Reality vs. Reporting
Part 1: The Media Continues its Orwellian Decline
We live in a time of media fragmentation, in which the average person can comfortably stay in a biased and distorted information ecosystem indefinitely, totally unaware of challenging realities. This is truly ominous for democracy and anyone who expresses certainty about the outcome (either in the direction of catastrophe or reassurance) is overstepping their knowledge, for this is a situation which society has never really faced-at least to this extent.
I continue to primarily blame the mainstream media (MSM): its writers and producers and editors and anchors. THEY held the fixed attention of Americans from every background and of every political persuasion and THEY betrayed the conditional trust of the public… and they ultimately did this for money (all while excoriating many others who were motivated by money).
What if you learned that the only statistic ever really cited about police violence, by race, in the endless stream of controversy articles (especially in the past 3 years) was not wrong exactly, but was highly misleading? I will show you (in a following piece) that that is the case. It’s not that 4/5 MSM news outlets used the misleading statistic but some of the more honest or iconoclastic journalists dove deeper and revealed the true situation. They ALL used the statistic (which is completely irrelevant to the situation being described) and they did that because there are 3 categories into which more or less all MSM stories can now be sorted:
Non-narrative - things like (most) political upheaval abroad, trade agreements, (some) tax policy, uncontroversial stories about biology or anthropology or history, obituaries, some cultural events (although less even of those)…
These are mostly free from detectable bias. They’re still often reported poorly (journalists have lost competence as real-world detectives as the technological profile and ethics of their field has shifted) but the mistakes and omissions are fairly randomly distributed.
Narrative-adjacent - things like education policy, and gun control (which tellingly includes mass shootings), and (until recently) immigration, and legislation or supreme court decisions…
These are more contested and so are reported in a way which is clearly biased to a reader with all of the attendant facts, but the work makes a gesture toward the ‘other side’ and acknowledge the fact of significant public controversy or struggle around the issues. Keep in mind: these can be very biased, but they are at least making it clear that there are at least two sides to the issue.
Narrative-centered - things like sex change procedures for minors (for which the media’s label of ‘gender-affirming care’ rather assumes the question), or race as a factor in police violence, or rising crime in our poor communities, or (in the past two years) many immigration stories and statistics…
These are issues for which the ‘other side’ and, indeed, all dissenting information is completely suppressed. You will not find an article in the mainstream media about the drastic rise in adolescent teen girls seeking and receiving pharmaceutical (rather than psychological) treatment for gender dysphoria, or the fact that the patient population of such minors is now heavily female, for the first time in history. Any nod toward the hypothesis of ‘social contagion’ has been deemed forbidden territory a priori. The journalists and writers who have explored such territory (Abigail Schrier, Hannah Barnes, Helen Joyce) have experienced campaigns to end their careers, have had their books de-listed from Amazon, and have had interviews and speeches demonetized and throttled on YouTube. Let me be very clear: whether or not you agree with the suppositions of these writers, they are not motivated by hostility towards any group. I don’t know what the shape or character of this issue is, but no one does. THAT is why we need open debate and THAT is why the efforts of trans activists on this issue veer into territory which can only be called seriously unethical. The fates of thousands of children hang in the balance; no agenda or interest group can outweigh their health and happiness. This is something that the vast majority of people intuitively grasp, which is why the catastrophically one-sided reporting by the MSM is such a historic error.
In these issues, as in most others, the group trying to silence any dissent or opposition is the one which must be most vigorously opposed.
I could say much the same about the issue of racism in policing and I will, but I will say it elsewhere. The unfortunate fact is that as the years have passed, more and more issues have been situated in narrative-adjacent or narrative-centered categories. Even 3-4 years ago I was a strident defender of the New York Times. Sure, their human interest or domestic cultural stories were often ridiculously biased (exploring academic freedom in academia from the starting assumption that it was conservatives and right-wingers doing the silencing of faculty on campus, for instance, which is so backwards that it’s basically parody). But they were accountable to the standards of retraction and correction and they had the largest foreign correspondents bureau and some of the most talented writers on the planet.
I no longer defend the New York Times, on any basis. They have printed false information many times now without retraction. The truth is, however, that the choice of which subjects and narratives to focus on and which to ignore is a much more effective and insidious strategy of propagandizing. A paper can promote virtually any idea by finding an expert to parrot it and printing the credulous interview. A paper can’t be held to account for not running a story or for interviewing only certain experts. These are the imbalances that ethics used to preclude but those ethical norms are gone. In 2021 91% of NY Times readers identified themselves as Democrats and with such a Leftist group of subscribers the paper becomes a creator of stories that people want to read, not stories they should read. The public interest of journalism has been whittled away by shifting revenue models, all the while journalists question other figures and institutions for ‘greed’ or bias. This hypocrisy is now widely enough known that it is the general opinion. Even if the Times began implementing a strict editorial policy of balance and rigor (profits be damned) would the public notice? Would the subscriber base swell with heterodox and independent citizens thirsty for untainted news? I believe it would but it’s an open question and a moot point: the only indications of future editorial policies are of doubling down and institutional capture by the most extreme and easily offended (psychological unstable) staff members.
I suspect that my migration, from a reflexive defender of such organizations to a critic with an acute sense of betrayal, is one that many Americans have made and many more will continue to make as the issues reported in our newspapers and on our phones continues to diverge from objective (and verifiable!) reality.
In part two of this essay I will describe the actual situation of educational policy debates and realities in this country… and the reported situation. It seems that the gulf between these two states grows with every month and every issue and all that we can do is 1.) understand what’s happening and help others to understand it as well and 2.) seek alternate sources for news and starve the old hegemony of funding until they have withered away, hopefully to be replaced by vibrant and truly subversive journalistic institutions… closer, in that sense, to what we used to have.
Great piece! So important right now.