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.
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?
I will think more about your reply and may return to it, but I wanted to let you know that I believe you have missed the import of what I was saying. Perhaps that is my mistake, as the writer.
One of the things that you and I have been discussing over the last several months is the difference in communication methods through time. I keep trying to impress how much of a revolution instantaneous methods are in terms of their influence on culture, yet we still manage to talk past each other on this point. For me, the most important thing about these stories about New Year's Day is not that the press got it wrong initially -- in fact, in this era where gossip is treated as news and vice versa, that's almost to be expected. That's one of the reasons I say to let the sediment settle. But also I made mention that both Trump and Elon Musk meddle in the news of the day, at blistering speeds, cementing in the minds of their followers a version of events that would be nearly impossible to wrench out of their heads and which would not have set there were it not for their intentional crafting of events.
Moreover, with the extraordinary reach of their social media audience, these readers / viewers have the same story molded in their minds at the same time and thus can discuss it as though it were a shared memory. This is dangerous and illustrates the nature of this group bonding, particularly among MAGA adherents. It's not a similar way of thinking -- it's the *same story* being impressed upon them; and they talk among themselves, reinforcing that story and reinforcing that bond. You may not like it or believe it when this is discussed as being a cult, but you need to pay attention to these group processes. It's of extraordinary importance.
The medium is key. Let me refer here to an interchange that Marshall McLuhan had during an interview in 1978 at Cambridge University. It can be found here (at ~ 8:10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9fKhsZuKO4&t=490s
McLuhan says:
"Ramon -- what do you think the effect is of not having a body [as the telephone makes one incorporeal]?
"When it takes the telephone -- telephone, radio, or TV -- if you don't have a physical body at all? [Ramon: 'Depersonalization.'] Yeah... now complete. The observation is it would be depersonalization. It's a -- well, you are there. The sender is sent. By the way: on all electric media, the sender is sent. That is the message. *You* are the message. They send *you*. On the telephone, *you* are sent. And the person to whom you're speaking, they are sent to you. The sender is sent.
"Also, as you say, you lose your identity. You're a nobody. The person who is sent is nobody."
[McLuhan is asked, 'Why is the person who writes somebody, as a greater sense of identification, than the person who's talking on the telephone?']
"Hardware. There's note paper and pen and ink, and a courier sending this missive to another party somewhere else. It's not instant. I mean, electric is always instantaneous -- there's no delay. That's why you don't have a body. Instantaneous communication is minus the body.
"So that began with the telegraph. The telegraph also had that built-in dimension of the instantaneous and it completely transformed news and information. The mere speed. It didn't matter what was written -- the fact that it went at the speed of light transformed everything. It caused the Civil War. The hidden ground of the American Civil War was the telegraph. No historian knows this. ..."
So McLuhan was conscious of this difference in media, physical and slow (newspapers, written letters) versus electric / electronic (radio, TV, now Internet and social media). It's the difference between the Pony Express and a bullet train. There's no comparison except that they both are conveyances.
The most important thing about Trump's tweet was not that he was attempting to break news. It's that he was commandeering the medium and utilizing it for the purposes of spreading rumor. The point of the rumor wasn't to further the news story. It was to hijack it so as to contaminate more people with the putrid concept of xenophobia and racism. That was his entire prime motive, and he accomplished that with tremendous success. He painted the story of the New Orleans assailant as an immigrant before his followers knew the real story, so by the time they got to the actual details they already had the emotional response of being repulsed by the idea of terrorism on our soil by a foreign actor. That type of reaction can't be undone.
That's why I recommend staying away from hot news stories for as long as one can stand, unless it's a genuine emergency. In this upcoming administration, every story that can be twisted in this way will be.
Thank you for your reply. We agree on the fact that the press in a capitalist society has a financial interest in making up stories if it sells advertising space. I would also agree that the nature of the modern media landscape makes this process much easier through social media. I think where we diverge is that I think that this impulse towards media lies for the lolz and/or political gains was always there and not something that suddenly appeared with the appearance of MAGA.
For example, the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 was caused in part by the fact that the two gubernatorial candidates of that year, Clark Howell and Hoke Smith, owned the city’s main competing newspapers and used their papers to fear spread racist hysteria, while also claiming that they would be the best candidate to crack down on “uppity negroes”: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/atlanta-race-massacre-of-1906/
The newspapers continued to spread rumors of Black men assaulting white women during the outbreak of mass violence, which then led to subsequent articles about how the victims only had themselves to blame for being Black out in public. Obviously, Trump is acting in the same spirit when he broadcasts claims about Haitians in Ohio eating dogs, except he has a much bigger audience than Clark Howell or Hoke Smith could have ever dreamed of having.
I think it’s also worth considering how the media landscape has changed over the past 100 years or so. People lament the fall of the monoculture, but I think the monoculture only existed for a brief time in the mid to late twentieth century, when TV was able to present a more homogenized culture of news and entertainment. There used to be a ton of newspapers that often catered to niche audiences with their own set of facts, a precursor to the media fragmentation of today. To go back to my previous example, the reporting of the 1906 Race Massacre would look much different in the Atlanta Journal (the white newspaper owned by Hoke Smith) versus The Atlanta Independent (a Black newspaper). Now the media landscape is theoretically even more fractured than it was in the early twentieth century due to social media, but also more centralized and controlled due to billionaire and government surveillance on as Internet platforms.
Hello again, LM. Thank you, as always, for your thoughtful reply.
I just wanted to say that I will consider what you're saying here, yet I still think that you are reaching to compare media that bear little resemblance to each other and so cannot shed light on what the other is. I hope most of us are aware of the fact that newspapers in the 1800s and 1900s were slanted so as to demonize the Other (often Black people, though many others filled that slot), and I've referred to quotes by V. O. Key, Jr., who wrote about how race in the South absolutely warped politics.
My point in this essay isn't to retread that ground. We know that racism corrupts discourse. I meant more to point to the vehicle of rumor, how that's being pressed into service in Trump's overall project (whatever that happens to be), and how social media is utterly turbocharging that phenomenon. It is in that way that we have not seen anything like this before. The combination will create a curtain of perception around those in the MAGA bubble (and perhaps around those adjacent to that bubble), a worldview/reality that can be affected in a second among millions of people with a single sentence -- boosted by electronic means.
Personally, I consider how Trump got out in front of this story to bear strong resemblance to how Israeli spokespeople commandeered the storyline coming out of Amsterdam in the wake of violence by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Even the mayor of Amsterdam, retracting her use of the word 'pogrom' to describe the events, admitted that Israeli figures inserted themselves in the timeline at 3:00 a.m. on the night in question, shaping the narrative before most Western outlets were up and running for that newsday. To this day, despite evidence contradicting that first telling, the official Israeli POV of the Amsterdam incident is still running wild in various spaces. I absolutely see parallels with that and how Trump portrayed the New Orleans assailant as a foreign agent of terror who crossed the border -- that's a story 180 degrees away from reality that absolutely is taken as gospel among Trump's following, and that has to do with how he got out in front of that story.
That ability to shape a story just as it's coming into view is one that is being ceded to Trump, with all of this media capitulation in the wake of his electoral victory. It's only going to get worse from here.
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.
Thanks for reading, FC! And thanks for the reminder about the terrible coverage of Paul Pelosi's attack. That's a very good example of the chroniclers getting it ridiculously wrong. (If you'll recall, however, a good deal of the CT that swirled around that story originated from Twitter, which had recently been purchased by Elon Musk. Twitter was an incubator for these bad ideas.)
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?
Thanks for replying, LM.
I will think more about your reply and may return to it, but I wanted to let you know that I believe you have missed the import of what I was saying. Perhaps that is my mistake, as the writer.
One of the things that you and I have been discussing over the last several months is the difference in communication methods through time. I keep trying to impress how much of a revolution instantaneous methods are in terms of their influence on culture, yet we still manage to talk past each other on this point. For me, the most important thing about these stories about New Year's Day is not that the press got it wrong initially -- in fact, in this era where gossip is treated as news and vice versa, that's almost to be expected. That's one of the reasons I say to let the sediment settle. But also I made mention that both Trump and Elon Musk meddle in the news of the day, at blistering speeds, cementing in the minds of their followers a version of events that would be nearly impossible to wrench out of their heads and which would not have set there were it not for their intentional crafting of events.
Moreover, with the extraordinary reach of their social media audience, these readers / viewers have the same story molded in their minds at the same time and thus can discuss it as though it were a shared memory. This is dangerous and illustrates the nature of this group bonding, particularly among MAGA adherents. It's not a similar way of thinking -- it's the *same story* being impressed upon them; and they talk among themselves, reinforcing that story and reinforcing that bond. You may not like it or believe it when this is discussed as being a cult, but you need to pay attention to these group processes. It's of extraordinary importance.
The medium is key. Let me refer here to an interchange that Marshall McLuhan had during an interview in 1978 at Cambridge University. It can be found here (at ~ 8:10): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9fKhsZuKO4&t=490s
McLuhan says:
"Ramon -- what do you think the effect is of not having a body [as the telephone makes one incorporeal]?
"When it takes the telephone -- telephone, radio, or TV -- if you don't have a physical body at all? [Ramon: 'Depersonalization.'] Yeah... now complete. The observation is it would be depersonalization. It's a -- well, you are there. The sender is sent. By the way: on all electric media, the sender is sent. That is the message. *You* are the message. They send *you*. On the telephone, *you* are sent. And the person to whom you're speaking, they are sent to you. The sender is sent.
"Also, as you say, you lose your identity. You're a nobody. The person who is sent is nobody."
[McLuhan is asked, 'Why is the person who writes somebody, as a greater sense of identification, than the person who's talking on the telephone?']
"Hardware. There's note paper and pen and ink, and a courier sending this missive to another party somewhere else. It's not instant. I mean, electric is always instantaneous -- there's no delay. That's why you don't have a body. Instantaneous communication is minus the body.
"So that began with the telegraph. The telegraph also had that built-in dimension of the instantaneous and it completely transformed news and information. The mere speed. It didn't matter what was written -- the fact that it went at the speed of light transformed everything. It caused the Civil War. The hidden ground of the American Civil War was the telegraph. No historian knows this. ..."
So McLuhan was conscious of this difference in media, physical and slow (newspapers, written letters) versus electric / electronic (radio, TV, now Internet and social media). It's the difference between the Pony Express and a bullet train. There's no comparison except that they both are conveyances.
The most important thing about Trump's tweet was not that he was attempting to break news. It's that he was commandeering the medium and utilizing it for the purposes of spreading rumor. The point of the rumor wasn't to further the news story. It was to hijack it so as to contaminate more people with the putrid concept of xenophobia and racism. That was his entire prime motive, and he accomplished that with tremendous success. He painted the story of the New Orleans assailant as an immigrant before his followers knew the real story, so by the time they got to the actual details they already had the emotional response of being repulsed by the idea of terrorism on our soil by a foreign actor. That type of reaction can't be undone.
That's why I recommend staying away from hot news stories for as long as one can stand, unless it's a genuine emergency. In this upcoming administration, every story that can be twisted in this way will be.
Thank you for your reply. We agree on the fact that the press in a capitalist society has a financial interest in making up stories if it sells advertising space. I would also agree that the nature of the modern media landscape makes this process much easier through social media. I think where we diverge is that I think that this impulse towards media lies for the lolz and/or political gains was always there and not something that suddenly appeared with the appearance of MAGA.
For example, the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 was caused in part by the fact that the two gubernatorial candidates of that year, Clark Howell and Hoke Smith, owned the city’s main competing newspapers and used their papers to fear spread racist hysteria, while also claiming that they would be the best candidate to crack down on “uppity negroes”: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/atlanta-race-massacre-of-1906/
The newspapers continued to spread rumors of Black men assaulting white women during the outbreak of mass violence, which then led to subsequent articles about how the victims only had themselves to blame for being Black out in public. Obviously, Trump is acting in the same spirit when he broadcasts claims about Haitians in Ohio eating dogs, except he has a much bigger audience than Clark Howell or Hoke Smith could have ever dreamed of having.
I think it’s also worth considering how the media landscape has changed over the past 100 years or so. People lament the fall of the monoculture, but I think the monoculture only existed for a brief time in the mid to late twentieth century, when TV was able to present a more homogenized culture of news and entertainment. There used to be a ton of newspapers that often catered to niche audiences with their own set of facts, a precursor to the media fragmentation of today. To go back to my previous example, the reporting of the 1906 Race Massacre would look much different in the Atlanta Journal (the white newspaper owned by Hoke Smith) versus The Atlanta Independent (a Black newspaper). Now the media landscape is theoretically even more fractured than it was in the early twentieth century due to social media, but also more centralized and controlled due to billionaire and government surveillance on as Internet platforms.
Hello again, LM. Thank you, as always, for your thoughtful reply.
I just wanted to say that I will consider what you're saying here, yet I still think that you are reaching to compare media that bear little resemblance to each other and so cannot shed light on what the other is. I hope most of us are aware of the fact that newspapers in the 1800s and 1900s were slanted so as to demonize the Other (often Black people, though many others filled that slot), and I've referred to quotes by V. O. Key, Jr., who wrote about how race in the South absolutely warped politics.
My point in this essay isn't to retread that ground. We know that racism corrupts discourse. I meant more to point to the vehicle of rumor, how that's being pressed into service in Trump's overall project (whatever that happens to be), and how social media is utterly turbocharging that phenomenon. It is in that way that we have not seen anything like this before. The combination will create a curtain of perception around those in the MAGA bubble (and perhaps around those adjacent to that bubble), a worldview/reality that can be affected in a second among millions of people with a single sentence -- boosted by electronic means.
Personally, I consider how Trump got out in front of this story to bear strong resemblance to how Israeli spokespeople commandeered the storyline coming out of Amsterdam in the wake of violence by Maccabi Tel Aviv fans. Even the mayor of Amsterdam, retracting her use of the word 'pogrom' to describe the events, admitted that Israeli figures inserted themselves in the timeline at 3:00 a.m. on the night in question, shaping the narrative before most Western outlets were up and running for that newsday. To this day, despite evidence contradicting that first telling, the official Israeli POV of the Amsterdam incident is still running wild in various spaces. I absolutely see parallels with that and how Trump portrayed the New Orleans assailant as a foreign agent of terror who crossed the border -- that's a story 180 degrees away from reality that absolutely is taken as gospel among Trump's following, and that has to do with how he got out in front of that story.
That ability to shape a story just as it's coming into view is one that is being ceded to Trump, with all of this media capitulation in the wake of his electoral victory. It's only going to get worse from here.
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.
Thanks for reading, FC! And thanks for the reminder about the terrible coverage of Paul Pelosi's attack. That's a very good example of the chroniclers getting it ridiculously wrong. (If you'll recall, however, a good deal of the CT that swirled around that story originated from Twitter, which had recently been purchased by Elon Musk. Twitter was an incubator for these bad ideas.)