Media Mediocrity
With such an awful media environment at times, I attempt to bring some clarity to consuming news.
Welcome back to The Burnett Breakdown. I apologize for the lack of a newsletter last week, but I was on dad duty last Saturday and it turns out that 7-month-olds require a lot of attention. Please subscribe if you haven’t already and feel free to share The Burnett Breakdown far and wide.
Mainstream Misses
If you have been even adjacently aware of conservative politics in the last 8 years or so, then you know the conservative antipathy for the “mainstream media” (exactly which media companies fall into this group is always left undefined). In fact, I would argue that most conservative commentary now is simply commenting on how the media covered (or failed to cover) a particular story.
“Look at this headline from the New York Times.”
“So and so on CNN said this.”
“A reporter from MSNBC tweeted…”
Most of the time, conservative media criticism is lazy journalism that does little to promote productive political discourse but is part of a larger game of gotcha that political partisans play. However, there are also times when the mainstream media covers a newsworthy event so poorly that it earns every ounce of the ire it gets from conservatives.
Two stories, in particular, stand out in recent years as following in this category. First, the Hunter Biden laptop story was astonishingly mishandled by the mainstream media (along with the tech companies like Twitter) as it was labeled misinformation from the very beginning without due diligence to verify the story. With the passage of time, various news outlets have authenticated the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Second, the lab leak theory to explain the origins of COVID-19 was dismissed as a fringe right-wing conspiracy theory and not taken seriously by any mainstream media outlets. Well, this origin story is now considered to be the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19 by the United States Energy Department as made public last weekend.
(If you are wondering why we should care about what the Energy Department has to say about the origins of COVID then here is a great piece by Jim Geraghty from National Review laying it all out).
Conservatives were called right-wing nuts for espousing the possibility that these two stories were worth paying attention to and now conservatives have been proven correct. To make matters worse, most mainstream media outlets won’t acknowledge that they were wrong, which only angers conservatives more. Instead, they have simply moved on and discussed the new developments as if they had believed the stories the whole time.
Fox News
If the mainstream media can’t be trusted, then surely Fox News can, right? I wouldn’t be so sure as the latest court filings from the Dominion Voting Machines v. Fox News lawsuit demonstrate.
In case you haven’t been paying attention, Dominion Voting Systems is a company that provides election technology and services, including voting machines and software. In early 2021, Dominion Voting Systems filed a lawsuit against Fox News for defamation, alleging that the news network made false and defamatory statements about the company and its role in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.
In the lawsuit, Dominion claimed that Fox News broadcasted a series of false and defamatory statements about the company, including claims that Dominion's voting machines were rigged to switch votes from former President Donald Trump to President Joe Biden. Dominion argued that these claims were baseless and caused significant harm to the company's reputation and business.
The lawsuit seeks damages in excess of $1.6 billion, which is the estimated value of Dominion's business. Dominion also filed similar lawsuits against other media outlets, including Newsmax and One America News Network.
The most recent court documents reveal how unseriously many of Fox’s opinion hosts took the stolen election claims that people like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell were espousing following the 2020 election, all while still giving them air time on their Fox shows. As The Morning Dispatch summarized,
According to Dominion’s filing, [Rupert] Murdoch noted in private communications on November 16, 2020 [Rudy] Giuliani’s claims “should be taken with a large grain of salt,” and he described the former New York City mayor’s rantings as “really crazy stuff” three days later. [Sean] Hannity argued on November 11 “Rudy [was] acting like an insane person,” and, in January, a Lou Dobbs Tonight producer argued Giuliani was “so full of s---.”
The real-time indictments of Powell were arguably worse. [Laura] Ingraham called her a “complete nut” on November 18, and Fox Corporation Senior Vice President (SVP) Raj Shah emailed top executives on November 23 to say Powell’s claims were “outlandish.” Hannity admitted in later testimony he “did not believe [Powell’s narrative] for one second,” but Carlson had perhaps the most disdain for the lawyer, labeling her a “crazy person,” “lunatic,” and “poison” over the course of November. “I’ve got a high tolerance for crazy,” he said on November 22. But Powell, he continued, was “too much.”
The filings make clear that the Fox hosts felt pressure to provide air time to these folks, in spite of their recognizing how absurd the claims were because they were afraid to lose viewership to up-and-coming news channels like Newsmax. As an organization that has “news” in its name, I would think Fox News would want to tell its audience the truth they may not want to hear instead of feeding them lies that they may want to hear, but that is apparently not true.
What To Do
This predicament, in which news organizations can’t seemingly be trusted, has led to many discussions about misinformation/disinformation and what to do about it. It has also left many people exhausted with politics in general as they simply don’t know what to believe anymore and don’t have time to fact-check every little news bit they consume. Are we just doomed? What can we do about this?
Well, think of this as my news literacy guide to help you navigate the sewage water that is our media environment.
First, we have to recognize that we live in a world full of lies and that truth is incredibly difficult to find. We like to think that we are part of the upper echelon of intelligence in the population that knows what is true the instant we see it. Because of this, we feel like we don’t have to work very hard to find out or think about what is true. That is for people who “don’t think for themselves.”
We should be surprised and skeptical when the “truth” seems so obvious. That’s probably a warning sign that there is more to the story.
This brings me to my next point: the easier it is to consume, the less you should trust it. It is so much easier to sit on the couch and watch cable news for an hour than it is to sit and read a full newspaper for an hour. Watching someone rant and rave can be done without much thinking required which is why so many people do it at the end of a long workday. Unfortunately, nuisance and attention to detail are sacrificed for the sake of entertainment.
A detailed investigatory report isn’t riveting entertainment, but it probably provides significantly more value in discovering what is true than a 750-word reaction to the report. It is much easier to watch a 30-second clip from the president’s speech than the entire speech, but the entire speech will provide significantly more context.
Another rule of thumb is that the more political a story becomes, the more cautious you should be. The average journalist and news consumer doesn’t have strong political leanings regarding the United States recently placing a $5 million bounty on Musa Baluku, an ISIS leader in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a result, there is very little incentive to misconstrue such a move.
Conversely, monumental Supreme Court decisions, executive actions, or proposed legislative bills are often immensely political which means that there is a lot more incentive to misguide or misdirect. This should make one more skeptical when consuming news on these topics.
The more political topics are consumed, the more primary sources are vital to pay attention to. Any secondary source is someone else’s analysis or summation of the primary sources, which can be helpful, but isn’t as reliable as reading the primary sources for yourself. With primary sources, you can interpret them for yourself without the potential for someone else’s thoughts to misdirect.
Finally, maybe the most important thing of all is to simply give it time. In the rush to proclaim the “truth” first, the news media is just as guilty as humans of making a claim and then putting a stake in the ground to defend themselves. Unless we are in a position of power, we don’t have to be the first person to have a fully-formed opinion. In fact, we can be the last person we know with a fully-formed opinion and there is nothing lost.
I know this is ironic coming from somebody who spends time every week writing his opinion, but I’m sure that has led to some inaccuracy on my part at some times. As a result, feel free to be skeptical of what I write. Just make sure you are subscribed (preferably a paid subscriber) before you correct me.
God Bless,
Hunter Burnett