News, Notes, and Notions for 9Jun24
You can't defeat misinformation by relentless promoting misinformation, plus latest Heard Tells, media appearances, and things worth reading from the week that was
It would make news media and social media as it exists in the Year of Our Lord 2024 much better if we could just yeet the term “misinformation” into the sun. Or at least out of the vernacular.
The bloated, decaying corpse of the word formerly known as “misinformation” has been laying out in the open for all to see, but the stench of it is starting to get to the point that someone really should remove the remains to six feet under ground with a healthy layer of lime. The exact time of death is unknown, but the cause of death based on the physical condition of the body was clearly repeated blunt force trauma.
Merriam-Webster simply defines “misinformation” as incorrect or misleading information. That’s it. Clear, concise, straight to the point.
But Merriam-Webster makes their money by defining words, not by propagating them. The socio-political world of news media and social media does strange things to words, though. Like the Borg collective on Star Trek, the Clickage Class takes the original meaning distinctiveness of a word as their own, adapting that word to service. What remains is a hybrid word that kind of looks like the old word, but is used however it’s new Clickage Class masters want to use it.
Frankly, it is too exhausting for most folks to keep up with which words have been hijacked to what meanings, what terms are/are not void of original intent, what integrated grifter network has co-opted what words, on and on.
The same is true with flags and symbols, but that’s another matter for another time.
Anyhoo…Borg words like “misinformation” and such.
Traditional news media, and to a lesser extent the new media and social media that has come to compete with them, are in the meaningful signals business. Not just the stories or breaking news but how it is presented in order to context to an audience. Everything from tone of voice, music used, the graphics surrounding the screen, the placement of the segment in the broadcast, all those things are signals as to the importance and meaning of the story being covered.
The problem with buzzwords, and using “misinformation” as a specific example here, is once the term loses all meaning those outlets have gone from gatekeepers of information to the wrong side of the moral of the Boy Who Cried Wolf. The meaningless signal having become the norm - the lie that the wolf was coming - meant the meaningful signal lost all meaning and bad things happened - the wolf really did come.
The professional grifter class has added another stack to the media “misinformation” Matryoshka doll. It used to be that truly crazy nonsense was just pointed and laughed at, if not missed all together because - by and large - news media just ignored it. Social media changed that. Now the news media, needing the symbiosis with social media, has a habit of taking the looney, the wackadoo, the what-the-hell, and running think pieces and fact checks on such nonsense. Going out of the way to do so has the perverse effect of elevating otherwise unseen garbage into newsworthy “misinformation” by default, regardless of intention. And by doing so, the full power of the news media just helped spread the very thing they are condemning as unworthy to a much larger audience. Self-fulfilling prophets make bad tv, and even worse gatekeepers of information.
Folks stop paying attention to bad gatekeeping, especially information gatekeeping in a world where more options to get that information are available than ever before. But ignorance is only bliss in the modern media world if the buzzwords stay meaningful only for algorithmic purposes, and not the actual damage of perceived meaningless signals that turned out to be very important indeed.
Since we can’t really yeet the artist formerly known as “misinformation” into the sun, at least we can perk up our discernment antennas when it is being used as the lead item on the news, or in commentary, or in some important diatribe about whatever. One person’s misinformation is always going to be another’s monetized key word in this day and age. Best we can do is try to know the difference.
This Week’s Heard Tell Episode
Download and listen to Heard Tell wherever you get your podcasts:
Listen on iTunes
Listen on Spotify
Listen on iHeartRadio
Heard Tell RSS Feed
Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by talking about the reactions of folks in news media and social media to the Donald Trump verdict in his New York City business records case. Next, the Caitlin Clark coverage as the woman's basketball star transitions from college to the WNBA has become new ground for the unholy union of political/cultural content creators and the always loud sports media world, which means the actual issues like gender, sports, race, and other things are being co-opted by the bad faith grifters when they need to be seriously discussed. Host Andrew talks about the 80th anniversary of D-Day with a personal story from when he was at the 60th anniversary in London in 2004. Plus, India has gone to the polls and elected PM Modi to a third term, and India's rising place in the world politically, culturally, and economically is something to pay attention to. We end on a good note of a young family whose days-old little girl was not only saved by a quick thinking state trooper, but revealed to have much more going on than just an onset of a medical emergency.
Download and listen to Heard Tell wherever you get your podcasts:
Listen on iTunes
Listen on Spotify
Listen on iHeartRadio
Heard Tell RSS Feed
Your Heard Tell Show is turning down the noise of the news cycle and getting to the information we need to discern our times by debating the merits of the latest calls for mandatory service with Alex Petropolous, who has been doing media appearances on the subject including a SkyNews segment that received attention. Alex joins us from Brussels, Belgium, as he and host Andrew talk mandatory service vs incentives service, how this plays into the very old game of selling "politics of what's wrong with the youth" to get the votes of the older generation, and how it is indicative of the generation gaps forming as the Baby Boom generation starts to give way to midlife Gen X, Millennials in their 30s/40, and rising generations coming behind them. Plus, Alex gives his thoughts on UK politics, the coming general election, Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer, and what to watch for between now and when the UK goes to the polls in July.
All that and more on this episode of Heard Tell.
Media Appearance:
I was back on The New Forum up in Canada offering some commentary on the Hunter Biden trial. My bit at the 18:45 mark:
Worth Reading:
I have a piece of my own coming out this week on Kyneddi Miller, the 14-year-old girl found starved to death in Boone County, WV, that has state officials scrambling after they’ve botched, stonewalled, and made a mess of any attempt by media and the public to get to what really happened. But this by Stephen Baldwin is must read:
The hard truth–that no one wants to hear, let alone say–is that this isn’t the first time such an awful thing has happened.
In December 2020, four children died in Williamsburg after being shot and killed, and their bodies disposed of in a house fire. The perpetrator was a woman who was the biological mother of several of the children and the step-mother of the others.
It was gruesome and tragic. First responders are haunted by what they saw to this day, and will be forevermore.
It was also something people saw coming. Soon after the murders, people came forward saying they’d called the WV Child Abuse Hotline to report suspected abuse of the children. Some of the calls were in years prior and some were in the months leading up to their murder. At least one of the phone calls came from a medical professional.
But the phone calls were “screened out,” which means the person who answered the phone at a call center run by the WV Department of Human Services (DHS) in North Central, WV, decided it wasn’t worth sending Child Protective Services (CPS) to check out the situation. Therefore, local CPS and law enforcement never knew about the suspected abuse and never had a chance to prevent the children’s murders.
I spent years trying to untangle what happened so we could learn from it, make changes, and improve the system for future cases. Bills were introduced in 2021 to automatically “screen-in” calls from law enforcement or medical personnel, but they were rejected by bureaucrats and legislators. Witnesses were called to testify before the Select Committee on Children & Families, but the same bureaucrats and legislators spent the entire hearing talking so that the witnesses only had a few minutes to speak. Then the meeting ended, and they never took action.
Four children died, and nothing changed. I know, because it happened again. And again. And again, to Kyneddi Miller earlier this year.
Stuff to ponder from Jonah Goldberg’s G-File:
The crowd in The Life of Brian that screams “Yes we’re all individuals!” doesn’t get the joke. On elite college campuses, there are few tropes more conformist and herdlike than, “You’re not the boss of me!” The people who prattle about “personal truths” and “the personal is political” are as often as not acolytes of groupthink, not independent thought.
So, what does all this have to do with crying about Private Ryan and D-Day?
There’s been a lot of “greatest generation” talk this week. Longtime readers know I really dislike this stuff. I have bottomless gratitude and admiration for the men who stormed Normandy, or who fought in WWII in other theaters. Collectively—and colloquially —it’s fair to say they were heroes.
But they were heroes for what they did as individuals. The man who stayed home during World War II—whether he just refused to enlist or avoided the draft, for legitimate reasons or otherwise—can share in American pride and admiration for the sacrifices of others. But he deserves none of the honor and glory. This is true of the 4-F patriot and the able-bodied draft-dodger (perhaps not in equal portion); unless you personally earned the “greatness” label, claiming it simply by dint of your birth year is a kind of demographic stolen valor. The guy who spent D-Day in a drunk tank in Cleveland has no right to say, “How dare you talk to someone from the greatest generation that way?!”
We think of identity politics primarily as a shorthand for race, gender, sex, and—to some extent—religion. And that’s fine in most contexts. But these categories are simply the most obvious forms of identitarianism. Age is a powerful form of identitarianism. AARP fights for senior citizens in much the same way the NAACP fights for American Americans. Young people—or rather a slice of activists who politicize their age—practice identity politics. So do government workers, veterans, academics, journalists, unions, police, and all sorts of groups that organize around their identity. In our polarized political climate, even Republicans and Democrats talk and act like they are a special caste.
These various groups don’t all operate the same way. They aren’t all equally problematic, or necessarily good or bad. Factions based on economic interests don’t trouble me nearly as much as factions formed around immutable characteristics. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with factions of any kind. Politics is about adjudicating the competing interests of groups. The problem is one of degree. When factions become concretized into a form of self-conception that sees itself as a kind morally superior and privileged caste, it ceases to be simply a faction and becomes a form of identity. The tell is when the group stops making arguments based on facts or concrete interests and starts making arguments based on the self-asserted authority of their identity itself. This usually comes with emotional appeals about collective grievance. Young people are particularly prone to this. They often believe that just because they are young they have some special moral status and insight. “In America,” Oscar Wilde observed, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.”
In a way, identity is a means of outsourcing yourself to a group.
Our friend Krista Kafer takes on a Lauren Boebert immigration ad:
Instead of doing anything meaningful, the GOP House intends to vote for legislation to bar noncitizens from voting which is already illegal. Your ad claims you are “taking action to stop the invasion.” If posturing counts as action, you guys are nailing it.
The ad then says, “We need to shut down the border, build the wall, and deport them all.” Catchy rhyme but there are several issues with these recommendations. There are around 330 ports of entry into the U.S. including 48 land crossing points from Mexico, as well as, airports and seaports that receive international travelers. Shutting down the entire border with Mexico, our second largest trading partner, would cost the U.S. billions of dollars, cause a diplomatic crisis, and disrupt the lives of the millions of Americans and Mexicans who legally cross every day.
A third of the Mexico-U.S., 1,969 mile border is already fenced. Border walls are effective at deterring crossing at those points and shifting illegal crossing to more remote areas. Walls do not stop individuals from presenting themselves to border agents at ports of entry and claiming asylum. Moreover, walls are ineffective at stopping drug trafficking since drugs are smuggled in by motor vehicles through ports of entry. Some areas cannot be fenced because of ecological impacts. This isn’t to say that additional construction would not be useful but at $20 million a mile, the U.S. needs to be judicious. There will never be a 1,969-mile wall along the border.
Also, deporting 11 million of people as former President Donald Trump claims he will do with the aid of police, the National Guard, and possibly the military has significant feasibility as well as humanitarian concerns. It will require complicated logistics involving transportation, legal hearings, and diplomatic negotiations. Large detention camps will be necessary. Maybe he’ll build something in Granada, Colorado.
With less than two weeks left in the primary, there is time to correct your campaign ad, Congresswoman Boebert. Honesty is always the best policy. I’ll put the consulting bill in the mail.