What can be more irritating than to see a news story that’s
a week or month or even a year old appear on Google News, Yahoo! News or your
Facebook feed? What’s worse is when days after it was originally published you
ran across an early version of a news story—when maybe some of the facts were
wrong or the accused had not yet completely exonerated herself (might as well
be topical). When I find out I’m reading yesterday’s—or last year’s—news, it raises my blood pressure a little.
That is, if the story has a dateline attached to it and I
remember to check it. Otherwise, I may believe it’s the latest news, or that the
ideas or assertions that were already discounted are actually true.
This reappearance of stories that should be time-bound out
of chronological context is one of the ways that the shift to the Internet for
getting news and creating public forums has warped our sense of time.
Another way is the 24-hour availability of Internet news. In
traditional news media, the reader, viewer or listener gets a chunk of the
world at a given increment in time at the same time every day. Here is how the world stands when the paper
was printed at 1:00 am. Here is how the world stands right now at 6:00 pm. By
contrast, the Internet purports to give us news to the instant 24 hours a day.
Anyone who frequently checks news-oriented websites knows that it’s more like
news every few hours plus whatever big event just occurred. But the very
expectation that what you see is up-to-the-minute destroys the sense of
chronology you develop by reading the newspaper or watching the 11:00 pm news
every day and thus order events by the day they occur. In a sense, on the
Internet everything happens at once in a timeless drift.
One thing hasn’t changed, though. Politicians, pundits, store-bought
intellectuals and reporters continue to fill news media outlets with lies,
false accusations, mistakes in logic and pure fantasy. I’m not talking only
about the right-wing media. The mainstream frequently carries distortions,
large and small. What was the media applause before the Iraq War, the intense
focus on deficit reduction during a recession, the multiple Benghazi hearings,
the “swift-boating” of John Kerry, the brouhaha over Planned Parenthood, the
touting of the Tea Party in 2010 and the disregard of organized left-wing
activity in that same year and this year if not distortions and fantasies. The best recent example of mainstream news media creating false news or a false
take on the news is the Associated Press (AP) scandalously falsifying article
which claimed that more than half of the people who met with Hillary Clinton
when she was secretary of state used the Clinton Foundation as a conduit to
reach her. As it turns out, the AP was looking at a miniscule subset of
visitors, and that in fact very few of the people with whom Clinton met during
her reign as secretary of state had made contributions to the Clinton
Foundation. Just as the case with every other media outlet that has pored over
Clinton emails, the AP was unable to provide one example of a contract given, a
policy changed or any other action taken by the State Department as the result
of a request to the Clinton Foundation.
The AP is trying to create a scandal where there is none.
Now for a slight change of topic to Donald Trump’s latest
inanity.
It seems as the Donald’s overactive imagination has been
acting up again. During the campaign,
the Donald has imagined African-American life in the United States to be a
wretched urban hell in which no progress towards a higher standard of living
and a safer environment has been made over the past 50 years. He has imagined
that crime is up when it’s really down, that unemployment is up when it’s really
down and that illegal immigration is up when in fact it’s so far down that more
illegals have left the United States than entered over the past few years. Of course, these fantasies of Trump’s could
also be out-and-out lies, like his many lies about his past successes as a
businessperson or that he opposed the Iraq War early on or that Hillary Clinton
has stated she wants to repeal the Second Amendment. (I wish it were true!)
Trump’s first statement about Clinton’s aide Huma Abedin
leaving her husband, the notorious sexter Anthony Weiner, serves as a dismaying
metaphor for the current state of public discourse.
Trump
said that Huma “is making a very wise
decision. I know Anthony Weiner well, and she will be far better off without
him. I only worry for the country in that Hillary Clinton was careless and
negligent in allowing Weiner to have such close proximity to highly classified
information. Who knows what he learned and who he told? It’s just another
example of Hillary Clinton’s bad judgment. It is possible that our country and
its security have been greatly compromised by this.”
Trump turns a wild innuendo—that Clinton was “careless and
negligent” about allowing Weiner to have close access to highly classified
information—into a true statement which then serves as an example of a wild
assertion—that Clinton exercises poor judgment. His conclusion is that we should
be very worried that important state documents got into the hands of an
Internet pervert.
Picking apart this statement is easier than walking away
from your bills and making your vendors sue you for the money. It assumes that
we believe that one or more of the following are true: 1) Clinton has control
over the selection of her employees’ mates; 2) Clinton routinely shares state
secrets with the significant others of her employees; 3) Huma Abedin told
everything she knew about state secrets to her husband, on the advice or orders
of Clinton.
Perhaps Trump is confused and thinks we’re still in slave
times, when the boss, who was also the owner, tried to exercise complete
control over the sex lives of his employees, who were the slaves. Or maybe he
thinks that because Abedin has an Islamic background that she has no rights
over her own body and voice and was forced to follow her Clinton Mafia family
orders to marry that twerp.
So where was Clinton’s bad judgment? In hiring someone who
is a high-achieving, hard-working and talented individual? Perhaps it was
hiring someone with an Islamic background? That racist assumption may in fact
be what Trump is really trying to communicate, just as his ostensible appeals
to African-Americans seem meant to really communicate to whites that he
endorses certain myths and lies about African-American culture.
It’s worth noting that Trump declares his expertise at the
beginning of the statement: “I know Anthony Weiner” well. Is that any different
from your run-of-the-mill Manhattan Institute or American Enterprise Institute pseudo-academic
claiming expertise in the topic about which she/he is about to lie or distort?
In fact, I could point to a number of Wall
Street Journal Op/Ed pieces that take exactly the same structure as the
Trump quote (for a few examples, see my analyses of Journal opinion pieces in OpEdge blog entries for February 11,
2016, December 8, 2015, August 4, 2015 and May 5, 2015):
1.
Establish false expertise
2.
Give false assumption
3.
Create a causal relationship based on the false
assumption, sometimes using coded language
4.
Come to false conclusion.
The
subject of the Trump quote on Abedin-Weiner symbolizes the degradation of the
news media over the past 20 years. That the media thinks the separation of two
prominent political figures rates top-of-the-news, first-page coverage degrades
the marketplace of ideas. This kind of story traditionally was never front page
news and often would not even make the Times;
it was called “tabloid news” or a “page six” story, after the gossip column
page of the scurrilous New York Post.
That a political candidate would deign to comment on the private matter of an
opponent’s employee further sullies the political discourse. The completely
illogical nature of the comment suggests a mind that is both disorganized and
deranged or a cynicism about the abilities of the American public to reason
cause and effect, or perhaps both. In any case, this kind of logic further
demeans discourse. (The hypocrisy of a serial adulterer taking an ethical stand
has been par for the course in American political history, and is therefore less
troublesome.)
In
short, the Trump quote is a complete disgrace, from every point of view. If you
want to know what’s wrong with our current public discourse on important
issues, multiply this illogical, tasteless and irrelevant quote by about a
billion.
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