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Notes -
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:
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:
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:
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.
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 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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