Holman W. Jenkins, Jr./ WSJ
We in the media have our hands full with newsmakers who are frauds and sensationalists.
One can never wear out Walter Lippmann’s observation that journalists traffic in stereotypes, not only because they enable “economy of effort.” The stereotypes we embrace also assure us of our own status, such that “any disturbance of the stereotypes seems like an attack upon the foundations of the universe.”
This has been nicely demonstrated in the controversy over the Covington Catholic High School students at the Lincoln Memorial. A snippet of video was confidently interpreted as showing an encounter between racist white teenage male students and a dignified Native American Vietnam veteran solemnly banging on his drum in communion with the spirits of his ancestors and in harmony with nature.
Unfortunately a great deal of additional video evidence turned out to be available and now the foundations of the media’s universe have been shaken.
There’s one thing the great Lippmann perhaps did not adequately foresee. That’s how, in our media-drenched world, the stereotypes would come to inhabit the minds not only of those reporting the news but of those making it. Take Nathan Phillips, the Native “elder” in the tableau created by the media. He has given numerous interviews whose main feature is that they continue to support the media stereotype rather than the events known to have occurred. He can’t stop clattering on in the expected fashion about racism, cultural appropriation and the white teenagers’ need for sensitivity training.
Moments like this make me think of the careful list of swastika sightings on college campuses by the nonprofit Amcha Initiative. Its listing is largely rhetoric-free, and makes no suppositions about the perpetrators in the absence of evidence. This is undoubtedly a good thing.In a long report by New York City’s public radio station this week titled “A Hate Contagion,” the key word is contagion. “Police say that many of the crimes involve kids who are rebelling, aware [only] that the swastika is bad. . . . Some swastika incidents are related to personal grudges—between neighbors, for example—more than anti-Jewish sentiment. Other culprits are simply drunk young adults.”
The report gives a respectful hearing to school principals and police chiefs who make a decision, despite criticism from parents and others, not to publicize such incidents for fear of turning them into a more popular way of acting out. By now, even a preteen scrawling a swastika on a school bench probably does so with a degree of media-knowingness.
This problem runs deeper than we seem to realize. The Washington Post recently devoted 5,000 words to a fake-news purveyor without noticing the significance of its own reporting: The guy running the site was a liberal who got his jollies (and made money) by inventing tall tales to titillate conservatives. In Alabama’s U.S. Senate race, we belatedly learn, a liberal tech billionaire funded the creation of fake conservative Facebook pages to influence conservative voters. Or read conservative scholar John Lott’s lengthy account of how Jonah Peretti, founder of BuzzFeed, the supposedly reputable news site, stole Mr. Lott’s identity and sent out fake emails in his name.Maybe the best account of the Mall incident is Caitlin Flanagan’s in the Atlantic, particularly how CNN clung to its original stereotype even as contradictory information poured in. You might wonder what differentiates Claas Relotius, the German reporter who invented fake details about “Trump’s America” for the prestigious Spiegel magazine, from the general run of journalists? Only that he was a fabulist; he was hardly unique in thinking his job was to find ways to tell editors and readers what they wanted to hear.
In a more perfect world, the Covington episode might be seen as an occasion usefully delineating who should not be employed in the media to interpret the world for the public. In their wisdom, the Founders gave us a government incapable of doing anything, and one ironic result is a U.S. so powerful that it gets stuck with the job of organizing the world.