Andrew Sullivan and the Narrative of the "MSM Narrative" - by Jonathan V. Last - The Triad - 0 views
shared by Javier E on 15 Nov 21
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This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.
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“We” and “They”
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The “mainstream media”—I’m going to stop putting that in quotes, but keep imagining that I’m saying it sarcastically—is probably made up of several thousand individuals and then a three-figure number of institutions. At any given moment, on any given story, some number of these people and institutions will communicate facts that are eventually understood to be misleading or incorrect. Some of these people and institutions are better at their jobs than others.
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The point is that the MSM universe is so large that you’re always going to be able to cherry-pick examples to support the notion that “they” are feeding “us” false narratives.
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We have had a robust conversation about whether the inflation we’re seeing is transitory, or not. There are different signals pointing in different directions. Of the thousands of people who make up the MSM, some give more credence to one view, some to the other.1
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The same is true for literally every other example Sullivan cherry-picks. Jussie Smollett was not an “MSM narrative.” It was a crime-blotter case that the media reported, and then continued reporting on, even as the subsequent reporting took Smollett’s story apart.
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Surely some people in or around the MSM were more credulous than they should have been. Some people were skeptical from the start. There was no “narrative” except the one that exists in Andrew Sullivan’s head.
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And of the dozens of thousands of meta-stories the MSM has covered over the last five years, much of the reporting has added real value to our world, yes?
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For instance, if you only relied on reporting from the MSM about COVID, you would have been much better informed than if you’d relied on, say, Facebook, or conservative media. Reporting on the 2020 election lawsuits and allegations of fraud in the MSM were, in the main, very helpful.
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What’s the Alternative?
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Remember: It wasn’t a faceless blob called “the media” that published the UVA story. It was Rolling Stone. And it was a collection of reporters at various “mainstream media outlets” who took the Rolling Stone story apart.
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I mention this history not to damn the mainstream media, but to show that what Sullivan laments isn’t new. There is no golden past. People in the media make mistakes. Sometimes big ones. Bigger, even, than the “narrative” on the Covington kids.
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Undergirding Sullivan’s essay is a notion that someone ought to do something.
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Is the journalistic mode great? No. Like democracy, it is the worst system there is—except for all the others.
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Well, we tried that. “Conservative media” in its modern incarnation—the Washington Times, Fox News, the Federalist—was created as a corrective to the endemic flaws in the mainstream media.
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The conservative broadcast ecosystem—Fox, OAN, Newsmax, talk radio—is so untethered from reality that their legal departments occasionally force them to air libel-remedy hostage videos condemning their own “reporting.” They air anti-vaccine nonsense and false-flag theories.
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The Federalist publishes snuff fantasies and COVID death-cult nonsense.
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And conservative media criticism is so nakedly partisan that on occasions when conservative media makes a mistake—for instance, the Washington Examiner’s Muslim prayer-rugs-at-the-border story—the response from erstwhile “conservative media critics” was . . . [crickets].
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In conservative media, there is no self-corrective outside of the legal system.2
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Any Club at Hand
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Why has Sullivan recently become so exercised about the dangers of MSM narratives? I suspect because we often write what we know.
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In recent years Andrew Sullivan has been othered by parts of the MSM for sins against current political orthodoxy. To him, these recent developments feel like a big, all-consuming story. Because for him, personally, they have been.
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someone has to defend the honor of the dreaded mainstream media. Because here is the very boring truth about “MSM narratives”:
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The media is a vast space where actors and institutions are interconnected, but operate semi-independently, according to a variety of incentives. Sometimes independent actors make good-faith mistakes. Sometimes they make bad-faith mistakes. But in most cases—in nearly every case, actually—the marketplace of ideas eventually wins and the truth outs.
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The MSM is like a giant peer-review system, but where the peer-reviewing takes place after publication. Jonathan Rauch talks about this at length in The Constitution of Knowledge—that the scientific enterprise and the journalistic enterprise have similar modes of operation.
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the Rolling Stone case is actually a proof of concept for the media.
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By its diffuse nature, the media can’t be optimized. There will always be flaws and inefficiencies.5
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I’d argue that the mainstream media’s continued openness to self-correction over the last few years is evidence of its overall reliability and health—even in the face of our democracy having hit a real-deal constitutional crisis.
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We are on the cusp of a media crisis that no one is talking about.
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As we move toward 2024, the big concern should be how the media would cover an openly anti-democratic presidential candidate. Would they treat said candidate as a danger to America? Or would they attempt to remain neutral and pretend that he was just another generic politician doing normal political things?
