~pt: What is the opposite of post-truth, revisited
The Opposite of Post-truth is a weekly newsletter covering online political discourse and its manipulation.
By Ariel Stulberg
I’m worried the beat this newsletter covers is over, resolved back into the politics, tech, and media currents.
“Fake news” on the original definition has been laid bare. The Russian sock puppet networks too, to a large extent. Facebook, Google, Twitter have reluctantly acknowledged their complicity in both phenomena and begun to take self-regulatory steps.
But, how much did it ever matter? No one can say. What they can say, or what two Microsoft Research economists do say in a 5,000 word CJR analysis, is that the mainstream news media, CNN, the New York Times, and the rest, play a much larger role.
Maybe Trump and our best friends on the Left have a point and the entire fascination with Russians, bots, memes, shit posts, ad targeting, and conspiracy was merely an attempt by disillusioned liberals such as your correspondent to cope with their grand failure to understand mainstream American people and institutions.
I’ll mull it over. For now, I’ll keep bringing you media, politics, and tech stories on subjects such as the Trumpist media war, surveillance capitalism, cognitive psychology, algorithm gaming, the alt-light, racist propaganda, the economic collapse of the media business, to the power of tech firms over political information and discussion.
Last week, mainstream media outlets made a bunch of errors, to which Trumpists media critics and their fellow travelers disingenuously overreacted.
- CNN corrected its much-hyped story about Don Jr. receiving an “encryption key” and a set of Wikileaks documents by email. But, the documents were public at the time. Two congressional sources gave CNN the wrong date for the email.
- MSNBC broke ties with comedian and Majority Report host Sam Seder after alt-light star Mike Cernovich willfully misread an ironic Seder tweet from 2009 criticizing defenders of film director and confessed child rapist Roman Polanski. MSNBC reversed its decision three days later.
- WaPo politics reporter David Weigel posted a tweet that erroneously understated the size of Trump’s crowd in Florida on Friday. Weigel took it down 20 minutes later
The last turned out to be the biggest story, despite being the least significant sin, because Trump got personally involved.
He demanded an apology. Weigel apologized. Trump, spiked the football, called it “FAKE NEWS” and “(fraud?)” and suggested Weigel should be fired.
If Trump weren’t a joke clown president, these attempts to dictate the behavior of the press be alarming, however unconvincing and impotent they might be.
Weigel’s tweet had a political edge, but it seems to have been an honest mistake. Journalistic errors happen. Disingenuously pretending that errors are equivalent to deceptive propaganda is both bullshit and very common on Right Twitter.
The response to CNN’s far bigger boner — the latest in a long serious of supposed Trump-Russia blockbuster stories that turn out to require major corrections — followed the same pattern.
Glenn Greenwald called it the U.S. media’s “most humiliating debacles in ages” and called it product of an anti-Trump, anti-Russia, anti-Wikileaks agenda.
I disagree. Two congressional sources were both wrong. It’s a bad look, but, again, it happened in the course of an honest pursuit of truth. It’s right to criticize journalists for making mistakes. It’s unprofessional. But, mistakes don’t indicate poor journalistic ethics or a lack of good faith.
MSNBC’s fuck-up wasn’t journalistic but meta-journalistic. The firing reflected a failure to understand the propaganda war mentality and limitless bad faith of the pro-Trump media.
For indirect contrast, consider the following:
“There have been times in our history where corruption and lawlessness were so pervasive, that examples had to be made. This is one of those times.”
What do you think? Dramatic, but a point of view I, for one, can sympathize with.
It’s a trap, though. The above was spoken by Trump intimate Judge Jeanine Pirro on her Fox News show. She was arguing for a “cleansing” at the FBI and DOJ, “of individuals who should not just be fired, but who need to be taken out in handcuffs.”
She names Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Bruce Ohr, James Comey and Robert Mueller, specifically calling for handcuffs for the first two.
Trump seems to want to be above the law. His media supporters seem to be acting as straight-ahead advocates of that grossly un-American posture. ‘I know the FBI is corrupt, but what is Trump?’
What Trump’s supporters say on cable television matters. The president watches at least four hours of TV a day, and consistently reacts emotionally to what he sees, reports NYT’s White House in their latest detail-rich behind-the-scenes story.
“Wrong!” Trump tweeted today, also taking a second to flame CNN’s Don Lemon.
Attitudes towards the news media are more polarized than at any time since measurement began, according to Dartmouth’s Brendan Nyhan.
The Boston Herald declared bankruptcy and will be sold. Cracked shut down its video unit and laid off 25 employees.
The New York Times, on the other hand, is sitting pretty at 3.5 million total subscribers.
Correction from last week: WaPo didn’t film Jamie Phillip walking into Project Veritas’ offices. Its reporters merely observed her walking in.
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