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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.

I find it pretty obvious that the mainstream media is dishonest and awful.

But I do think, in general, that mainstream media is better than right wing media for the simple reason that they grind their axe less. Mainstream media can write about style, or sports, or music, or science or a million other topics and sometimes they can even leave their woke bullshit out of it. Whereas right wing media exists largely only to counter the mainstream media and therefore spends nearly all their energy on the culture war.

A strong right wing media would be one that spends less time fighting the left and one that just reports the facts. They could even have a travel section and talk how they spent a lovely three days in Mexico with nary a mention of politics.

I don't think such a thing exists.

and sometimes they can even leave their woke bullshit out of it.

Can they really? I heard a piece on the radio this morning. It was about a local woman making her debut with the local opera. It was strange, I thought, to feature such on the news, until I heard her name, and heard her speak.

She's black. That's why she was on the radio. A black woman at the opera is news, a white woman at the opera is bupkis. Now the interview didn't mention race at all. It didn't ask about difficulties overcome or racism faced. It was just a nice puff piece about a local girl singing for the local opera. You might not consider this grinding the axe, but I do.

When every single thing on the radio is, "but what about the women," or, "but what about the gays," or, "but what about the blacks," or, "but what about the trans," then yes, I'm going to consider it an axe to grind, and I can't unsee it anymore.

When every single thing on the radio is, "but what about the women," or, "but what about the gays," or, "but what about the negros," or, "but what about the trannys," then yes, I'm going to consider it an axe to grind, and I can't unsee it anymore.

I just don't think this is fair representation of mainstream media. If we take the BBC, as just one example, surely the most mainstream of all mainstream media, and looks at the current headlines that just isn't true.

The current top stories on the UK home page are in order Sunak's fine, the nurse strikes, Zahawi's tax affairs, the new NZ PM, the compensation being set for a patient whose limbs were wrongly amputated, a feel-good puff piece about a man donating to his local pharmacy and Germany's tanks to Ukraine, or lack thereof. If you won't any article with a culture war article, there's only two out of the dozens on the front page, one of which is just a report about the Archbishop of Canterbury's commeaents on the recent gay marriage debate in the C of E, which is completely neutral and probably a worthy topic for coverage, and one about Andrew Tate. In the World section there are no pieces with a culture war angle, expect the Andrew Tate article which reappears here but not very prominently.

But fair enough, that's not American. NYT? The top article is about layoffs in tech, 2nd on military support to Ukraine (tanks), then others on Haiti, NZ, AI, David Crosby and George Santos. The only one of the main page that could be considered to have a culture war angle is the one on March for Life, but I don't think that's unreasonable.

The point of all this is if all you are hearing is about 'marginalised' groups that is probably what you're listening for.

I think this is useful. Just to contribute, I opened the website of German newspaper Die Zeit. Ten years ago, they were known as being slightly left-liberal but overall pretty boring.

Headlines on the front page:

  • Report about a reporter bringing 4 Afghan refugees to his home

  • Accusatory article about German companies exporting to Russia

  • Article about the Polish MP to bring together a coalition of countries to send tanks to Ukraine if Germany won't

  • Russian "occupiers" having to use their own cellphones to communicate with each other

  • A reporter naval-gazing about being addicted to nasal spray

  • Piece about a self-employed designer only earning 400€ per month

  • Banks pay too few dividends for personal accounts

  • The evolutionary explanation for the meaning of life

  • Sympathetic article about people gluing themselves to the streets to protest climate change

  • (Sober, non-editorialised) article about the rising number of asylum seekers from Syria

  • Accusatory article about companies not doing enough against climate change

(I stopped here)

I have to say, I am extremely surprised there is no fluff piece about feminism. Them being the reason I stopped reading them some years ago.

There's always a comment like this whenever media bias is brought up, and I still don't really know how to bridge the gap between your viewpoint and the OPs. I feel like you could make the same argument about a hypothetical issue of Pravda in 1950.

"Comrade, you say that everything in the news is about Marxism, or praising the Supreme Leader, or rooting out counter-revolutionary forces, but it is not so! Look, here we have an article about a town collective that exceeded their monthly ditch digging quote by 225%, here there is an article about new libraries being built using funds seized from wreckers, and another about the Mayor of St. Petersburg providing commentary on the liquidation of kulaks which, as far as I can tell, is completely neutral. Then there's a simple factual article about a former KGB lieutenant getting appointed as governor of an oblast. Sure, there's an article about Pavlik Morozov and how we need more patriotic children like him, and there's an opinion column about how wreckers are undermining the socialist state and ought to summarily executed, but really, you're only going to be upset by that stuff if you go looking for it. Perhaps you have some sort of complex?"

That last line, the psychoanalysis angle, has always been unproductive, IMO and is more of a veiled sneer than anything. Anyway, my point is that if you're a liberal sea creature swimming in liberal water, you might only notice that there's water at all when there's a particularly strong current. But a conservative land creature under 20 feet of water will feel a.quite justifiable sense of weight and oppression even if the waters are perfectly still.

Yeah but looking at one random 1955 edition of the Current Digest of Soviet Press, which collated the top stories in newspapers such as Pravda the bias is way more obvious and prevalent than you suggest. The top story is on 'The profound treatment of Leninist philosophical heritage', then we have an article on Jazz, but this is used to attack Western racism, then one on 'gross provocation by French police authorities', another praising Soviet foreign policy, one criticising the reception of a Soviet delegation in the US, a discussion of Marx on religion and countless others. Almost the only one without an overt Marxist, anti-Western or pro-Soviet angle is one article on sheep farming. The bias is obvious and everywhere.

That's because you're looking at it from the outside. You weren't raised in an environment where articles on with those themes and topics were considered "normal" and "non-controversial." That's the whole point of my post. If you had been born in 1915 and grown up reading nothing but that stuff in newspapers it might not seem very ideological at all.

I will concede that Cathedral propaganda is much more subtle, but that doesn't make it any less effective. Quite the opposite, in fact -- the Soviet framework was less totalizing, less all encompassing than the liberal framework (see Legutko's Demon in Democracy).

I feel like we're running fairly close to an unfalsifiable argument, where if there doesn't appear to be any propaganda or bias in MSM that must simply be because the observer is inoculated to it or because it's so subtle.

The comment near the top of this chain said everything they heard would invariably have an angle about a marginalised group; while I can't speak for American radio, this just doesn't seem to be the case in prominent MSM outlets.

I feel like we're running fairly close to an unfalsifiable argument, where if there doesn't appear to be any propaganda or bias in MSM that must simply be because the observer is inoculated to it or because it's so subtle.

I think this is self-evident. The question is not whether there is bias, only how much, because there is no such thing as a neutral viewpoint. To get a bit pedantic, the most mundane dog-bites-man story will have some sort of philosophical framework baked in consisting of basic assumptions about reality, such as what a dog is ("a mammal often kept as a domestic housepet," "a ritually unclean animal," "a harbinger of evil," "a symbol of wiley cleverness," etc. etc.) and what a man is (well, in $CURRENT_YEAR maybe this is a bad example). Articles about mundane topics written by ancient Greeks are far enough removed from us culturally that they are laden with bizarre assumptions that make no sense to us unless we read up on ancient Greek culture and society beforehand to understand their framework.

We can easily see the unique assumptions (the bias) of the ancient Greeks because there is so much cultural distance between us and them. American leftists and rightists are not yet so far removed from each other, so we can find "unbiased" stories that both would probably agree are "neutral." But as we move to topics where the left and right have diverged more, the distance between the two frameworks reveals (usually leftist) assumptions which, yes, are often very subtle. As I have stated elsewhere, I am a "reactionary" Catholic so my framework is much more distant from the leftist framework than the average American conservative (who I believe is rightly described as "last decade's Democrat") and so I can see the left/liberal/Enlightenment fnords more clearly.

Edit: To get off my soapbox and back to the claim under discussion, I don't think that literally every article or radio segment has a claim about a minority group, but a whole lot of them certainly do, and even a mundane piece about an opera singer has a subtext that might be invisible if you're thoroughly immersed in a 21st century American context.

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