(This video is a placeholder until after the script has been finalized and recorded)
Video Transcript
In an increasingly polarized world, how can independent media buck the trend of:
- declining trust and
- establishment gatekeeping?
Take for example, this piece that Matt Taibbi and Matt Orfalea did about the Nord Steam pipelines bombing. — a piece which challenges the Overton Window (what is considered politically acceptable to say). When I shared this article with friends, I found that the less politically-aligned readers experienced barriers that prevented them from accepting Taibbi’s thesis 1234.
To help inform readers and build trust, I’ve developed CiteIt — a citation app that looks up a quote’s context when the quote has been linked to a web source.
If you scroll down this page, you can click on the “Majority Report’s” suggestion that independent writers need editors so they can avoid the type of mistakes that gatekeepers like Mehdi Hassan have charged Taibbi with.
Life is unfair. Typos are bound to happen, as are misrepresentations of mistakes and one can’t always reach all subsequently misinformed partisans.5 A productive response is to innovate, defending one’s record, 6 and demonstrating a higher standard of transparency 7 that discloses conveniently a quote’s context in a way that is not possible in print or television, and which mainstream media will find difficult to match. 8
See what a demo of Taibbi’s Nord Stream article looks like after I manually linked the sources, enabling CiteIt to look up the context, and pull from an auto-generated YouTube transcript.
CiteIt is not a panacea. 9 The potential of quotations to be taken out of context constantly undermines authors seeking to use quotations to challenge and inform their readers. By using CiteIt’s contextual citations, Substack could,
- give writers a tool to better inform readers
- help writers win over skeptical readers
- establish features that differentiate Substack from competitors like Twitter and Threads, and
- build a positive reputation that helps combat critics and gatekeepers.
I propose that Substack try CiteIt first with Long-form Articles, and if this is successful add the feature across the Substack product line:
To see the Nord Stream Demo article for yourself, click the green button underneath the video.
A footnoted transcript of this video is also available.
Links:
Footnotes:
Despite an excellent video by Matt Orfalea and Matt Taibbi’s 29 quotations ↩
I really like Matt Orfalea’s video, which I recall preceded the article, but this video format is designed to tell a story and can’t provide enough context to satisfy skeptics. When I did a usability test of my demo article, I also found that a significant number of readers skipped the video and went straight to the article. That’s why my demo integrated contextual video with the article. I know at this point that readers haven’t been introduced to CiteIt, so that they don’t know what to expect, but my hope is that contextual citations eventually become conventional for readers.↩
Taibbi didn’t actually argue that the US was responsible for the bombing and his thesis was pretty well undeniable.↩
Taibbi’s thesis was:
- American officials have an extensive, years-long record of promising action to stop or disable the pipeline.
- Those earlier statements were ignored both by officials and press commentators in asserting ad nauseam that the West did not have motive for the attack.
- Despite a total absence of evidence, American voices repeatedly insisted Russia was behind the attack.
There are bound to be people left with the mistaken impression that the typos Mehdi misrepresented were serious. ↩
Create a canonical response that you can refer back to, rather than having to rehash it.↩
This would be a way to play offense —build something better, rather than being defensive.↩
MSNBC may have a louder voice with those who watch television, but Substack writers have the potential to be more authoritative on many issues because mainstream media is limited by the Overton window and captured by its advertisers and sources. (yes, this is a generalization) ↩
To be sure, there are reasons that not all sources — like “Deep Throat” or Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream pipeline source/s can be disclosed. CiteIt is for stories where greater disclosure is possible↩
I saved a copy of a Slide that outlines Proposed Next Steps. ↩
A higher-quality alternative to Twitter and Threads, that differentiates Substack.↩
Make it easy to cite Video within Long-form Articles and Notes. Videos must support auto-transcription.↩
Make it easy to cite Podcasts within Long-form Articles and Notes. Transcript support would need to be added. Podcasts have RSS Support. (Historic.ly) ↩