Category Media Criticism

Reality checkers

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

obfuscate: to throw into shadow; to make obscure; confuse; to be evasive, unclear, or confusing (Merriam-Webster)

We — all of us, I think — we need more people in our world with clear vision about things that are happening plus both the ability and the commitment to speak plainly and honestly about those things. Today I come to praise the deobfuscators.

Have you heard, there were people in the White House during the last term who tried to cover up the president’s physical and mental decline? I know, such a shock, right? Or, as the great Charles P. Pierce puts it in Esquire, the hysteria over Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s revelation “that a White House will withhold adverse health information from the public…is, of course, news to those people who remember Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer operation, the unspoken agreement not to photograph FDR in his wheelchair, the relative severity of Eisenhower’s heart problems, the staggering medical record of John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s manic boozing during the height of the Watergate crisis, and, in the closest parallel we have, Reagan’s staff’s successful concealment of the fact that he was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his second term.”

It’s not to say that what is reported in this book is not true; it is to say, rather, “duh.” The diminishment of public dialogue in our time, to a focus on what is shiny and new to the exclusion of all else, makes it easy for us to lose sight of the things that should really matter to our country, to our children’s future. Of course, there are those who prefer it this way:

Life will go back to normal for the elite political media and their useful idiots in the Democratic party. They won’t have to think much about assaults on habeas corpus, deportation of tiny cancer patients, destruction of the regulatory safeguards of the federal government, or clear-cutting of American democracy. Game on!

Earlier this month we all learned that Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, decided to lift the “permanent” ban from baseball issued in 1989 to Pete Rose, which makes Rose eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Columnist Mike Finger at the San Antonio Express-News elegantly gives voice to the clear reading of events which corporate Baseball would prefer you ignore: MLB dishonestly re-defined “permanent” to mean “lifetime” and cravenly capitulated to a president who can’t keep his tiny tiny hands off of other people’s business.

In one view of America, apparently shared by Manfred, character counts, but it doesn’t count that much. Some sins are unforgivable, but only for a while. History should be honored, but the parts that make us uncomfortable can be omitted.

And above all, principles are what matter, right up until the day someone in power asks you to abandon them.

Within three years, baseball’s all-time leader in hits might be enshrined at last in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Thanks to Manfred’s decision, Rose is eligible to be considered by the veteran’s committee, even though he repeatedly broke the game’s most hallowed rule, even though he denied it for more than a decade, even though he never apologized, and even though the ban he accepted in 1989 was supposed to be “permanent.”

None of those facts changed after Rose died last September at age 83. The only big development since then was that Rose received a public show of support from the president of the United States.

If your consideration is limited to Rose’s career as a player, there’s no doubt he deserves the honor of being in the Hall, starting with the fact the had more hits than any other player, ever. But he was banned because he broke the rule that no player is allowed to bet on baseball, ever. Period.

Rose had his chances to atone for his misdeeds while he was alive, and he never did. He applied for reinstatement in 2015, initially claimed he didn’t bet on sports anymore, then admitted he still did. He kept making appearances in casinos, even after then-commissioner Bud Selig suggested that staying away could provide a path to removing the ban.

(snip)

And now is the time that Manfred chooses to ease off the most notorious betting rule-breaker of his generation?

Apparently, now is indeed the time. Now is the time, even though betting wasn’t the worst of Rose’s alleged transgressions. In 2017, Rose was accused in federal court documents by a woman who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with him when she was 14 or 15 years old in 1973, when Rose was in his 30s. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rose issued a response acknowledging he had sex with the accuser, but “said he believed she was 16 at the time, old enough to legally consent in Ohio.”

In 2022, when an Inquirer reporter asked him about the incident, Rose responded, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

That, of course, is not an admission of guilt. It’s also probably not a line likely to be included on Rose’s Cooperstown plaque, if he gets one.

It is, however, a reflection of one version of America. As long as the right man is vouching for you, any source of shame can be overlooked, if not outright ignored.

We need people who are on the lookout for attempts to warp the facts of the reality we share, and I’m pleased to have found two more.

The truth shall set you free – Episode 2

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Maybe this really isn’t very complicated at all.  Maybe, a growing number of Americans don’t trust the mainstream news media because they don’t like what they see and hear and read, and they don’t understand what journalism is supposed to do.  I first encountered this phenomenon as a journalist way back at the beginning, by which I mean about 1980.

As a kid I somehow understood that the “news” I read in the newspaper and heard and saw on radio and television was intended to inform and educate me about what was happening in the world, not to promote any certain politicians or favored views of the world.  And that’s not to say that news didn’t (or doesn’t) cast some politicians and views of the world favorably, if you consider the ones who were not in the news in the first place for accusations of law-breaking and dirty dealing.  Watergate happened when I was in high school – both the crimes and the reporting that uncovered the crimes – and Woodward-and-Bernstein were making “investigative journalist” a career goal for more and more college students, although that’s not specifically what attracted me…I was looking for an alternative after I decided, as someone who really didn’t enjoy college, that it would take too long to go to law school.  Later I realized I made a mistake turning my nose up at “college” the way I did.  Later I also came to realize that all good journalism involves “investigating” and the term of art was more a promotional pitch than an accurate description of a exclusive branch of the practice.

After having worked for a year on the college newspaper as a reporter and editor (followed by life-affirming experiences as a lunch-rush sandwich maker in a fast food restaurant and then overnight cashier in a self-serve gas station), I got a part-time job in the news department at a local country music radio station.  They needed someone else to cover school board meetings since their reporter was the daughter of the school board president, and someone to write and anchor short on-the-hour newscasts on weekend afternoons and evenings.   That’s what had me on the air reading the first UPI bulletin about the assault on Congressman Leo Ryan and his traveling party at Port Kaituma in Guyana before the news the next day of the massacre at Jonestown.  Before long I was covering city hall and a municipal election while still a student, then going full-time after graduation.  Nine months later I took a job at another station in town (for more money) as a reporter and anchor, lucky to have a terrific friend and mentor there (Olin Murrell, the late musician you may have heard of) who kept my focus on a clear and fair presentation of the stories that made up the daily news.

Olin also hosted the live evening call-in talk show on that station, and late in 1980 he gave me a chance to try it out: be the ringmaster who conducted interviews and managed an open discussion of any topic, able to articulate my opinion and be devil’s advocate with callers as they expressed their opinions, so as to generate a discussion and hold the attention of an audience.  A few years ago I characterized my outlook at that time as “left of center but not crazy; I had more than one caller who complimented me for being funny and so reasonable…for a liberal.”

It was those conversations with a caller named Irene that were the first direct exposure I can remember to the accusation that the news media is liberal and biased against conservatives.  It seemed to be drawn from a false belief that no person who believed in the Conservative cause and ideals – think Ronald Reagan and the Moral Majority – would ever express an opinion contrary to that company line.  It was as if, first, they did not believe that any reporter was capable of quarantining the influence of their personal beliefs when reporting the facts of a story, and second, that any facts reported that did not gild Reagan’s lily must be wrong or have been intentionally distorted to make him look bad.  And this was long before the rise of “alternative facts” or “fake news” and today’s growing mainstream distrust of mainstream reporting.  Where does that come from?

In a thoughtful piece in Slate this month, Ben Mathis-Lilley lays out the case that an economic impact on legacy media from online sources that do not prioritize fair and responsible reporting has made it “increasingly difficult to sustain a media outlet whose business mostly involves the costly process of nonpartisan fact-gathering and reporting.”

That’s especially true at the local level, where newspapers often simply don’t exist anymore—but it’s also true nationally, where the country is headed in the direction of having one reportorial omnipublication (the New York Times) and a few others that are mostly for people who work in business. Concurrently, the right wing has developed its own media apparatus, while social media and streaming platforms now allow public personalities to build their own audiences directly.

Where that mostly leaves the participants in media (defined broadly) is trying to hustle up a career by selling a strong perspective on the world—by having a dramatic and emotionally satisfying explanation for everything that’s happening everywhere. Its marker of success is being able to headline your own podcast or subscription-driven Substack newsletter, and it runs on opinion “takes,” which cost relatively little to produce, but have to compete for space and eyeballs on Google results, X and Bluesky, and Apple News. And in many cases, the more a take reinforces readers’ existing beliefs, the better it does. It’s a truism and a Paul Simon lyric for a reason: All else being equal, people prefer to hear what they want to hear, and disregard the rest.

So, if even the media outlets which are not ideologically bent one way or another are pushed to publish quick, emotional opinions about the news – rather than to report and present “the news” itself – in order to remain profitable and stay in business, it shouldn’t be surprising that more and more Americans have come to believe, through their own experience, that there is a lot of opinion included in mainstream “news.”

What this often (though not always!) rewards is pandering to simple, polemical worldviews—Everyone else is stupid, they’re all lying to you, this or that particular group is responsible for everything in the news that is upsetting—rather than uncertainty or curiosity. It’s a good time to be a person who says everything is bullshit. (Which, to be clear, is a take I usually agree with. There’s lots of bullshit out there!) At the same time, groups that feel like they’re under attack will look for their own messengers to deliver polemical responses which reject every criticism and assign blame somewhere else; this is what “stanning” is. (Crucially, the political center is just as subject to these incentives as everyone else; there are centrism stans, too, who find “illiberalism” at the scene of every crime.) It is a polarization-optimized discourse. And everything it touches gets a little dumber and more difficult to trust.

For a detailed explanation of how the rise of online “news” has threatened the existence of mainstream reporting, check out Phillip Longman’s “How Fighting Monopoly Can Save Journalism” in the first quarter’s Washington Monthly.  It has a thorough background of how digital players have stripped mainstream journalism of its income and contributed to the growth of opinion journalism; I found it very educational with both scary and hopeful aspects:

[With politicians of both parties] repealing or failing to enforce basic market rules that had long contained concentrated corporate power, policy makers enabled the emergence of a new kind of monopoly that engages in a broad range of deeply anticompetitive business practices. These include, most significantly, the cornering of advertising markets, which historically provided the primary means of financing journalism. This is the colossal policy failure that has effectively destroyed the economic foundations of a free press.

An extension of the attitude I first heard from Irene some 45 years ago is evident in our next president, who has a long record of attacking as corrupt and/or unfair any source of information that does not praise him.  That combative attitude is present in Republicans at lower levels of government, too, many of whom (I’m talking about you, Ken Paxton) have taken to refusing to even engage with the “hostile media”…and then pander to their supporters by later attacking those outlets over stories in which they didn’t get a chance to defend themselves!

I think most people want a reliable source for news that is not biased for or against certain politicians or any particular view of how the world should be.  Like the folks in a rural southeastern Colorado county who volunteered to pay more to keep their weekly newspaper from shutting down, from losing their only source of what was happening where they live.  If journalism can find a way to better provide that, affordably, we can still have the educated populace that is critical to our survival as a free people…as Ronald Reagan himself said it, in 1981: “If we are to guard against ignorance and remain free, as Jefferson cautioned, it is the responsibility of every American to be informed.”

Nothing but Bluesky from now on

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

So it’s late at night and I’m at the desktop computer bopping around the interwebs looking for entertaining but brief stories…nothing too dense, you know, I really ought to just go on to bed.  I was checking out Slate and hit this headline: “Sick of X and Elon Musk? This App Might Be for You.”  Since I am that, I read on and learned that there is a thing called Bluesky, which is currently making news for its growing popularity as an alternative to Twitter.  (I still call it Twitter, can’t help it.)

What, then, is Bluesky? Until this week, one could think of it as a small, clean lifeboat, sitting off to the side of a sinking cruise ship where most of the passengers also have norovirus.

For more than a year, Bluesky has been the boat for left-leaning Twitter refugees who were so fed up with Musk that they beat the masses in deciding not to stick around on his platform. That could have some echo-chamber effects, not that such an outcome was any worse than being surrounded by the most obnoxious people on the internet over on X. (For example, a critical mass of Bluesky users were a good ways behind the rest of the internet last summer in recognizing that Joe Biden had no chance of political survival after his last debate performance.) X has remained where most of the action happens, because it is where politicians, companies, the biggest media outlets, and their reporters still live. The discourse has steadily degraded there, but the power users have not fled en masse.

But while X has spiraled deeper into a racist fever dream and Threads has kept building its sunshine-pumping text app for influencers, Bluesky has been building.

So OK, I signed up to check it out, the same way I did with Twitter in 2008, when I initially resisted because I bought the criticism that Twitter was just a bunch of people telling other peoplebafkreickppry5djbfnkxqijqap3bvglmguqdkgicr3rdzcdciritdbqzxu what they had for lunch today.  You’d have thought I’d just fallen into The Time Tunnel: it all looked and felt like Twitter did back in the early days, but without the overtly annoying stuff including the incessant interruptions from Musk with some new misleading or downright false information.  The Washington Post says Bluesky is where liberals who are fleeing Twitter are going:

With Musk taking on a central advisory role to Trump’s administration after leveraging X and his personal fortune to boost Trump’s campaign, U.S. liberals and others disenchanted with the site are once again scurrying to friendlier pastures. This time, though, the primary beneficiary may not be Meta’s Threads, which is controlled by Musk’s fellow billionaire Mark Zuckerberg and has acquired 275 million users in just over a year, many of them X refugees.

Instead, the upstart social network Bluesky is surging. It has more than doubled in size in the past three months. And in the eight days since the election, it has added more than 1.25 million users, bringing its total to more than 15 million as it topped Apple’s App Store rankings on Wednesday. Of those, some 8.5 million have logged in within the past month, spokesperson Emily Liu said Wednesday.

That’s nowhere near the number of users on Twitter or Threads, not even close.  But I found that a lot of the people who I enjoyed following on Twitter are already on Bluesky, and a visit there doesn’t have the feel of the slog I get whenever I check out Twitter.  Which, I will say, has become less frequent in the last few months since I realized I shouldn’t subject myself to getting bogged down in the negativity I kept finding.  Alex Kirshner on Slate characterizes the vibe this way:

Bluesky does not trap users in nonchronological feeds. It gives people only what they ask for, and it does so in real time. It turns out that when a lot of people join the fray, that creates a feeling of controlled but wholesome chaos that resembles what Twitter felt like to some of its earlier addicts around, say, 2014 or 2015. I have been on Bluesky for more than a year but cannot claim to have dived into it in earnest until this past weekend, when I found its college football–watching crowd to be much more energetic and fun than what I had seen this fall on X.

Eventually, more power users should migrate, in part because Bluesky does not throttle access to their work in the way that X, Meta, and Google have so frequently done. There are no bought-and-paid-for blue check marks that flood the zone. Bluesky doesn’t go out of its way to deprioritize posts with links. It encourages members of the news and sports media to spend time there and bring along their audiences. As the journalist Matt Pearce put it: “​​Hard to describe as a journalist how grateful I am to have a text-based app that does not suppress hyperlinks. I don’t know if people realize exactly how hostile the corporate internet has gotten toward news.” In building a social media site that does not go out of its way to be unusable for people distributing news or trying to consume it, Bluesky has been an innovator.

The platform already works as a place where people enjoy spending time on the internet, with a more bespoke experience and less online sewage than they find on X. That will need to be its value proposition to win over more people in moments when Musk isn’t helping Donald Trump return to power or peeling away more features that once made Twitter popular.

(snip)

Bluesky is winning a segment of the internet not because it is ideological but because it is customizable, allowing people to take more control of their experience online. It has not displaced X as a hub for the formation of elite public opinion, but it could dent Musk’s monopoly on that kind of discussion if enough power users, politicians, and companies eventually move. For now, it is a nice place to hang out with pals on the internet, get news without being confused, and take a quick break from thinking about Elon Musk.

I recommend checking it out.  That light blue butterfly icon in the sidebar of this blog is a link to my feed on Bluesky; use it as a way in the door.

A little something from me for the holiday

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It’s as predictable as the local TV Breaking News!  alert about an apartment fire that was put out hours ago: reporters are about to tell us that Labor Day is the traditional start of the presidential campaign season.  Oh yeah?  And all that “presidential campaigning” and adjacent nonsense I’ve been so unsuccessful in avoiding for the last 20 months, what was that – a fever dream?  I wish this was just the start, but mostly I wish it was the end.

The Founding Fathers were pretty smart guys, and I don’t think they set presidential elections four years apart so we could spend half or more of the time in between laser-focused on the next election.  There is nothing I can think of that is more non-productive, unless you are one of those people who make their living from the political-industrial complex.  We can’t (probably shouldn’t) make it against the law to campaign non-stop if you wish to, but we don’t have to encourage it the way we do.  And by “we,” I mean American journalism.

I understand why the national media has to cover the campaign every day: in case something newsworthy happens.  Something actually “new,” or something tragic, or yes, even something weird.  But when Kamala Harris again expresses her joy as she seems to do most days, or Donald Trump again tells the same lies he tells every day, I can do without you – every day – trying to make it seem like that’s the most important thing that happened.  You have to have someone there every day, just in case, but you don’t have to tell me about it every day even when the story doesn’t change.

This is especially applicable to all-news television (and radio), broadcast and cable, which has tons and tons of space to fill and only just so much news every day with which to fill it.  (This I know from experience, having been an editor and newscaster at Houston’s top-rated news/talk radio station when it changed to all-news: it didn’t take even an hour before we were repeating ourselves, and then repeating the repeats.  Within a few years, the talk shows were back.)  Opening up a live camera at some event and then just letting it run is an efficient way to fill time (or is it kill time?), but a lazy way to do it and an ineffective way to inform people about what’s really going on.  (See: CNN at every Trump rally in 2015 and 2016.)

And please, when you do a story on the campaign, make an effort to try to put things in perspective, and stop being so damn petrified by the threat that “someone” will say you’re biased; just answer the accusation plainly and directly.  For instance:

“No, we are not biased against the former president and his campaign.  We are reporting facts and providing context for our readers, listeners and viewers so they can clearly understand what happened Monday at Arlington National Cemetery, including (1) the irony of the man who called American soldiers and sailors who gave their lives for their country “suckers” and “losers” because “there was nothing in it for them” now using the nation’s largest veterans cemetery as a prop for a campaign ad, in violation of service regulations/federal law (not to mention good taste and good manners), and (2) the chutzpah of the whole Trump campaign, which (a) ignored the law against political use of the grounds, (b) when confronted with the violation, slandered the person who had the temerity to do her job by saying that “an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” [emphasis added] and (c) then posted the video anyway.”  [I’m not linking to the TikTok video, but it’s easy to find.]  “We understand that in some cases, a presentation of the facts and the context can seem biased against the subject of a story; our stories are not meant to be puff pieces on behalf of anyone.”

And when it comes to reporting on TFG, allow me to pass along these suggestions from a New York Times review of campaign rhetoric during just one week earlier this year.  I think we all know by now that Trump lies.  A lot.  More than 30,000 times just during his presidency, the Washington Post calculated, about 21 times per day on average.  And that doesn’t include his golf scores.  The Times analysis of the deluge of deceit, the overflow of fibbery, the mountain of misrepresentation, found that “Though his penchant for bending the truth, sometimes to the breaking point, has been well documented, a close study of how he does so reveals a kind of technique to his dishonesty: a set of recurring rhetorical moves with which Mr. Trump fuels his popularity among his supporters.”  “His words focused heavily on attacking his political rivals, self-aggrandizing and stoking fear to make his case for 2024. In doing so, Mr. Trump often relied on repeated falsehoods and half-truths. He has yet to deviate from this approach in the general election.”  Check it out.

I also recommend checking out Eugene Robinson’s column in the Washington Post for getting into the details about the “dishonorable” actions of the former president at Arlington this week:

Just because we are accustomed to this kind of behavior from Trump does not mean we should accept it. Just because he has no sense of honor or appreciation of sacrifice does not mean we have to pretend honor and sacrifice no longer exist. Just because “Trump is an awful person” is an old story does not mean we should yawn at this latest demonstration and quickly move on.

(snip)

“Federal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities within Army National Military Cemeteries, to include photographers, content creators or any other persons attending for purposes, or in direct support of a partisan political candidate’s campaign,” Arlington Cemetery officials said this week in a statement. This was made clear to Trump’s team as the visit was being planned, officials said — including the strict enforcement of the rule at Section 60, where grief and loss are still raw.

“What was abundantly clear-cut was: Section 60, no photos and no video,” a defense official told The Post.

(snip)

No one can dismiss the incident as a misunderstanding by Trump and his aides, since their official position is that Trump is infallible. The campaign’s response, as usual, was a lie — a false and gratuitously cruel statement from spokesman Steven Cheung…

(snip)

Arlington National Cemetery is a place of honor. Donald Trump thinks honor is for suckers and losers — and values sacrifice only if it might help him win an election. Do not become numb to his nature.

Stewart to the rescue

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

“The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”  Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787

If I may be so bold as to raise a point with Mr. Jefferson, I wonder if he would still prefer journalism to government if he knew something of the state of the former in the 21st century. Generally speaking, the Founders’ confidence in the American people to govern themselves fairly and justly was based on a presumption that the people would be honestly informed about the issues of their day, and they had faith that a free press would do that.  Even the free press of their day, which was unabashedly partisan.  American journalism evolved, and not always to the good: in an effort to be, and to appear to be, non-partisan, there are elements of today’s journalism that won’t defend objective truth for fear of being labelled everything from unfair to slanted to (gasp!) liberal.

But there is hope: journalists could be in practice what they aspire to be in theory, finders and defenders of truth based on verifiable evidence.  Like the courts have done, in admirably turning so many lion-like defenders of a certain 34-times-convicted felon into cowering pussy cats because courts prioritize truth, while television prioritizes likeable personalities and access.

Yes you, the eager young fellow in front: