Lies That Journalists Tell

Remember: it's not a lie, if you believe it.

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Ever since my mother passed away, I go over to my father’s house most nights and watch TV with him. Mostly we watch Jeopardy together and have lately taken to watching Wheel of Fortune as well. I don’t watch TV news anymore, but my dad likes to have Fox News on, which I put up with. But tonight he was watching the interview that ABC News did with President Joe Biden, and so we watched that together.

It was quite an eye opener. The interviewer, George Stephanopolous, is a longtime Democratic operative, having been White House spokesman for Bill Clinton. If you haven’t heard, Biden performed very poorly in his first debate with Donald Trump. More to the point, he seemed not completely in control of his mental faculties, slurring his words and staring off into space when not answering questions. This is hardly news to those who have paid close attention to him, but it was a revelation, especially to Democratic party donors and supporters.

Stephanopolous grilled the president about his mental state and whether he should step down as president. The president tried to argue that he was mentally able to lead the country but neither Stephanopolous nor the panel appeared appeased by his performance. All stressed that calls for him to step down would continue.

This is quite the performance. As many have noted, journalists by and large dismissed claims of Biden’s deteriorating mental abilities for years. Clips have circulated for a long time now of Biden slurring his words, staring into space with his mouth open, or other verbal and mental gaffes. I have seen multiple clips of Biden reading his prepared remarks off of a teleprompter and then reading aloud the directions that go along with them, such as “wait for applause” or “pause.” He has clearly declined mentally from where he was four years ago, and it is not difficult to notice.

However, most news outlets seem to act as if this is some sort of great revelation. Anyone who has paid close attention knows this is false. Most new outlets no longer exist to provide “information” in a neutral sense but are part of the messaging apparatus of the professional classes in this country. People still act shocked that this is the case (or if they are part of that class, they are shocked, shocked you would make such an accusation, since the narrative pushed by these outlets is basically for them) but they shouldn’t be.

Newspapers were originally created for something like this, during the Thirty Years’ War in Europe and the British Civil Wars, as vehicles of partisan propaganda campaigns. It was only during the 18th and 19th centuries, with the cult of civility and 19th century democratic revolutions that they gained an air of “seriousness” and “neutrality,” and that mostly in the Anglophone world. In their heyday in the high Victorian era, newspapers were supposed to represent “the public” by presenting it with “facts.” That all started to decline with the growth of mass newspapers. Early TV news in the US mimicked the early seriousness of newspapers and got away with it, because there were only three networks. Once cable news came along and broke this monopoly, this facade was punctured for good.

Which is to say that news media have returned to being the engines of narrative maintenance and messaging they always were. In our “postmodern” era, “narrative” more important than individual facts, because the whole is greater than its parts. There is actually some truth to this, since individual “facts” don’t actually equate tot “truth.” They do have to fit into larger patterns of meaning.

But that is not something news can provide. What news outlets can do is tear down “narratives” that oppose the one they promote. That’s why particular facts that contradict the narrative can be ignored when it is “our” narrative but become microcosms of reality when they cast doubt on the “narrative” of our opponents. Corporate news media doesn’t always outright lie but more often simply ignores inconvenient “facts” like the obvious gaffes president Biden has committed over the past four years. Or else they treat such things as insignificant, of no concern to right thinking people.

They do however blow them out of proportion when it harms the “other” narrative, and here they do often outright lie. The best example I can think in this regard is the controversy over Canadian residential schools. If you don’t recall, in the summer of 2021, news media in Canada and elsewhere breathlessly reported that “mass graves” had been found on the site of “residential” schools, schools run by religious organizations (Catholic and Protestant mostly) whose aim was to assimilate Native Indians culturally speaking. These were closed down by the early 1990s, but since then a narrative has grown up around them, as elsewhere, that they were part of the “cultural genocide” of the Native Americans.

What the Chief of the Kamloops Indians found were old graves whose markers had disappeared over time—wooden crosses, mostly. But the news media plastered the internet with the words “mass graves” until everyone’s eyes bled because the graves were merely a microcosm of the larger narrative—that White European, civilization was genocidal. The graves were merely obiter dicta. In the end, it didn’t matter what happened with the graves, as you still have news outlets decrying “residential school denialists” for their unbelief. No matter what the facts may be, European civilization is evil, full stop.

You might say this is lying, but au contraire mon ami. Because the larger truth is SO IMPORTANT, even if a particular claim turns out to be factually incorrect, it is not a lie, because it does not alter the larger truth—that European civilization is evil, racist, sexist, homotransphopic, etc. What matters is that they believe what it is meant to prove, not that every claim or detail proves it. In other words, it’s not a lie, if you believe it—as long as it is the right belief.

This is the reality of the news media today, and once you get used to it, it is not that big of a surprise anymore. Terrible, yes. But unexpected? You’d have to be just as detached from reality as Joe Biden to be surprised.