On Consensus in Media

 

Russell Brand

Here is a recent wise quote from Russell Brand, paraphrased for brevity: “A consensus in mainstream media is not a verification. It is the opposite. The more you see the mainstream media making a point of claiming something is true, the more likely it is false.”

For “mainstream media,” I would substitute the term “broadcast platforms”: any information channel that is directed at a broad general audience. A more obvious example of a broadcast medium in this sense than even the traditional television networks is the education system. But it will also include newspapers at the local level, and large-circulation magazines: a National Geographic, a Scientific American, a Rolling Stone, a Time Magazine.

These are likely to be spreading false information, because these are the platforms on which it is most profitable and effective to spread false information. So if any powerful interested party can exert control of one, they are likely to do so for their purposes. Most probably, the government; but also business interests, professional groups, and other special interests with a lot of money to advertise.

If there really is a consensus on something, it should go without saying. Nobody needs to belabor the fact that the earth is round. So if a broadcast medium is repeatedly pointing out that something is true, this is almost in itself proof that it is not. You are looking at a propaganda campaign.

What about a “consensus of experts”? Good question. I would add that group who claims a consensus, or any organization that claims to govern by consensus, is really a dictatorship. Consider those elections in Eastern Europe in which the leader used to reliably poll over 90% of the votes. That’s consensus. It is not a good sign. It really means a situation in which nobody dares object to whoever has the strongest arm or the loudest voice. So beware any consensus of experts too.

We are all fortunate that the broadcast media are dying. It is a brave new world, in which what was long hidden should begin to appear in the light.

The Death of Late Night

Stephen Colbert and the Late Show are being cancelled. News, but not a surprise. Apparently the show was losing 40 million USD per year.

The problem is that they were no longer attracting enough of the key demographic, those aged 18 to 54. This is the only TV audience advertisers care about.

Why, exactly? Don’t older people have money to spend?

Yes, but they also tend to have already made their choices. They are loyal to their preferred brands. They are no longer in the open market.

The loss of this key younger demographic tells us network television itself is dying. Only old people still watch, loyal to their preferred medium, out of force of habit.

The decline is probably irreparable, thanks to improving technology. It is not just that there is greater competition; the new competition on the Internet can narrowcast, offering a more targeted market for an advertiser. For most brands and products, this makes more sense than paying for everyone’s eyeballs.

But here is a second puzzle. Why are the late night comics seemingly doing their best to jump off that cliff, to hasten their own downfall? For years, they have become increasingly political and partisan. And stopped telling jokes. This obviously alienates a large portion of their potential audience: obviously not what you want to do if you are broadcasting.

Colbert, for example, will be forever best remembered for one skit in which he simply danced with a troupe dressed up as hypodermic needles, with no setup or gag, just the shout “vaccine” at the end of each bar. A sad legacy.

Was this some desperate and incompetent attempt to narrowcast on a broadcast medium? To fight for  bigger piece of a shrinking pie?

I think it illustrates instead a saying often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, about how you change the public consciousness. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

This describes well the evolution of the political and social tendency often these days called “populism”; or, in the US, “MAGA.” It too is a product of the new technology.  With greater access to information, people are increasingly disinclined to trust the received consensus—that which is socially “broadcast” to them.

The late night comics, by the nature of their position on the networks, were committed to the old “broadcast” paradigm.  Being comics, they naturally saw their greatest influence and their main chance at the “then they laugh at you” phase. For some years, ridicule of this rebellious new turn of thought was the obvious and easy go-to for a gag. And it gave the comics great prestige and social influence. I remember not so many years ago the common comment that “I get all my news from the comedy shows.” Shows like the Daily Show.

But in going for the partisan gags, the late night hosts locked themselves into the “then they fight you” phase. As their habitual targets rose in power and influence, they were no longer funny. It was no longer a laughing matter. A few shrewd comics have managed to navigate this by flipping sides: Joe Rogan, Scott Adams, Russel Brand, Bill Maher. Many more seem to have dug themselves in too deep, becoming publicly identified primarily as a political figure.

I feel especially sorry for Jimmy Fallon, who early on seemed to see the risk, and tried to resist it. But when broadcasting is your livelihood, you are pretty locked in. You would have to kick against your employers as well as all your closest colleagues.

And now they are losing the argument.

 

 

  

Meet the Press

I can’t stand to watch Justin Trudeau’s coronavirus briefings. There is something about the quality of his voice… feigned concern. He is too obviously an actor, and not a good actor. I feel my intelligence insulted every time.

Doug Ford is a little better, but still hard to take, for the same reason.

Trump was knocked for his apparent lack of compassion at his virus briefings. But I vastly preferred his approach, which was to give encouragement and hard information.

His new press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, seems to have taken over the task. She is immensely entertaining to watch. But mostly for her takedowns of the press.

The media are behaving outrageously throughout this; they have become the last place to go for reliable news. Given the technological pressures they face from the new media, it looks like deliberate mass suicide on the level of Jonestown, Guyana. But then, it looks as though the Democratic Party is doing the same, with their nomination and resolute support of Biden and the House’s passivity and obstruction.

I wonder if this is all connected. Trudeau, and Ford, speak to the voters like children; and the left apparently likes this. The legacy media, and the Democratic Party establishment, are indeed acting like children, refusing to deal with unpleasant realities. They are instead throwing tantrums and making demands.

They are spoiled adult children: narcissists.

And one secret about narcissists is that they actually always want someone else to take charge. They do not want adult responsibility.

As a result, they are actually doing everything they can to re-elect Trump.

So Much for Canada's International Crredibility

Seems I'm not the only one who was shocked by recent CBC coverage of the Epoch Times.

I was delighted, by the w3ay, to find the Epoch Times's special edition in my mailbox.

I figure it's a collectable now.

Eat Chinese, You Racist!

I suppose it was inevitable. The coronavirus scare has now been declared to be racist, at least by Global News.

Global does not give a lot of details on the supposed racism; they feature a political cartoon showing a rat looking ill, captioned “Welcome to the Year of the Rat.” If there is racism in that, they do not explain it. It seems that it is now racist to even vaguely associate the coronavirus with China, even though it began there, and almost all of its victims, so far, are there.

Supposedly racist cartoon by the Toronto Sun's Sue Dewar.

They cite as “ignorant” and “misinformation” suggestions they find on social media that the virus is a product of Chinese food.

Of course, it is a product of Chinese food. According to the authorities, at least, the virus crossed over to humans from exotic food animals in the Wuhan wet market.

Ignorance? Misinformation? It is Global News that seems to be spreading misinformation. By the nature of the beast, social media works against this, by improving the information flow.

The striking thing is that the legacy media still do not seem to have figured this out. The news is the last to hear the news.

The core evidence of racism in the story, the core complaint, their lede, seems to be that business is down in Canadian Chinatowns. People are avoiding them for fear of the virus.

Problem: avoiding Chinatowns is probably sensible. It is obviously more likely that, in Chinatown, you could encounter someone who has recently been to China. And so, the risk of catching the virus is greater. Tough for the Chinatown businesses, but the virus is tough on a lot of businesses.

Global News’s report is giving poor health advice. “Visit Chinatown, make a point of eating there, or you are a racist.” Racism, real or imagined, is more important to them than the public health.

Worse, the report identifies common sense as racist. The obvious corollary: racism is just common sense.

It is hard to believe they are not intentionally promoting racism. I think they are, at a minimum, racist in their own thinking. As someone once wisely said, if you keep hearing dog whistles, you must be the dog.

CBC Drops Its Own Bomb on the US

The CBC coverage of the Iranian missile attacks on two bases in Iraq amounted to misinformation—“fake news.” The host referred to it as an “escalation,” indeed a “dangerous escalation.” She marveled at how accurate the strikes were and that they had gotten through American anti-missile protections. “What,” she asked her expert commentator, “gave the Iranians the confidence to do this?”

This amounts to an example of the principle that, when someone has committed themselves to lying, they tend to say the opposite of the truth. The Iranian response was more like the minimum needed to save face. There were no casualties; not a sign of accuracy. And that is all they had to go on at that point. As to getting through American defenses, these bases were hastily equipped to fight guerillas with IEDs. It seems improbable that there would have been some “iron dome” set up to shoot down incoming missiles.

And it is hard to see how the attack showed any growth in Iranian confidence. Everyone could see they were obliged to do something, or lose face.

Then I switched to RT—the Russian government propaganda channel. Just for comparison. Russia is supposedly an erstwhile ally of Iran; they have recently been conducting joint military exercises. And they have no free press.

Yet Russian Television told it straight.

That’s a pretty damning indictment of our mainstream media, and our taxpayer-funded network.

What can explain this?

There is an inevitable temptation in news to sensationalize. That could account for the talk of World War Three being imminent. But RT would have the same temptation. And that cannot explain the bit about the missiles being so accurate and getting through the US defenses.

It has to be anti-Americanism of an extreme, even unprincipled, sort.

Fake Fake News News

National Post has published a piece from Bloomberg News taking umbrage over Trump's “Fake News” Awards.

The piece is, alarmingly, presented not as opinion, but straight news. But get this for a nice, balanced, objective lede: “President Donald Trump announced the recipients of his so-called Fake News Awards, on Wednesday, his latest attack on the press that has drawn objections from within his own party.”

Near the top, it notes “Trump’s announcement came as two senators from his own party excoriated him for his incessant attacks on the free press.”

“The free press”? Why this qualifying adjective? Is there another press in the US, well-known to readers, large and worthy of mention, that is not free?

No. Surely the implication is that any criticism of the press, or any part of the press, is an attack on press freedom.

If you think so, and want to argue so, you do not believe in mere freedom of the press. You believe in dictatorship of the press.

It then complains that Trump has called on journalists to be fired for “minor” mistakes.

Doesn't calling the unspecified mistakes “minor” there sound like an expression of opinion more than objective reporting? Shouldn't it be substantiated in some way?

The article then asks:

The “Fake News Awards” announced on the Republican National Committee website and touted by President Donald Trump pose a conundrum: Does it really count if the news organization admits error?

Everyone makes mistakes – and the point is not to play gotcha. News organizations operate in a competitive arena and mistakes are bound to be made. The key test is whether an error is acknowledged and corrected.

Since they ask, yes, it does count. It would be worse, no doubt, if the error were never acknowledged. But people rely on the media, the press, to be authoritative. They are supposed to have layers of editors and fact-checkers to ensure that it is. That is what the people are paying their quarter, or their dollar, for—that reliability. Otherwise they could get all their news on the streetcorner. If an error nevertheless gets printed, that is certainly worthy of condemnation, just as if GM put out a car that burst into flames when the brake was applied. A later recall does not erase the fault.

Moreover, if the error is something that any layperson would expect to have been caught by even a cursory fact-check before publication, we have the right to suspect it was a deliberate case of fake news. The danger is that, at best, the papers no longer check the factuality of assertions they agree with. Then they will run a correction if (and only if) they are caught out. Oops. But no matter—the damage is often already done.

The National Post piece then gets down to specifics. It objects that the story of Trump removing a bust of Dr. Martin Luther King from the Oval Office—an event that never happened—was not fake news, because “This is is reference to a tweet by a reporter – which was quickly corrected. Do tweets really count as ‘news’? This did not appear as a news article.”

This rebuttal is itself fake news. The assertion was not only in a tweet; it was included in a pool report at the time, and in Time magazine's own news article. Time's own website writes: “A TIME story that included the error was corrected.” And here is the actual correction:

Correction: An earlier version of the story said that a bust of Martin Luther King had been moved. It is still in the Oval Office.

So let's see: how did the present author manage to know something that was just not true? How did Bloomberg never fact-check? How did the National Post, in turn, never fact-check? One begins to get suspicious.

The notorious koi story is a similar case. CNN released a video showing Trump dumping food into a koi pond, and this was widely reported as boorish behaviour. The video did not show that Trump was simply following the lead of Japanese PM Abe.

The NatPost piece's defense, again, is that this was “just a tweet.”

However, a quick trip to Snopes shows that actual news stories were indeed filed with this fake news:

The Guardian: “Trump dump: president throws entire box of fish food into precious koi carp pond.”

Jezebel: “Big Stupid Baby Dumps Load Of Fish Food On Japanese Koi Pond.”

CNN's one headline was “Trump feeds fish, winds up pouring entire box of food into koi pond.”

It certainly sounds as though they are making dumping the entire box the focus of the story.

The NatPost commentator insists CNN is off the hook because they added, down in the fifth paragraph, “Abe, who actually appeared to dump out his box of food ahead of Trump.” But buried this deep, and contradicting their own lede, it looks like it was only there to cover butt if necessary.

And the CNN news story includes the deceptively edited clip. It was not just a tweet; it was both a tweet and a full news story.

Evidently the legacy media have no thought to reform. They are determined to go down with all hands on deck and with all guns blazing.

It is a magnificent thing to watch.

Fake News

Why is this a story?