Over the weekend Andrew Sullivan published a jeremiad against the “mainstream media” that tracks pretty closely with the Matt Taibbi-Glenn Greenwald-Bari Weiss view: that one of America’s most pressing concerns is woke activists at the New York Times.
This is nonsense. Let’s unpack all of it.
“We” and “They”
What and/or who is “the mainstream media”? Is it the New York Times and the Washington Post? The AP? NBC News and CNN? Ryan Lizza’s Twitter feed? The Los Angeles Times? BuzzFeed? Axios? NPR? Maggie Haberman’s book?
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.
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.
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.
As I said, we could do this all day long.
It Has Always Been Thus
Sullivan is outraged at how the Daily Beast and the New Republic ascribed anti-gay animus to the Pulse nightclub shooting. He thinks that maybe this is all Trump’s fault, that Trump broke the media’s collective brain:
We need facts and objectivity more than ever. Trump showed that. What we got in the MSM was an over-reaction, a reflexive overreach to make the news fit the broader political fight.
Man oh man, I hope no one tells Sully about 60 Minutes and the forged George W. Bush Texas Air National Guard documents.
What’s the Alternative?
Undergirding Sullivan’s essay is a notion that someone ought to do something.
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.
How’s that working out for us?
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.
The Federalist publishes snuff fantasies and COVID death-cult nonsense.
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].
https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/andrew-sullivan-and-the-narrative