taibbi post objectivity and bombshell memory hole
We live in a time of incredible political division. Many of us have had the experience of talking to someone whose idea of reality seems to be completely alien to our own. It’s become difficult to have an argument in the traditional sense. People with differing opinions no longer seem to be working from commonly-accepted sets of facts. It’s a problem that has a lot to do with changes in how we receive and digest information, especially through the news media.
I’ve worked in the press for thirty years. In my lifetime the core commercial strategy of the news business has changed radically. At the national level, companies have moved from trying to attract one big audience to trying to capture and retain multiple small audiences.
Fundamentally, this means the press has gone from selling a vision of reality they perceive to be acceptable to a broad mean, to selling division. For technological, commercial, and political reasons this instinct has become more exaggerated with time, snowballing toward the dysfunctional state we’re in today.
A story that illustrates how the old system worked involves the first major national news broadcast, the CBS radio program anchored by the legendary Lowell Thomas.
History buffs will know Thomas. His was the iconic voice on those old WWII newsreels:
Thomas began doing a national news program in 1930 and noticed something right away. Years later he explained, “I had quickly discovered that my evening program was a perfect way to make listeners angry. You could step on millions of toes at the same time.”
Thomas had a creative background, having been an adventurer, explorer, and actor who’d toured the world doing one-man shows. He was excited about the possibilities of radio and wanted to find a way to capitalize on its provocative qualities, planning on publishing a book of listener letters called Making Millions Angry.
Thomas’s sponsors balked. One, the magazine The Literary Digest, asked him instead to “play things down the middle.” His publisher made him change Making Millions Angry to the lifeless title, Fan Mail.
Thomas committed to the “down the middle” strategy. His news show announced that it sought the widest possible audience through its famous introduction, “Good evening, everybody”:
Thomas kept his feelings out of things and let audiences supply the emotion. He later called this “letting your listeners make up their own minds.”
We’d call this the “objective” style of reporting today, and it’s important to understand, this was not about ethics. It was a commercial strategy. The news made its money by attracting the largest possible audience, then allowing advertisers to court that audience. The thinking was, once you started injecting politics into the show, it reduced the number of potential customers who’d be susceptible to advertising.
This would the template for news for about fifty years. Anchors from Thomas through Dan Rather and Jessica Savitch delivered information in a reserved monotone. Print journalism was written in an even, unemotional, third-person voice.
Beginning in the early nineties, three major changes altered the business.
The first was the development of the 24 hour news network, with CNN launching the first such broadcast:
Instead of one newspaper and one broadcast per day, media companies began to think of news as a continually evolving thing. Although the initial CNN concept was just repeating loops of half-hour broadcasts that changed maybe twice per day, eventually it evolved to capture continuous, live coverage of ongoing events.
This format put enormous stress on media companies to find new ways of creating content. You couldn’t make enough carefully-reported news to fill every hour. Outlets had to find something that could be created and put on air at the speed of thought.
One type of story that worked was putting something visually interesting on screen and having reporters talk while people watched. It could be a coming hurricane, a baby down a well, a car chase, a hostage situation, a sunken submarine, etc.
War was very useful in this respect. An anchor talking over explosions was an easy way to capture audiences. The first Gulf War in Iraq became one of the first true 24-hour stories, making stars out of live news performers like Arthur Kent, the “Scud Stud”:
The other easy way to generate content was to put two people on set and have them argue about something. News companies didn’t care if these were good arguments. They weren’t interested in arbitrating who was right or wrong. They just knew it was an easy way to generate interest, in the same way football or boxing does.
Of course, pro sports is real competition. Crossfire was closer to pro wrestling, where the competition could be semi-scripted to seem more dramatic.
Crossfire, which started as an NBC radio show and moved to CNN, simplified politics for audiences. There were just two ideas shown, “From the left” and “From the right.” An issue would be tossed between two combatants like Tom Braden and Pat Buchanan, and they would spend a half-hour tussling over it, with a few blocs of ads wedged in between.
This side-against-side format wasn’t much different from game shows, except game shows were better TV, from the companies’ point of view. In game shows, people fight to win money and sponsored products, i.e. they’re commercials surrounded by commercials. A lot of television is designed around concepts like this.
Shows like Crossfire were a step down from sports or game shows commercially, but had the benefit of gravitas. People felt they were talking about something real, which they did not feel about Family Feud or Hollywood Squares. It’s crucial to understand that when a product has anything to do with news, there’s a law of diminishing returns that comes into play the further broadcasters move from reality.
As the show becomes more hyped and dramatic, you might get more eyes, but you’ll lose belief, which is essential to the enterprise. Once the audience begins to sense there’s a false element to a news show, forget about the ethical issues involved: as a commercial product, it starts to lose utility. People will just watch soap operas or cop shows instead.
The second major change was the introduction of the Internet, which forced a major alteration to the structure of the news business.
Newspapers and TV stations for decades were almost guaranteed profits, thanks to distribution advantages. Newspapers had their own trucks, boxes, paper kids, etc. If you were a local business owner and wanted to put out a want ad to hire someone, the local newspaper was the only show in town.
Marshall McLuhan, author of The Medium is the Massage, predicted with uncanny accuracy what would happen if classified ads were to be lost to media firms. He said, in 1964:
The classified ads (and stock-market quotations) are the bedrock of the press. Should an alternative source of easy access to such diverse daily information be found, the press will fold.
TV and radio stations leased a limited number of channels from the state. There were only so many broadcast ad spots available.
As one former newspaper owner put it to me during my research for Hate Inc., “These were scarcity businesses. They were licenses to print money.”
Almost overnight, the Internet eliminated the distribution advantage. Worse, it brought floods of new content. News companies were forced to compete not just with each other but with millions of independent voices. If you were a news channel you weren’t just competing with other news channels, but with cat videos, Sasquatch sites and a thousand other things.
The news business went from being from easy money to very hard money, prompting the third change, involving the use of political slant as a moneymaking strategy.
In the sixties, seventies and eighties there began to appear new forms of talk radio, with disc jockeys like Alan Burke and Bob Grant in New York, for instance.
Mainly these were conservative talk shows that hunted drive-time audiences. They largely targeted working and middle-class men who responded to content about things that frustrated them, often involving liberal politics.
Then in 1987 under Ronald Reagan, the federal government stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, which required balance on public airwaves. This, combined with the new economic pressures, led to companies embracing the idea of selling slanted media.
In the Internet/cable era, TV companies like Fox realized: rather than try to corral an increasingly splintered whole audience, it’s better to pick one demographic and try to dominate it. Fox hunted a conservative demographic by feeding it stories that reinforced the idea that America was being overrun by immigrants and minorities and criminals.
Fox chief Roger Ailes famously described Fox’s audience as “55 to dead.” These people were older, white, suburban or rural, had disposable income, and were often retired and able to spend all day watching TV, ready to shop with credit cards – the perfect ad market.
They used storytelling techniques to build up casts of characters. Hillary Clinton was a perfect TV villain for conservatives – she said she wasn’t baking cookies and even though her husband was president, she wasn’t going to be Tammy Wynette and Stand By Her Man. The more Fox showed Clinton on air, the more the “family values” audience was provoked.
Heartland viewers flocked to Fox by the millions, beginning a sorting process with audiences that continues to this day, with conservatives moving to one side to Fox, and progressive or liberal audiences drifting in another direction.
Since that period in the eighties and nineties, the “objective” news formula has gradually disappeared, and has more and more been replaced by Fox-style coverage that courts specific demographics.
There were some holdouts, but the change grew more pronounced over the years. Then Trump happened. I was on the campaign trail in the summer of 2015, when I started to hear reporters talk about a problem.
Trump, it seemed, was making everyone too much money. Worse, the increased media attention was pushing him to the nomination. Media companies were in a pickle. How could they keep the ratings without being accused of helping a potentially dangerous politician?
The Columbia Journalism Review later did a study that showed coverage of Trump went way up beginning in early 2016. Coverage also become significantly less policy-focused and more focused on his personality.
I don’t have any problem with negative coverage of Donald Trump. I wrote a lot of it. The problem was the new formula – described by the New York Times as “copious coverage and aggressive coverage” – fit perfectly into the commercial needs of the corporate press. Trump was the perfect modern media product.
In the post-objectivity era, media companies learned there was a consistent, dependable way to make money. First, identify an audience. Then, relentlessly feed it streams of stories that validate that audience’s belief systems.
The easiest method is to publish stories that present people your audience does not like in a negative light. Fox did this with terrorists, criminals, feminists, liberals, the French, the “New Black Panthers,” and a thousand other bugbears. The more horror stories they showed, the more their market share grew.
With Trump this effect was now easily accomplished with “liberal” audiences. Media companies figured out that all they had to do to secure high ratings was wave Trump at people all day long. This has coincided with a huge surge in profitability: cable news revenues are up 38% since Trump announced his campaign in 2015.
A converse is that media outlets lose revenue and market share when they challenge or confuse audiences. A case in point that Cenk Uygur talked about in a documentary called All Governments Lie: in 2008, his Young Turks show built up a huge audience of people who’d fallen in love with Barack Obama during his campaign.
But in 2009, when the Young Turks began reporting negatively about Obama’s performance as president – for instance his response to the financial crisis – they lost audience.
Media companies are very aware of this dynamic, but in the Trump era it became possible to avoid this problem with ease. What’s happened since 2016 is the news landscape has split into news for people who love Trump, and people who hate him.
The world as represented in news programs is now almost exactly Crossfire. We only see two ideas. These ideas are shown to be in constant combat. There is no pretense of a hope for cooperation or accommodation.
Audiences are completely siloed. A Pew study that just came out showed that of the people who say Fox is their primary news source, 93% describe themselves as Republicans. For MSNBC, the number is 95% Democrats. The New York Times is 91% Democrats. Even NPR is now 87% Democrats.
Pew Research Center
@pewresearch
Americans who name Fox News as their main source for political and election news overwhelmingly self-identify as Republican. Those who name MSNBC and several other outlets overwhelmingly self-identify as Democratic.
pewrsr.ch/3ihQtBj
September 12th 2020
231 Retweets528 Likes
So one channel is talking almost exclusively to one group of people, while other channels are talking almost exclusively to another group of people.
As a business, the news media was headed this way long before Trump. However, we’ve now arrived at a place where the Good morning, everybody model geared toward delivering information broadly has been switched out for a model that more than ever works backwards, beginning with the audience. It’s more like demographic targeting, or audience-framing, than information delivery.
When I entered the business in the nineties, I wasn’t aware of any of this.
My idea of journalism had been informed by watching my father, a TV reporter. He got an assignment and did it and didn’t think much beyond that. At the reporter level, no one from the business suite comes and tells you you have to shape your copy for an audience, to increase sales.
In fact, in the years before money got tight because of the Internet and other factors, most journalists were encouraged to believe they were above business concerns. The sales reps were often tucked away in separate offices or wings of offices, literally out of sight of editorial staff.
Some years into my own career, however, I began to understand that media work involves constant unspoken pressure to highlight some facts over others. You learn to recognize almost more by smell than by thought what is and is not a “story,” what editors will and will not accept.
In my early years, I worked as a correspondent in Russia, and learned that editors loved stories about American culture being introduced into post-communist society, like American-advised elections or stock exchanges, or a KFC opening in Moscow:
Stories that were not as complimentary about the economic policies we’d advised Russia to pursue, for instance about Russia’s loss of public health care or free higher education, or its soaring crime and addiction rates, were not as desired.
In Manufacuring Consent, Noam Chomsky talked about how unspoken press pressures often involved patriotic political imperatives. American reporters could write about communists murdering a Catholic priest in Poland during the Cold War (a “worthy victim”), but not about U.S. client states in Central America doing the same thing (to “unworthy victims”).
As reporters we internalized those biases. In the post-objectivity era, we’ve come to internalize new ones as well.
If you work at Fox, you’re not going to do a climate change or police abuse story. You will do a story about corruption at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If you work at MSNBC, you won’t do a story about problems with NAFTA, or Barack Obama’s drone program.
This sounds obvious, but most people think this is a matter of politics. It is that in some cases, but it’s also very much about money. Once a company has established an editorial approach, and a political tone, departing from that approach will cost it audience, and lots and lots of money – billions in some cases – as well.
This creates an enormous risk of the tail wagging the dog. News companies make more money if they pick stories they know will get you upset, and avoid the ones that are confusing to you. They will make sure they wind you up as much as they can not just every day, but every minute. This can be very damaging to your mental health, to say nothing of what it does to society.
The news is not a public service. First and foremost, it’s a consumer product, like cigarettes or Twinkies. And because we’ve learned that division sells, it can be bad for you, and addicting, in the same way other consumer products can be. We worry about the food we put in our bellies, the air we breathe into our lungs. It’s time to worry about what we put in our brains as well.
The New York Times published a massive expose about Donald Trump’s taxes on Sunday, starting the world on yet another trip up the Trump delirium coaster. The stages of the morality play are burned in our brains. Pundits scream bombshell, rush up a ladder of indignation, jump squealing into an abyss of apocalyptic predictions, dust off and do it again.
How many of these stories have there been? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? I tried physically counting and gave up. Our heads are packed with years of half-told stories that were discarded the instant they stopped having commercial or political utility. Some involved Trump, some not, who can remember them all? From sonic weapons in Cuba to spies gone dark to a secret bank server to hacker huddles in Prague to probable cause for an “agent of a foreign power” to Mike Flynn’s mistress to the Manafort-Assange confab to the exfiltrated agent with a home on Realtor.com to Putin’s niece and treason in Helsinki and North Korea and the Oval Office, we remember beginnings and not ends.
This fall, Showtime released a movie about Jim Comey whose trailer features scenes of Russian prostitutes in a hotel elevator, on their way to give the Donald a pee show. This scene not only seems never to have happened but was revealed in recent weeks to have been spun by a Washington-based Brookings Institute analyst who was, no shit, the subject of an FBI counterintelligence investigation a decade ago. That doesn’t mean Igor Danchenko was a spy, but considering the awesome quantity of ink the pee story commanded across years of convulsive warnings about a compromised president, blue-state audiences at least deserved to hear this ridiculous development — and didn’t, apart from one item in the Washington Post and a Vox story pooh-poohing the news as a Republican fundraising stunt. For the rest of time, a plurality of the country will be frozen in the moment when this and dozens of other panic-switches were turned on, a campaign of titillating false starts now too numerous to be undone.
Like many “bombshells,” the Times tax story contains real information, including potentially real outrages, like bank fraud or deducting consulting fees paid to his daughter. The headline revelation is Trump as metaphor for American finance generally, showing the appearance of wealth resting atop absurd fictions, with huge debts rolled into the next ice age and losses somehow appearing as his greatest assets, in ways inconceivable to regular people. At the end of the cycle, pundits will conclude that Trump has a story about being rich in place of actual wealth, making him (drumroll please) more like a con man than a tycoon.
That this is the same analysis some of us made at the beginning of Trump’s national political run eons ago won’t matter. Nor will it matter that Trump’s returns ought to be as embarrassing to media antagonists and a string of “reputable” politicians as they are to him, given that it was screamed to high heavens for years, from op-ed pages and cable news panels and the floor of the U.S. Senate, that proof of secret links to Vladimir Putin would be found. This idea never had merit — no sane person can think an espionage conspiracy would be detailed in a tax return — but a parade of experts and officials contended just this, including Chuck Schumer, George Will, Rachel Maddow and countless others:
Rep. Pramila Jayapal
@RepJayapal
I agree. Trump,should release his tax returns. What is he hiding? What did he say to Putin behind closed doors?
Robert Costa @costareports
Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC) says the president should release his tax returns in order to clear things up this week. Tells Post “I don’t know” if Russia has anything on the president and wants more answers on the president’s finances
July 18th 2018
205 Retweets686 Likes
Citizens for Ethics
@CREWcrew
Your daily reminder that Trump is the first president elected since Nixon to refuse to release his tax returns, and any payments from Russia or other foreign countries remain secret.
July 18th 2018
476 Retweets1,123 Likes
Bill Pascrell, Jr.
@BillPascrell
After today’s revolting display in Finland, Congress must commence oversight hearings and stop attacking law enforcement. We could explore the extent of ties between Trump’s business empire & Russia with @HouseGOP demanding the Trump tax returns. #CongressMustRequest
July 16th 2018
100 Retweets211 Likes
What the Washington Post described as an “operating” assumption was pushed aside with an offhand Times passage, “Nor do [tax records] reveal any previously unreported connections to Russia." The Times later noted tax records “for the most part, lack the specificity required” to reveal troubling connections. This checked another predictable bombshell trope, the insertion of replacement mantras for old wrong ones, e.g. the “walls are closing in” becomes “We never expected to find collusion,” “crimes are difficult to prove,” etc. Sometimes replacement mantras are replaced, as in “Mueller was undone by obstruction” becoming “Mueller was undone by Bill Barr,” only to later become the current line, “Mueller was a coward who sold us out.” Within a week it will be legend that no one ever expected to find ties to Putin in Trump’s returns.
The priesthood has learned from the WMD episode and no longer bothers to revisit past assumptions. The standard is evolving fast. At least with taxes story, pundits had the decency to couch charges as hypotheticals (“What Trump’s Tax Returns Could Reveal About Russia” was a typical formulation by CNN). Now core factual premises can be changed on a dime without acknowledgment, because the ascent up the indignation mountain has become the whole ritual.
The recent case of Pulitzer-winning Times writer Nikole Hannah-Jones and her nitwit editors doubling and tripling down on the provably false notion that they never called the date of 1619 America’s “true founding” was particularly amazing, because it was so unnecessary, and brazen.
Over the course of the last year, Hannah-Jones and Times Magazine chief Jake Silverstein emphasized they were aware the concept of 1619 being America’s “true founding” was exactly the part of the project that would make some people “upset.” As Hannah-Jones put it, “You don’t expect to make certain arguments, like 1619 is our true founding and not 1776… and not expect some pushback.”
The instant Trump decided to target the Times through an executive order creating a “1776 Commission,” saying their project “rewrites American history to teach our children that we were founded on the principle of oppression,” news outlets circled wagons, including would-be Times competitors. CNN invited Jones-Hannah on to clear up the “misconception” that the project was intended to “rewrite history about when this nation was founded”:
CNN
@CNN
The 1619 Project "does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country, but what it does argue for is that we have largely treated slavery as an asterisk to the American story,” creator @nhannahjones says as President Trump has railed against it.
cnn.it/2ZPdeoS
September 18th 2020
301 Retweets910 Likes
Hannah-Jones baldly insisted the project "does not argue that 1776 was not the founding of the country,” creating a factual issue that didn’t exist previously. She responded to criticism of this pointless statement by admitting to “imprecise” language, then went on social media to announce that neither “the project nor I never argued 1619 as our literal founding.”
This was said in the face of people like Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic chronicling more than a half-dozen direct quotes to the contrary. Moreover everyone can see the “true founding” language was in the magazine’s original online promotional materials, then later quietly swapped out for a statement about the project being an “ongoing initiative” to emphasize the historical import of slavery. Who are they fooling?
The closest and perhaps only analog to a Pulitzer-winner insisting she did not say something she did say on video many times is Donald Trump denying that he called John McCain a “loser.” We’ve never seen anything like this in media, and it’s hard to know what the point could be, beyond the intentional lowering of expectations.
As infuriating, disturbing, and ethically absent as Trump often appears to be, he’s sustained by his opposition being as unashamed to lie as he is, and being humorless, hectoring bores besides (witness Hannah-Jones, in the middle of the “true founding” double-down, insisting with a straight face that “truth is the goal” and “transparency and accountability are essential to a functioning democracy”). It’s the only possible thing that could give him legitimacy, which is starting to feel intentional. Either that, or the core of this is turf war: having snuck past the usual gatekeepers to the White House, Trump appropriated the reality-distorting power the political establishment reserved for itself. You don’t get to lie to the public, that’s our job! Hence the venom, which feels too intimate to be anything but professional jealousy.
The paper of record took another blow when a Canadian man who’d been the subject of a multi-part Times podcast about the bloody travails of an ISIS soldier was arrested for making the whole thing up.
The acclaimed podcast series, called Caliphate, devoted entire segments to an Ontario resident named Shehroze Chaudhry who supposedly traveled to Syria and engaged in murderous escapades under the name “Abu Huzayhah.” The series is mind-blowing. In Chapter Four, “Us vs. Them,” Chaudhry was asked, “How did ISIS prepare you to kill people?”
“We had dolls to practice on,” he said, adding they would “feel a lot like human.” Chapter Five of the series, entitled, “The Heart,” is the stuff of snuff films. Chaudhry recounted to Times reporters Rukmini Callimachi and Andy Mills:
Huzayfah: I’m just trying to build up the, the courage to do it… After that, I stabbed him… The blood was just — it was warm, and it sprayed everywhere.
[Music]
Huzayfah: And the guy cried — was crying and screaming. He did not die after the first time. The second time or so, he probably just slouched over. That was —
Callimachi: How hard is it to put a knife into somebody —
Huzayfah: It’s hard. I had to stab him multiple times. And then we put him up on a cross. And I had to leave the dagger in his heart. And then there was a sign that said, uh, it had a code on it. And, like, 166 — drugs and alcohol-type offense. Yeah.
Callimachi: God.
Mills: How did, how did it feel?
Huzayfah: Um, it just — at the time, it just felt disgusting, but numb at the same time. Like, gloomy-ish. I just instantly thought, I’m a psycho killer now. Like, what the hell did I just do?
Crucifixion confessionals! You don’t get those every day in journalism. When the Royal Canadian Mounted Police took the unusual step of arresting Choudry for perpetrating a hoax, the Times didn’t blink. Pressed by Washington Post writer Erik Wemple — an increasingly isolated voice in the mainstream media reportage world — the paper insisted it had not presented The Caliphate as fact. Instead, it said, “part of what the series explored was whether Abu Huzayfah’s account was true,” a transparent deflection Wemple didn’t buy:
We dissent. The first five episodes of the series, by and large, recount Abu Huzayfah’s story with minimal skepticism from the host… Snippet after snippet, Callimachi heaped credibility on Abu Huzayfah. Far from amping up “narrative tension,” she drained it.
The story had nothing to do with Trump, but in the endless, Twitter-accelerated wash of accusations and counter-accusations about “fake news media,” outlets like the Times can wait out messes like this and hope no one notices they have nothing to do with politics.
For the better part of a century, most journalists understood there’s no such thing as objectivity. It was accepted that every decision, from the size and placement of headlines to the order of quotes to whether or not to cover a thing at all, reflects editorial opinion. That didn’t mean trying to get things right wasn’t a worthy aspirational goal, but it did mean we knew papers like the Times were mostly being silly when they marketed themselves as incorruptible arbiters of The One Truth.
Now the business has reversed course, acting like a gang of college freshmen who’ve just read Beyond Good and Evil for the first time. Objectivity is dead! There’s no truth! Everything is permitted! The cardinalate has gone from pompous overconfidence in its factual rectitude to a bizarre postmodernist pose where nothing matters, man, and truth is whatever we can get away with saying.
This quantitative approach to reality is Trump’s exact attitude, with the enormous difference that Trump isn’t pretentious about it. Between his rants and the increasingly desperate Operation Valkyrie routine of his opponents, the spectacle to a disinterested observer feels like endless collisions of invidious, contextless bullshit. When will it end? It’s reached the point where the only thing we can do is look back from time to time, to make sure we remember what remembering is.
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