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The Munk Debate with Matt Taibbi, Douglas Murray, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg is now online: Be it Resolved: Don't Trust Mainstream Media.
Contrary to many alternative media takes, I thought that Goldberg had a surprisingly strong showing. I remember her from the Peterson, Fry, et al. debate where she seemed too crude at times. This time Goldberg's opinions clearly came from experience, and her points were well conveyed. Briefly she claimed that there are clear signs that the media does learn from its mistakes and "overcorrects," that the media would not have driven you to make bad decisions if you followed it, and that the processes and culture of the media remain in place. The debate was worth watching just for her.
Murray conveyed a deep sense of moral disgust at what he saw as the carelessness of the Con side. This too came off as having come from experience. There was a point lurking here that I thought needed more articulation. The Con side said that they were professionals who were still doing what needed to be done, and they pointed frequently to successes on their side. But can one be called a professional if only the broad "process" is followed, and no attention is taken to details such as promptness of reporting, accountability, and the taking of personal responsibility rather than pointing fingers? In the absence of the markers of professionalism, it seemed more like they were claiming that their status as mainstream reporters performing an essential service gave them the right to lead people to a better future. In this I am reminded of the film The Verdict. Few people really care ifa doctor will do a fine job in the future, if he can get away with criminal negligence just this one time.
Gladwell's performance dragged down the debate consistently, but I feel some sympathy for him. His system of diversity has left him in a place that he didn't think it would take him. His constant complaints about white people did not seem enlightened, but as bigoted as any racist tract. Still, his point about whether people like him would have been "included" in the past did have something to it. What we've seen in recent times is a concept of diversity that succeeded in pushing people forward, but failed in the end to bring them up to the same standards as those who they have joined. It is just like programs which try to give educational opportunities for the disadvantaged, but which children finish without learning proper English. If you forget the goal, then you have failed and must try again. Similarly, Gladwell wasn't supposed to end his journey as something that strongly resembles a bigot, but he seemed unable to stop himself from doubling down on it despite it being obvious that it was doing them no good. If men like Gladwell begin to recognize failure and try again, perhaps building on what they have learned so far, I have little doubt that they will do a lot of good.
Taibbi did well, not much to say there. I do think that the Pro side didn't adequately answer questions about their alleged fixations on culture war (edit: and Twitter) issues, but it seems like a charge that could easily be thrown back at the mainstream media over the past decade.
I found her (Goldberg's) arguments to be the complete opposite of good straight from the get-go. The first point that stood out to me in her opening statement, that 'the media' is not 'ideologically captured' is just wrong. Like she doesn't understand what people are talking about. To reinforce her point she brings up the 'Red Wave' phenomenon the blue mainstream media were pushing in unison. A phenomenon that can be characterized entirely as 'I am afraid my enemy is going to win like they did last time'.
It seems to miss the point of what people have been saying about media bias. The point of the 'displeasure' of how the media was shilling for Hillary Clinton in 2016 wasn't that the media was saying that she was going to win. That was just a consequence of the actual problem. That problem being that 'the media' was obviously and completely in the tank for Hillary and an ill-defined political direction that we can code as 'blue'.
Because of this lack of understanding Goldberg's whole concept of 'over-correction' is just irrelevant at best. The media didn't 'correct' itself in any sense that relates to 'ideological capture'. It's still just as captured, just expressing itself differently. They recognized that they might have harmed 'the cause' and changed gears. They didn't change gears to correct their own beliefs. They changed gears so that they would stop harming the cause. From their perspective, in hindsight, it was obviously folly to say to your prospective voters that the election was in the bag. If you want to aid 'the cause' you must gin up your voters to vote. So you tell them that the enemy is mounting for an attack and that you must brace the gates, or you will lose everything you care about.
At risk of being too uncharitable to a person like this. Is she just that stupid? How can someone in her position look at this entire debacle, ongoing for years now, and still be so far off the mark? Is she a malicious actor?
She then moves into 'the big stories'. And says the mainstream media got most of them 'right'. She doesn't expand on what that means beyond that Trump and COVID where events that happened. Which, as a standard of 'rightness' doesn't seem to elevate mainstream media far above 'alternative' media but that's neither here nor there since she backpedals the argument a bit and says that you would be 'closer' to the 'truth' if you followed mainstream media and not 'alternative' sources. This is not really a truth apt claim since the 'truth' given out by blue media and non-blue media is simply not the same. This muddy language is then used to support her argument where she says that the hysteria ginned up about Trump was largely correct because January 6 happened. The problem here being obvious, one 'truth' says J6 was a coup attempt, the other 'truth' says it was a valid protest. If she is malicious, she is brilliant at what she does. If she isn't, she is an idiot savant at making stupid arguments.
I don't think you could underpin the concept of 'ideological capture' better that Goldberg does in her opening paragraphs of her opening statement. Not only does she demonstrate what it looks like, and that she is suffering from it. She also demonstrates that if blue journalists were fish, 'ideological capture' is the water they swim in. Lacking self-awareness to the point of absurdity.
I recently had a discussion with a guy who had a take along the lines "We should focus more on economy and not on culture war such as abortion or gay things that conservatives jin up constantly". When I pointed out that this would require the same sentiment from the left: stop going for trans rights, extending term of abortions or stop going for women quotas in professions and so forth. His answer was something along the lines that these are not CW topics, they are matter of unalienable rights that are outside of any discussion. And to me it seemed that he really believed it, he could not probably comprehend that let's say abortion from the position of conservative can be also viewed as question of human rights and preventing genocide. It just did not click.
I think that the whole "justice" angle fried the brains of some people. Everything is now matter of justice, fairness and human rights: we have climate justice, racial justice up to mundane things like dental care justice. In a sense this is "genius" position: every topic and policy I am in favor of is domain of fairness, justice and basic human rights. These are nonnegotiable and there is no compromise possible here, these are topics outside of standard political process and all reasonable people already agree. If you disagree it means you are extremist and not worthy of engaging in a discussion.
I'll grant you diversity quotas as a culture war topic the left is actively pushing on... but from my perspective the abortion and trans rights issues look entirely defensive from the left. The left wants the status quo ante of Roe v. Wade and wants trans people to be left alone. The right is the side making those into culture war issues, not the left.
A lot of people have already given the Red Tribe arguments, but I think there's a more complex underlying one that's easy to miss.
This morning, literally, I had a discussion about whether overheard joking or misunderstood naming or pronouns applied against a trans person (in this case, trans male, but I've had the awkward 'you know she used to be a he' version before from a guy who apparently thought I was very clueless) could be unlawful harassment. It's not wrong, either as a matter of law or a matter of policy.
And yet, it's hard to understate how much of a change this is from even local Blue Tribe norms less than ten years ago! I'd had similar conversations in deep Blue Tribe LGBT-friendly spaces at that time, but the equivalents were over things like when and how it becomes appropriate to handle pronouns without risking involuntarily outing someone. There was interest in passing something like GENDA, but it was far from an obvious and certain thing. Even in LGB-specific spaces, trans men are pretty new to a lot of people's radars.
That's not to say that makes the novel standards wrong. But they are, to a very large part of society, both novel and potentially ruinous to violate, while also completely unknown to one side and wildly obvious to the other. I don't think people understand the extent this make the 'defensive vs' offensive' framework even less useful than it might otherwise be.
Women secretly passing as men is a common literary trope partially because there are multiple instances of it happening historically. How many of those would identify as trans men by today's definitions is impossible to know (probably some, certainly not all?). But all of them would have expected to be treated as their identified, not birth, gender.
That said, putting trans people on people's radars is exactly what the left is accusing the right of here. Until the right started making noise (and laws) about which bathrooms people were using, it wasn't something people were paying attention to, so trans people were often able to fly under the radar.
This seems like reversing cause and effect to me. Isn't it quite likely a more accurate explanation that people simply noticed some odd presences in their bathrooms, that those who objected to them were the only people who had any reason to "mak[e] noise" about it, and that those people by implicit virtue of objecting to them automatically became right-sorted on the issue (even if they're perhaps otherwise fairly centrist (or even left-wing, those exist) or politically apathetic)?
Your version implies that, for example, the classic image of the "MtF" aspiring transsexual who looks, in terms of the general strength and direction of their biological secondary sex characteristics, somewhat like "Macho Man" Randy Savage in a dress (and though this obviously isn't all of them, they absolutely do exist and in many cases the volume of their behavior matches that of their appearance) was just hanging out in women's bathrooms with nobody the wiser or concerned until some dedicated, already dyed-in-the-wool right-wingers (like I'm imagining a MAGA cap-wearing "bathroom patrol" clothed in all red, not that I imagine that you meant to imply something quite so strawmannish) started "making noise" about it. Even a heavily toned down version of that doesn't seem realistic to me.
Do I think that your Average Joe who wasn't personally affected by the issue was paying attention to it? No, as they rarely do to any issue other than to maybe drop a quick virtue signal about the designated cause of the week. But it wouldn't have been something that "noise" was fit to be made about unless actual real people were affected by it. I guess what I'm trying to say that is that right-wingers by no means invented the inherent weirdness and discomfort for many people of certain gender/sex presentations and characteristics showing up in contexts where they traditionally had never and that "noise" almost certainly would have been made about it in any case. (I certainly remember much "noise" being made about it before any laws regarding the subject were even proposed much less passed.)
People were going to notice if they had seen so much as more women with prominent Adam's apples in their bathrooms (and even left-wingers probably would have "ma[de] noise" about this if they hadn't been given the appropriate ideological mandates), much less the more extreme retention of masculine secondary sex characteristics by many feminine-identifying aspiring transsexuals. You can stop many people from declaring their findings out loud, but, at least for now, you can't stop most of them from simply noticing (in the unofficially illegal sense) themselves.
There's a gradient here between more and less gender-non-conforming (to be clear, I mean identified gender, not sex-assigned-at-birth; I am intentionally not using "trans" here because gender-non-conforming cis people are also affected). I expect that more gender-non-conforming people have always had trouble in gender-segregated spaces while only moderately/lesser gender-non-conforming people may have been more likely to go unnoticed. The recent culture war over the issue means some people are a lot more aware of looking for gender-non-conforming people and therefore noticing ones that are only slightly gender-non-conforming that would have gone unremarked on before.
The question is who made the first attempt to move the Chesterton's fence of what level of gender-non-conformance is acceptable in gender segregated spaces. I had pointed to the North Carolina bathroom bill, but there was apparently a year or so of lead-up involving the left winning court cases and making rules at various legal levels that that was in response to. Of course, with court cases, it can be difficult to determine the aggressor (e.g. was it an intentionally set up test case), but it looks like the left started it, not the right.
That's just like if a few high-profile heists make shopkeepers more alert and thus more likely to detect petty shoplifting though. Nobody's fundamental values have been changed.
That is, similarly to how there's never been a "Chesterton's fence" among shopkeepers declaring any amount of shoplifting acceptable (as opposed to simply too financially trivial and difficult to detect to be worth worrying about), I don't think there was ever any "Chesterton's fence" declaring any level of "gender-non-conformance" in regards to not belonging to the biological sex conventionally associated with a particular space acceptable. (Meaning I don't think there was ever any point at which people who objected to the more extreme cases of highly visible biological males in spaces generally reserved for biological females accepted the less visible ones, just that, like petty shoplifters, they weren't worth trying to detect because the overall general risk of having any biological male in such a space was seen as lower.)
So unless you deny people's rights to those values/boundaries, a positive service has been performed in increasing their vigilance in enforcing those values/boundaries.
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There's a darkly humorous irony there. Transmen hitting the point where they're completely ignored and no one acknowledges their existence is a big sign that they've made it and are passing. Welcome to manhood, brother, no one gives a fuck, have a beer and deal with it.
Ah, sorry, that is the case to some limited extent in a few subcultures now -- furry treatment of the topic isn't great, but it's closer to the 'have a beer and deal with it' than anything else -- the post I'm linking to is more about a period where it was not really understood as a possibility, even for people who did not pass and were recognized. There were some places that were aware enough: eg, Norah Vincent's Self Made Man is further complicated by her own politics, but recognized the possibility of a "man trapped in the wrong body", as did some NPR interviews with her. But a lot of places could and did just treat as butch female, and not in a 'just one of the guys' tomboys extent even then.
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There's a "funny" corollary to that with detransitioners, where everybody's focused on the harm done to FtMtFs, while MtFtM's tend to get the "have a beer and deal with it" treatment.
This is somewhat justified with FtMs being the majority of trans people, but given their invisibility while trans, your theory is probably more likely to be correct.
FtMs are the majority? Maybe recently but historically the ratio is 10:1 in favour of MtFs
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Obligatory Norah Vincent reference.
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