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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.
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.
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.
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.
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