Media Guide, Part 1: The Invisible Consensus
Most people's values are roughly equivalent
Takeaway: the media divides the public and uses distraction and personal insinuation to create doubt and confusion about issues which MOST people would otherwise agree on: “this doesn’t happen”'; “this isn’t a big deal”; “people who care about this are bad people (or bad people-adjacent)”; “the experts aren’t sure about this thing, and so you shouldn’t be either”; etc.
I guess…I don’t know. I don’t know. Because — you know who I would defer to on that, just because neither of us are sex educators? I would defer that question to a qualified professional, a sex educator, and say hey, you’re an expert, you’ve treated tons, you know, you’ve educated tons of people, you’re a full-time sex educator, you’ve really studied this. What are the appropriate boundaries? I don’t think that myself, as a journalist, or a media personality, I don’t think I’m the right one to make that decision. And I guess I’m wondering why you….I’m wondering why you feel like you’re qualified to be a sex educator when you have no background in that.
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, speaking to about showing graphic material depicting anal sex to young children
Taylor Lorenz, a WaPo journalists famous for doxing and harrassing subjects of her stories and their families and co-workers has stated she has “severe PTSD” from being doxed and harrassed
It’s difficult to feel certain these days. Certainty kills curiosity, and it often inflates feelings and opinions into fanatical beliefs, but a certain daily degree of certainty is useful and healthy. We must act as if we know things every day (our neighbors aren’t bad people, our political system functions, our money will be worth something tomorrow) and being lost in a constant cloud of ambiguity is simply not psychologically healthy for people. For example, self-styled ‘non-binary’ folks have dramatically worse mental health outcomes than us binary folks. This could be causal or not (or it might be that a high degree of self-absorption characterizes both people who tend to call themselves NB and people with depression & anxiety) but it’s certainly not oppression or social stigma: until a decade ago no one knew what NB meant and I’ve never heard of an anti-NB hate crime. In my experience non-binary people tend to be anxious young women who believe certain things about gender and society more generally and have applied their beliefs and a certain modern whimsy regarding identity to claim that the sex binary simply does not apply to them. They then sometimes use a feminine tendency toward social aggression to try to force other people to reflect their stated identity in interactions. It’s fairly tiresome, and the cultural luster has already faded from the identity, but it contributes to my point: certainty and social consensus are generally the most comfortable places for humans to live within. Most people thrive when they know whether they’re men or women. Most people thrive when they can feel certain about most things.
But that certainty has been eroded in many places, by technology and cultural change and by a corps of ideologues who claim that traditional certainties and consensuses as are actually bad and that upending them will be good, for marginalized people especially but also for everyone else.
Did you know that mass casualty events caused by Chinese drivers intentionally killing dozens of cyclists and pedestrians are now a regular occurrence in China?
Did you know that roughly 10% of public school students are estimated to suffer sexual assault in school at some time which, if true, would imply hundreds of thousands of mostly invisible victims?
Did you know that black citizens are at NO EXTRA RISK of death in interactions with police in the U.S. compared to white citizens?
Did you know that the Canadian native school ‘mass graves’ breathlessly reported in the media several years ago now simply appear to be misinterpreted GPR data and there have been no bodies or remains recovered?
You wouldn’t, if you read the news. Even if you pursued lengthy research into these stories you would probably come away with an entirely wrong belief. That’s because the media has now prioritized biased standards of political sanitization above newsworthiness again and again and again. The phenomenon of teen girls (often autistic or anxious) reporting gender dysphoria at dozens of times the rate of even ten years ago (now representing hundreds of thousands of individuals) should probably be a major story, but for YEARS the media has refused to even allude to the phenomena. Crimes committed by American black men against Asian Americans? A serious problem, and one which the hundreds of news stories and the #StopAsianHate campaign completely failed to mention. I could go on all day, but the point is that our media is unreliable (at reporting the truth, anyway… they are pretty reliably biased in certain directions). There is more information than ever floating around in the aether and much of it is being deliberately shaped or curated by people who want you to believe certain narratives. When can we be certain of anything?
Don’t worry-this never happens, even when it does. It’s totally not a problem, and should CERTAINLY never be reported by legacy media
Here are some rules of thumb:
Rule # 1 - When Many People Condemn Something and NO ONE Defends it, it is Bad
The media strategy of obfuscation and personal attack (usually by implication) is often deployed. Parents who oppose Genderqueer being kept in Middle School libraries are ‘anti-LGBTQ’. Anti-CRT bills in Florida are part of an effort to stymie the teaching of black history, nd so on.
What you will often find is a deafening silence where the defenders of the practice might be. No one explicitly defends Genderqueer’s content for children… they just pretend it doesn’t exist. No one explicitly defends racialist lesson about ‘whiteness’ or the segregation of lessons or extra-curriculars based on ethnic group… they just do it and hope that parents and the public don’t find out.
When no one will defend a practice, it is a bad one, and the people who are secretly practicing and promoting it (in class lessons and applicant interviews and DEI trainings) are operating in bad faith. They are trying to hide their efforts from scrutiny until the society has shifted so far that their efforts no longer earn them public opprobrium. Then they will claim that the thing was always happening and that it’s a good thing.
Practices which fall into this category:
Choosing unqualified pilots or lawyers or police based on identity characteristics
Introducing adult and explicit content to children in schools and elsewhere
Fast-tracking adolescents with comorbities and complex mental health symptoms straight to ‘gender affirming’ pharmaceutical treatments
Imprisoning people for social media posts that most people agree with
Teaching students about whiteness, or any other race essentialism
Discriminating on the basis of race for schoolchildren’s lessons or activities
Releasing violent, repeated felons in service of bail reform or to achieve equity
Rule # 2 - When Many People Make Claims and NO ONE Addresses Them, Those Claims are Correct
There are also claims which are made and are completely ignored or side-stepped. Similar media strategies of distraction and personal defamation and condemnation-through-association are sometimes made against the people making the claims, but more often they are just ignored (suppressed) altogether.
The fact that hundreds of children’s graves were breathlessly reported at the Kamloops School based on misread ground penetrating radar data is a fact that the media has studiously ignored in the last two years. This news caused a hysterical reaction in Canada and the journalists who helped create the story probably feel a little embarrassed but also know that fake stories like these cause massive drops in trust among readers and viewers. They desperately want to keep the modicum of trust which remains, although it declines every day. Do I know that there are not hundreds of unknown juvenile graves under the ground at Kamloops? No… but the fact that no one is now claiming that there are, and the fact that the government has made no effort to excavate any of the supposed graves tells me that I can feel pretty certain this was a media-driven moral panic, partly implemented to erode Canadian patriotism and stoke fear and guilt about Canada’s (remarkably liberal and enlightened) history.
This is a great piece! The mainstream media has completely abdicated from its responsibility to the public.