation to strive for ones benefits as “agenda”. And this post is about understanding agenda.

Because this blog prides itself for being concise, while also allowing for a mixed view (some might argue this is a thin veil to cover indistinc writing), I will tell you the main point right away: Everyone has agenda!
With this important foregone conclusion I want to point at its aspect in losing conspiratorial thinking. And as with everyone of my parts on the topics so far, my point will - again - revolve around not stoping short in critical thinking.

With everyone trying to improve their lives and everyone being influenced by their own agendas, the way we perceive to be able to satisfy our agendas is often the way we act. What we deem possible largely is not so much dependent on us, but on the strucutres (social and physical) we find ourselves in - I will call the sum of these structures “systems”. We perceive systems and act in a way that we believe will allow us to resolve our agendas. So the design of systems is almost all that matters for how we act. Quick theoretical basis established!

With all the different domains in which humans act, every one of them is important for some people. There are however some domains that are important for all people. One of those domains is the political domain. And all political domains are reliant on legitimation, which in turn is largely comprised of communication. In democracies this communication idealy goes both ways from governance to populus. So the democratic political domain important for everyone and - idealy - largely dependent on communication between all involved members. This discourse, in turn, is dependent on information. Information dissemination to the populus is largely supplied by specialized news actors. The way the actors in the news business act is, as we established, dependent on the design of the system they perceive. Quick establishment of “why we care”!

Frequently, when something bad happens, something bad happens again.
Consumers of news relevant for the political discourse are often aware of the possibility of agenda. When some plausible story gets around, that some news outlet is biased in their reporting due to agenda, the consumers often try to ignore the outlet in total. However, there are frequently agendas, that lead news actors to argue that some other news actor is not to be trusted in their reporting. E. g. actor “A” might want to untruely discredit another actor “B” purely so that “B” is not trusted, when he was to report on true discrediting information about “A”. Spin loads of even more confusing constellations would be fun and easy, but the point seems clear: There are actors (in the news sector), whose agenda it is to hide their agenda when pointing out the agenda of others.

So when conspiratorial thinkers say “This actor (politicians from party XYZ) is obviously the bad one, this other actors (news paper group ABC) said so!”. It makes all the difference if its believeable that the agenda of ABC is more likely to want to report the truth (e.g. because their MO is well researched news for a charged product), or if the agenda is more likely to want to profit from a change in perception of XYZ (e.g. because the news paper is owned by a political rival of XYZ).
This extra step is most common among conspiratorial thinkers, but the solution is very close.

Thanks for reading! Stay beautiful <3