"Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think."
Remember this? It was from 2018. Timothy Burke, the video director at Deadspin, read a report from CNN that quoted local station anchors who were uncomfortable with a speech that was part of an initiative at Sinclair Broadcasting Group. The company described it as an "anchor delivered journalistic responsibility message."
Mr. Burke tracked down the stations, and discovered the broadcasts when each aired what he called, a "forced read."He stitched together the various broadcasts to create a supercut of anchors eerily echoing the same lines.
I take issue with the media and their misinformation campaigns. The content of the message, while ironic, isn't the problem I have. I find the growing centralization of media voices by multinational corporations to be a greater challenge. This is a spectacular example of editorial control by a company that, at best, is crassly commercial and restricts local newsrooms from reporting on the world as they see it.
Sinclair is anything but a benign agent; they aren't out to be objective reporters but rather advocate for a cause, which is quite clearly against the principles of fairness in media. The media fails in its duty to provide a public service in return for leasing a spectrum of the airwaves.
The U.S.'s robust democracy rests on various pillars, one of which is a free press with the latitude to report the news, investigate, and keep the citizenry informed and the government honest.
Ron Collins, a friend of mine who I met through the interwebs many years ago, wrote this back in April. He gave me permission to post his Medium essay in my newsletter. I think it sums up how I’m feeling.
Pandemonium Of Parallel Pandemics
In making the kinds of remarks I have been making throughout this crisis both online and IRL, what is most consistent in the responses I get is how people instantly conclude that I am alleging a hoax, or conspiracy, of pure falsehood. Even though, never once, have I suggested any such thing to anyone. Because I never have thought that what is really going on, is either.
What I do think is going on is two pandemics, each running its own self-determining course, and each quite beyond any human institution’s capacity to alter or slow its spread, or mitigate its harms.
One is the quite real and dangerous emergence of a new strain of virus. Whichever form of wishful-magical thinking you choose to endorse as to one policy or countermeasure or another having ‘made a difference’, the true story of this virus looks like one where it does what it does until it doesn’t anymore, and that its current target species is just along for whatever ride it takes us on.
The other, which may well be even more real and quite a bit more dangerous, is an appallingly widespread pandemic of mis- and dis-information, ignorant and reckless knowitallisms propagated by anyone with an IP address who cares to indulge in them, improvised and nonsensically-selective policy maneuvers based on objectives having more to do with crowd control than disease control, political and commercial opportunism seeking advantages to be gained out of both this disease and its ensuing chaos at once…
And, looming large over it all, is the absolute lack of any reliable credibility which might safely be invested in any source of information.
So, let’s talk about propaganda. And, let’s stipulate for the time being that such a discussion need have little relation with either hoax or conspiracy.
Yes, I did just say that.
I have studied the functions and tactics of propaganda for much of my life, and have learned that it is, at best, overly simplistic to assume propaganda as some scripted and intentional effort to deceive large groups of people en masse, merely with outright fallacies. If only it were that simple.
One scholar put it best:
…the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself as a jarring dissonance.
[The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1960/1971 (Vintage Books 1971 ed.) by Leonard Schapiro, ch.XXV, “The Party and the Nation”, p.477]
Propaganda renders the truthfulness or fallacy of a thing irrelevant, making the greater priority become one of what the consequences must be if one is caught out in the open departing from known safe conventions of discourse.
As such, a great deal of propaganda is mostly or even entirely factual, or at least built upon a foundation of observable and verifiable facts. The more important objective of propaganda is not so much to deceive its target audiences away from facts, as to instruct them on what conclusions to draw from them.
What I see going on throughout this crisis, indeed had been observing to my dismay for decades beforehand, is that the ways facts are selected and presented are so consistently determined by what conventional interpretations are being instructed alongside them. Whether anyone intended such a condition or not (probably not), author Schapiro’s ‘uniform pattern of public utterance’, in other words, has now and long since become the greater priority in the presentation of facts, than the facts themselves.
For lack of a better term, I’ll call that uniform pattern of public utterance by its already-familiar twenty-first-century name: narrative.
News media, having long since parted company with any such ethos of professionalism as limiting itself to ‘who, what, where, when, how’, now openly considers its duty to be to tell us how to think, or what it is we already do think according to their ‘data science’, and what we must interpret from only what facts it finds lend themselves to a narrative, which it holds as more crucial to the public interest than the facts themselves (perhaps best codified by its flippantly counter-journalistic daily-affirmation of ‘speak truth to power’?)
Add in:
…politicians responding primarily to poll numbers, weighing the consequences of their actions and statements only against them, always looking not for the most truthful thing to say but the most defensible narrative to promote, above any higher duty, or code of personal conduct any more honorable than that universal First Rule of Public Service of ‘cover your ass’;
…clinical and scientific professionals whose primary allegiances in composing their narratives with which to semi-inform a larger populace are determined more by the factional alliances, business models and funding mechanisms of their employers, than by any dedication to ‘objective truth’ or any oath to ‘first do no harm’;
…and a vast and entirely self-unregulating global complex of social-media users and blogospheric ranters, whom recent history suggests will say whatever pops into their heads to uphold whatever narratives feel the most appealing to them at a given moment, irrespective of any knowledge or qualifications underlying it or of any potential consequences of saying it…..
…and now, amid such indecipherable cacophony of competing and mutually hostile narratives, each containing some measure of factual information about this virus, but each also using those facts only as a template on which to assemble the latest presentation of a narrative, the process of ‘to consider the source’ is less a question of whether or not the source is outright lying, but much more to do with which narrative it is trying to get us to believe, from what facts it deigns to present.
Already, with this briefest possible explanation, I seem able to manage of what I am trying to point out, I already know I have lost the attention of most who will bother to read this far; that it is likely some of them have concluded since my opening sentences that I am simply alleging some conspiracy.
(Or… something, my wording having already auto-deployed that ‘jarring dissonance’, for its having run contrary to whichever acceptable narrative…)
And yes, I am presenting you with a narrative. So sue me.
And no, I am in possession of no more ‘concrete’ facts than anyone else and quite a few less than many. My narrative being unfamiliar, or too circuitous to summarize easily, or insufficiently seeded with known and tested ideological cues, might well lend itself to some simply deciding I am a kook.
I have been called worse.
But I am no ‘conspiracy theorist’ and never have been.
Because I recognize that conspiracy is simply unnecessary in the distribution of propaganda. (Take a moment, if you need to…)
Once factionally-conventionalized interpretations of any and all facts have become so universal and so readily employed, as declarations of loyalties or ideological preferences, anyone stating a viewpoint is probably also circulating propaganda without even realizing it. I may be too, though the general lack of anyone lining up under some banner to name a faction after my way of thinking is as comforting as it gets, in this scheme of things…..
Propaganda becomes the norm, the reliable constant; the equation becomes its own solution, once enough people have become accustomed to the idea that facts may only serve to bolster a narrative, and that if they do not they must be omitted, minimalized, or explained away, in a serviceable context which ‘supports’ the narrative, and is never allowed to point out its flaws.
Trying to work out what is really happening in this crisis of disease means trying to work out what each source’s true intentions and viewpoints are, because it is simply axiomatic that no one is presenting pure fact out of a pure motivation of letting those facts speak for themselves.
Which amounts to a condition of literally no one on earth actually knowing with any degree of confidence what is actually going on, and everyone left only with a choice between narratives, which generally means everyone will believe what best suits their existing biases, toward whichever packaged narrative they can be the most comfortable with.
And yes, in times like these, I find this epidemic of bias-confirmation via narrative-propagation, on such an unrestrained, unprecedented and unforeseen scale, to be potentially far more dangerous over a far longer term than a singular viral outbreak.
Now, read back over all that, and tell me where the part is about me alleging a hoax or conspiracy.
I am fairly confident many readers have already concluded that I am.
Believe whatever you want, which is kinda my whole point here: that doing just that is about all the informed agency anyone in this mess is going to have to work with. What I believe is truly happening is a lot more dangerous than either hoax or conspiracy, which I regard mostly as idle, insubstantial and ineffectual pastimes.
Hoaxes generally collapse under their own dead weight. A hoax is simply a lie, and lying is tedious and complicated, once the obligation to defend the original lies becomes compounded to an untenable degree, with more and still more new lies to try and keep straight.
Whereas conspiracies, no matter how thoroughly engineered, once unleashed generally entrap the conspirators within running battles of improvisational chaos, just trying to counteract all the unexpected factors and unintended consequences they always encounter.
This second pandemic I am trying (!) to articulate is a lot more real, and a lot less under anyone’s original control, than either hoax or conspiracy.
It is certainly every bit as real as, and I fear vastly more dangerous than, this outbreak of a genuine virus which has set it in motion. The first pandemic, one way or another, will end. I am not so sure about the second one.
Clayton Craddock is an independent thinker, father of two beautiful children in New York City. He is the drummer of the hit broadway musical Ain’t Too Proud. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration from Howard University’s School of Business and is a 25 year veteran of the fast-paced New York City music scene. He has played drums in a number of hit broadway and off-broadway musicals including “Tick, tick…BOOM!, Altar Boyz, Memphis The Musical and Lady Day At Emerson’s Bar and Grill. In addition, Clayton has worked on: Footloose, Motown, The Color Purple, Rent, Little Shop of Horrors, Evita, Cats, and Avenue Q.