Okay. I get where you’re coming from but, man, this seems like a naive take!
You’ve cited an interesting-to-me set of people: people who have all been extraordinarily successful at getting an impactful message out to new audiences, in particular audiences who wouldn’t have been drawn into the existing LW sphere on its own. Piper, MacAskill and Ball are all great communicators. A big part of that communication skill is matching your message to its audience. My hypothesis is that the behavior you’re critiquing is driven by their skill at figuring out what people need to hear, and when, to excite them and move them in the direction that they need to go in order to make the world a better place. Maybe sometimes they’re not perfect at it but they’re a hell of a lot better than you and me.
All you have to do is tell your audience what you’re doing!
Why do you think this will work? In the political sphere especially, motivations are extraordinarily scrutinized. Maybe Piper and MacAskill could get away with this, but I suspect Ball could not; maybe he can sneak a few things in now that he’s proven himself, but his ability to say anything about his motivations now speaks to his extraordinary communications skill getting where he’s gotten. (Also, you shouldn’t assume Ball was spinning before and is now telling the truth: he knows that “I’m a straight shooter” is what 80k’s audience wants to hear; he may be forced to spin whatever he said to folks he works with, etc.)
I don’t disagree that people should lean more in the motivation truthfulness direction that you’re pushing for. I also want people to lean more in that direction, and try to hold myself and my teams to a higher standard of truthfulness in comms every day. But it’s very much a spectrum, not black and white, depending on the audience. In my speaking and writing I’ve ~always had to change my message depending on the forum and I think the best communicators are ones who know this intimately and craft a message that people both need to hear and want to hear.
Local news is inherently interesting. Reading about new shops and restaurants in your area, or your friend’s kid whose football team is winning, or the local political drama where you go to the town meetings regularly—I think those all seem arguably more relevant to people in their daily lives than (e.g.) how corrupt, exactly, are the politicians far away from you. I think the “local news” trend tapped into this inherent interest for many years.
So I guess the question is, how did global news manage to gain a monopoly on interestingness? I think it’s because culture wars (and arguably celebrities and a few other global things) are a mindhack that have only managed to start winning and capturing attention in the last few decades, once news websites were able to start iterating faster based on feedback from clicking on social media links; and unfortunately that does seem to have some self-reinforcing effect where the more people are talking about the global things instead of the local things, the more interesting it becomes, to the point where local news now seems inherently uninteresting in comparison.