A Media Post

 After writing about the media response to the current situation in Afghanistan, I felt I should go into a bit more detail.

It's just that I'm not sure where to start.

I feel like anything I write would mostly be based off my rules of thumb, guesses, assumptions, and observations... and rather short on fact.

Plus, well... I don't watch cable news. Ever. I haven't done so in years, maybe even a decade or more. It started because I hated being at the mercy of whatever story they wanted to tell (I did not need 24 hr coverage of Anna Nicole Smith, thank you very much), plus the way that they would fill up air time with pretty much nothing. 

With online articles I could read whatever caught my interest, and follow up with new information when a new article came out. 

As for online news... I do favor what I consider credible sources, but even there you still have to use your head to sort through the opinion, framing, and spin. And, well... the paywalls mean that I limit myself on some of the bigger names. (NYTimes, for example. There's only a limited number of free articles so I really have to be interested in the story to click. I suppose I could get a subscription, but I'd probably need multiple subscriptions - Washington Post, The Economist, etc - and that adds up. If we weren't dealing with the squeezing of the middle class and we all had a bit more spending money I suspect they'd see more subscriptions from people like me. That, btw, is also a classic example of why failing to pay workers in accordance with inflation means there's less people willing to spend money on things. In a consumer society you'd think they'd realize their hurting themselves, but alas the potential future economic growth isn't enough to make businesses pay their people more. We saw that with Henry Ford already.)

The other odd thing about the media is that we all have this idea of what it should be. i.e. fact-based reporting on important issues, willing to do in-depth investigations that speak truth to power and bring problems to light, etc. etc.

Except I know a little bit about history, and I'm aware that that's there's a lot of history where that didn't happen. 

I suppose there's always been an element of information warfare there, and given the current mess with bots and trolls and people deliberately trying to manipulate the news it might be worth trying to read about more historical examples. If I can find a good book recommendation. (No promises on when I'd get to it though. I truly do have an ever expanding list of books that I want to read.)

So take this for what it's worth from someone who doesn't watch any sort of cable news, and only occasionally reads the news articles from major publications. (Which does beg the question of where and how, exactly, I learn anything. I'm not sure how to explain that though... I like using a news aggregator to get a sense of the big issues news junkies are talking about. Mostly the headlines. And if I'm interested in a topic I'll try to dig up multiple sources. Maybe read two or three articles or blog posts about it, see what people are saying on Facebook and Twitter, check out a fact-checking site... it just depends on the issue and sources available. I consider certain sources unreliable enough that I don't bother with them, though. I try to have a diverse feed, but tbh the conservative side has gotten so bad that it's hard to find counterbalancing opinions worth reading.)

So anyways. Media is biased. I don't think that's really debatable right now. The issue is 'how'?

Conservatives claim there's a liberal bias, liberals claim there's a conservative bias (see 'Hillary's e-mails'), and tbh I don't think it's quite so clearly one or the other.

It's more like... most mainstream media represents 'the establishment', however you want to define that. And some of the reporters do seem to have a liberal bias, but a lot of their editors and whatever-the-position-is-called within the organization seem to have a conservative one. Let's also not forget that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. I do not know how much influence he exerts over that, and whether that means the Washington Post won't ever write anything critical of Amazon (though it seems rather likely.)

'The Establishment' is a handy term that isn't very well defined, kind of like the powers-that-be, but it doesn't necessarily mean there's some group of people chilling in a cigar smoke-filled room plotting how to divide potential opposition and support the status quo. 

It's more like - the people who get into these positions tend to socialize with each other and gain a common understanding of the world around them. That shared view has biases and inaccuracies that they really don't question (like this idea that poor people are lazy and you need to keep them hungry in order to get them to work for you. Practically a recipe for terrible leadership, but good luck convincing the people who believe it to question it.)

So there does seem to be an element of groupthink, and I normally do follow the 'never attribute to malice what you can attribute to incompetence' rule of thumb... but that isn't quite enough to explain things.

After all, there's documented evidence of business owners using agencies like the Pinkertons to break up strikes. Just like there's documented evidence of the feds trying to disrupt the Civil Rights Movement.

Thus there really are people with money and power who use the tools at their disposal to tackle anything they consider a threat. (The long term negative consequences of that are not so clear to them, or they wouldn't keep doing it.)

It's hard to say for sure what all is going on today - information truly is a prized commodity, it seems. But I have heard of people hiring agencies to, as one example, push internet links they don't like to the bottom of search engine results. 

And, ofc, there's all those nasty bots and trolls trying to manipulate public discourse.

There do seem to be some people who are capable of influencing the media (i.e. Hillary's team seemed to consistently have some sort of fluff piece saying good things about her immediately after any sort of negative reporting. Ofc, given that she lost in 2016 that doesn't necessarily mean such efforts can force the results they want. Any more than a bot army, or whatever we want to call that since I think some of those actually have real people paid to spread lies. It's important to address sources of misinformation, but we shouldn't give them more weight than they really have. Example - most of the posters that I suspect are paid to argueTrump took covid seriously are rather laughable. It's such a ridiculous rewriting of the last year and a half.)

So anyways. The thing about Afghanistan, and Biden,  is there was an article I can't seem to find now, that basically said anybody who disagreed with the line they were pushing wasn't asked to give their opinions on the news. In other words, they weren't even trying to get 'both sides', or cover it in depth. They seemed to want to run with 'Biden has hopelessly screwed up in Afghanistan'.

Which, well... first of all foreign policy has almost never registered with the average American. I mean, I care... but I'm kind of weird like that. The perpetually online news junkies I tend to see on twitter care... veterans care...

But most Americans barely even remembered we had a presence there. Sure, it looks bad now and Biden's ratings took a hit, but I seriously doubt it's going to matter once the news cycle moves on. 

I'm not sure how much of that illustrates the difference between the news junkies and 'establishment' types vs the average American. (What was that quote about Biden's speech? 95% of the establishment will hate it, 95% of Americans will appreciate it? Says something about the discrepancy.)

I am not sure why the mainstream media would be so determined to push that story line, though. It doesn't seem like the thing the 'liberal media' would do. (I did see someone speculate that they were thrilled to be able to criticize Biden for something, to try and show they weren't biased and were holding him accountable or something. Idk, it's the kind of thing where I can see some patterns but don't really know the underlying causes.)

There do seem to be some darker, more malicious forces at play... the consistent efforts to undermine trust in the vaccine, and covid prevention protocols, demonstrate that. I'm just not too sure who's behind it, and why. I can speculate about it plenty, but without facts it gets a little too close to conspiracy theory for comfort. 

The thing is, I know and have seen the disinformation army at work. It exists. And that makes it easy to make assumptions about who is behind the coordinated effort we're seeing. That they are essentially getting people killed proves it's malicious. That some of their same arguments come out of the mouths of conservative politicians implies some coordination (one day I saw multiple accounts suddenly making the claim that covid was rising in Florida because Biden was secretly sending illegal immigrants there, and it was only a day or two later that DeSantis rather publicly made a milder version.)  

So. Malicious disinformation, probably but not necessarily in coordination with conservative 'leaders' like DeSantis.

Seriously, we're under attack. It's just not a kinetic strike. (I can say that as a blogger with no consequence, but I would hope our national security team is thinking long and hard on how to address it. Hopefully without escalating it into a more physical confrontation.)

The attack on Biden's Afghanistan efforts seems... somewhat connected, but I'm not entirely sure. Especially since it's hard to believe the more credible news agencies would be on board with that.

It could just be something about the way their businesses make money. (I understand they want the stories people will click on, but I'm generally not the target audience for that. Otherwise we wouldn't consistently have wall-to-wall coverage on topics I couldn't care less about.)

I'm not really sure what I'm getting at with all this. There's far too much I don't know, and too much of the current milieu is hidden. 

That's a large part of why I wish I could see the history books that will be written after a lot of whatever is going on has been declassified and open to historians.