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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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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