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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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Richard Hanania has a new essay out, "Why the Media is Honest and Good":

https://richardhanania.substack.com/p/why-the-media-is-honest-and-good

He argues that the mainstream media is actually pretty good at its job and is good and respectable for every topic except race, gender, and sexual orientation. His argument has a few parts but the major thrust of it is that there is no better alternative--when everything is tallied up the MSM is far more truthful than competitors like Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, Alex Berenson, etc. He points out that the revealed preferences of intelligent right-wingers seem to agree with him--many still read the MSM and even those who do not don't object to Hanania linking their articles with commentary as "fake news." He attributes this to conservative incompetence at institution building:

"No matter how conservative you are, if you want to know what’s happening in Myanmar, the latest news on nuclear fusion, or what researchers have been saying about the pace of scientific innovation, one has to seek out liberal reporters and institutions. Your choices are to rely on leftists to be an informed person, or to live in ignorance. Nothing is stopping conservatives from building their own media institutions, except for their own incompetence and lack of idealism. Even the few conservative institutions that people take seriously like The Wall Street Journal have to rely to a large extent on left-wing staff. There is no shortage of right-wing grifters though, and the movement should spend more time reflecting on this fact and less time criticizing others. After the 2020 election, Fox lost much of its audience to other news stations because it dared to acknowledge that Biden had won. Fox should be praised for maintaining its standards here, as it appears the Republican base has a much larger appetite for delusion than conservative elites are willing to provide."

He goes on to use Vice as an example of good(ish) liberal media. While he says they publish a lot of disgusting and stupid content, he likes much of their reporting, such as when they traveled to Lebanon to interview bank robbers or snuck into North Korea. He thinks the good more or less outweighs the bad here, especially since reporting like this cannot be found elsewhere.

He then makes some concessions about bias in the coverage but goes on to argue that the media is far less bad than academia:

"But I don’t have high standards for humanity. “Be intelligent, don’t explicitly lie to me, don’t see yourself as on a team trying to ‘own’ the other side, and have some kind of professional standards where you at least care a little bit about truth” is about the best that I think we have the right to expect. And institutions like the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic generally meet that standard, at least to a much greater extent than most of their critics. I would argue that much of academia is broken in the way that a lot of media critics think the press is. In many fields, reading the scholarly literature will either be worthless or actually make you dumber. The press largely works though, and I’m afraid that if we dismiss the Atlantic as crude propaganda that is destroying society we won’t have any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics.

The MSM is at its worst when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation because the left has lost its mind on these issues. One should be able to disaggregate various areas of coverage. If the media was as bad on every topic as it is on identity, I would probably join conservatives in suggesting we burn the whole thing to the ground, which is the posture I’m in favor of taking towards much of the academy. The press is committed to a narrative in which disparities are caused by discrimination and whites and men are constantly oppressing women and people of color. Even here, they’re usually not explicitly lying. For example, they’ll lower their standards in order to publish an unconfirmed report about an alleged hate crime against a minority, and often treat what should be at most local stories into matters of national significance. Recently, three black UVA football players were killed, and the Washington Post made it into a story about white racism, not informing the reader that the shooter himself was black until paragraph 8. This article may not technically contain a “lie,” but it is clearly giving a false impression regarding what happened."

Now, why does Hanania think we should care that the media isn't all bad? He thinks blindly hating journalists will simply lead to the right trusting even worse sources, and can even make people lose sight of the real issues in favor of lashing out to "own the libs." He sees the destruction of media as a pipe dream that is not even particularly desirable, and would rather reform it or create equally high-quality right-wing outlets. It also makes it more difficult for right wingers to achieve reform if they blindly hate media institutions and fail to see why the New York Times is read by many more educated, powerful people than Breitbart.

He ends the piece with an interesting example of counterproductive media criticism, partially from the right, which I copy below:

"To take a concrete example of this, in 2022 the labor union representing NYT reporters accused the paper of bias for giving minorities lower performance ratings than whites. This data should have reflected well on the paper; disparities are practically always a sign that a process is fair, while equality of outcomes should make you suspicious and can only be found in the most politicized industries and professions, or where standards are practically non-existent. Of course, the NYT was attacked from the left for its supposed bigotry. But the report was also featured in conservative outlets, with the articles not disputing the NYT Guild’s assumption that differential scores for blacks and whites indicates something is wrong. More broadly, the conservative press and even Republican politicians are generally inclined to support unionization for companies they dislike in the first place, often in the correct belief that it will hurt the institution in question by doing things like requesting diversity audits (sometimes they actually fantasize about unions being a force for conservatism, but this is a delusion that ignores not only what most unions are like today, but the long history of organized labor almost always being at the vanguard of far left causes, with the only exceptions being when it was in bed with organized crime). If your goal is just to harm your enemies, that’s a great strategy, but it will end up making society even more woke, since you’re not going to destroy these powerful institutions, and, as we already mentioned, conservatives have nothing to replace them with if they did. The NYT having dared to give black journalists low ratings in the first place should be taken as a sign that the newspaper isn’t nearly as bad as you think, and that if you engage constructively with it you can make it better. But if the Right is going to join the Left in accepting witch hunts involving unfounded accusations of racism, there will be much less of a tendency to maintain current standards."

I think his arguments are fairly convincing and the piece is a nice counterbalance to the usual MSM hate, but that Hanania underestimates just how damaging the MSM coverage of race, gender and sexual orientation has been. I am not sure I would say that the good from the large volume of pretty good reporting from these outlets outweighs the bad from what I consider the national gaslighting of the American population on these issues. He also sees the NYT's harassment of Scott as an unfortunate exception rather than a rule, which I'm not sure I am convinced by.

Curious what you all think.

This is a good essay and I have shared it with people. While I can treat the doxing incidents as outliers, as Hanania has instructed me to, it still troubles me that the people who do these things continue to find employment in an industry that allows them to do such things. Taylor Lorenz may be best-known for doxing LibsOfTikTok, but she also doxed Pamela Geller's kids in response to hate speech committed by their mother, which they were obviously not responsible for. Until Lorenz apologizes for going after Geller's kids, I can't think of the Washington Post as a good institution while they employ her.

Also, I'm not convinced that Trump playing "QAnon music" was a signal to his base like Richard thinks it was. That was stock music that QAnon followers had been using in their videos. For all I know, they started using that stock music because they heard it at Trump rallies.

If I write off every outlet that's been used as a platform for bad things, then I don't think I'll have any news outlet left other than fringe right stuff that would (and did!) radicalize me. So I'm going to forgive news outlets that at least don't employ people whose claim to fame is doing this stuff repeatedly.

The claim that Taylor Lorenz's coverage of the Oshry sisters was unethical doxxing depends on an understanding of "doxxing" which is not universal, even among online communities (which have a much stronger rule against doxxing than IRL ones). The Oshry sisters were running a social media influencer operation which made minimal attempt to conceal their legal names and very much traded on their family relationship with each other. Taylor Lorenz did not unmask an actively-protected pseudonym, and she did not share non-public contact information, which are the central examples of "doxxing". She signal-boosted the true, publicly-available, fact that public figure X was semi-public figure Y's mother.

If you wanted to defend Taylor Lorenz using the traditional rules of journalism (which I won't - the article was clickbait), there is a very obvious argument to make that she was unmasking hypocrisy - the Oshry sisters were making a big deal about how important family was while cutting out their mother.

The claim that this article was so unethical that Taylor Lorenz should be unemployable is the claim that there should be some kind of ethical rule against signal-boosting true but embarrassing publicly-available information about public figures - in other words it is a claim that journalists should not do journalism. The claim that it was a trashy article because it treated an Instagram influencer as if they were an important public figure is valid and accurate, but that isn't and shouldn't be a career-ending offence.

Does the Daily Beast even count as mainstream media anyway? The Wapo not holding it against Taylor Lorenz that she did tabloid shit when she was working at a tabloid is normal business ethics, even if they do think it was a trashy thing to do.

I'm under the impression that the connection between the Oshry sisters and their mother was not publicly known prior to Lorenz's article, which outright brags about how much effort the two put into hiding their mother. I may be missing context because I never even heard of them before I saw this article. With that said, nearly all dox can be described as publicly available information. It's connecting the dots with the information that's the threat to people.

I think with Taylor the bigger issue was Libs of tik tok AND Taylor being a cry bully demanding that any criticism of Taylor is evil misogyny.

I agree with you that women who start public fights (both verbal and physical) and then cry misogyny when a man fights back are beneath contempt.

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