Ever since some English author said the “The pen is mightier than the sword” everyone too timid to pick up the latter has turned to the former as a safer, shorter path to power. Well, today the microphone is mightier than the pen, particularly when it’s amplified by social media, which is weaponizing words to where anyone with a cellphone can amass a following eager to believe, and practice, whatever they preach. Hey, it’s all in the name of the greater good of free speech, right?
In pondering a response to this not-so rhetorical question, allow NBN to offer up some industry character insight it witnessed in 20 years working for the Fourth Estate in the name of the First Amendment: There’s the small-town tabloid owner who inexplicably wrote a very sympathetic front page piece on the parole hearing of a high-volume 1970s pot smuggler who also owned the local supermarket. Then there’s the city desk editor who enjoyed a very cozy relationship with a state senator who in turn enjoyed a very cozy relationship with a local sewer system business under NBN investigation. Lastly, there were the ubiquitous ad sales reps who regularly lobbied beat reporters for favorable coverage for large advertisers—see supermarket owner above.
Such convenient, corner-cutting-ethics is inevitable in any profit-driven industry. In newsrooms it’s even more easily—and in some respects rightly—justified by the greater good of bringing to light much greater corruption by those entrusted with an even shorter path to power: elected officials. The question now is: have these petty professional peccadillos left the news industry open to insurrection by microphone-wielding, social media sycophants acting on behalf of those elected officials and their corporate overlords? In our Summer 2019 Blog: Yellow Journalism vs. Words of Mass Destruction in the Age of InfoWars.
In 20 years of journalism NBN has worked in six local newsrooms earning a tiny piece of a Pulitzer Prize and a half dozen other industry awards along the way. We’ve also freelanced for some of journalism’s marquee publications, and interned for a top investigations team after graduating from the world’s top journalism school. Lastly, growing up, NBN’s parents were journalists who threw countless parties involving no one but journalists from those same marquee publications. We’re not saying we’re the world’s best journalists—far too many editors know otherwise. We’re just saying we know a thing or two because we’ve seen a thing or two.
Sadly, we’ve never seen anything like the state of journalism since President Donald Trump declared it “the enemy of the people.” And we’re pretty certain no one else born after World War II has either. What more proof is needed than the US President publicly praising the work of the “journalist” Alex Jones. So, NBN offers up its bona fides above to propose a baseline assessment below of journalism pre-Trump, then we hazard a guess as to where the industry is today and who, if anyone, can be trusted to help us understand the world around us.
Journalism as an industry has always had credibility issues. On one hand you have the heroics of Ida Tarbell, the Catholic sex abuse scandal, the Big Tobacco poisoning expose’ and the Pentagon Papers, all of which resulted in societal shifts that probably saved, and/or otherwise improved the lives of millions. But then you have the Hearsts and Pulitzers, to name two of too many, who regularly, recklessly cashed in on that public trust resulting in equally disastrous societal impacts that ended or worsened just as many lives. Suffering perhaps the gravest injury from the bad, bias, and BS historically baked into journalism, is the credibility of the industry itself which is always taken with a grain of salt because of these abuses. (Reader quiz: What do the LA Aqueduct—see promotional video above—and the LA Times have in common? Hint, the latter made the former and both made one infamous newspaper family a lot of money.)
Is it possible that in three years a bloviating pseudo-billionaire could have collapsed centuries of industry substandard-setting by all the elemental forces above? Certainly not through any effort of his own. The internet and social media have, at the very least, severely hobbled the heroics hyperlinked above that served to periodically remind us of the vital service that journalists provide. By letting the entire world join the profession, social media essentially neutered the extremely costly quality control standards that allow more established publications do the truly noble work cited above.
But the most significant shift in recent years is that a dark communication industry secret—that many audiences really will believe what you tell them provided it’s also what they want to hear—has been ruthlessly pursued by those who know how to leverage the power of the printed word far beyond just selling ad space.
They know you don’t need to be a 200-year-old broadsheet or seven-figure Unique Visitors Per Month (UVMP) website with advertising, wide ranging topics, and engaging art to attract a huge audience. Today, those are optional expenses behind the real gold to be mined in the Fourth Estate: molding public perception by bending “news” in favor of whatever it is you are selling. And in the Good ‘ol USA, nothing sells like the Holy Trinity of American conservativism: might makes right, greed is good, and separation of church and state does not really apply to Christianity. Stir in the insidious subliminal demonization of cultures acting otherwise, amplified exponentially through social media, and BINGO: In the time it takes to establish a decent restaurant in a wealthy neighborhood, you can have a media outlet telling tens of millions of American voters exactly what they want to hear.
As a result, it’s the wild west of journalism today wherein traditional media outlets, aka the mainstream media, are suddenly slugging it out with new-age conservative publications of mysterious provenance, zero-net worth and an unswerving message catering to, and aimed directly at, a silent majority once again coalescing around this Holy Trinity of conservatism. Only this time they aren’t the majority and they are anything but silent.
Under such circumstance any country that considers its news media an unofficial but equal branch of government is going to be very vulnerable to attack for precisely that reason: it depends so heavily on an unofficial branch of government–The Fourth Estate. And the weapons of choice for these conservative newcomers to leverage that fault line? An avalanche of specious media coverage of the most divisive issues all extrapolated from one or more of these three core beliefs. And that’s exactly what this amazing three–part series by The New York Times makes clear is happening in the United States today.
In three very digestible 15-minute segments, which NBN highly recommends, The New York Times simply and elegantly illustrates how propaganda has evolved from an internal governing strategy for autocratic leaders, to global conquest opportunity for same. NBN was blown away, both by the series and the lack of attention it generated. That may be in part due to the public’s traditionally jaundiced view of journalism. One Facebook friend, we’ll call him Nero, calls this explosion of far-right-leaning news that’s divided this country to near Civil War levels, nothing more than propaganda as usual.
Calling a focused, highly financed effort to undermine the credibility of the only non-government oversight of all three branches of U.S. government, “propaganda as usual” is like calling cancer a disease. Technically it is, and so is heartburn. But the latter is controlled with a 50 cent roll of TUMS. An industry central to American freedoms suddenly devouring itself through a concerted effort to attack the most venerable aspect of its operations—its credibility—is a little more intractable, if not terrifying. And yet, tens of millions of Americans with no direct knowledge of how the industry works pretty much agree with Nero.
They don’t see as suspicious the recent emergence of countless, completely uncredible conservative news outlets deliberately diluting the already troubled credibility of the news industry. Rather, it’s seen more as an industry-wide problem, thanks in part to the jaundiced view everyone has for journalism in general. But that’s only half the reason why so many people are willing to actually believe the Clintons are a murderous crime family that ran a human trafficking ring under a pizzeria, or that Barack Obama is an Arab and that the planes flown in the 911 attacks were holograms.
Those most susceptible to such dubious sources of information tend also to be disciples of the Holy Trinity of conservatism because they want to believe these stories. The fact that such stories never appear in mainstream media outlets, just confirms for them such outlets are pushing a liberal agenda and cannot be trusted. A message the conservative media drives home every chance it gets. The question that goes unasked by everyone is: How is it the traditional media of yore became the liberal media of today? How did the media we hated to love but read nonetheless become the liberal or fake news media tens of millions now ignore as the enemy of the people?
This question is why NBN began this article with our resume. What those without such impressive credentials don’t know about “the enemy of the people” is this: The mainstream media is liberal, insomuch that it understands the complexities of life cannot be solved through pithy slogans. Worse, professional responsibility requires those in mainstream newsrooms to assume the same understanding is held by all their readers, not just the liberal elite in L.A. and NYC. But that’s a subject for another issue of NBN.
How do the mainstream media come by this higher understanding of humanity? Career advancement for the vast majority of mainstream journalists invariably means covering charity events for destitute families and school district budget workshops where funding cuts for high school band instrument purchases are wrangled over for hours. Or by letting the public really know what happens in war. In other words you don’t get to be a top mainstream media political correspondent until you’ve paid your dues. This question is why NBN began this article with our resume.
What those without such impressive credentials don’t know about “the enemy of the people” is this: The mainstream media is liberal, insomuch that it understands the complexities of life cannot be solved through pithy slogans. Contrast that experience with the top reporters in “conservative” news media which, outside of a few wonkish publications, really only evolved about 30 years ago with Rush Limbaugh running interference for Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America. Limbaugh’s meteoric success exploiting the faith and fear fault lines of the Conservative Trinity with previously unimaginable bombast and a near absence of credible sourcing ushered in a whole new era, and definition, of news. Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Matt Drudge, to name a very few, jumped right in, each trying to out-Limbaugh the other in a rapid devolution that has now given us Glenn Beck, Andrew Breitbart, Laura Loomer, Milo Yiannopolis, and Alex Jones, to name a very few.
NBN again points to its resume to note that among the dozens of journalists and editors we’ve worked with, the number that embrace even in majority the Conservative Trinity can be counted on one hand. That’s because the overwhelming majority of mainstream journalists, through their time on the front lines of human conflict—literally and figuratively—understand the inevitable human costs of 4.8 billion people owning 2 percent of the world’s wealth. They know you don’t promote prosperity by letting bankers declare open season on their own investors.
You don’t promote peace through buying ever more bullets and bombs. They speak to global warming scientists, they don’t aggregate articles and statistics on the subject. Perhaps most important, they know that when politicians and priests start singing the same psalms, the proles need to pay attention or they will be the ones using all those new bullets and bombs
Sadly, history is on the side of the Conservative Trinity and those who espouse it, which is why conservative media so easily attracts huge audiences. They point amorously back to the good ‘ol days of unfettered private exploitation of public resources as proof positive that what made the country great back then will do so again if we only put our noses to the grindstone and ask fewer questions. That’s the thing about questions, and those in the mainstream media who endlessly ask them: As often as not the answers are not what we want to hear, so better not to ask, right? Just go with what’s always worked before. We’re not making America great, we are making America great again.
This is where a totally free press leaves a country so dependent on it so vulnerable to those telling us what we want to hear. As The New York Times video series points out: The mere semblance of a factual basis behind an argument confirming your core convictions can capture converts by the millions. And few convictions are dearer to tens of millions of Americans than the Conservative Trinity. And now, thanks to the avalanche of “news” out there, real or not, the time required to verify these tried and true axioms against present day realities is too onerous for anyone who also wishes to stay informed and enjoy their lives.
As NBN has sped past its 2,000 word cut-off, and probably lost our remaining four readers, it’s time to wrap up. The political stakes for future generations have not been so high since World War ll, only this time, it’s not just Germany following its fearless leader off a cliff. The disinformation is world-wide, and perhaps most aggressively, here in the United States, the bastion of free speech. So, what to do? Go back to the source. We all naturally gravitate to stories that confirm our core convictions. It’s called confirmation bias.
So it only makes sense as you dive past that headline declaring Obama, or Trump, to be the Anti-Christ, look first to see who is making that argument. Not just the publication, but the author. Our Facebook friend Nero chided NBN recently for questioning the author before the article, but these days you can find facts and figures to support any story you wish to tell. The difference being, these days, you can also find someone willing to tell pretty much any story you wish to hear, so it only makes sense to see why there are qualified to tell it.
Next, we all have to step back from putting too much faith in articles and writers using anonymous sources. By relieving sources of responsibility for what they say, those of us who champion the mainstream media bear direct responsibility for the rise of the conservative media which depends almost exclusively on anonymous and third party sourcing. Not until we start holding those who make the news, accountable for the news they make, will we be able to rebuild the always-challenged credibility the Fourth Estate had. It’s time we consider as carefully what’s being said in an article as who is saying it.
Summer 2019: Our Musings
Mainstream Media Running Amuck With Anonymous Sources
One must tread carefully when criticizing colleagues with vastly more respectable resumes. But then that’s the beauty of being a blogger. So NBN happily attacks Fox News contributor du jour and Operation Iraqi Freedom co-conspirator Judith Miller (see video); The New Republic fabulist Stephen Glass; New York Times ’ Beltway Sniper prevaricator Jason Blair, and Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who single-handedly destroyed 40 years of painstaking reputation-building at Rolling Stone. It’s a long ugly list growing longer every year, as documented by the Journo-trade group Poynter. What, if anything, can be done? Stop reading anonymous sources. Each of these junk-journalists were enabled by an editorial mindset that far -too readily rests a publication’s prestige on the judgment of journalists whose entire careers can be made by the sorts of stories published by the authors above. Not only do these joker journos ruin the reputations of their publications and often innocent story subjects, but as NBN has argued before, the proliferation of anonymous sources in mainstream outlets has given those with less caution behind their content carte blanche to say pretty much whatever they want with little or no verification. Sadly, the horse has left the barn on this one. Media outlets with large followings cannot survive without anonymous sources. They also can’t survive without an audience.
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Why Real News Costs Real Money
If you’re going to take on Fake News and the half-truths it often springs from, you cannot leave out that conservatory of conservative conspiracy theory: “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” NBN watched the YouTube version which opens with blood seeping over $100 bills and an ominous voice-over promising to connect the two. It then details numerous carefully choreographed collusions between the Clintons and corrupt country leaders, reminding NBN of that other modern day Camelot: The Bush Family, aka the “Family of Secrets.” One difference being, the Bushes opt for Middle East oligarchs while the Clintons cater to Third World autocrats. Either way, it’s clear, both have very dirty laundry. But as this issue of NBN is not so much about the stories as it is about who is telling them, we took a look into the author’s of both. It turns out Clinton Cash author Peter Schweizer is also president of the Government Accountability Institute, which includes, among its officers, conservative mercenaries Steve Bannon and Rebeccah Mercer. The GAI took in $2.5m in 2016, $1.45m of which went to salaries and other compensation, according to the Org’s 2016 IRS Form 990. Does anyone doubt that the sourcing standards and final edits for Schweizer’s book were handled by the same folks who provided the Clinton Cash cash?. So who is the bigger baloney merchant here? The Conservative Charity fueled by hedge-fund billionaires dedicated to the deconstruction of the administrative state, or the charity headed by a former Dem POTUS and his wife/failed Dem POTUS candidate? One thing we can be certain of. This country has a very loose definition of charity. In case you’re wondering, Russ Baker, author of “Family of Secrets,” has no such unsavory charitable ties. His resume is squeaky clean and impressive.
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Digging Deeper into Disinformation
Did the Clinton Foundation pay for Chelsea’s wedding? Let’s take another turn at how fake news becomes real news before it sediments into the political sentiments of our nation. This WaPo piece is an excellent example of how remarks from a credible source, “top Bill Clinton aide Doug Band” can be interpreted in innocent or ominous ways. In a Wiki-leaked email to Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta, Band warns that Clinton Foundation “resources” were “used for wedding and life” of first daughter Chelsea and that “the practice has to stop.” That immediately becomes Fox News headline: “Clinton aide says Foundation paid for Chelsea’s wedding, WikiLeaks emails show” Fox News is fact enough for the tsunami of conservative news headlines that eventually convinced millions Chelsea Clinton’s lavish wedding was paid for by a charity set up to help out Haiti’s destitute earthquake victims, among others. Don’t get NBN wrong. Anyone who thinks any officials as close to the global power base as the Clintons are completely on the up and up, may be interested in a Brooklyn bridge NBN is offering at a bargain price. So what’s our point? Perhaps the games Telephone or Chinese Whispers illustrates it best. Said another way, who knows what Band meant by “resources?” But we certainly know how, and why, Fox News et al. interpreted it as worst case scenario.
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Real Scoop or Stagecraft?
Wiping out anonymous sources brings NBN to the question of which came first: the anonymous source, or a journalism industry hopelessly eroded by same? For the purposes of this snippet about a Zerohedge article on Florida midterm malfeasance, let’s go with the latter. Zerohedge started life a decade ago as an apparently credible financial publication. The transition to Trump acolyte apparently occurred sometime around Trump’s famed escalator ride. But that was after Zerohedge’s financial forecasts helped it earn it half a million followers. Time to milk that credibility in the name of Deconstructing the Administrative State and start pumping pro-POTUS propaganda. The Zerohedge article above is a primer on fake news riding a crest of credibility before precipitating into the country’s collective conservative subconscious, as designed. The entire story is based on tweets by a local GOP political operative armed with a bad hair piece and cell phone footage of an Avis car rental office holding two ballot boxes and a few election signs. This ensemble of evidence is choreographed easily enough as to not require elucidation of an alternative, more suspicious, explanation here. The question is not if the story is true: if it was it would have not died so swift a death. The issue at heart here is: the story’s ability to add another shade or two to the collective colorization of the political discrediting of the opposition party. Death by a million cuts.
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News or Nuts?The Laura Loomer Story: When Feeding the Beast Devours your Soul
The first version of this snippet was a hilarious riff on alt-right “investigative journalist” as she calls herself, Laura Loomer. Then we came across the website Rational Wiki, which does a very thorough job of showing just how irrational Ms. Loomer is. When we came upon the section in the post detailing Ms. Loomer’s public suicide threats after she was banned from Twitter, we decided her story is more one of sadness than satire and all of a sudden NBN is feeling a little Loomerish itself. We here at NBN can only envy Loomer’s 270,000 Twitter followers, and have fantasized more than once what would happen to our post viewership if Rush Limbaugh and/or Fox News uttered our inanities on the air as they did more than once for Ms. Loomer. (Although, we’d hope such publicity would be disparaging and not flattering as they were for Loomer.) The point being, in this age of 24-hour news cycles and viral posts and videos, anyone looking to draw attention to themselves as a quick path to power, can do so now more easily than ever. But it seems to us that kind of sudden fame can be like heroin, where you become ever-desperate for more. So while NBN truly detests Ms. Loomer’s message and how she goes about telling it, the real fault lies with those listening. Liars figure and figures lie today like no other time on the history of news. So, it’s incumbent on those wishing to learn about the world around them to look first at who the teacher is. While Laura Loomer is a satirist’s dream come true, we prefer to lend a kind, if insincere ear, to her rantings and wish her well. Besides, what we first wrote earlier was leading us down some pretty angry avenues, vis-à-vis religion, and that’s for another issue of NBN. And, this rewrite brought us to the wonderful website: Rational Wiki.
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Diamond and Silk: Commentary Meets Clown Cacophony
If NBN is going to get down and dirty digging into the detritus of the conservative journalism biz, then let’s really roll in the refuse. So, NBN introduces (proceed with caution here folks): I Love My Freedom, What Finger News, Liberty Unyielding, EAGNews, The Gateway Pundit (recipient of the Breitbart Award for Excellence in Journalism), Flag and Cross, Geller Report…the list goes on forever (see mid-page dropdowns). Who is paying for all this? As we point out in Bad News this issue, you need some deep pockets and Russia certainly is involved directly and indirectly. But they are not alone. Corporate America has woken to the power of the press and confirmation bias. At random, NBN decided to look into the EAGNews, which stands for Education Action Group, to see who is footing the bill for this “news” publication. As a charity, EAGNews pays no taxes and its mission statement, according to tax filings is: “Supporting public education.” Only, if you take a closer look, you’ll see it’s completely opposed to public education. It’s based in Wisconsin and funded by the Koch Bros and appears to have been created, quite successfully, for the purpose of dismantling the state’s teachers union. In 2016 the group paid “salaries and compensation” of $324k from its $330k in contributions, mostly to these folks, two of whom actually have some serious journalism experience. This runs counter to our real-journalists-are-liberal theory, proposed in Bad News this issue, with the notable exception of the publication’s CEO and Founder. He is all over conservative TV along with having his own virulently anti-Democrat website and another agenda driven project called Dummycrats movie (Starring Amos and Andy, see video above.) So, we stand by our story: Real journalists are liberal by nature because that’s how the real world is and their job is presenting the real world. Conversely, conservative news is a business strategy by those with vested interest to weaponize words to further those interests, not inform readers.
