by Curmie

[I am particularly grateful for this installment of Curmie’s Conjectures because it assuages my guilt a bit. As longtime readers here know, I occasionally promise posts that never show up, or do, but so long after the promise that it’s embarrassing. Years ago, I promised a post defining and examining all journalistic tricks that I classify as “fake news,” and I use the term broadly to include misleading headlines, burying the lede, omitting key information that undermines the writer’s agenda, poisoning the well and other techniques. I started the thing, got frustrated and overwhelmed, and never finished it. Here Curmie doesn’t exactly present what I intended, but he touches on much of it, and as an extra bonus, he wrote it more elegantly than I would have (as usual). JM.]

I doubt that this blog has ever before turned to punk rock for ethics advice, but Boomtown Rats composer/frontman (and Live Aid impresario) Bob Geldof had it right in a song that’s probably more relevant today than it was 40+ years ago: “Don’t Believe What You Read.”  Well, not uncritically, at least.  At our host’s suggestion, I’m about to enter the fraught territory of trying to decide if a story published by an obviously biased media outlet might, this time, just be accurate. 

It’s difficult of late to find a news source that only leans in one direction or the other, rather than proselytizing for the cause.  The news networks and major newspapers have carved out their market shares based on feeding their viewers and readers what they want to be fed.  Whether the advent of Fox News was a trigger or a reaction is up to individual interpretation, but there’s absolutely no doubt that we’re now in an era in which news as reported is determined largely by editorial positioning, rather than the other way around.

It’s inevitable that, to steal a line from another of my favorite musicians, Paul Simon, “a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”  Fighting our own biases is not made easier by the knowledge that learning from experience and confirmation bias are opposite sides of the same coin.  If a story appears only on Fox News and the Drudge Report, or only on AlterNet and MSNBC, there’s an excellent chance that the indignation is feigned and the actual events are something of a nothing-burger.

But “usually” is not “always.”  As a society, we’re well aware of the tale of the boy who cried wolf and the miraculous last-second basket from well past half-court.  We nod and smile at the suggestion that stopped clocks are right twice a day. 

There are a few variations on the theme of biased journalism.  The first, editorializing in a news story, is generally the easiest to spot and the easiest to counteract.  If there are words like “communist,” “Nazi,” or “un-American” to describe a US politician, or phrases like “unborn children” or “reproductive freedom,” you’re reading an editorial, whether the article identifies itself as such or not.  There’s nothing wrong with editorializing; it’s what I do here and on my own blog, after all.  But I also try to not to suggest that what I write is completely objective.

Another variation on the theme, and a personal pet peeve, is what I call a Schrödinger sentence, because it is simultaneously true and not true.  For example, I’ve seen a whole lot of conservative commentary on this blog that “progressives want X.”  (“X” in this context, of course, has nothing to do with what Elon Musk renamed Twitter.)  True, there are enough progressives who advocate for X to make the noun plural, but I’m a progressive, and I’m a big fan of not-X.  The implication—or, rather, one possible implication—of the sentence is that in order to be a progressive, one must want X.  That is no more true than suggesting that all conservatives believe in Jewish space lasers.  And I really resent being told what I believe.

More problematic are the stories that leave out key points that run counter to the narrative the author wants to present, giving the impression of thorough and objective coverage while not in fact supplying it.  Suppressing dissenting opinions or factual evidence is the stuff of authoritarianism, and the media supporting both sides of the widening political rift in this country do seem to relish doing so.  Here’s where we hope that someone from a different perspective has also covered the story.

If not, we’re subject to the veritable cottage industry in reporting what “the other side doesn’t want you to see.”  Often, indeed I’d suggest far more often than not, that’s because there really isn’t a story there.  But sometimes, it’s Hunter Biden’s laptop.  Confession: I ignored that buzz for a long time.  The timing was too convenient, the possibility of manipulation too plausible.  I thought it had all the aroma of that risible but widely reported claim that Hilary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of the basement of a DC pizza joint.  (I’m no fan of Hilary, but give me a break!)  More to the point, whereas I was perfectly willing to believe HB was crooked, I balked at believing he could be so freaking stupid that he’d be exposed in the manner he was.  Oops.

And if I had that initial reaction, I can’t honestly complain that news editors did, as well.  I’m willing therefore to grant the possibility that the media decision-makers who didn’t run with the story when it first broke legitimately believed that like Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, there was “no there there.”  But I call your attention to the italicized words in the previous sentence.

Over the years, Jack has identified any number of stories that have been picked up by the right-wing press but not by their left-wing counterparts.  The same phenomenon happens in the other direction, too, of course.  I read a few days ago that there’s a school in Louisiana that will grant high school diplomas to students from outside the district based solely on the testimony of (Christian) homeschooling parents that their kids have been exposed to subject matter X, Y, and Z: not that they’ve understood it, or ever passed any test on it, just that Mommy says they’ve been exposed to it, even years earlier. 

The Parents’ Rights solution to students’ failing standardized exams, in that case, would be to require those exams only of public-school students.  Then they can blame teachers for their kids’ (or the exam’s) failures.  But homeschoolers shouldn’t have to subject their charges to those awful exams to prove their legitimacy, right?  They do have to write a check for a few hundred dollars, though.  (Go figure!)  If what I read is true, this situation is a couple steps past outrageous, even though the school is “unapproved” by the state. But is the story true?  I think so, but I’m not certain.  (See Part Two for more on this.)

Then, there’s the inclusion of irrelevant information as if it meant something.  I’m reminded of an old Mad magazine fake ad, which touted the fact that their brand of gasoline contained “no water to rust your tank, no molasses to gum up your engine.”  Sometimes it matters that Person X is of a particular race, political party, religion, or whatever.  But identifying an armed robbery suspect as a Baptist or a Muslim, a schoolteacher or a banker, a vegan or a butcher, probably tells us more about the reporter than about the criminal’s intentions.

And then there’s the last category, known simply as Making Shit Up.  The obvious examples are things like Hilary’s child sex ring, but the bigger problem is in the more plausible stuff.  Did Biden say this?  Did Trump say that?  Well, sort of.  But in context, not really… you get the idea.

We can also note things like conflations of debt and deficit, signaling either mendacity or profound incompetence: Hanlon’s Razor is real, after all.  I remember a hard-right Senator screeching that then-President Obama was “slashing the military.”  What Obama had actually done to precipitate this outburst, of course, was to propose a budget that would give the Pentagon a slightly smaller increase than they’d requested.  But the Senator’s comments were left unchallenged and uncontextualized by the right-leaning media… and the left-leaning media presented his misrepresentation as symptomatic of all dissent.

So, that’s a brief overview of the problem.  Stay tuned for Part Two, Strategies.

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