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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.

It's strategically dishonest, he is angling for mainstream acceptance.

Conservatives should take note and build their own institutions, but mainstream media needs to go just because of the pro-regime anchoring effect it induces in normies.

"Strategically dishonest" - I don't think you can read his entire body of recent work and come to this conclusion, if you have any exposure to American progressives, or even the mainstream.

For example, the first paragraph of another recent article, "Man Needs Sex and Violence, Not Top-Down 'Meaning'" ends like this:

Me and the boxer became friends after that (last I heard he had impregnated some black girl in Chicago).

This is not how someone that cares about respectability writes in the USA 2023. The fact that he would include the impregnated girl's race at all will stop most left-of-center readers from going any further. The fact that he doesn't think her race is gratuitous opens a chasm of inferential distance between Hanania and the mainstream media, and he, as a self-confessed occasional troll, knows it.

It's strategically dishonest, he is angling for mainstream acceptance.

I've also gotten that vibe from his recent work. He used to write more as a dissident left-winger kind of like Scott, but now it seems like he's trying to downplay his dissident views to move upward in the establishment.

Angling for that column in a mainstream medium, yeah, people have said.

The other thing about Richard H. is that he has always made me uncomfortable with his whole visage. I chalked it up to him being Palestinian and hence likely a product of cousin marriage. I've said this repeatedly elsewhere, but he always made me uneasy. Good essays, dude made me nervous, hated watching any videos of him.

Then something really weird happened on twitter.

At one point, on twitter during some heated debate, he posted a screen cap that was really rather surprising. It showed his screen, whatever article he wanted to showcase, and also 'context ads' he ..crossed out? Instead of blacking them out by cutting what's there - what I do when posting screencaps he just doodled over them or something. Probably a stimulant user. (do dumb shit faster, more efficiently).

Now, this might just be me being overly suspicious - but as a single guy, the context ads I get are usually of the type of 'hot girls down to fuck / hot milfs / shitty web war game / world of tanks / war thunder / weight loss gimmicks / lingerie. Some other innocuous fairly generic bait.

His screencap, on the other hand, was showing ads for swimsuits. But not just any swimsuits. Swimsuits for female children. Now, this could be nothing, but together with his whole weird looking yet fiercely intelligent bachelor (thus no wife or reason to look up children's swimsuit) does make me wonder whether he belongs in the ranks of people who are very easy to blackmail.

Because I have never seen a context ad for swimsuits for little children, ever. Female lingerie, yes. Kid stuff? Never. And I've heard that if you got to web stores, and look up a certain kind of product, it's going to show the same sort of product in your context ads then all the time. E.g. a friend was buying dioptric swimming goggles. Bought some, her context ads full of ads for dioptric swimming goggles for weeks..

People probably saved him posting this. He only left it up for a maybe minutes, I regret not saving it because the whole episode is so bizarre I've been wondering whether my memory is playing tricks on me. But that has never happened to me to the best of my knowledge, so I think he probably has .. a problem.

I get ads about Grammarly despite being excellent at spelling and grammar - I think the Google AI is pinging off me being a Grammar Nazi and doing some word-association.

It's possible Hanania's said something somewhere that associates with that in the AI's inscrutable brain. Or it's possible he has friends or family with a daughter and bought one of those as a present. I'm pretty sure the incidence of bad ad targetting and the incidence of family with kids are both higher than the incidence of paedophilia.

Good points!

I got the same ads, on youtube. I think everyone did, no ?

Maybe my brain was uncharitable.

However, why would he stay single ? I know he's ugly as sin, but he's very smart and very driven.

These are very attractive qualities for women!

I mean, yeah. I'm not 100% on this, maybe 40%, which is however fairly serious as I don't see pedos behind every corner like some people.

I think the Google AI is pinging off me being a Grammar Nazi and doing some word-association.

Well, I suppose better that than having ads for Mein Kampf and swastika banners follow you around to every website, in case it took that word-association a bit too far.

Who would be advertising Mein Kampf? It's out of copyright, and it's well-known enough that anyone who wanted a copy would go looking.

Not to mention, I don't think Google lets neo-Nazis buy Google ads, so even if it thought I'd respond well to neo-Nazi ads, there'd be none available.

I can't actually find any info online about whether he has kids. I know I've searched Amazon for "toddler panties" . . . because my daughter needed some. Entirely possible he was just buying stuff for his kids.

He's also written about why you should have kids, and "guy who thinks people should have kids does, in fact, have kids" seems like an expected outcome.

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