I haven't exactly kept it a secret how completely, utterly fed up I am with media lately.
This goes from the miasmic depths of YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok right on up the food chain to the supposedly responsible mainstream media. I still place a lot of the blame for Donald Trump's victory at the feet of the New York Times and their ilk; for months they ignored every babbling, incoherent statement Trump uttered, as well as the fascistic pronouncements he made during his more lucid moments, while putting on the front page headlines like "Will Kamala's Choice In Shoes Alienate Her From Voters?"
The idea of responsible journalism has, largely, been lost. Instead we're drowning in a sea of slant and misinformation, generated by a deadly mix of rightward-tilted corporate control and a clickbait mentality that doesn't give a flying rat's ass whether the content is true or accurate as long as you keep reading or watching it.
While the political stuff is far more damaging, being a science nerd, it's the misrepresentation of science that torques me the the most. And I saw a good example of this just yesterday, with a fascinating study out of the Max Planck Institute that appeared last week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.
First, the actual research.
Using data from the x-ray telescope eROSITA, researchers found that the Solar System occupies a space in one of the arms of the Milky Way that is hotter than expected. This "Local Hot Bubble" is an irregularly-shaped region that is a couple of degrees warmer than its surroundings, and is thought to have been caused by a series of supernovae that went off an estimated fourteen million years ago. The bubble is expanding asymmetrically, with faster expansion perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy than parallel to it, for the simple reason that there is less matter in that direction, and therefore less resistance.
One curious observation is that there is a more-or-less cylindrical streamer of hotter gas heading off in one direction from the bubble, pointing in the general direction of the constellation Centaurus. The nearest object in that direction is another hot region called the Gum Nebula, a supernova remnant, but it's unclear if that's a coincidence.
The researchers called this streamer an "interstellar tunnel" and speculated that there could be a network of these "tunnels" crisscrossing the galaxy, connecting warmer regions (such as the nebulae left from supernovae) and allowing for exchange of materials. How physics allows the streamers to maintain their cohesion, and not simply disperse into the colder space surrounding them, is unknown. This idea has been around since 1974, but has had little experimental support, so the new research is an intriguing vindication of a fifty-year-old idea.
Okay, ready to hear the headlines I've seen about this story?
- "Scientists Find Network of Interstellar Highways in Our Own Galaxy"
- "A Tunnel Links Us to Other Star Systems -- But Who's Maintaining It?"
- "Mysterious Alien Tunnel Found In Our Region of Space"
- "An Outer Space Superhighway"
- "Scientists Baffled -- We're At The Galactic Crossroads and No One Knows Why"
*brief pause to punch a wall*
Okay, I can place maybe one percent of the blame on the scientists for calling it a "tunnel;" a tunnel, I guess, implies a tunneler. But look, it's called quantum tunneling, and the aliens-and-spaceships crowd managed to avoid having multiple orgasms about that.
On the other hand, given the mountains of bullshit out there about quantum resonant energy frequencies of healing, maybe I shouldn't celebrate too quickly.
But the main problem here is the media sensationalizing the fuck out of absolutely everything. I have no doubt that in this specific case, the whole lot of 'em knew there was nothing in the research that implied a "who" that was "maintaining" these tunnels; the scientists explicitly said there was some unexplained physics here, which was interesting but hardly earthshattering.
But "streamers of gas from a local warm region in our galaxy" isn't going to get most people to click the link, so gotta make it sound wild and weird and woo-woo.
Look, I know this story by itself isn't really a major problem, but it's a symptom of something far worse, and far deeper. There has got to be a way to impel media to do better. Media trust is at an all-time low; a study last month estimated it at a little over thirty percent. And what happens in that situation is that people (1) click on stuff that sounds strange, shocking, or exciting, and (2) for more serious news, gravitate toward sources that reinforce what they already believed. The result is that the actual facts matter less than presenting people with attractive nonsense, and media consumers never find out if what they believe is simply wrong.
But saying "just don't read the news, because they're all lying" isn't the solution, either. The likelihood of voting for Trump was strongly correlated with having low exposure to accurate information about current events, something that was exacerbated by his constant message of "everyone is lying to you except for me."
We are at a crossroads, just not the kind the headline-writer was talking about.
Honestly, I don't know that there is an answer, not in the current situation, where we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to force journalists to be even-handed. And the proliferation of wildly sensationalized online media sources has made the problem a million times worse.
At this point, I'm almost hoping the people who reported on the astronomy story are right, and we are in the middle of an alien superhighway. And they'll slow down their spaceship long enough to pick me up and get me the hell off this planet.
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