What the pluck? Is that still a question? Or, is it now a matter of who gets to do the plucking? An insidious ensemble is strumming American heartstrings. Dictatorial DJs are calling the tunes of public emotion. They only bring one record to the national sock hop. Side A bleeds for the casualties, or purportedly wounded, with gushing excess. Side B doles out the grief for those found less worthy like Scrooge at a foreclosure. Which side gets play, after unfortunate events, is decided at a tier above all pay grades.
There are people who can be fooled all of the time. Their slice of the pie chart widens as Alphabet Corporation and other search engines keep reshuffling the deck.
The spinning industry finds itself confronted with constitutional crisis when crowds won’t sway to the choreography they’ve plotted. Kirk Van Houten only asked to borrow a feeling. Modern media minions insist “feelings” must be permanently inflicted. The ruling professoriate has a score to settle with anyone unmoved by official tear-jerking. They want straight-shooting stoics, poor, unheard, dehumanized and unfriended. The panic about artificial intelligence is churning out of an artificial emotion industry.
Shouldn’t we all have been blubbering like Jacob Frey at George Floyd’s casket based on editorially mandated cues? What kind of skeptic would accuse the Minneapolis mayor of chewing up scenery for the camera? What kind of imbecile could have seen anything else? Does any honest human really buy that people make off with flat screens or cases of Belvedere because of how dear “justice” is to their hearts? Whatever anyone actually “feels” … our betters prefer an environment where it’s unsafe to speak it out loud. (READ MORE: ‘Free Media’ for Trump Feels Like 2016 Again)
Little Landen Hoffman took the plunge from the third tier of the Mall of America down to the first 40 feet below in April 2019. A man named Emmanuel Arranda tossed the 5-year-old over the rail. It got its ration of ink back then. Was it adequate? There is no official manual prescribing the proper dosage of copy for such a case. All we know is that the news cycle failed to stall or even speed bump over the story. Reporters did not obsess on the background details of the culprit. Something toxic about noting the demography looms between the lines in certain cases. It’s as strangely toxic as not noticing in a case like George Floyd’s.
Do incidents with the gravity of Landen’s get slapdash coverage by accident? Do other, qualifying or disqualifying, factors bear on what evolves into mass perception?
Major media has been grappling with what is in or out of “context” since at least 1961. That was when “The Young Savages,” a film distantly based on the Salvador Agron case, pulled an inexplicable identity switch. A character based on Agron, the Puerto Rican killer, was made the injured party. Anthony Krzesinski and Robert Young Jr., the actual dead boys, were packing DNA Tinsel Town found unwelcome in the victim class. That was over half a century ago. So, the bad guys in the movie had to be made to look like the fatalities instead of the actual killer. Otherwise, Joe-Twelve-Pack might fall prey to disinfo, misinfo, propaganda and fake news that might conform to physical reality. Making narratives match up with facts on the ground can equal heresy in Hollywood.
It was all in an honest day’s work. Somebody has to be a gatekeeper, a filter, a digestive interlude between nutritional truth and what is fit for the palates of deplorable slobs. A distant professoriate will rule on demographic entitlement to any sense of grievance. What goes on in the world is irrelevant. You can bet the farm that if Landen hadn’t been white and the guy who tossed him over had been, the child would be more renowned than George Floyd today.
The WilmerHale law firm, according to Lauren Hirsch at the NYT, prepped University Presidents’ Claudine Gay, Elizabeth Magill and Sally Kornbluth. They represented Harvard, UPenn, and MIT respectively on December 5, 2023 in a Hill hearing that focused on anti-Semitism. All three wielded brand name doctorates. Mere laymen would expect those credentials, bolstered by the counsel of a global law firm, to keep the trio’s guards’ up to buck-in-season levels. Anyone who saw does-in-headlights instead must have been guilty of homogeneity, inequity, and exclusion. (READ MORE: Supreme Court Should Reexamine New York Times v. Sullivan)
In the peasant world, it’d be a chore finding someone who doesn’t know to duck when a question including the words “Jew” and “genocide” come at them in the same sentence. We might have been spared incomprehensible drivel about “context” if Archie Bunker was getting grilled. Psychopathic-babble has replaced Latin as lingua franca in Ubermenschenstan.
The follow up question that should have been put to the professoriate testifying before the House on December 5, is this: “In what “context” would advocacy of lynching be acceptable?” Claudine Gay’s answer to that while still in the hot seat is sorely missed. Elected officials rarely muster the wit of Bill Maher, Groucho Marx, or Al Jaffe going after their prey.
Media motives in what violence it chooses to graphically describe can be valid and humane. Not providing tinder for kindling lynch mobs comes first on the list. We are dangerously past the point where the excesses and restraints in the literalism of copy are doing more harm than good. Any editor, writer, reporter, broadcaster, news producer — whatever — who continues to see the consuming public as a tabula rasa to etch upon is not only unfit for post, but a major threat to the whole industry … and society at-large.
This shortlist leaves off hundreds, if not thousands, of allies fighting on the side to abridge both “the freedom of speech” and “of the press.”
There are people who can be fooled all of the time. Their slice of the pie chart widens as Alphabet Corporation and other search engines keep reshuffling the deck. Tracking down factual details that aren’t convenient to certain perspectives can often be sped up using a library and no electronic sources. Do news industry suits actually foresee a day when info-hungry peasants will feed from a single trough? Who will do the slopping? Someone with the integrity of Claas Relotius? The world wariness of Sabrina Erdely? What if people like them and Jussie Smollett never got caught? Silicon Valley and the DHS could be on the lookout for “journalists” with the stealth of Kim Philby going by what we saw in the Hunter laptop suppression incident.
It was Joseph Goebels who said: “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Whatever academic doctrine reigns at the Columbia School of Journalism these days, it’s the Nazi numero duo’s M/O that flies in corporate suites. At the top of the info industry food chain, other items on the Third Reich’s informing agenda have been known to apply.
Remember when Hillary Clinton’s emails hit Wikileaks? It was when Chris Cuomo told the world: “Also interesting is, remember, it’s illegal to possess these stolen documents. It’s different for the media. So everything you learn about this, you’re learning from us.” It’d be nice to know how many executives in the Fourth Estate estate were nodding along as Chris said this — and if any of them has wised up since. What was “interesting” was a Fordham law grad making so silly a statement. He publicly embraced a feudally archaic legal theory of entitlement.
It is tiresome to continue reciting the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” to make a simple point.
“Freedom of the press,” said A. J. Liebling, “is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
A man who died in 1963 couldn’t have foreseen the reach that would be accomplished by those with less means in the internet age. Some see Liebling, including Jack Shafer, as the greatest media critic yet known. Does that really stand in the present media era? Was the word “press,” in Amendment one, ever referring to an entitled class? Wasn’t “press” rather, simply a contraption that facilitated access to a mass audience? Liebling constantly complained about the concentration of ownership. Internet access, at one point, had gone a long way toward resolving that complaint. Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft are doing their damnedest to reverse that and recentralize the newsfeed. They’d gladly reincarnate Colonel McCormick and Cissy Patterson today if it would rescue them from the plague of the plebian voice.
The idea that you have a right to be heard has been contested by The Atlantic Council, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Facebook, Twitter, The Democratic Party and, particularly, the Biden administration itself. This shortlist leaves off hundreds, if not thousands, of allies fighting on the side to abridge both “the freedom of speech” and “of the press.” That is, if the modern equivalent of a “press” is something a yokel can get his hands on. (READ MORE: The New York Times Attacks Musk, Hires Antisemites)
When Philip Bump tells us, “Doing your own research is a good way to end up being wrong,” it’s mighty hard to resist adding the letters t-i-o-u-s to his surname. And guess what? Phil was able to find a study that confirms his conclusion. Is there any contention that falls under the rubric of “sociology” that hasn’t been proven by a paper cranked out of a higher education mill somewhere? The Washington Post cites scores of unnamed experts on some news days. Vetting the flows of spurious contention from the “experts” cited across legacy media would require an office and full-time staff.
The cost of diversity, equity and inclusion in reporting is not hard to compute. The demographic majority in the U.S. is losing its foothold in lifespan, wealth, and contentment. And, while Harvard may have gotten a flash of color into its presidential pan, the overwhelming majority of the black population in the U.S. hasn’t gained a meaningful step in decades. All the “concern” pulsating from plush academic lairs, Wall Street boardrooms, DC double-think-tanks and media conclaves, for Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, isn’t raising any oppressed group upward. It is simply reducing more and more people into the realms of serfdom. The zero-sum game being described is the very bludgeon knee-capping general opportunity. The elitist version of “truth” isn’t freeing any souls. It is solidifying a caste system far worse than the one Isabel Wilkerson imagines.
