Reading Bernie’s mittens, What video-assisted refereeing tells us about the perils of post-Trump media ‘normalcy’, and Why Gamestonk serves the oligarchy
Mainstream liberal media has learned little from failures highlighted by Trumpism; they're dying to revive pre-Trump bad habits — while social media apps amuse us into passivity
At the onset of the last presidency, I wrote that the Trump White House could turn out be the best thing that has happened to American journalism in a generation — not because the spectacle of Trump (“bad for America but damn good for CBS” in Les Moonves’ memorably candid phrasing) was a cash-cow for legacy media giants, but because it should have forced those outlets to critically examine some of the dysfunctional elements of their own standard operating procedures. It seems I was being uncharacteristically optimistic.
Holding the line against Trump meant, for liberal legacy titles, pushing back on his war on facts — though even meticulously challenging Trump’s lies meant allowing him to shape the daily news budget. Still, for a press corps that had grown accustomed to genuflecting before the altar of power Washington DC, accepting — if slowly and unevenly — that the president was lying every day and that his statements were not made, nor should they be received, in good faith marked a profound breakthrough.
The danger, of course, is that there’s an enduring desire to genuflect now that Trump has been more copacetic to the press corps’ own ideology. Yes, folks, ideology. Spare us the claims of objectivity based on simply reporting “the facts” — even placing a definite article before “facts” reinforces the fiction that there is, in fact, one fixed and finite set of truths that matter in any story, and that by simply revealing and verifying those facts, we will be free of bias.
Sticking to true facts is a natural and vital instinct in the face of the toxic lies of Trump and his Republican enablers. It’s also an indispensable, basic condition of journalism. Necessary, though not sufficient.
If we are to follow that old maxim about journalism as a first draft of history, we’d do well to remember the warning from great British historian E.H. Carr, about how facts become “the facts”:
“It used to be said that facts speak for themselves. This is, of course, untrue. The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: It is (the historian) who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context… The historian is necessarily selective. The belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy, but one which it is very hard to eradicate.”
Every reporter and editor knows that there are myriad pieces of verifiably-true information available for the reporting of any story — most of which, for reasons of space if nothing else, must be excluded. In every story or script they write, journalists select which facts matter most; which other facts contextualize their most important facts; and which facts are less important or irrelevant, and can therefore be ignored or discarded. To become “facts”, pieces of information must not only be verifiably true; they must be chosen “to speak” as Carr would have it — those pieces of information must be deemed to matter more than other pieces of information. The choices of which facts matter and which matter less or not at all are shaped by an explanatory framework, a worldview (if we don’t share it, we might call it an ideology) comprising values and analytical assumptions consciously or unconsciously adopted.
Those assumptions also reflect the point-of-view (in the cinematic sense) from which we tell the story. A mass layoff at a Fortune 500 company may look like financially sound cost-cutting to that company’s shareholders, but for thousands of households who’ve lost an income, and to a town whose small business owners depend for their custom on the incomes generated by that factory, it would be a catastrophe authored by the owners and investors. Whose experience of a particular event is prioritized in the story? To which audience are we imagining telling this story, and how are their interests and affinities guiding it? And what do these facts actually mean?
What journalism should learn from soccer’s VAR controversies
The New York Times’ 2004 mea culpa for its role in convincing liberals to back the US invasion of Iraq focused on how it failed to properly question “the facts” about the Saddam regime’s alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMD). But English Premier League soccer’s ongoing imbroglio over checking goals and red-cardable offenses through Video-Assisted Refereeing (VAR) is a good analogy for understanding why those WMD facts were only a small part of what was flawed in the Times’ approach to Iraq. Consider: VAR is the English Premier League referees’ fact check, providing real-time access to an unimpeachably verified set of visual truths. Yet, even armed with the most accurate facts, referees continue to make bad calls. Every single weekend.
The problem, of course, isn’t VAR; the problem is the poor quality of English refereeing: The refs have to weigh the relative significance of jumble of different facts occurring in any 2 or 3 seconds of play, considering a complex set of rules, connecting or dismissing connections between different physical facts, and making judgements on their significance of those facts to the outcome of a particular passage of play. The analog for journalism should be clear enough: it’s not simply the facts, but the referee’s interpretation of the facts, singularly and in combination, that decides the call.
On Iraq, the Times didn’t simply accept the Bush Administration’s WMD “facts”; that paper accepted the government’s narrative that such “facts” necessitated what proved to be a disastrous war. The Times’ failure was not only its embrace of the Administration’s dodgy facts, but also of its dodgy interpretation of such facts. Remember, France and Germany shared the Bush Administration’s belief that Iraq possessed some residual WMD capability, yet vehemently opposed a war they could see would cause more problems than it solved.
Facts matter in journalism, but once we have our facts, the interpretation of those facts matters even more.
(Watch more soccer, it explains everything.)
So, what should we note about the analytical frameworks within which mainstream US liberal media outlets understand “the facts”? Well, the proverbial “view from nowhere” that underwrites the “just-the-facts” version of media “objectivity” is, more often than not, the view from Davos.
The Davos capitulation
In the course of his captivating podcast conversation with Adam Shatz, Pankaj Mishra notes the corrosive affect on Western journalism of the Cold War’s end — until that moment, there had still been some sense of conscience, of awareness in the media corps of taking the side of the poor and disadvantaged and challenging those who grew rich amid the immiseration of the rest (a.k.a. “comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”); after proclaiming the triumph of the West over the Soviet Union (and taking as gospel Fukuyama’s preposterous bumper-sticker claim that it marked “the end of history”) Western journalists and liberal politicians were suddenly converted to Margaret Thatcher’s dogma that “there is no alternative” to the neoliberal economic and social model.
Almost overnight, the leading editors and journalists of the US media corps became Davos Men, acolytes and praise-poets to the billionaires and the governments they owned. The facts that mattered were those which were deemed important to the narrative of the Davos elites, of a globalizing, financializing, technologically accelerating brand of capitalism that would float all boats. Hegemony, Gramsci told us, is the ability of a narrow class or social group to project its own, selfish interests as the general interest of society at large. The hegemony of the Davos Men was well established in the US news media by the late 1990s.
I saw it at work during the 15 years I spent at TIME: I worked with a number of truly inspiring, courageous, principled, insightful, creative and brilliant journalists and editors there, but I also saw too many who chose to approach their stories from within the same ideological frame (though they never recognized it as such) and point-of-view as the elites they covered, whether the story was expeditionary warfare in the Middle East or domestic economic policy. They seemed to imagine journalism’s role as being to explain the thinking of those in power to the reading public. (I once received a bollocking — though had to restrain myself from laughing — from a senior editor for this piece on Why Davos Doesn’t Matter published on the magazine’s web site during the World Economic Forum’s January 2008 convening. My piece had simply pointed out what was already obvious by then to those outside of the Davos bubble about the collapsing hegemony of post-Cold War Western elites — an idea, perhaps, too ghastly for their acolytes to contemplate...)
Access and stenography
Precisely because of its hostile attitude to the legacy media, the Trump Administration ought to have provoked a rethink on decades of a “journalism” that prioritized access to those in power — in order to be the first among competitors to report some nugget of spin from an insider, quaintly called “a get” in newsrooms as if such a transaction represented a feat of reporting ingenuity rather than a spoon-fed line.
When Trump attacked the press as “enemies of the people”, my response — beyond concern for the safety of journalists in the face of angry white nationalists goaded by this demagoguery — was that it was a good opportunity to remind the press corps that we’re supposed to have an adversarial relationship with those in power, even if we personally voted for them. That’s the job. We’re obviously not “enemies of the people” (did Trump even know that it was Stalin who had popularized that phrase?), but nor should we be friends or allies to those in power. Holding power to account was something that legacy media in the US had largely forgotten in the post-Cold War years. (The reason thoughtful US audiences are excited by Mehdi Hasan’s style of interviewing politicians is that he eschews the fawning softballs that are the norm of access journalism; instead, Mehdi asks tough questions and refuses to accept evasions offered in answer. His approach to interrogating politicians should be the norm; sadly, it is the exception in US political journalism.)
In a healthy democracy, the press helps citizens hold the government accountable, by vigorously interrogating official policies and behavior.
Unfortunately, it has been decades since America had that kind of news media. Instead, the press has allowed multiple presidential administrations to spoon-feed it information. News organizations in the United States have prioritized access to the corridors of power above all else, even when access is conditioned on avoiding uncomfortable questions or accepting evasive answers.
When “access journalism” leads senior editorial decision-makers to identify with political elites, explaining the government's thinking to the public becomes their primary purpose. Combine that with cuts to news budgets, and political coverage becomes a mere endless cycle of sound bites from politicians and their surrogates – not unlike a dedicated sports channel covering a football season.
Even the more meticulously factual media outlets have, in recent decades, confined their coverage to a narrow range of topics that tend to confirm the political establishment's self-serving narratives.
It wasn’t hard to see why the establishment liberal media were so irked at their comic defenestration by Stephen Colbert at the 2006 White House Correspondents Dinner:
Access journalism in a competitive environment requires keeping sources sweet to get that “get” or that cover-story interview, which is why the result is more often than not a highly stylized stenography.
And the gushing of mainstream media covering the Biden inauguration reflects what seems to be a deep-seated hunger to return to the ‘normalcy’ parodied by Colbert.
As Naomi Klein notes
In liberal media outlets, inauguration week marked a giddy return to the Obama era of covering the first family as Davos-class celebrities. Does Biden’s Peloton bike present a security risk? Who dressed Jill Biden? Have you seen Kamala’s sister’s badass feminist sweatshirts? This strand of politician-as-lifestyle coverage had been largely dormant during the Trump era. Sure, the White House was filled with rich and thin people wearing and consuming expensive and desirable things. But they were proto-fascists and shameless grifters, so dwelling too much on Melania’s capes and Ivanka’s jewelry was a bad look.
And we learn from the Washington Post that
the aristocracy of this city is ready to move on, daring to hope that the last four years was a fever that finally broke and life can get back to normal. Normal, as in a respect for experience and expertise. Normal, as in civility and bipartisan cooperation. Normal, as in not wanting to punch someone in the face.
At the center of this hope is President-elect Joe Biden, moderate by nature, attuned to the rhythms of the town, eager to bring people back together
Biden and wife Jill Biden “know how to get around Washington, how to be a part of the establishment, how to make it work for them in their everyday lives,” says an influential Republican hostess who, like many of the city’s social leaders, spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak frankly without retribution. “People who have always enjoyed the Washington scene are yearning to get back to that, have some semblance of what they enjoyed so much before. There are a lot of Republicans who sat out the Trump years and bit their tongues for four years who are thrilled to have Biden.”
At the heart of this optimism is the belief that politicians on both sides of the aisle get more accomplished when they like each other...Sure, not everybody is going to kiss and make up overnight. But Washington’s elite social world can pivot faster than a prima ballerina. With the promise of a coronavirus vaccine and a call for comity, it’s ready, willing and able to press the reset button and start fresh.
God save America from the consequences of the bonhomie of schmoozing elites and their media satraps…
A timely piece by David Sirota and Andrew Perez reminds us of the class politics of the NY Times’ façade of “objectivity” — it’s undergirded by a view of political bias that restricts the idea of politics to a contest between Democrats and Republicans, obscuring the reality that America’s oligarchy is reliably bipartisan in the pursuit of its own, narrow interests, which are antithetical to the interests of most Americans:
The facade of objectivity is built on the premise that politics is only a contest between red and blue and nothing else — in this construction, objectivity only means never expressing affinity for either party…
Whether (Lauren Wolfe, who tweeted about feeling a chill when Biden landed in DC on inauguration day) was fired for other reasons or not, the media industry’s interpretation is important, because it illustrates the pervasive culture of fake objectivity. The assumption that journalists can be terminated for commenting on the red-versus-blue war tells us that everyone working in media understands the big no-no is partisanship. In general, this aversion to partisanship allows editors to preen in front of the objectivity facade as courageous defenders of just-the-facts-ma’am reporting.
Democracy, though, isn’t just a tribal battle between warring parties. The red-versus-blue obsession obscures how politics is mostly driven by a transpartisan struggle between people and money — and in the same week the Wolfe controversy erupted, the Times published two articles that make clear its reporters are more than welcome to take the side of money in that far bigger political conflict.
And talking of class politics…
I’m not going to go there. Naomi Klein already did, though one has to wonder how serious she was being in the 5 meanings she read into the media frenzy over that instantly iconic Bernie image:
The mittens expressed Sanders’ and the left’s reserved judgement: “Those crossed arms were the mittens saying, ‘Let’s see what you actually do and then we can talk about unity’.”
They were a warning that Biden will get no honeymoon from the left
They represent a liberal effort to neuter Sanders’ revolutionary spirit, an acceptance of a defanged grandfatherly figure while they get on with the same failed centrism of the Obama era.
A neoliberal nod to the reality being lived by ordinary Americans
Muscular Movement Mittens:
Like so much of his historic 2020 primary campaign, the symbolic power of the mittens was the work of the “us” in “not me, us,” a decentralized movement of movements that represents thousands of grassroots organizations and tens of millions of voters, and that stands for policies supported by majorities of Democratic voters, according to many polls, but are still rejected by its elite… On Biden’s big day, the movement that represents those policies and those values made global meaning out of a pair of old mittens. It did because it could. It was a friendly little flex with a not-so-friendly undercurrent. We’re still here, it said. Ignore us, and we won’t sit nearly so quietly next time.
Alternately, of course, you could simply argue that the mitten frenzy was a symptom of the Huxleyian culture Neal Postman warned us about, a simulacrum of trivialized images that allow only for a kind of Fisher-Price fetish engagement with real power relations. Remember Foucault’s oft-quoted observation to the effect that “in mere political thought and analysis we have not yet cut off the head of the tyrant”? One can only speculate as to what he’d have made of the leftist memes of Instagram.
GameStonk: Turning rebellion into money
It was hard not to be amused by the spectacle last week of an angry crowd of middle class Millennials sticking it to a massive Wall Street hedge fund by kiting the stock of a doomed video-game retailer that said hedge fund was shorting. The episode highlighted what we’ve long known, i.e. that the stock market is a casino with increasingly tenuous connection to the economy in which goods and services are produced and traded. My brave and brilliant former TIME colleague Rana Foroohar nailed this phenomenon five years ago, warning that the stock market was unmoored from the real economy and that 85% of its transactions were entirely speculative in nature (stocks bought and sold on the basis of making bets that others would want to buy or sell them rather than on the earning potential of the companies they were meant to capitalize). “Are financial institutions doing things that provide a clear, measurable benefit to the real economy?” she wrote. “Sadly, the answer at the moment is mostly no.”
And the Gamestonk episode laid bare the rot, and the political power associated with it as panicked hedge funders demanded blocks on small traders being able to spoil their game in this way.
John Cassidy, the New Yorker’s thoughtful political-economy correspondent, sees the GameStop saga as a symptom of a wider, more dangerous fever bubble of massively overvalued stocks heading for another, epic crash if the Fed’s interest rate policy continues to pump free money into the casino.
But most worrying in the hype was the extent to which people who might embrace the Bernie-mittens icon as an avatar for their revulsion at the American oligarchy were willing to treat the GameStop investment hype as some form of popular rebellion against the 1%. That’s just plain wrong, as Alexis Goldstein explained: GameStonk wasn’t David vs. Goliath, it was Goliath vs. Goliath. The Guardian reminded us that a handful of people are going to get extremely rich as a result of the illusion they have created that buying stocks being shorted by a hedge fund is a form of rebellion against capitalism. Comrade Elon Musk seemed down with that interpretation. As in a Ponzi scheme, most of those buying GameStop stock are likely to lose; the early adopters will no doubt get out while the going is good.
The genius of the GameStonk phenomenon lies in the ability of a handful of clever people, like the pioneering “Roaring Kitty” who claims to have made some $48m off the scheme, to enrich themselves by using the simulacrum of social media to mobilize a crowd to join their stock-kiting frenzy by presenting it as a rebellion against capitalism. For that handful of early adopters, it will likely prove to have been a very profitable illusion. Not so for most. “At some point, the inflated prices, wildly decoupled from any underlying fundamentals, are bound to come crashing down,” wrote Axios this morning about GameStop. True, but as John Cassidy warns, the same is, in fact, true for the wider stock market. Even more so the warning in Rana Foroohar’s work: A political culture that celebrates the Dow as an avatar of general wellbeing is heading for a nasty reckoning with economic reality.
Her warning of five years ago may be even more relevant today:
The structure of American capital markets and whether or not they are serving business is a topic that has traditionally been the sole domain of “experts”—the financiers and policymakers who often have a self-interested perspective to push, and who do so in complicated language that keeps outsiders out of the debate. When it comes to finance, as with so many issues in a democratic society, complexity breeds exclusion.
Finding solutions won’t be easy. There are no silver bullets, and nobody really knows the perfect model for a high-functioning, advanced market system in the 21st century. But capitalism’s legacy is too long, and the well-being of too many people is at stake, to do nothing in the face of our broken status quo. Neatly packaged technocratic tweaks cannot fix it. What is required now is lifesaving intervention.
Nice and thought-provoking, as ever. Not to diminish your take, but it seems to me fairly predictable that when the Times abandoned its "objective" stance to take on Trump's existential attack on all good things, there would be confusion if a Democratic administration took over. Does one move permanently over to a more European sort of journalism, where you more openly write according to your institution's political preferences, or does one snap back in "objectivity" and pretend no preference now that that particular [Presidential] threat has subsided? Whatever else is involved in Wolfe's story, she clearly did not get the (unwritten) memo.