The media’s raison d’etre exists, not in the truth, but solely in opposition

The mainstream media have printed various misinformed or later-to-be-corrected statements about the impact of COVID-19, mainly because they (like most of America) were still learning about the spread of the virus and its potential public health implications.

The president was learning, too, in real time. The difference is that he is blamed by the media for every statement he makes. If it’s true, then it’s insensitive, and if it turns out to be inaccurate, then it was a blatant lie.

At this point, it seems that the mainstream media exists solely to refute and oppose anything the president says.

Of course, President Donald Trump is not perfect. He exaggerates. He makes blanket statements without caveat. And he is known to protect himself to the point of stretching reality.

Those who have come to know him and work with him on a daily basis understand his foibles. But they also understand that the president is merely human.

He breathes the same air and eats the same food we all do. He has hopes and dreams for his own life and for America that echo our own. Despite his many faults, he was duly elected to lead the country; he has our best interests at heart.

But the media’s raison d’etre exists, not in the truth, but solely in opposition. When the president goes left, whether right or wrong, the media go right. It is as if they have abdicated their roles as fact-finders and investigators and turned into repudiators.

This is laziness at its worst. It lacks credibility and betrays an emotional bias that goes to the heart of truth and falsehood. If the media is so readily able to embrace falsehoods merely to combat the president, are they not just as guilty of the betrayal of truth they accuse the president of committing?

Perhaps the most cynical media iconoclasm centers around the seeming glee some pundits take in the tanking economy. It is almost as if they embrace forced closings and their devastating economic effects as the welcome price of ridding the country of Trump.

Forget about the folks who are suffering. Forget about working mothers with children out of school and nowhere to go. All these pundits have to do is show up at their laptops and type away from the cushy surroundings of their high-end condos. But they aren’t forced to make the hard choices of laying off workers or letting crops rot in the field. For them, reopening the economy is synonymous with losing the political battle.

We all want a free press that is able to question the official line. As a media pundit and commentator, I often question the president’s approach. But it bears asking whether a press is truly “free” when it is bound by its preconceived notions of truth and falsehood.

Perhaps ideological constraints on fairness and objectivity devalue their roles as the investigators and revealers the Founders imagined when they enshrined the First Amendment.

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HANSON’S RULE OF OPPOSITES

In his American Greatness column “The doctrine of media untruth,” Victor Davis Hanson lays down a highly useful rule of opposites:

As a general rule, when the New York Times, the Washington Post, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Service, NBC, CBS, ABC, MSNBC, and CNN begin to parrot a narrative, the truth often is found in simply believing just the opposite.

Put another way, the media’s “truth” is a good guide to what is abjectly false. Perhaps we can call the lesson of this valuable service, the media’s inadvertent ability to convey truth by disguising it with transparent bias and falsehood, the “Doctrine of Media Untruth.”

Victor gives many pertinent examples. This one is my favorite and I quote it for the sheer pleasure of the truth blast:

The country once knew little of Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.). But once the media sanctified his role after the 2018 election as the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, we knew what lay ahead. No sooner had the Renaissance Schiff assumed the chairmanship of the committee than we were lectured ad nauseam how he was a Harvard Law graduate, with a sly sense of humor, who had he not blessed the country with his stellar political career otherwise might well have been a successful Hollywood screenwriter. He ran his committee with flair and competence lacking under the former chairman, the supposedly plodding dairy farmer Devin Nunes (R-Calif.). In other words, we quickly discovered the truth through the Doctrine of Media Untruth.

Within about a year, the public knew that Schiff was a fraud. He had suppressed key testimonies that long ago revealed that the functionaries in the collusion hoax had admitted under oath they had no evidence for the accusations they made daily in the media, and that CrowdStrike, in fact, could not prove a Russian genesis for the hacking of DNC emails.

Schiff himself tapped into the communications records of his own colleague and the former chairman of his committee, Nunes. He lied habitually, most egregiously in denying that he or his staff had anything to do with the Ukrainian “whistleblower” when in fact his team had been in close communications with him.

Each time Schiff assured the media of “bombshells,” that the “walls were closing in,” or that there were all sorts of new top-secret, classified, rarified information known only to him, which would shortly “prove” Trump “collusion,” we understood that he was a con man and prevaricator who had no proof at all or any such evidence. Whatever report he issued (cf. the “Schiff memo”), would certainly be dishonest and not factual. And, of course, it was.

Incidentally, Hanson’s rule of opposites must be applied to understand Susan Rice’s incriminating memo of January 20, 2017. It is one key among many to the biggest scandal by far in American political history

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NYT Attacks Military 'Racism' Over Memorial Day Weekend

Poorly timed race-baiting revisionist history from the Times's editorial board. 

“Why Does the U.S. Military Celebrate White Supremacy?” That’s the headline of a New York Times editorial attacking the military for naming some bases in the South after Confederate officers. Why the Times editorial board’s armchair generals chose Memorial Day weekend to tread upon the memory of fallen Patriots with this race-baiting tripe can likely be explained by the new Pulitzer Prize sitting on the shelf for the Times’s race-baiting revisionist history in the 1619 Project. But perhaps it was also a distraction from Joe Biden’s revealing remarks on the black vote. In any case, when all you have is a race hammer, everything looks like a racist nail.

“It is time to rename bases for American heroes — not racist traitors,” declares the Times. Bafflingly, the editorial’s argument begins by recounting a racist’s attack on a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, five years ago. Predictably, the Times also makes multiple Nazi references. Why either has anything to do with the name of Fort Benning in Georgia is left to the deranged imagination of leftists everywhere.

Pentagon spokesman Jonathan Rath Hoffman offered this response: “On a solemn day for remembering those that have given their lives for our country fighting against tyranny and subjugation, the NYT has more than a million possible stories of the ultimate sacrifice by American patriots that they could tell. But they don’t.”

Likewise, retired Staff Sgt. Joey Jones slammed the paper, saying, “There are 365 days in a year. There has been 150 years since the Civil War. Why is the New York Times writing this on Memorial Day this year of all years?” He added, “To me that’s offensive. That’s as bad as saying that coronavirus was warranted because we had slavery 200 years ago. That’s not how we look at our country. … I find it offensive and repulsive.”

There’s a time and place for thoughtfully evaluating American history, but this was neither the time nor was it thoughtful. More to the point, where does the airbrushing stop?

Meanwhile, President Donald Trump visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery Monday morning. He too used the word “race” in his remarks, though the meaning was entirely different. Praising the National Guard and others who’ve battled the coronavirus pandemic, Trump said, “Once more the men and women of the United States military have answered the call to duty and raced into danger.” Trump appealed for the kind of unity that the Times aimed to destroy. “Together, we will vanquish the virus and America will rise from this crisis to new and even greater heights,” he said. “As our brave warriors have shown us from the nation’s earliest days, in America, we are the captains of our own fate.” Indeed we are.

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Correctly counting the cost shows Australia's lockdown was a mistake

The future will now be worse because the flawed pandemic health projections didn't correctly calculate their effects on economic welfare.

Australia’s economic policies in response to the coronavirus threat have been driven in the main by projections of death and infection rates, produced by epidemiological modelling, that since have been proven to be orders of magnitude above what any country anywhere in the world, regardless of policy, has experienced.

Meanwhile, the welfare costs of our economic policy responses have been either overlooked entirely, gestured towards vaguely but not actually calculated, or calculated in ways strikingly out of alignment with international best practice when estimating the welfare costs of different policy alternatives – eg, using full value-of-a-statistical-life (VSL) numbers, rather than age-adjusted VSL or quality-adjusted life years, when valuing lives lost to COVID-19 (which are predominantly the lives of older people with a few years, not an entire life, left to live).

A leading reason for points 1 and 2 is that it’s a lot less work to count bodies and point to scary body-count projections than to think hard about the many and various costs – many invisible and requiring a reasonable counterfactual that is, again, mentally taxing to create; many manifesting only over time – that arise when we take the drastic economic policy actions we have taken.

The costs of what we have done are enormous. These costs will show up most obviously over the next few months in the body counts sacrificed to causes other than COVID-19 – like from famine, preventable diseases and violence in lower income countries; and deaths from despair, isolation, and non-COVID-19 health problems that have lost resourcing in better-off countries such as Australia – but will also stem from sources that don’t have actual deaths of presently living people attached to them.

Lower GDP now and going forward means lower levels of government services on education, healthcare, research and development, infrastructure, social services, and myriad other things that keep us happier, healthier and living longer.

Kids whose education has been disrupted due to our mandates that schools and universities move activities online, and young people who have lost their jobs or are entering the job market during the recession we have created, will carry the impact of these disruptions for years.

Discoveries of cures for diseases other than COVID-19 will be delayed; IVF babies won’t be born; our progress on lifting up the tens of thousands of Australian children who live in poverty will be set back.

The future we’ll now have is worse than the future we could have had without the policy responses we have seen.

That comparison of what-we-will-have to what-we-could-have-had can be expressed in terms of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) and wellbeing-adjusted life years (WELLBYs), and compared directly to estimates of the QALY and WELLBY costs of the COVID-19 deaths and suffering that our policies have averted.

When you make this comparison, correctly, the evidence is clear that Australia’s lockdown has been a mistake.

In hindsight, instead of reacting out of fear, our government could have understood its primary role early on to contain and reduce the population’s fear; it could have set proportionate and targeted policy, not blanket policy (eg, extreme lockdowns were not what drove the decline from peak infections in Australia: when many of the harshest measures were set, infections were already on the decline); and it could have been perennially mindful of the massive economic and hence human welfare costs implicit in any decision to stop trade, pull children out of school, or lock people away from their friends and family.

In normal times, we jump up and down and fill national airwaves about changes in GDP or unemployment rates that are an order of magnitude less than what we are seeing now. In normal times we don’t track single-digit daily death rates from any cause as a leading indicator of whether it’s safe to venture outside, knowing that hundreds of people in Australia die each day from myriad causes. In normal times we talk about striving for health not through sitting at home and avoiding other people, but by building our strength and supporting our immune systems. People today have lost their perspective on what is normal.

Travel bans and social distancing rules have drastically reduced footfalls at Australia's prime tourist destinations, and economists anticipate a telling effect of the drop in tourism on the economy.

As the costs of our decisions become more and more apparent, with time, our fear will stop controlling our minds. I hope the perspective of the public and policy-makers returns quickly, so we have a chance of handling things better if the next wave of the virus attacks again what is now one of the most immunologically unprepared high-income countries in the world: Australia.

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Political correctness is most pervasive in universities and colleges but I rarely report the  incidents concerned here as I have a separate blog for educational matters.

American "liberals" often deny being Leftists and say that they are very different from the Communist rulers of  other countries.  The only real difference, however, is how much power they have.  In America, their power is limited by democracy.  To see what they WOULD be like with more power, look at where they ARE already  very powerful: in America's educational system -- particularly in the universities and colleges.  They show there the same respect for free-speech and political diversity that Stalin did:  None.  So look to the colleges to see  what the whole country would be like if "liberals" had their way.  It would be a dictatorship.

For more postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, GREENIE WATCH,   EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and  DISSECTING LEFTISM.   My Home Pages are here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  Email me (John Ray) here. 
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