Lying about the past, misunderstanding the present, misreporting the future

A few weeks ago there was a zero value-add media folderol around Trump meeting Putin in Helsinki. The establishment media was working double-time in order to try and establish some linkage between this routine event and their parallel manufactured Mueller investigation. They desperately wanted Helsinki to provide some sort of evidence that was so strikingly absent in the Mueller probe.

I can't remember whether it was NPR or the NYT but one of them had a piece in which they were repeatedly making a big play of Putin and Trump "meeting behind closed doors." They were pathetically trying to denormalize that which is normal in all such global leadership events. You have the public presentation - the ribbon cutting, the photo ops, the smiles and handshakes - and then you have the meetings where the real work is done. Behind closed doors. Sometimes it is beneficial. Sometimes it is nefarious. Sometimes it is well-intended but disastrous. But it is always behind closed doors.

Trying to make "closed doors" into a substantive issue was, in my view, both revealing of the mindset of the journalists as well as strategically disastrous for their professional brand. Not everyone notices what journalists are doing all the time but more are doing so. Now is the time for journalists to be more discrete and cunning, not ham-fisted and clumsy.

Roger Kimball touches on this in his Could The New York Times’s abortion coverage be any more one-eyed? Forget the abortion issue, it is the observations on communication that are illustrative.

A writer friend recently told my son about an exercise he was given in a high school composition class. The idea was to show how word choice affects the mood and emotional weather of your prose. He recalled an example from TIME magazine. (For younger readers: TIME used to be — long, long ago — an important news outlet; that TIME is not to be confused with the virtue-signaling enterprise of the same name that has taken its place). Consider the different rhetorical implications of these two sentences:

Truman slunk from the back room to huddle with his cronies.

vs.

Eisenhower strode from the chamber to consult with his advisers.

Would you rather “slink” or “stride”? Do you frequent “back rooms” or occupy “chambers”? Is it, outside the precincts of American football, more dignified to “huddle” or “consult”? And those with whom you do parley: are they “cronies” or “advisers”?

You know the answers to all of these questions and you can see how those different choices of words reveal very different attitudes about the subjects under discussion.

According to my friend, the point of the exercise was admonitory. It was to caution novice writers to be careful lest their prejudices infect their word choice and thereby spoil their reliability as accurate, dispassionate reporters.

I suspect many writers for The New York Times absorbed something like the amusing example my friend retailed without, however, taking on board the moral about preserving one’s reputation for accuracy and (so far as is humanly possible) bias-free reporting.

Consider the opening sentence of the Times’s report on Ireland’s vote to legalise abortion last May: “Ireland voted decisively to repeal one of the world’s more restrictive abortion bans, sweeping aside generations of conservative patriarchy and dealing the latest in a series of stinging rebukes to the Roman Catholic Church.”

Striding through chambers — decisively striding through chambers — to consult with one’s advisers, right?

Compare that with the Times’s reporting on Argentina’s defeat last week of a bill to legalise abortion. “Argentina’s Senate on Thursday narrowly rejected a bill to legalize abortion, dealing a stinging defeat to a grass-roots movement that pushed reproductive rights to the top of the country’s legislative agenda and galvanized activist groups throughout Latin America.”

Regardless of one's personal stance on abortion, or any other moral issue, it is easy to see that the Times signals its editorial positions in other ways than simply in its editorials.

To paraphrase Jim Treacher, Modern journalism is all deciding which facts the public shouldn't know because they reflect badly on the narrative of critical theory social justice. Or as David Burge says, "Journalism is about covering important stories. With a pillow, until they stop moving."

Earlier in the week, I posted twice about the NYT lying about their own past headlines and reporting (Who deserves credit is one thing. Lying about the recent past is another and It's like claiming you're eighteen while handing over a driver's license which proves you are fourteen).

They capped the week of lying about their past reporting with something that approaches lying about the future.

It has apparently become important for the establishment media to push the claim that America is an inherently racist nation, brimming with knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing deplorables. They really wanted the first anniversary of Charlottesville to be a thing but it came up empty.

Their fall back was some putative White Nationalist march in Washington, D.C., planned for the weekend. The NYT spent the week building up expectations that this event would manifest that incipient putsch of which they are so terrified. Forget that the only overt racism is coming from their ideology of social justice critical theory. Forget that these events are few and far between. Forget that every time a handful of attention seeking knuckleheads get together, that the countermarches are orders of magnitude greater in number. Forget that Implicit Attitude Tests show that there is no systematic racial prejudice. In the movie the NYT is watching, we are always trembling on the brink of establishing racial apartheid. Again ignoring that the only people who sanction apartheid are the social justice critical theory people.

Sometime around Wednesday or Thursday, the NYT had to check its enthusiasm just a mite when they reported that the march application to the police only anticipated 400 participating white nationalists. To put that in perspective, even the SPLC, which wildly exaggerates numbers for commercial purposes, only estimates some 5-10,000 KKK members/Aryan Brotherhood types out there. The number on the police radar screen is dramatically smaller than that. In comparison, violent gangs such as MS-13, Bloods, Crips, drug cartels, each command some 10,-30,000 members and the FBI is tracking some 1.4 million violent gang members (though I am guessing that the real hardcore number is more like 250-500,000).

According to the FBI, about 20% of all homicides are committed by gangs. In gang centers such as Los Angeles and Chicago, it is as high as fifty percent.

In the US in 2016, 17,250 people were murdered. Of these 17,250 murders, 9 fell into the category of hate crimes. Not 9%. Nine of the murders were racially motivated. Six of those were murders of blacks by whites and three of those were murders of whites by blacks.

I am not ignoring all the tragedy these antiseptic numbers represent, I am simply putting the NYT critical theory social justice obsession into perspective.

The NYT wants reality to be different than it actually is. The US is a more peaceful nation and a more racially integrated and adjusted nation than the NYT can stand. Racial violence is rare, it comes from all sources, and white nationalists are a vestigial concern.

But the establishment media does a good job of misdirecting. Look at the results from Google Trends.



Based on Google Searches, you'd think that the KKK was alive and well despite its near complete collapse. The mainstream media are accomplishing their goal of telling a different story than the one revealed by the numbers.

So how did the white supremacist march in Washington turn out? The one the NYT was profiling and showcasing?

Well, it is hard to keep track because the NYT keeps rewriting its reporting. First we had the anticipation of a major white supremacist march. Then they had to reset expectations for perhaps a 400 person march. Then they were reporting some dozens of march participants. Then it became a couple of dozen. As of 9:05am Monday, August 13th, we are down to:

The right-wing agitator Jason Kessler and perhaps 20 fellow members of the far right

"Perhaps twenty"? Talk about weasel words. When numbers are this low, the journalist should be able to count on their fingers and toes. Give it another 24 hours and the trend line suggests that there will have not been a march at all. Or possibly we will be in existential territory with negative numbers of marchers.

The NYT tried to build this up to be the highlight of the critical theory/social justice social calendar - the event that would show the till-now masked face of racist America. With the near complete absence of racists at the heralded racist march, the NYT has done an about turn.

After weeks of hype, white supremacists managed to muster just a couple of dozen supporters on Sunday in the nation’s capital for the first anniversary of their deadly rally in Charlottesville, Va., finding themselves greatly outnumbered by counterprotesters, police officers and representatives of the news media.

Let's remember just who was doing the hyping.

The numbers are always small, the counter protesters always outnumber them. What kind of wool is the NYT trying to pull over its reader's eyes?

Grasping for straws, the NYT notes:

But even with the low turnout, almost no one walked away with the sense that the nation’s divisions were any closer to healing.

The nation's divisions are being manufactured by the social justice critical theorists of the mainstream media. Out here in the real world, people get along, even respect one another. People are happy about a booming economy. People work hard to make the lives of their nearest and dearest better. They worry about their mortgages and put in some overtime. They volunteer in their community to solve real and persistent problems. They interact with their neighbors and colleagues as individuals, not as identity groups.

But none of that has anything to with the hot house hallucinations, delirium tremens, and rank hysteria of the mainstream media.