Thinking about the media environment

30 years ago if the president nominated a Supreme Court Justice that week’s Newsweek would have bits about her basically manufacturing consensus that this person and their history and perspective now mattered

15 years ago I would’ve been reading the Volokh Conspiracy as a group of professionals – with distinct bias and interests such that their writing became informationally denser with regular reading – had for months in advance mulled over who it could be, giving a foundational introduction to most of the possibilities

Today I see it mentioned in tweets that’re mostly trying to advance some greater agenda I have to pay long-term attention to the tweeter or at least their milieu to grok while actually still leaving the first-order effects of that particular jurist fairly opaque