#PoisonPress: The Political Toxicity of US Media
A Plea for Intellectual Integrity
(Jan 10, 2020)
NBC is reporting that Attorney General William Barr is up to some shenanigans because he issued a memo authorizing DoJ prosecutors “to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections.” To substantiate the insinuation that Barr is up to some serious shitfuckery, the authors of the piece, Dartunorro Clark and Ken Dilanian, state that Trump’s legal team has mounted “baseless legal challenges to the election results, alleging widespread voter fraud cost him the race.” Their proof? Some courts laughed Team Trump out of the courtroom when they tried to make their case. Further proof? They claim Barr’s move to secure election integrity is a reversal from his previous position. Now, could Bill Barr be working behind closed doors to save his job and get Trump re-elected? Sure, it’s possible. **Newsflash** The possible does not axiomatically mean the true. Nor does it mean that the 2020 Election was ‘clean’ or on the up-and-up. It would take a large and massively illogical leap of faith to arrive at such a conclusion.
Election Rigging: An Uncomfortable Norm?
As investigative journalist Greg Palast has reported for nearly two decades, malfeasance is de rigueur in US elections. For example, he claims that roughly 500,000 ballots were thrown out in the 2020 Democratic primary in California at the behest of the Democratic establishment. (Excuse me while I piss myself laughing every time Democrats mouth count-every-vote platitudes.) Prior to that incident there was the Shadow app scandal in Iowa, where Pete Buttigieg prematurely declared victory before the results were verified. (He squeaked out a narrow win.) If you can’t, won’t, or don’t want to remember that, your inability or refusal to do so says a lot about you. Buttigieg’s Iowa proclamation is interesting because just like the vast majority of televised and print media, Biden and Harris are claiming victory even though the election results have not been analyzed, verified, or certified. They should be; they deserve to be. It is my hope they will be even if we have to call in the UN or some other outside arbeiter. Hell, call in three or four. I’m down with that. Let’s dig into the sausage and grip all the greasy, nasty nibbly-bits with our fists.
Sometimes I wonder if so-called #ResistanceWarriors are even interested in upholding the most fundamental tenets of electoral democracy. Every election should be vetted and certified, period. (Federal Elections Commission, anyone?) If you don’t think that’s important because your guy (and gal) won, you’re as bad, and potentially worse, than the people you wag your finger at.
US media is a toxic cesspool of mis- and disinformation
What’s funny, and alarming, about this is that the US news media, including NBC, CBS, ABC, but especially CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and sacred cows like PBS, the NYT and WP (and even so-called adversarial outlets like The Intercept and Democracy Now!) pursued a factless, baseless investigation against the Trump administration for four years. The allegation? Top officials in Trump’s campaign conspired with Kremlin operatives to steal the 2016 election. No proof was ever found. Cut to the present, and Clark and Dilanian at NBC News are wagging their fingers at Barr and Trump. Seriously? Do these people own mirrors, or don’t they get paid enough to purchase such amenities?
I ask because I wonder if Clark and Dilaninan or any other ‘journalists’ in the #PoisonPress understand the concept of intersubjective verifiability. The term refers to how we arrive at truth. It is a hallmark of scientific inquiry and analysis, and we engage in that process every single day — even when we talk about sports scores or the weather. We needn’t go far to appreciate how this concept is a bedrock of civilization. There’s a scene in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew (Act 4, scene 5) where two characters, Katharina and Petruchio, argue, respectively, whether or not they are looking at the sun or the moon. Eventually, Katharina concedes under pressure from Hortensio, a third character, to make nice so they can proceed on their journey. At that point, Petruchio reverses his claim and begins to espouse her position. (Gee, that’s disingenuous.) To her credit, Katharina sticks to her guns and continues to assert that the sun is, indeed, the sun. Near the end of the scene, however, Petruchio intimates to Hortensio that his first “merriment,” i.e. playful little joke, has made Hortensio jealous. Closing the scene, Hortensio reveals that he has become “untoward.” He means improper, unseemly, or perverse. Translation: Petruchio’s disingenuous exchange left Hortensio, who originally called for civility, damaged.
This little scene is instructive because it demonstrates how two people cannot arrive at truth. Intersubjective verifiability involves at least three individuals because, inherently, it is a democratic process based on reason, argument, evidence, and consent. It’s how we arrive as close as humanly possible to determining objective truth. It’s how we negotiate big, and philosophically slippery, concepts like reality. It also shows us that those who call for objectivity amidst shitfuckery can quickly become collateral damage. The creation of objective reality, especially in politics, is a messy business, y’all. But it needn’t be.
What are Clark, Dilanian, and all these other ‘journalists’ up to? They’re politicking for money. They are politicizing what in any rational world would be relatively benign: a call for [checks notes] justice and fairness. Election integrity is the purview of the Federal Elections Commission. So? There is no legitimate reason why DoJ cannot be a part of that process. That is what some would call intersubjective verifiability. To believe otherwise places our elections in the hands of faceless bureaucrats or, worse still, the talking ghouls on network television. (Known liar and war criminal George W. Bush has been quoted in the media as ‘verifying’ the election. Why? Because he called Biden to congratulate him on his ‘win.’ Big deal. Bush is a known liar. No one should believe him or his judgement.) In Clark and Dilanian’s defense, they concede that Barr’s memo “does not allege that there are substantial irregularities in the election.” But surely they must know that hyper-politicized readers and viewers will take what they will from the piece, or are these two ‘journalists’ unaware of how poisoned the media system is these days? It would surprise me if they would not concede that gentle point. Perhaps I’m a hopeless idealist.
If you’re a Biden-Harris voter and you read their piece, you’re probably shaking your fist and loudly proclaiming, “See! Trump is a career criminal, and Barr is doing his bidding!” This is neither speculation nor hyperbole. Someone named Von Berg shared Clark and Dalinian’s ‘article’ in a group I belong to on Facebook. At the bottom of the post, Von Berg disparaged Barr with the hashtag #PutinsOtherPuppet. Based on what, exactly — feelings? More like propaganda.
Von Berg’s little hashtag shows how the Russiagate probe has stunted and twisted people into modern-day Hortensios. Russiagate was pure fantasy: partisan distraction for clicks and views and profit$. Yet people still believe it because 1) their consent has been, and continues to be, manufactured, and 2) their late-stage Trump Derangement Syndrome, still fueled by the media, renders them incapable of reason. Do you need more evidence of this phenomenon? Consider Alexandra Petri’s fanciful concession speech she invented for Trump out of thin air in the Opinion pages of the Washington Post. It’s laughable. All Ms Petri is doing is revealing her media abuse scars. She’s showing off her punch-drunk hyperpartisan lizard brain. Part of me feels sorry for her.
Lest you think I’m unfairly casting aspertions, let’s consider ‘the other side.’ (Fun fact: there is no ‘other side’ in the US media ecosystem. It’s one big garish grab for money, that’s it.) If you voted for Trump-Pence and read Clark and Dilanian’s piece, it will reinforce your view that the media is gunning to get Biden and Harris installed as quickly as possible. I didn’t vote Trump-Pence, but I sympathize with that view. No one in their mind, right or otherwise, could possibly overlook Big Media’s profound slant in 2020 election coverage. In fact, slant and spin to gain audiences is one of the hallmarks of the #PoisonMedia. While Trump-friendly outlets are guilty of spinning the news for their candidate, that does not mean that auditing, verifiying, and certifying election results — this one or any other — is dubious, scandalous, or proof of anything other than [checks notes] transparency, honesty, and fairness. If you think it is outrageous that those three words can be uttered in close proximity to proper names like Barr and Trump, you, like Ms Petri, are revealing your biases.
We should not just expect election integrity, we should demand it — loudly, proudly, and with the full-throated vigor of reason-beings who value objective truth. A couple days ago I wrote that I hope Trump waits until the final possible moment to concede. I’m still of that view. Sans a landslide Biden-Harris victory (which they did not get), there is no reason for Trump to concede sooner than is reasonably expected. It is perfectly legit for Trump, and us, to demand transparency. Anyone claiming otherwise is either a fool or a partisan hack. Hint: you can be both. Sadly, the two often go hand-in-hand.
Deeper Problems
One of the things I find troublesome about the #WokeLeft is the phrase “Speak your truth.” That’s not how it works, people. “Speak your experience”? Yes. “Speak your knowledge”? Cool. I’m doing that right now. But “Speak your truth” is pure drivel. No one can make or own truth. All we can do is process information, arrive at conclusions, and wait for majority consensus to emerge. That is how we arrive at objective notions of truth. That’s why the QAnon Cult is utter hogwash, the antithesis of the Russigate fever dream that has captured the minds of media elites and average citizens who lap that slop up. It’s no coincidence that the centrist Left and the deranged Right have twisted themselves into what Chris Hedges, citing Newsweek’s Dalia Lithwick, calls magical thinking. It is a sad commentary on how hyper-partisan and hyper-propagandized the United States has become.
Anyone who disregards the administratively mind-numbing process of electoral verification to assume that the outcome of the US election is written in stone is a charlatan. They walk among us. Many of them work for so-called respected media outlets. These people are not your friends. Don’t take the candy they offer you. They’re trying to pull you into an unmarked van with the intent of holding your faculties of reason hostage — for money. When people in the press and televised media do so, they reveal who and what they are: presstitutes.
Trust no one; question everything; demand evidence. Otherwise, what are we talking about?
