If only the mainstream media sought the truth

Hmmm.  A flood of articles this morning either directly or indirectly pointing out how hard the mainstream media is working to misdirect, confuse, or misinform readers.  

First up, there is this piece, The Media’s Cover-Up of John Fetterman by Peter Savodnik.  The subheading is No amount of spin can undo what voters witnessed on the debate stage last night in Pennsylvania.

I watched some pieces from the debate and then simply had to stop.  You become complicit when you indulge the embarrassment of another person.  Regardless of his politics, Fetterman should not have been put in this position.  He is, of course, responsible to a significant degree for the choice of debating, but someone near and dear to him should have put a stop to the idea.  Humiliation is just unpleasant.

Even more embarrassing perhaps is the transparent unprofessionalism of the mainstream media, happily trying to hide the situation from the public.

The Pennsylvania Senate race is among the most important in the country. So, the Fetterman campaign—which seriously limited the candidate’s interaction with constituents and put the kibosh on press gaggles—granted some interviews. Almost all of them were conducted remotely, over Google Hang, with closed captioning. None that we can recall focused on the most important thing about John Fetterman: The fact that the candidate, who suffered from a stroke five months ago, does not appear fit to serve.

Until last week. 

Last week, NBC reporter Dasha Burns had the temerity to observe the obvious: John Fetterman has trouble with chit chat. Here is what she said: “In small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear that he was understanding our conversation.”

She got crucified for it by any number of journalists with blue checks.

From Kara Swisher: “Sorry to say but I talked to @JohnFetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense. Maybe this reporter is just bad at small talk.”

From New York Magazine’s Rebecca Traister, who profiled the candidate: His “comprehension is not at all impaired.” The problem, she explained, is “a hearing/auditory challenge.” She added: “He understands everything.”

Molly Jong-Fast came to Fetterman’s defense, tweeting that, in a recent interview, the candidate “understood everything I was saying and he was funny.”

Connie Schultz, a USAToday columnist and the wife of Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown, observed: “As he continues to recover, @JohnFetterman used technology to help him answer a reporter’s questions. How we as journalists frame this reveals more about us than it does him.”

The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson suggested that the problem wasn’t Fetterman but, well, us. “Part of our culture’s ongoing stigmatization of disability stems from our profound lack of understanding about the variability—and spectrum—of physical and mental challenges.”

And so on.

The NBC reporter was also attacked by Fetterman’s wife, Gisele. She suggested that Burns should be punished for reporting honestly. “I mean, there are consequences for folks in these positions who are any of these isms,” Gisele Fetterman said. “I mean, she was ableist. That’s what she was in her interview. It was appalling to the entire disability community and I think to journalism.” (The Second Lady of Pennsylvania seemed unconcerned with the First Amendment.)

If anything, Burns, who has covered the race extensively, understated just how bad Fetterman’s condition is.

I was in Pennsylvania a few weeks ago to report on the race, and the Fetterman campaign refused to make the candidate available. Now, it’s obvious why they have limited media engagements to friendly venues like MSNBC, New York Magazine and The New York Times—where reporters are, presumably, reticent to report anything that might be viewed as helping Republicans.

But there was no sympathetic journalist on stage with John Fetterman last night. What we were left with was reality. And reality was painful to watch.

I hope that Dasha Burns' career recovers from the professional catastrophe of reporting the facts.  Rather, I respect that she reported the facts.  I hope the industry raises its standards to meet hers.

Then there was this piece from a couple of days ago, San Francisco’s Mayor Apologizes for Telling the Truth by Leighton Woodhouse.  The subheading is It is not racist to acknowledge that the city’s open-air drug market is dominated by Honduran drug dealers. Ignoring that reality hurts working-class families.

Earlier this month, San Francisco Mayor London Breed was asked in an interview about her pledge to crack down on the crime, drugs and lawlessness that have plagued her city for the last several years. In her response to the question, Breed asked in exasperation, “Why do people who deal drugs have more rights than people who try to get up and go to work every day and take their children to school?”

The line received some applause. Asked to elaborate, the mayor said this:

Let’s talk about the reality of this situation. There are, unfortunately, a lot of people who come from a particular country—come from Honduras—and a lot of the people who are dealing drugs happen to be of that ethnicity. And when a lot of the arrests have been made, for people breaking the law, you have the Public Defender’s office and staff from the Public Defender’s office, who are basically accusing and using the law to say, ‘You’re racially—you’re racial profiling. You’re racial profiling.’ Right? And it’s nothing ‘racial profile’ about this. We all know it. It’s the reality. It’s what you see. It’s what’s out there.

Breed’s comments did not go unnoticed. Soon after, the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club put out a statement condemning her “racist and xenophobic comments.” The club described her remarks as “appalling” and demanded an apology.

That apology was, unfortunately, forthcoming. 

“In trying to explain what is happening in the Tenderloin,” Mayor Breed wrote last week, “I failed to accurately and comprehensively discuss what is an incredibly complex situation in our City and in Central America.” Breed described San Francisco’s drug dealers as “people of all races, ethnicities, and genders.”

The mayor shouldn’t have said anything of the sort. She said nothing offensive or inaccurate in her original comments. In fact, it’s her critics who are being dishonest about what’s happening in the open-air drug market of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District and who are doing a disservice to the poor, immigrant communities on whose behalf they claim to speak. And by conflating professional drug dealers with regular immigrant families, it is they who are being xenophobic and racist.

Once again, the mainstream media and political leaders are in cahoots to hied reality from the eyes, ears, and noses of their constituents.  Apparently it is well established and well known in San Francisco that Honduran drug cartels have established a commercially profitable stranglehold on the drug trade in the Tenderloin.  

It is known but apparently no one is allowed to acknowledge the fact even though being able to speak openly almost certainly would lead to better public policy.  

But there’s another explanation for why everyone Solorzano arrested was Latino, which is precisely what Mayor Breed was trying to explain: The professional drug dealers who work in the Tenderloin and the adjacent SoMa neighborhood are all Honduran nationals. This is because Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, which does not practice Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in its hiring practices, recruits the dealers from Honduras and smuggles them into the United States. So, if you arrest any number of these dealers, they’re all going to be Latino. This is not “racial profiling.” This is just a fact.

Then there was Haircare Churnalism on NPR by Adam Cifu.  Perhaps marginally less egregious in the sense that we no longer expect journalists to understand anything scientific or mathematical.  So, perhaps less about hiding the truth and more about simply not understanding the truth in the first place.

This is certainly an example of churnalism. We define churnalism as the careless, incurious reporting of poorly done biomedical research. Churnalism trades the real story -- why this study is unimportant or proves something other than it contends -- for the easy headline. There are seven deadly sins of churnalism and this story certainly managed to commit a few.

The seven deadly sins:

Observational studies almost never prove causation

Extrapolation and generalization

Ignoring confounding, selection bias and other epidemiological errors

Neglecting plausibility

The ‘Disclaim and Pivot’ maneuver.

Keep testing; report just once

Being incurious

The truth is often hard to know.  But it helps if we don't run from it screaming in horror and instead seek it out.