RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last month’s suicide bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester wasn’t the first time an Islamist terrorist targeted young people out for a night of fun. In 2001, a Hamas-affiliated terrorist blew himself up outside the Dolphinarium, a Tel Aviv nightclub, killing 21 Israelis, including 16 teenagers.

But news coverage of the two massacres was strikingly different, as the Manchester attack generated exponentially more attention. The New York Times, for example, offered a handful of small accounts about the Tel Aviv attack. But the Manchester bombing generated dozens of wire service and Times staff updates along with analysis stories and an editorial lamenting the horror of targeting children.

There are reasons why attacks in Europe are covered more exhaustively than those targeting Israelis. But as a result, Americans may not fully appreciate the depth of Palestinian violence because the near-daily examples of it are all but ignored.

The stark reporting contrast between the Manchester and Dolphinarium attacks reveals a change in how terrorism has been covered during the intervening 16 years. The Dolphinarium attack took place about three months before the September 11th attacks that dramatically increased media attention to terrorism.

A significant reporting gap continued after 9/11, however. Two 2002 shooting attacks within 12 days of each other prompted vastly different coverage by the New York Times. The July 4 shooting attack at Los Angeles International Airport, which claimed two lives, produced at least 13 articles. By contrast, nine people were murdered in a July 16 shooting and bombing attack against an Israeli bus going to the settlement of Immanuel. The Times devoted only one article to this slaughter.

The Times commits minimal attention to attacks on Israelis today. Last Friday’s fatal stabbing attack in Jerusalem received a scant 431-word article containing no images or references to “terror,” “terrorist,” or “terrorism.”

Worse, the newspaper ran a 243-word Associated Press article about the attack with a headline emphasizing the terrorists’ deaths, rather than their victim: “Palestinian Attackers Killed After Killing Israeli Officer.”

By contrast, the Times provided much more sympathetic coverage to an April terrorist attack in Paris that similarly claimed a police officer’s life. At 1,037 words, the article was almost three times as long, contained six photos of the attack scene, and referred six times to “terrorism” and thrice to “terrorist attack.”

An attack’s location plays a significant role in determining the extent of news coverage. Commentator Joe Concha calls this the “there versus here” phenomenon.

For example, the Times published eight articles about last November’s car ramming and stabbing attack at Ohio State University that killed no one, but injured 11 people. That included a profile of the suspected terrorist behind it. Deadlier attacks overseas generally receive far less coverage.

However, that “there versus here” explanation falters in comparison to coverage of vehicular attacks in Israel with others that occurred overseas since Ohio State.

Many people, when they know a subject really well, find newspaper accounts of it misleading or inaccurate, even as to the most elementary facts. And yet the strange thing is that it does not discourage them from continuing to read newspapers and even believe them.

I have always felt some affection for the perpetrators of literary fraud: for William Henry Ireland, for example, a young man of limited accomplishment (in his father’s opinion) who at the end of the eighteenth century forged Shakespearean documents to earn his father’s notice and praise. Amazingly enough the forgery was not immediately exposed as such, and Ireland even went so far as to “discover” the manuscript of a Shakespearean tragedy called Vortigern that was actually staged, albeit only for two performances. He made fools of serious scholars—always a delightful spectacle—until he was thoroughly exposed by Edmond Malone, though even afterwards he found learned defenders. Later he wrote a pathetic but sometimes moving memoir of his malfeasance.

I have asked myself why I feel so strange an affinity to forgers and impostors, and have come to the conclusion that it has something to do with my journalistic career. Journalists who are asked, as I used often to be, to write authoritative analyses of complex events that happened only two hours ago and about which they have no more information than that which is publicly available, to be solemnly read the following morning by millions of readers, are nearly always perilously close, at least if they are honest with themselves, to intellectual fraud. It is fellow-feeling, then, that is at the root of my sympathy for literary forgers and impostors.

A newspaper not universally known or appreciated for its attachment to the literal truth used often to call me in the middle of my medical avocations to ask whether I could write a thousand words by four o’clock on some subject or other, and if I protested that I couldn’t because I knew nothing of the subject it would grant me an extension of half an hour, presumably for research, that is to say until four-thirty. In vain did I argue that I could write a much better article if I were given a day or two to prepare it; for the newspaper, whose time horizons were as limited as those of a mayfly, it was always now or never, even if the subject were one of lasting importance. To have a reasonably coherent thousand words in time was always much more important for the newspaper than such minor qualities as depth or accuracy. Also to be eschewed was any kind of nuance. Nuance, said the editor, only confused readers and drove down sales. Readers needed messages neat.

I quickly discovered how little time it took in the age of the internet to appear authoritative, even on subjects to which I had never previously given a moment’s thought or notice. In the kingdom of the ignorant (that the newspaper believes its readers to be), the man with one fact was king. In those days the newspaper was prosperous and paid very well; and it is not everyone who can sound like an expert by four or four-thirty. I never wrote anything that I believed to be untrue, except under very special circumstances, but I had no illusions about the wholeness of the truths I was relaying. When the next day I saw people reading my article on the bus or train, I felt like snatching the newspaper from their hands and telling them not to bother. As Pudd’nhead Wilson said, it’s better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.

I was even sent abroad sometimes to cover major events in small countries whose language I could not speak and whose history I did not know. Foreign correspondents are social birds and flock together in the bar of the country’s one five-star hotel where they sit and originate or absorb rumours, many of them demonstrably false, by the most minimal effort. The other source of my information was taxi-drivers, who were either well-informed or at least impressively self-assured. Many a taxi-driver’s prejudices have been printed in the august journals of distant lands.

There was a time, a time before cable news, when the network anchorman reigned supreme. Thank goodness those days are long gone, but like the dominant broadcasters of yore, Scott Pelley of CBS News has a voice that could make a wolverine purr. Still, it’s not clear that anyone could make sense of the words that Mr. Pelley was speaking on Thursday.

In a commentary for the “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Pelley began:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Some of the gunshot wounds might have been self-inflicted? If CBS had discovered evidence that those attending the congressional baseball practice had actually been wounded by their own bullets, rather than shots fired by James Hodgkinson, this surely would have been the scoop of the year. But Mr. Pelley quickly made clear that he and his colleagues had no such evidence. Instead, he was suggesting that the victims of the attempted assassinations might bear some blame for motivating Hodgkinson to attack:

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Blaming anyone other than the shooter for attempted assassination is generally a mistake. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Mr. Pelley was intoning his commentary on the same day that victim Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was undergoing one of the series of surgeries he has required since the Wednesday attack. Last weekend his condition was upgraded to serious from critical. On Thursday, the day of the Pelley commentary, shooting victim Matt Mika was also in critical condition. Capitol Police Officer Crystal Griner was also still in the hospital on Thursday, according to CNN.

Given the timing and the circumstances that Mr. Pelley chose to make his case, one might have expected him to cite some truly damning rhetoric that had been uttered by the victims, if not direct evidence that they had incited Hodgkinson to carry out his bloody attack. One would have been wrong. The CBS voice offered not a shred of evidence that any of the shooting victims had done anything to create an “abyss of violent rhetoric,” or to inspire the actions of the man who tried to assassinate them. Instead, the anchorman mentioned a politician who was not targeted:

Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” And the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

Mr. Pelley offered no evidence that Hodgkinson suffered from mental illness, nor did he explain how comments by Mr. Sanders could possibly raise the question of whether the victims’ wounds might be “self-inflicted.”

Believe it or not, the segment went downhill from there. The CBS newsman concluded by citing President Trump’s harsh rhetoric about his network and other media outlets, as if Mr. Pelley and his colleagues were the real victims of last week’s violence.

Coincidentally on Friday Mr. Pelley left the CBS nightly anchor chair to focus on his reports for the CBS program, “60 Minutes.” The move had been announced in May and in media terms, Mr Pelley remains kind of a big deal.

One of the more interesting trends of recent years has been the effort to view citizenship through a kind of debauched meritocratic lens. This approach is favored particularly by those who oppose enforcing immigration laws, who argue that somehow immigrants (including illegal immigrants) are more “American” than poor Americans. Like some earlier iterations of Social Darwinism, this worldview combines moral self-righteousness with a crass materialism.

In a recent column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens offers a “Modest Proposal”–style recommendation to deport poor Americans: “Complacent, entitled and often shockingly ignorant on basic points of American law and history, they are the stagnant pool in which our national prospects risk drowning.” Stephens says he doesn’t really want to deport struggling Americans; his tongue is firmly in his cheek. His main purpose is to criticize the deportation of illegal immigrants by pointing to the supposed shortcomings of many native-born Americans. However, rather than destroying the case for enforcing immigration laws, this satirical proposal far more effectively skewers efforts to dissolve national fellowship in the name of the pseudo-meritocracy.

Stephens’s proposal cherry-picks evidence to show the supposed degeneracy of native-born Americans. But it does not account for the fact that immigrant households rely on government assistance at a much higher rate than native-born households do. Nor does it account for research finding that the children of many immigrant families sometimes face more challenges than their immigrant parents did. For instance, sociologists Edward E. Telles and Vilma Ortiz found that the economic prospects of those descended from Mexican immigrants often stall or even decline after the second generation. To note the struggles of immigrants and their families is not to pile moral blame on them. These difficulties do, though, indicate that immigrants face many obstacles, some of which are greater than those faced by the native-born. In many areas, illegal immigrants are prime competitors to legal immigrants, so widespread illegal immigration almost certainly makes it harder for legal immigrants to climb the ladder of success.

Intellectual shortcomings radically compound the economic deficiencies of the meritocratic denigration of the native-born. The worldview that poor Americans can’t cut it and should therefore be replaced by more “competitive” immigrants might fit comfortably in a corporate boardroom, but it profoundly misunderstands the purpose of citizenship and the enterprise of inclusive politics. Whether or not a poor American “deserves” to be an American is beside the point — what matters is that he is American and that, by virtue of his citizenship, he has an inherent claim to the public square and public concern. While pseudo-meritocratic initiatives to cull the weak are chic on Wall Street, they inject poison when applied to politics. Arguing that the poor and disadvantaged are somehow less worthy citizens exacerbates civic alienation; it cuts the materially unsuccessful out of the body politic and flatters the indifference of the successful, whispering to them that they are justified in sneering at the struggles of the weak. In its high-handed dismissal of the struggles of the poor, the argument that the native-born are degenerate trash-people is almost a recipe for even more populism, a force that has caused Stephens himself no small angst in recent years.

Thursday evening, CBS’s Scott Pelley, who officially ended his tenure as the network’s Evening News anchor the following evening, told viewers that “It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.”

It’s clear from Pelley’s subsequent commentary that his answers to all three elements are “Yes.” It’s equally clear from the examples he supplied as support that he sees (or wants viewers to see) the problem as predominantly about the conduct of those on the right.

Transcript below:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress, yesterday, was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow, have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Yesterday was not the first time.

In December last year, a man with an assault rifle stormed into a Washington-area pizzeria to free child sex slaves whom Hillary Clinton was holding there — or at least that’s what political blog sites had said. He fired into a locked door to discover no children in chains.

Sen. Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” The shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

In February, the president tweeted that the news media were the “enemy of the American people”:

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

Later, at a lunch for reporters, President Trump was asked whether he worried that language would incite violence. His pause indicated it had never crossed his mind. Then he said, “No, that doesn’t worry me.”

“Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.”

…..Ronald Reagan’s optimism is often expressed in a story that is surely apocryphal, but irresistible. He is said to have come across a barn full of horse manure and remarked cheerfully that there must be a pony in it somewhere. I suggest we look at the media landscape in a similar fashion. The mismatch between the mainstream media and the public’s sensibilities means there is a vast untapped market for news and views that are not now represented. To realize that potential, we only need three ingredients, and we already have them: first, free speech; second, capitalism and free markets; and the third ingredient is you, the consumers of news.

Free speech is under assault, most obviously on many college campuses, but also in the news media, which presents a conformist view to its audience and gets a politically segregated audience in return. Look at the letters section in The New York Times—virtually every reader who writes in agrees with the opinions of the paper. This isn’t a miracle; it’s a bubble. Liberals used to love to say, “I don’t agree with your opinion, but I would fight to the death for your right to express it.” You don’t hear that anymore from the Left. Now they want to shut you up if you don’t agree. And they are having some success.

But there is a countervailing force. Look at what happened this winter when the Left organized boycotts of department stores that carried Ivanka Trump’s clothing and jewelry. Nordstrom folded like a cheap suit, but Trump’s supporters rallied on social media and Ivanka’s company had its best month ever. This is the model I have in mind for the media. It is similar to how FOX News got started. Rupert Murdoch thought there was an untapped market for a more fair and balanced news channel, and he recruited Roger Ailes to start it more than 20 years ago. Ailes found a niche market alright—half the country!

Incredible advances in technology are also on the side of free speech. The explosion of choices makes it almost impossible to silence all dissent and gain a monopoly, though certainly Facebook and Google are trying.

As for the necessity of preserving capitalism, look around the world. Nations without economic liberty usually have little or no dissent. That’s not a coincidence. In this, I’m reminded of an enduring image from the Occupy Wall Street movement. That movement was a pestilence, egged on by President Obama and others who view other people’s wealth as a crime against the common good. This attitude was on vivid display as the protesters held up their iPhones to demand the end of capitalism. As I wrote at the time, did they believe Steve Jobs made each and every Apple product one at a time in his garage? Did they not have a clue about how capital markets make life better for more people than any other system known to man? They had no clue. And neither do many government officials, who think they can kill the golden goose and still get golden eggs.

Which brings me to the third necessary ingredient in determining where we go from here. It’s you. I urge you to support the media you like. As the great writer and thinker Midge Decter once put it, “You have to join the side you’re on.” It’s no secret that newspapers and magazines are losing readers and money and shedding staff. Some of them are good newspapers. Some of them are good magazines. There are also many wonderful, thoughtful, small publications and websites that exist on a shoestring. Don’t let them die. Subscribe or contribute to those you enjoy. Give subscriptions to friends. Put your money where your heart and mind are. An expanded media landscape that better reflects the diversity of public preferences would, in time, help create a more level political and cultural arena. That would be a great thing. So again I urge you: join the side you’re on.

As his rallies grew, the coverage grew, which made for an odd dynamic. The candidate nobody in the media took seriously was attracting the most people to his events and getting the most news coverage. Newspapers got in on the game too. Trump, unlike most of his opponents, was always available to the press, and could be counted on to say something outrageous or controversial that made a headline. He made news by being a spectacle.

Despite the mockery of journalists and late-night comics, something extraordinary was happening. Trump was dominating a campaign none of the smart money thought he could win. And then, suddenly, he was winning. Only when the crowded Republican field began to thin and Trump kept racking up primary and caucus victories did the media’s tone grow more serious.

One study estimated that Trump had received so much free airtime that if he had had to buy it, the price would have been $2 billion. The realization that they had helped Trump’s rise seemed to make many executives, producers, and journalists furious. By the time he secured the nomination and the general election rolled around, they were gunning for him. Only two people now had a chance to be president, and the overwhelming media consensus was that it could not be Donald Trump. They would make sure of that. The coverage of him grew so vicious and one-sided that last August I wrote a column on the unprecedented bias. Under the headline “American Journalism Is Collapsing Before Our Eyes,” I wrote that the so-called cream of the media crop was “engaged in a naked display of partisanship” designed to bury Trump and elect Hillary Clinton.

The evidence was on the front page, the back page, the culture pages, even the sports pages. It was at the top of the broadcast and at the bottom of the broadcast. Day in, day out, in every media market in America, Trump was savaged like no other candidate in memory. We were watching the total collapse of standards, with fairness and balance tossed overboard. Every story was an opinion masquerading as news, and every opinion ran in the same direction—toward Clinton and away from Trump.

For the most part, I blame The New York Times and The Washington Post for causing this breakdown. The two leading liberal newspapers were trying to top each other in their demonization of Trump and his supporters. They set the tone, and most of the rest of the media followed like lemmings.

On one level, tougher scrutiny of Trump was clearly defensible. He had a controversial career and lifestyle, and he was seeking the presidency as his first job in government. He also provided lots of fuel with some of his outrageous words and deeds during the campaign. But from the beginning there was also a second element to the lopsided coverage. The New York Times has not endorsed a Republican for president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, meaning it would back a dead raccoon if it had a “D” after its name. Think of it—George McGovern over Richard Nixon? Jimmy Carter over Ronald Reagan? Walter Mondale over Reagan? Any Democrat would do. And The Washington Post, which only started making editorial endorsements in the 1970s, has never once endorsed a Republican for president.

But again, I want to emphasize that 2016 had those predictable elements plus a whole new dimension. This time, the papers dropped the pretense of fairness and jumped headlong into the tank for one candidate over the other. The Times media reporter began a story this way:

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalist tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

I read that paragraph and I thought to myself, well, that’s actually an easy question. If you feel that way about Trump, normal journalistic ethics would dictate that you shouldn’t cover him. You cannot be fair. And you shouldn’t be covering Hillary Clinton either, because you’ve already decided who should be president. Go cover sports or entertainment. Yet the Times media reporter rationalized the obvious bias he had just acknowledged, citing the view that Clinton was “normal” and Trump was not.

I found the whole concept appalling. What happened to fairness? What happened to standards? I’ll tell you what happened to them. The Times top editor, Dean Baquet, eliminated them. In an interview last October with the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard, Baquet admitted that the piece by his media reporter had nailed his own thinking. Trump “challenged our language,” he said, and Trump “will have changed journalism.” Of the daily struggle for fairness, Baquet had this to say: “I think that Trump has ended that struggle. . . . We now say stuff. We fact check him. We write it more powerfully that [what he says is] false.”

Baquet was being too modest. Trump was challenging, sure, but it was Baquet who changed journalism. He’s the one who decided that the standards of fairness and nonpartisanship could be abandoned without consequence.