Media in modern times

That is sort of what I feel like from two or three relatively insignificant but telling items over the past couple of days.

Three, maybe four days ago, I heard a segment of an NPR piece. The discussion was about the contrasting positions between John McCain and Mitch McConnell on campaign finance reform. Even though there was a lot of spin and bias in the reporting, the segment was interesting. John McCain always took the high road reformer position - money should not determine the outcomes of elections. Fair enough. But the basic objective was enable through intrusive and restrictive laws which restrict fundamental Bill of Rights clauses.

Mitch McConnell's position is equally clear. Free speech is free speech. The government does not get to choose who can say what through which channels.

Both positions have their nobility and both can clearly be abused. But McConnell's criticism is searing - the government should not be allowed to control what people say in elections.

The other message that came through the NPR reporting was a clear institutional interest. NPR journalists were clearly longing for the imagined memory of a time when only a few companies were allowed to shape the national reporting. It was a few (basically the TV channels) players communicating to many (the entire public).

Now, owing to technological change, it is a many to many model. Everyone can craft their own channels to an astonishing array of news sources ranging from individuals to enterprises to foreign sources.

The Mainstream Media has been stripped of their institutional authority and lost their marketplace credibility. The NPR segment was trying to set up a two player model - either the public determine elections or rich people determine elections. But the unstated longing and subtext message was that there is a third model to which NPR wished to return. The model where an oligopoly of news sources sets the narrative and agenda and thereby determine elections.

The criticisms of mainstream media against their critics is often interpreted as leftwing news media bashing rightwing critics. And there is significant truth to that. But the other way to frame it is that the mainstream media are desperately fighting a rearguard action against the proliferation of alternate news sources and channels.

As an example of the importance of channels, I offer much maligned Twitter. More and more of my news comes directly from a host of experts whom I follow directly on twitter or on their own blogs. Not journalists. Experts whom journalists used to interview. Why should I listen to the spin and bias of Journalist SMITH when I can access the knowledge and opinions of Experts JONES and BROWN directly?

The MSM no longer has the power of selecting experts.

So the idea of the MSM fighting a rearguard action to defend their old oligopolistic privileges was already on my mind.

Then over the weekend, there was an attack on the US embassy in Iraq which quickly had the MSM raising parallels to the attack on our Benghazi embassy under Clinton. There seemed almost an unseemly media glee that Trump might suffer the same humiliation as did Clinton (see here for some other examples). It reminded me of a BBC interview in 2003 in the lead up to the Iraq invasion when the BBC interviewer, reflexively anti-American, was aggressively trying to coach historian Antony Beevor (author of 1998 classic Stalingrad) to forecast that the American invasion would come to grief at a siege of Baghdad. Beevor, as a respectable intellectual, was both trying to be politely responsive but also not serve as a political mouthpiece for an empty-headed journalist. It was one of those moments of naked media bias on display that are both embarrassing and horrifying.

But the parallel between Benghazi and Baghdad quickly unravelled. One call from the embassy quickly yielded 120 rapidly deployed Marines and the mob dissipated. The media did not get the rock upon which the USS Trump would crash which they so desperately desired. Or, at least, not yet.

But there were some more particular parallels which reflected poorly on the MSM and which they did not seem to consider. At Benghazi, the initial State Department position, unquestioned by the MSM despite evidence to the contrary, was that the attack on the Benghazi embassy was merely a mob incensed by a video and which got out of hand. There was a whole dog and pony show across the Sunday news programs where experts and administration spokespeople all lined up to push the lie which was unquestioned by the accommodating journalists.

Of course, it quickly emerged that there had been intimations that there was going to be a terrorist attack, that this was a terrorist attack, and there was no issue about video-incensed mobs. It was a terrorist attack which no one wished to acknowledge.

So it was especially striking how the New York Times chose to frame this terrorist attack on the American embassy in Iraq.

Hundreds of Iraqi mourners tried to storm the United States Embassy in Baghdad, shouting “Down, down USA!,” in response to deadly American airstrikes this week that killed 25 fighters https://t.co/jrAtON72eR

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 31, 2019

Click for replies. Note the ratioing

Mourners? This feels just like the video-incensed mob deception abetted by the MSM. As best I can tell, what happened was a week or so ago, the Iranian-funded Hezbollah terrorist group operating in Iraq rocketed an American compound, killing an American contractor. The US responded a few days later with a missile attack which killed more than two dozen Hezbollah terrorists across multiple locations. The Hezbollah Iraqi front group then attacked the American embassy in Baghdad. From all the pictures, the attackers were clearly under command and control in a coordinated attack. They were all young men between twenty and forty and half of them were in uniform.

Mourners? It is hard to see that as an appropriate and impartial description of the terrorist attackers.

The actual NYT article, Protesters Attack U.S. Embassy in Iraq, Chanting ‘Death to America’, is hardly any better. It provides more relevant background but tries to make this primarily about Trump and his responses rather than the act of Iranian terrorism which it is.

The NYT does acknowledge that Hezbollah is backed by the Iranians. In one paragraph out of a nearly fifty paragraph article it further acknowledges:

The upheaval comes at a critical time for Iraq and for the United States’ role in the country. Mass protests in recent months against poor governance have weakened the government and underscored the criticism of Iraqis who feel that Iran has too much sway over the country’s politics.

There is no mention in the article of the protests roiling Iran, some portion of which are directed against Iran's adventurism in the region (Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen) and financial and military support for Hezbollah and the Houthi. Money and lives being wasted while Iranians themselves suffer economic turmoil and collapse.

You can't help but feel that the Times's anti-Trumpism hasn't extended into anti-Americanism.

The final big incident fueling this perception of the MSM as an enemy of the people is the church shooting in Texas this past Sunday in which two parishioners were killed by a mentally ill street person before being killed by a member of the congregation's security team.

USA Today led the charge into enemy of the people territory with this opinion piece.

Opinion: Jack Wilson is exactly the type of person you want around with a gun because he's a firearms instructor. But we know nothing about the at least six other parishioners who also appeared to draw their handguns. And that's terrifying. https://t.co/od0vfGftjU

— USA TODAY (@USATODAY) January 1, 2020

Note the ratioing.

That apparent call to twitter-mob and investigate the members of the church security team set off some strong negative responses.

So did the opening lines of the piece itself:

Jack Wilson is a hero alright. It took him only six seconds to kill a gunman at a Texas church, saving countless lives.

Unfortunately, that kind of split-second heroism has been turned into a PR tool by gun advocates.

Rather than celebrating saved lives, USA Today, via the opinion piece, seems to be mourning the damage done to their crusade against the Second Amendment. Is it any wonder that the glib enemy of the people snark actually has resonance.

All three of these items:

NPR pining for its days of privilege determining the outcome of elections;

NYT misreporting an attack on an American embassy (again);

USA Today inadvertently telling its readers that their lives are worth less than the damage from their survival owing to a gun in the hands of a good man

All reinforce the idea of the MSM as enemy of the people. The commercial, technology, and political trends of the past five years have been unkind to the MSM. Their first actions of 2020 do not suggest that they have a line-of-sight on their core issues or how to deliver fact-based reporting to a news consuming public now inundated with alternative, and often more accurate, news sources.