There are many ways in which the news media groom the news. The most obvious strategy is by what they choose to report. If the AP, New York Times, and Washington Post run with the same story incessantly for days, it will assume importance regardless of its actual merit. It’s effective. It’s one of the reasons Donald Trump is on the brink of becoming the Republican nominee for president of the United States.
There’s another way in which the news is groomed or, as I suspect they would prefer to think of it, curated and that’s by what the major news outlets refuse to report or put into the back pages or their digital equivalents. That’s even more effective and not nearly as overt. It’s darned hard for a story that the major news outlets aren’t interested in to get any traction.
What was the most important story of yesterday? I think it was the murder by a DAESH-affiliated terrorist of a French police commander in Paris in broad daylight, which the editors of the Wall Street Journal have decided to remark on today:
Nearly lost amid the coverage of the weekend’s Orlando terror attack, Monday evening saw another Islamic State outrage in France. This time the victims were a senior police officer and his companion, stabbed to death in and around their home by a man who pledged support to Islamic State and uploaded a video of the murders on the internet. The victims are survived by their 3-year-old son, who witnessed the attack.
The alleged attacker identified by prosecutors, Larossi Abballa, was known to authorities. He spent several years in prison after a conviction for membership in a French group feeding recruits to al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He was under surveillance before Monday’s attack. After police killed him while storming the victims’ house they found a list of other potential targets. Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.
The human interest stories of the grief of the family and friends of the victims of the Orlando murders are bathos. They aren’t news. They should be left to their grief and we shouldn’t wallow in it or be forced to do so.
The French must be asking themselves if a police commander in France’s largest city isn’t safe, who is? France is teetering on the brink of a political upheaval. This story is another push towards that brink and its importance shouldn’t be ignored.
IMO this story was pretty darned important, too. Russian government hackers breached the Democratic National Committee’s servers. What did they go after? Their oppo research on Donald Trump. Why? I think they’re trying to figure him out. When, as I think is inevitable, they decide they’d rather deal with him than Hillary Clinton, expect a deluge of the material they hacked from Sec. Clinton’s private email server (or received from third parties) to become public. Sec. Clinton’s problems over what she acknowledges was her mistaken use of an insecure private email server are just beginning.
Just another home grown extremist with easy access to guns.
I drove ten hours yesterday from Southeastern West Virginia to home, mostly listening to NPR, and indeed the takeaway from these events according to about 99% of its coverage is that the events in Orlando were a great reaffirmation of the dignity of the LGBT community, and a black eye for America and homophobic parents.
The exception I believe was Peter Beinart, who was interviewed and gave useful context that all of what we know about the murderer is pretty similar to what we know about other terrorists, they are angry, alienated people. If you’ve any sort of humanities background (as most journalists I suspect do), then you’ve faced the school of thought as least as old as Kierkegaard that human existence is itself alienating. There is nothing unique about the condition, but what is unique is the way in which each person chooses to make himself exist to others. Here, a person planned and committed acts of mass murder, which he publicly credited to his allegiance to ISIS. Most of the rest is useless psychobabble and avoidance.
PD,
Uncritical affirmation of the LGBT community is definitely one of NPR’s biases. I love NPR and listen daily, but I had to turn it off for a while during the whole transgender bathroom kerfuffle – the amount of time they devoted to that story got old really quick.
Still, I think NPR is one of the better news outlets and their opinion shows are pretty centrist (center-left IMO) compared to just about anything else on radio.
They do get into certain kicks. I started listening to NPR regularly back in the 1980s. During that period a friend of mine referred to NPR as “Radio Managua”.
I’ve been traveling a lot for the last ten days and only accidentally learned about the events in Orlando, so NPR was about my only available news outlet while in transit. I thought if I listened to conservative AM talk shows I might never unlearn the misstatements made.
I’ll conflate the stories and note, Russia would like few things better than a victory by Marine Le Pen, and her consequent teaming with Russia against takfirism and detachment from America’s jihad-sparking imperial policy. Together with a Trump victory which would
lessen the Russophobic Nato agression favored by Clinton, and ideally a return to an America First position allowing Berlin and Moscow to form a continental world-stabilizing axis of peace.
When, as I think is inevitable, they decide they’d rather deal with him than Hillary Clinton, expect a deluge of the material they hacked from Sec. Clinton’s private email server (or received from third parties) to become public. Sec. Clinton’s problems over what she acknowledges was her mistaken use of an insecure private email server are just beginning.
You’re attributing too much competence to the Russians. There’s no reason to think their government is any more perceptive of how Americans react to stories than ours has been about how the Russians and Russian government react to stories. We’ve told them stories to convince Americans, even though they’re Russians. They’ll tell us stories to convince Russians, even though we’re Americans.
There’s no reason to believe in the competence of any government these days.
I have great confidence in the ability of the Russians to influence American public opinion effectively. Si monumentum requiris circumspice. Products of old Soviet disinformation campaigns are still believed uncritically.
The Russians are probably as responsible as any outside power for the radicalization in the Middle East. Before the invasion of Afghanistan, jihad was a conventional state tool. When the Ottomans declared a jihad against the U.S. during WWI (though the U.S. never declared war on the Ottomans, the peace-loving Germans insisted), it was a conventional (and meaningless) threat.
With the invasion of Afghanistan, Abdallah Azzam is given the platform to reinvent jihad as an international struggle of all Muslims without the need for legitimate authority to call for jihad. Jihad as traditionally understood is no threat to the U.S., but this form of global movement of non-state actors is damned difficult to deal with, and it emerged through Afghanistan first, and then gained traction in Bosnia and Chechnya. I blame the primary actors first, but the Russians second.
Additionally, Soviet disinformation is a major culprit in radicalizing the people of the Middle East and North Africa against us even prior to our invasion of Afghanistan. When you add to that substantial Soviet infiltration of the governments of the countries of MENA, it actually explains quite a bit.
Products of old Soviet disinformation campaigns are still believed uncritically.
The generation responsible for that (including their allies in the US) are long gone. We’re dealing with the current nation of Russia and its rulers, not the Soviet Union and its rulers. I don’t think Russian leadership is much more competent that leaders in any other country.
Look around – almost every major nation is ruled by incompetents or worse. And I don’t mean particular leaders only, but the whole class of leadership. The situation hasn’t been this bad since the run-up to WWI.