Donald Trump and the ‘Lamestream’ Media

December 12, 2016 § 6 Comments

Way back in 2009, failed Vice-Presidential candidate Sarah Palin took her feud with the media to a new level.  She began referring to it as the ‘lamestream’ media, bitter as she was about the justifiable questioning of her qualifications for the position, amongst other things.  Her nomenclature, though, became a crystalizing moment for many on the far right, as they now had a catchy and witty term to describe the media.  The far right had long had a problem with the mainstream media, which tended to dismiss them as nut jobs or worse.  Indeed, far right sites like Breitbart, which had already been in existence for two years by the time Palin came up with her term, had been critiquing the allegedly liberal media.  Breitbart, though, was just the most successful of these far right sites, most of which, including Breitbart, descended into conspiracy theories, hate speech, and vague threats against minorities.

And then Donald Trump happened.  Trump, a life-long moderate Democrat from New York City, saw an opportunity.  Clearly he was a student of Joseph Goebbels’ theories of propaganda.  Goebbels, who was the Nazis’ spin doctor, noted, most famously, that a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth.  But Goebbels also opined that propaganda works best when the manipulated group believes it is acting of its own free will.  This is not to say that Trump is a Nazi, of course (though some of his followers clearly are).  It is to note that Trump is a master manipulator.

All throughout the primaries and into the main presidential election, he carried out a series of feuds with the media.  He refers to the New York Times as ‘failing’ in nearly every tweet about it. He even carried out a feud with Megyn Kelly of FoxNews.  In that, he seemed to break with every expectation of a conservative candidate, as Fox has long been the conspiracy-driven, nearly fake-news media darling of the right (lest you think I’m biased, liberals have MSNBC, and it’s not like the far left doesn’t have its own issues with the media).  It probably helped that Fox was in a crisis of its own at the time, with head honcho Roger Ailes being forced to step down due to a sexual harassment scandal.

Trump, then, coalesced an already-extant movement that developed in the wake of the rise of Barack Obama, the first African American president, and his candidacy for the presidency.  Trump’s candidacy, though, took this until-now fringe movement into the mainstream, most notably through Breitbart and the appointment of its CEO, Steve Bannon, as his campaign CEO before appointing him as the Chief Strategist of the nascent Trump administration.

Trump’s media campaign and discourse has been nothing short of brilliant, even if it is nefarious and repulsive.

 

Advertisement

On Experts & Anti-Intellectualism

July 5, 2016 § 5 Comments

Nancy Isenberg‘s new book, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, is attracting a lot of attention.  No doubt this is, in part, due to the catchy title.  White trash is a derogatory and insulting term, usually applied to poor white people in the South, the descendants of the Scots-Irish who settled down here prior to the Civil War, the men who picked up their guns and fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.  (Oddly, the term is not really applied all that often to poor white people in the North).

I am also deeply suspicious of books that promise to tell me the “untold” or “true” story of anything.  And certainly, if you asked American historians if class was an “untold story”, they’d laugh you right out of their office.  But no doubt the title is due to Viking’s marketing department, not Isenbeg.

Nonetheless, I bought the book, but as I was doing so, I read some of the reviews on Amazon.The negative ones caught my eye. Most of the negative reviews were either misogynistic or anti-Semitic.  But, one, by someone calling themselves Ralphe Wiggins, caught my eye:

This book purports to be a history of white trash in America. It is not. It is a series of recounting of what others have said about the lower white classes over the past 400 years. In most cases the author’s summarizations are a simple assertions of her opinion.
…
The book is 55% text, 35% references and 10% index. The “Epilog” is a mishmash of generalizations of Isenberg’s earlier generalizations.

Let us now parse Wiggins’ commentary.  First, Wiggins complains that Isenberg simply summarizes “her opinion” and then generalizes her generalizations.  Clearly, Wiggins does not understand how historians go about their craft.  Sure, we have opinions and politics. But we are also meticulous researchers, and skilled in the art of critical thinking.  The argument Isenberg makes in White Trash are not simply her “opinion,” they’re based on years of research and critical thinking.

Second, Wiggins complains that the book is 35% references and 10% index.  Of course it is, it’s an academic work.  The arguments Isenberg makes are based on her readings of primary and secondary sources, which are then noted in her references so the interested reader can go read these sources themselves to see what  they make of them.  Revealing our sources is also part of the openness of scholarship.

Wiggins’ review reminds me of Reza Aslan’s famous turn on FoxNews, where he was accused by the host of not being able to write a history of Jesus because he’s a Muslim.  Aslan patiently explained to her over and over again that he was a trained academic, and had spent twenty years researching and pondering the life and times of Jesus.  That was what made him qualified to write Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth.

But all of this, Wiggins’ review, Aslan’s turn on FoxNews is symptomatic of a bigger problem: the turning away from expertise. In the wake of the Brexit vote, the satirical news site “News Thump” announced that all experts would be replaced by Simon Kettering, a local at the neighbourhood pub:

Williams knows absolutely everything about any subject and is unafraid to hold forth against the received wisdom of 400 years of the scientific method, especially after four pints of Strongbow.

Amongst his many accomplishments Simon is remarkably well-informed about optimal football formations, the effects of political events on international capital and bond markets, and the best way to pleasure a woman – possibly his favourite subject.

His breadth of knowledge is all the more impressive as he doesn’t even need to bother spending ten seconds fact-checking on Google before issuing a firm statement.

As my good friend, Michael Innes, noted in response:

Yep. Personally, I’m looking forward to all the medical and public health experts at my local surgery being fired and replaced with Simon. Not to mention the car mechanics at my local garage. I’m sure with a little creative thinking (no research!!!) we can dig deeper and weed out yet more of the rot, too.

See, experts can be useful now and then.  And Nancy Isenberg is certainly one, given that she is T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University.

 

 

Where Am I?

You are currently browsing entries tagged with foxnews at Matthew Barlow.