Wait a week
Back in 2021, after President Biden oversaw the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, we all witnessed how the American media machine all arrayed against him, not just blaming him for the mishaps but blasting him personally. Attacks came in from all sides, not just Fox News but the centrist and even left-leaning media channels, too. Hot takes pervaded the landscape.
I don’t know about you, but I withdrew from broadcast media at that point. First and foremost, it was to preserve my serenity. The attacks were non-stop, relentless and, more to the point, came from a place of emotion. Pundits and anchors were simply emoting at the audience, yelling, screeching, almost certainly initiating a similar reaction in the hearts and minds of their viewers. I stayed away.
When it came to the aftermath of October 7th and Israel’s assault on Gaza, then, it was easy for me to shift away from broadcast news, because I had already built up a reserve of ways to get my news elsewhere. MSNBC was just as guilty as the rest: coverage of explosions and destruction blanketed their channel for hours on end. So for that first week, everything I consumed was in print or on YouTube, and none of it had to do with that conflict.
So it was with curiosity — and, later, astonishment — that I saw the news that there had been a report of beheaded babies that had to be retracted. CNN had run with this story and was forced to walk it back. Even more eyebrow-raising was the fact that, in the space of a week, President Biden himself had given credence to this story and the White House had to correct the record.1
I was one of the few that had been initially untouched by that salacious rumor, so I was not affected by that propaganda campaign.
Those news stories were meant to affect the hearts and minds of the audience. By avoiding the coverage, I had sidestepped the influence.
So it is with the stories this week from New Year’s Day. We had the intentional ramming of a crowd and setting of explosives by an assailant in New Orleans, who was killed by police at the scene; and we had the explosion of a Tesla Cybertruck in Las Vegas outside of a Trump-branded hotel.
All sorts of rumors flew — which is understandable, because people wanted to be able to grasp what had happened. Many of us were already on tenterhooks about what 2025 would bring, and this seemed an ominous turn for the fledgling year.
But you see what happened. President-elect and congenital liar Donald Trump insinuated that the New Orleans assailant was an immigrant or had at least slipped into the country through porous borders. He immediately otherized the perpetrator, when in fact the person was American and a veteran of the U.S. military. The person involved with the Cybertruck explosion, too, was American and active in the military.
The media, broadly speaking, did not do much better with its speculating. Their incentive was to get the scoop or, barring that, be the first to get the story right. But that meant they had to continue to throw darts at the board, a terrible way to report the news.
It hasn’t been a full week, but much of the record already has required correction. This is to be expected! It was a major, mysterious happenstance. Nobody knew what was going on, and answers were not going to be immediately forthcoming with the New Orleans assailant killed at the scene and the Cybertruck driver dying on-scene as well. This was always going to take time to figure out.
But you see what the media has done in the meantime, and here I speak specifically of conservative media. Because Trump has not backed down from his initial mischaracterization of the New Orleans assailant as a foreign threat, conservative media has stayed with its initial spin, leaning into this insinuation even though the person was, at least at one point, an asset to the United States. This is instrumental. They want to stoke xenophobia.2
This is a function of the sped-up news cycle. And this dynamic is going to be turned against us throughout the upcoming tenure of Trump but certainly in the first hundred days of his regaining the office. Trump is a virtuoso of media, and he will use the news cycle and the rumor mill (turbocharged by Elon Musk’s X platform) to effect a 21st-century Luftwaffe against us, the viewers at home.
I urge you: wait a week. There will be news stories — genuine emergencies — that we will be unable to avoid. I grant that. But, if possible, and especially if the story appears overtly sensational, wait a week. Let the story develop. Let facts come to the fore. Otherwise, you risk allowing yourself to be co-opted into the machine of influence that Trump and his cronies have in store.
Think of time as a prophylactic. Use it for your own self-preservation.
It has not been a full week, but Democracy Now! has a fairly well-sourced report about the backgrounds of these two attackers, as well as how Trump and the right wing have weaponized the story in service of fearmongering.
Jesse Dollemore of Dollemore Daily also remarked upon the similarities in coverage of these stories by the right-wng media machine.
This did not stop Biden from resurrecting this false story after this official correction (something that I’ve written about here). Biden did immense damage to both his credibility and to that of his political institution by embracing that rumor.
This is a problem in and of itself, as it threatens our ability to conduct national security. We need to be able to identify threats in real-time, and we won’t be able to do that if the public is conditioned to view “outsiders” as culprits when in fact the problem is homegrown, even our next-door neighbors.
The press has always been like this though. The role of the media in a capitalist society is to sell advertising space. The best way to do this is through lurid tales of sex, violence, and other assorted crimes. Whether or not these things actually happened is a minor concern. Just slap words and phrases like “allegedly” or “sources say” and you’re good to go. For example, the New York Herald reported a disturbing and graphic story in 1874 about wild animals escaping from the Central Park Zoo and mauling onlookers. Granted, none of this happened (a detail that wasn’t mentioned until the end of the article) but it made the owner of the newspaper a lot of money, which is what really mattered.
Things have only gotten worse due to the extreme concentration of the media within the last thirty years, not to mention the rise of the Action News/Eyewitness News format that values blood and guts over hard news. At least in the 1950s and 1960s there was a more diverse media landscape in the form of various “ethnic” newspapers and radio stations, not to mention explicitly socialist media. Now almost none of that alternative media exists anymore and what remains is a shadow of itself. It’s hilarious to see people claim to swear off the mainstream media, only to report that they’re watching the BBC, one of the most mainstream and Western chauvinist sources imaginable.
I do think that the mainstream media is conservative, but not in the way that people at the Other Site seem to think. For them, the problem is that the mainstream media criticized the Biden administration too much. To me, the problem is that most legacy media wants and needs access to the people at the top, which can only be achieved by not inquiring too much about how the proverbial sausage is made. In some cases, like the NYT’s role in manufacturing consent for the Iraq War and the Palestinian genocide, they are actively being a malevolent force in society. If the mainstream media doesn’t have the courage to call out Israel for its behavior, why would anyone expect them to have the courage to speak out against domestic injustices?
The traditional media is pathetic. I almost completely stopped watching network news after the Paul Pelosi attack. NBC rushed to air a story that Paul Pelosi knew his attacker, had invited him and they suggested they had a relationship. Yeah, the next day, they walked it back. But once they report something like babies being beheaded or a hook up gone bad, the walk back is like a whisper while that first story gets circulated on full speed.
We have to be extra aware now. I mean ALL presidents manipulate events. All. But Trump??? Wowzer. Plus he has lots of helpers. And not just FOX. The other networks are only two steps better. Journalism is really in the toilet.
You have good guidance on this. Wait a week. Thanks for this post.