Unmentionable acts
Transcribing bigoted lies doesn't promote fairness, it enables disinformation
Intro: The White House gets Twitter right
This blog concerns language of political discourse, so before I go into the piece I was working on before ‘press time,’ let me make a brief shout-out to the Biden White House for finally getting its political messaging right by revealing that the most vocal critics of student loan relief got their own PPP loans forgiven to the tune of hundreds of thousands, and even millions of dollars
In speeches, Biden’s made a point of attack MAGA Republicans as “semi-fascists,” a phrase likely to send some centrist pundits running for the smelling salts, even though it just acknowledges what historians of authoritarianism have been saying for years, and the only debatable part is “semi.”
These counterattacks do exactly what they should, which is corner the MAGA partisans into explaining the differences between one type of loan forgiveness and another or indignantly objecting to an ugly label—you know, what the Democrats have been doing for years. That’s where we want them to be, because explaining is losing.
Some people have speculated that Biden is taking this bare-knuckled approach because he has achieved some big policy goals and The Former Guy is not looking so formidable these days. That’s likely true. They also credit the White House’s new social media director, Megan Coyne, whose tweets on the Biden’s White House official twitter are a master class in not taking shit, Jersey style. But let's not forget. Ms. Coyne didn't just wander into the White House and start tweeting. Biden’s team hired her because they liked her work. The decision to change messaging strategies came from the top down. That means that at long last, they get it.
Meanwhile, traditional media gets it wrong, by repeating, amplifying MAGA disinformation
It seems pretty simple:
If you want to protect the truth, don’t knowingly print lies.
If your value comes from providing good information, don’t repeat disinformation
If you aspire to objectivity and rationality, don’t promote their opposites.
The fact that so many mainstream journalists instead, repeat right wing messaging word-for word, sparks constant joy for the people who spread anti-democracy lies. When media repeats the right wing’s carefully crafted propaganda and juxtaposes it with a clumsy and defensive refutation from some Democrat, they call it “balance” and the forces of disinformation call it a win. The Washington Post’s hopeful slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” epitomizes the naiivete of this approach. You don’t disempower propaganda by exposing it to the light, you highlight it. Journalists who comfort themselves with platitudes like “sunlight is the best disinfectant” seem to forget why antibiotics exist.
Propaganda is a Pathogen, Naiive Journalism is its Host Organism
Traditional media stalwarts, here’s a hold-the-front-page news flash: Anti-democracy propagandists don’t fear exposure; they welcome it. News media outlets that long prided themselves on exposing lies and misdeeds, aren’t comfortable admitting that they’ve been played. Propagandists’ lies are so carefully calibrated and targeted to their audience, that any repetition just spreads the message further. And when the people echoing their disinformation represent a respected mainstream source, it works even better. Political messaging expert, George Lakoff warned us more than 15 years ago that if you repeat an opponent’s lie when debunking it, you reinforce their lie, not your truth. Like the ancient prophet Cassandra who warned her fellow citizens against letting that big-ass horse inside the gates of Troy, nobody listened to Lakoff. Can you hear him now…please?
What’s the alternative to “both sides?”
If journalists, editors and publishers want to know how to report on ugly and hateful lies without promoting them, they only need to look in the archives to see how earlier generations handled topics they considered “not fit for public consumption.” For example, journos and editorial gatekeepers of earlier generations might have handled Trump’s ugly Access Hollywood boast by swaddling it in thick layers of indirect euphemism such as,
Mr. Trump then proceeded to boast in ribald terms, of outrages he inflicted upon the persons of young women in his charge.
In our time, newspapers and online journals transcribed Trump’s child rape confession with just a couple of asterisks cloaking a slang term for sexual anatomy, as if the disgraceful part was a term that consenting adults use in intimate contexts all the time, not this presidential candidate’s obvious delight in sexually assaulting children. This done, they congratulated themselves for being responsible guardians of public discourse. They would have done better to follow the example of old-time journalists who described unacceptable speech and behavior without handing their readers a how-to manual.
In some ways, the standards of what is and isn’t printable have changed for the better. Why not this way too? Editors of an earlier age might have given “the N-word” a pass, most journalists today wouldn’t print it, even in the context of a background quote, Likewise, we don’t cite chapter and verse of a Holocaust denier’s argument or the precise instructions that child molesters pass back and forth over the dark web. But journalists and publishers ignore that unspoken ethical standard when the verbal atrocities come from the mouth, or twitter account of a nationally known politician. They need to return to a strategy I call IPA: Indirection, Paraphrase and Adjustment.
The IPA strategy: Indirection, Paraphrase and Adjustment
My shorthand for this old-school strategy of reporting the unspeakable is IPA (yeah, like the beer),
Indirection - Describe, don’t quote. Tell, don’t show. When the subject is engaged in misleading and hurtful discourse, whom are you helping by taking dictation?
Paraphrase - Propagandists carefully craft their messages to hit emotional hot buttons and bypass critical thinking. Paraphrasing the propagandist’s message instead of repeating it lets our higher brain functions get to work dissecting the actual argument.
Adjustment - Things happen in context, and failing to provide that context isn’t objectivity. It’s just laziness. If Biden calls MAGA Republicans “semi-fascists,” and fully fascist MAGA Republicans object, that’s not a “he said/they said” controversy. It’s a US president lending his voice to what political scientists, foreign observers and historians of Fascism have been saying for years. And by the way, the people who hate hearing it most aided and abetted those who tried to overthrow our elected government in 2020. Reporting horrible facts is not bias, it’s reporting horrible facts.
Propagandists craft misleading narratives. It’s their jobs. But when the media reports those narratives verbatim, the reach of their disinformation expands. How else would we know about Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “Jewish Space Lasers” or any of the other equally disgusting things GOP elected officials regularly say, if not because we saw, heard and read about them on respected media outlets? (And what did that press exposure of MTG’s unhinged rant accomplish? People focused on the weird sci-fi conspiracy theory and not the anti-antisemitism it served.) All the tropes of right-wing propaganda: “tax and spend,” “big government,” “Critical Race Theory” easily evaporate when described with indirection and paraphrase and adjusted to their proper scale by providing context. But that context doesn’t just happen. It requires a conscious decision not to be the vector of disinformation.
Journalists: if you think these suggestions impinge too much on your freedom, remember that I’m just some guy on the internet. I can’t force you to write or not write anything at all. But the right wing politicians whose messages you’ve been repeating verbatim all these years have much more power to do both of those thing in ways you will not enjoy. If you help them gain power by repeating their propaganda in the name of fairness, they won’t hesitate to use it.
Choose a side.