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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.

1/2

Geeze I wonder why this guy loves the press :

Personally, I’ve always been treated well by the mainstream press.

This advice of course isn’t going to apply to people who think January 6 was a peaceful protest, Trump really won the 2020 election, mRNA vaccines are dangerous, or that the world is run by a cabal of Satanic pedophiles, because such views, unlike anti-wokeness and anti-masking, don’t have any support in newsrooms or among the kinds of people who become successful journalists.

Wow I wonder how somebody with such bold and brave opinions could find that the media is not that bad after all.

But let's see.

This guy claims that somebody with these opinions could NOT be 'among the kinds of people who become successful journalists'?

What is an example of good journalism according to him?

Vice.

[Let's see what Vice thinks of the Jan 6 protests.](

https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7w743/gavin-mcinnes-wears-proud-boy-colors-again-throws-support-behind-jan-6-defendants)

Gavin McInnes Wears Proud Boy Colors Again, Throws Support Behind Jan. 6 Defendants

Oh my, that sounds like one of these people that could never be successful journalists right there according to Mr Hanania!

(Disclosure: Gavin McInnes was a co-founder of VICE in the mid-1990s. He left the company in 2008 and has had no involvement since then. He founded the Proud Boys in 2016.)

Oh.

I know several people have already pointed out that right-wing journalists are pushed away from the media, but I thought that this part was especially savory.

I have another example of course.

Andrew Anglin who draws millions of people to read his blog.

He writes a dozen article every single day, derivative, not of his own research, usually using the MSM as the source.

Why is Andrew Anglin not sending teams of journalists to report on first-hand information?

Gee I wonder maybe it has to do with him getting banned from social media, all payment processing systems, getting banned from Cloudflare, getting banned from several DNS, getting banned from webhosts...

He would be a successful journalist if he were a leftist, or if the right-wing were in charge.

Currently sitting at 10k followers on twitter a couple months after joining back in.

Part of the problem is that Republicans aren’t very smart, so they can’t pressure the media in effective ways to give them better coverage and do actually do things that can’t be defended like equivocate on who won the 2020 election.

Just smart yourself out of depending on banks and internet access to be a successful media company.

But don't smart yourself too much or they'll put you in jail like Virgil Griffith.

Back in the 2010s they'd just have roasted the guy on a reality tv show like King of the Nerds instead.

Now, let's look at the 'right-wing' media that is allowed to exist.

Ben Shapiro for years has enjoyed great promotion on Youtube, to the extent that left-wingers complain that he was part of the gateway to the altright or the radicalization engine etc... Funnily enough one of my zoomer friends said he was first 'radicalized' by Ben Shapiro.

Here is another example from Reddit, Shapiro has ads on Youtube.

Meanwhile, ever since Gamergate or earlier, a wide range of Youtube streamers can testify that their videos were demonetized, removed, shadowbanned or deamplified. For example Pewdiepie.

The 'Adpocalypse' began over two separate incidents. The first was when it came to light that terrorist groups like Hezbollah were using YouTube to upload and monetize videos promoting terrorism.

The second occurred when Felix 'PewDiePie' Kjellberg made a video that included men he had paid to hold signs that read 'Death to all Jews.' Kjellberg insisted his video was satirical in nature and has since apologized. But since his channel remains the largest on YouTube, and since he was partnered with Disney's Maker Studios at the time and worked closely with YouTube Red on original content, the backlash was intense, and the reverberations were felt throughout the YouTube community.

Now, why is Ben Shapiro allowed to enjoy such an audience on Youtube?

Is it because he is such a consummate professional, expert at SIO?

He didn't do too well against an actual conservative journalist Andrew Neil.

Is it perhaps because his opinions are not actually a threat to the system, much like Hanania's?

['And by the way, I don't give a good damn about the so-called "browning of America."

Color doesn't matter. Ideology does.'](https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/875730927002963968)

Perhaps Susan Wojcicki the CEO of YouTube thinks that she needs some 'conservative' talking heads.

Another example quoted in the MediaMatters link above is PragerU, which has an Israeli intelligence veteran for CEO, on video saying :

Frankly, I think a big thing we’ve changed people’s minds on is Israel. I got a phone call from … Israel’s foreign ministry … they called me. They specifically said “what you guys [PragerU] are doing is probably better than most pro-Israel organizations” because our audience is not Jewish or Israeli, so we’re not called ‘Israel.com.’ We do videos on 52 different topics, and a few of them happen to be on Israel… In no case we’re preaching to the choir on no issue because we have such diverse issues. Yes, we’re always conservative and pro Judeo-Christian, you know, American values, but we have moved a lot of people who have never heard positive things about Israel more towards Israel because of the diversity of our content.

There's a lot of such media out there. American exposure to Israel in the media is overwhelmingly positive. And that country gets a lot more media coverage than any other smallish country (prior to Ukraine in 2022-2023).

Another aspect is how tied up at the hip with American intelligence / deep state the media is.

Twitter for example had a lot of former FBI agents working there. But they are not the only ones.

The initial articles covering the January 6 protests said that policemen were killed during the protests.

The only death during the protest was an unarmed, female protestor.

This was known at time of publishing, but it took weeks for the NYT article to show a correction that the one cop who died was not 'bludgeoned' to death but died after the protests in some other location and without really getting hurt by protestors.

Moreover, there is evidence that the protests were directed by people who were working for the federal government, and this is not something that the MSM has been willing to cover much.

The MSM journalists don't even believe their own lies in some cases, as with January 6:

NYT National Security Correspondent, Matthew Rosenberg, contradicts his own January 6 reporting: “There were a ton of FBI informants amongst the people who attacked the Capitol.”

Rosenberg: “It was like, me and two other colleagues who were there [January 6] outside and we were just having fun!”

Rosenberg: “I know I’m supposed to be traumatized, but like, all these colleagues who were in the [Capitol] building and are like ‘Oh my God it was so scary!’ I’m like, ‘f*ck off!’”

Rosenberg: “I’m like come on, it’s not the kind place I can tell someone to man up but I kind of want to be like, ‘dude come on, you were not in any danger.’”

Rosenberg: “These fcking little dweebs who keep going on about their trauma. Shut the fck up. They’re fcking btches.”

Rosenberg: "They were making too big a deal. They were making this an organized thing that it wasn’t.”

Rosenberg RESPONDS: “Will I stand by those comments? Absolutely.”

The irony with this is that during the Charlottesville protests of 2016, one of the deaths was a female left-wing protestor who was walking on the street in front of stopped cars, when one car ran at moderate speed into the car at the back of the line, which caused the other cars to move and hit her.

The Dailystormer was mainly deplatformed because they made a joke about her being fat.

I don't think any of the media outlets calling the dead female protestor of 2022 an insurrectionist or a terrorist has been deplatformed.

The perpetrator had his time of glory on TV instead of getting several life sentences like James Field.

I think the biggest problem for the media is what they choose to cover.

If a team of scientists makes a discovery, they have guidelines to go out of their way to find a woman or a non-white to talk about it, even if their involvement was very minor.

If they talk about a country that their bosses like, then they say (mostly) positive things, no matter what.

The issue is that this kind of thing can change very fast.

One day we support #MeToo, the next we have to remember the tragedy of Emmett Till.

Here's an example with a NYT journalist writing a hitpiece on Americans who indulge in Russian propaganda, getting their own media's links thrown back at them when asking for source on Ukraine being a corrupt country.

2/2

Another issue is that when needed they are all coordinated to cover up or create urgency.

The joke at the time 'Oh it's Ukraine season? I still have my Covid decorations up'

illustrates this state of affairs, where the American/Western media overwhelmingly talks about the same thing at the same time, to take over the mind of the people.

Then they claim that there is such a thing as democracy, while the majority of people get their opinions fed directly from the same sources, with a handful of billionaires controlling all large corporate media that is allowed to have bank accounts and appear on the internet.

The recent Biden classified documents 'scandal' is another example.

The initial find was on November 2.. Right before the Midterms.

But we did not see it in the media before the end of the election of the speaker of the House.

Compare this to the leak of the Roe v. Wade overturning before the Midterms.

Finally, here is a critique of this article on unz.com.

I will quote just the end:

second opinion, from Paleo Retiree, who worked for decades at a major weekly news magazine. After I wrote about the bronze statue boom of the last third of a century, which I’ve seen with my own eyes all across the country but can’t recall ever reading about in the national press as a subject worthy of art criticism, he responded:

BTW, there’s a surprisingly big world out there of gifted people — architects, painters, composers, poets, etc — creating delightful, solid and beautiful stuff in trad kinds of ways. I’ve met a bunch of them. The reason your average American culturefan isn’t aware of this activity is that the press doesn’t cover it, so you aren’t being told about it. You won’t know about it if you don’t stumble into it yourself.

You can trust me on this, btw: back in the ‘90s I pitched a lot of story ideas about the various New Traditionalisms to a lot of different editors, and 99.9% of the time my ideas were shot down. I had to have had the worst batting average of any arts reporter ever, lol.

You’d think editors of arts sections and arts publications would find such people and developments interesting, and would want to explore them and tell readers and viewers about them. But no: in fact what I found was that the editors and producers (and the people behind them) who run the discussion about the arts in our country aren’t interested in mere reporting, let alone in giving their readers and viewers a fair picture of what’s really going on culturally in the world. They’re interested in dictating terms and promoting agendas. A few scales fell from my eyes. It’s almost like the entire news business generally!

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