Why was Ferguson elevated as a national issue which required input by every member of the Official Class? Presumably, it is because it was so important. Its importance is self-evident. It was a paradigmatic illustration of exactly the race problems which afflict American society. Until the problems exemplified by Ferguson are addressed through the democratic process, injustices like these will multiply and deepen. That is the Official narrative of the event’s importance in the public consciousness.
Now let us be objective. What took place? A young black man got into an ill-advised scuffle with a cop, in which he apparently attempted to take the cop’s gun out of its holster and then later charged headlong with the apparent intent to violently attack. He was shot multiple times in the front during this charge, and died there in the street. As far as black-cop interactions go, it does not especially stand out. If media relied on what was being objectively determined by physical evidence, it would appear as just another blip on the radar. However, the media did not report what could be objectively assessed, but immediately began reporting the most sensational stories it found. What were these? Hearsay, the unqualified exaggerations of excited witnesses, who told many mutually contradicting stories. But that didn’t matter, it fit old prejudices.
Is this event, assayed apart from the lens of presumption, worth bringing attention to the attention of the entire nation? If the answer is yes, why isn’t every black-cop interaction of equivalent triviality brought to our attention? It would seem either the media is shirking its duty, or else the story simply wasn’t important. The importance of the story is not in the actual story itself, but in its elevation as a story demanding national attention, a simulacra of significance.
Follow through on this reasoning. The Ferguson event was elevated magnitudes beyond its actual importance. How many stories that are merely worth national attention for a day or a week actually significant? If the media can single-handedly raise a story to such heights in the public consciousness, what is to lead us to believe not every story brought to the height of public consciousness is not a similar simulacra? And how many stories of actual significance are never brought to anyone’s attention?
7 responses to “The News Is Important Because It’s News”
Yep. This is exactly how media bias works. The mainstream media rarely lies outright. But what they do engage in is careful selection of what gets made a big deal of. This provides an extremely distorted view of the world to anyone who gets their view of it through the media. Why, for example, do polls show that most people believe that 25-30% of the population is gay, when the actual number is about 2.5%? Well that’s what any reasonable person might think, judging by how much attention gays and their concerns get from the media. Why did the Catholic Church’s pedophilia scandal produce ten years of incessant headlines, while Rotherham is restricted to being talked about by right-wing bloggers? Why, for that matter, do similar abuses and coverups in the public school and foster care systems go unnoticed? Why do protest marches against the RFRA law in Indiana that draw a few hundred people get heavy coverage, but pro-life marches in Washington that draw hundreds of thousands get ignored? Why is every crime by whites against blacks national news, but crimes by blacks against whites only make the local news – if that?
Again, the media never quite exactly told a lie in any of those cases. It simply decided what was a big deal and what wasn’t. It abused the trust placed in it as a “gatekeeper” in order to push an agenda. This is one of the pitfalls of a high-trust society – it makes abuse easy. Maybe we shouldn’t be so trusting after all.
I found this dynamic to be painfully obvious during the week following the Chalie Hebdo shooting. Eleven leftists murdered along with a police officer and five shoppers at a Kosher supermarket.
This was a MASSIVE media masturbatathon where we saw some apologizing for Muslims, some fraudulently demanding free speech, others waxing lyrical about institutional racism.
Yet at the same time, Boko Haram murdering over somewhere close to 1000 people in Baga, Nigeria, barely registered as a blip.
Modern media is inherently disordered.
Journalists and other media professionals come out from colleges, where they are systematically indoctrinated. Colleges, universities, higher education is the real core of the problem, the source of every professional fostering the Narrative: teachers, journalists, politicians, activists, social scientists, government officials, lawyers…
That’s the dragon’s lair. The Narrative is nothing but dragon breath.
The New York Times specifically was at the center of making Ferguson a national story. This blog notes 106 stories in 3 weeks immediately after the shooting in the New York Times. That shows tremendous insanity and incompetence. Incompetence because it didn’t turn out to be the narrative they wanted. Do you know how many mountains a PR firm would move to be able to get just one story in the Times?
http://28sherman.blogspot.com/2014/12/media-megaphone-contributed-to-brooklyn.html
I am amazed how America mirrors my little African village. You want to claim and tell us you are an advanced civilization but really, you are just four tribes like my little village (Republican Tribe, Democratic Tribe and Rich Tribe and Pro-Israeli tribe). What is different is our tribes are well known, we know who we are, where we stand, our territory, our enemies, our allies and our belief system. Yours is a disaster, you may belong to the Republican tribe but if you win the lottery you belong to a different tribe. If you are black or Hispanic you belong to the Democratic tribe. If you want to exist as a political figure or keep your office you must belong to the Pro-Israeli tribe.
Now, Mr. Tribal chief, reading your article, you are no different than the media you are criticizing. You failed to examine or even hint a problem with killing of hundreds of an unarmed black males shot and killed by white police man under murky circumstances, which makes you for now a member of your tribe (Republican) I suppose. Nothing wrong with that but don’t claim you have a higher purpose or moral superiority, it is just that the media happens to be attacking the tribe you belong to at the moment.
You have an interesting web site though, I will come back to read from time to time.
Now, let me go back to my grazing cows here in Maasai Mara, but I will say this, when you are disillusioned with all of this, buy a piece of land with a herd of cows and create your own real tribe.
A news organization always reports news for its audience, if it is being successful. The mass media has its great impact because it rides on the accumulated capital of having been perceived (rightly or wrongly) as a general news service. National news was assumed to be a collection of the stories which might matter to everyone in the country. The classic switch to advocacy journalism was in fact journalists assuming what mattered to them was of universal importance; but instead you merely have reports FOR the journalist-class, MM’s Brahmins (and a subsection thereof;) it is important for said class to get reminders that they need to keep opposing racism, for example, and thus Ferguson.
In as much as their ‘world view’ departs from the reality of the world, will the stories be simulacra of news rather than real stories. Ironically in an age so dedicated to realism as the Modern age is, and a group so supposedly opposed to the superstitions and fables of religion, they have transformed news reporting into storytelling, but not merely in the sense of telling what happened, but telling what always happens. But by definition facts (factum = already happened) do not ‘always happen’ but do so erratically, at their own time and place regardless of the story we tell. To transform the reporting of facts into storytelling creates a problem for storytelling; a king may always die, but when people are interested in hearing IF the king died or not, on say, Tuesday, it is not helpful to give them the story rather than a non-interpreted (or minimally interpreted) set of facts.
This charge will be reverse-leveled against us; after all, America isn’t REALLY a communist country, is it? I mean, even if all democracies eventually become communist…
What of the claim that Soros-backed groups pushed the Ferguson narrative? If true this would make the NYT the loudest part of an echo chamber.