Unaccountable Consensus is Corroding Public Trust
Yascha Mounk (a German-American political scientist and author) talks frequently about this incentive problem in media: that journalists who go along with group think and are wrong, never get penalized, while dissidents who were actually right at the time, never retroactively get their reputations back. I’ve been thinking about this a lot, but it was his formulation which made the problem more obvious.
In elite media, incentives are wildly misaligned. If a journalist goes along with the prevailing consensus—even if that consensus turns out to be disastrously wrong—they suffer no real consequences. They’re “wrong with the crowd,” and that’s forgiven.
But the rare dissenter, who was right before it was safe to be right? They’re almost never rehabilitated. Their reputations remain tarnished, their skepticism remembered as crankery, even after they’ve been vindicated.
Many guests on Viewpoints have been dissenters from the mainstream consensus, and will likely be proven right over time:
- Mia Hughes on gender ideology
- Stephen Reich on educational policy
- Frances Widdowson on the Canada’s unmarked graves
- Melanie Bennet on classroom politics
- Marco Navarro-Genie on how Canada handled the pandemic
- and many more….
Will the elite institutions and polite society ever forgive them for being right? And what about their opinions on all of the people who went along with groupthink and got it wrong? Will they lose their credibility?
As Yascha Mounk has noted, this creates a perverse incentive: toe the line, protect your career. Challenge the orthodoxy—even with facts and good instincts—and you risk marginalization. It’s no wonder so few people speak up when it counts.
In the long run, this culture of unaccountable consensus corrodes public trust. If being right doesn’t matter, and only conformity is rewarded, journalism stops being a search for truth—and becomes little more than a professionalized echo chamber.
