Sweating the small stuff
I still think they’re straining at a gnat but swallowing a camel here.
Nandy criticises BBC’s ‘inconsistent’ reporting standards
Mr Shah is set to write to the culture, media and sport committee on Monday to express regret for the way the Trump speech, made on the day of the Jan 6 2021 Capitol riot, was spliced together. The Telegraph has previously disclosed that both Mr Davie and Mr Shah were warned of the doctored footage in May but appear to have kept quiet.
…
The decision to issue an apology has raised questions about why it has taken them six months to admit viewers were misled.
But they weren’t really misled. The two things Trump said were widely separated as opposed to connected, but the substance remains the same. It’s definitely bad practice not to make it clear when two sentences are not continuous, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily misleading. Trump was ranting and raging about forcibly stealing the election, and the fact that he did so in more than one section of the very long tedious speech doesn’t change what he was saying or what happened as a result of what he was saying. Some people ended up dead because of what he was saying.
It’s the liberal curse: the left has to play perfect baseball, or it loses credibility with the masses — and therefore it loses elections, and therefore it loses power, and therefore progress diminishes.
I don’t want to see the BBC shut down — I don’t think it’s entirely a “leftist propaganda machine” as the White House Press Secretary said — I want to see it reformed. Same with Canada’s CBC, and US institutions like the New York Times, PBS, and NPR.
I agree with your take that, while the video splicing was bad, it wasn’t entirely as misleading as it’s been made out to be, because as you say, the gist of the report was true: Trump did encourage the riots.
But of course on the matter of trans, the BBC is entirely guilty as charged. It censored the truth in service to the lie. And it’s a lie that’s so fundamentally obvious and so deeply felt, many people see it as a litmus test, a proxy for overall trust: if the liberal media isn’t telling the truth about male athletes in women’s sports, and right-wing news outlets are, then most people will take that to mean the liberal media probably isn’t the truth-telling side in any other political dispute.
In electoral politics, most adults reason like adolescents — not for lack of intelligence, but because emotions, identity, and low engagement make politics a tribal rather than rational exercise. We should always picture a 12-year-old when we imagine the average voter. Well, a 12-year-old can tell men apart from women better than she can tell whether or not Trump is a con man.
As to the question imposed on the average voter, who is also the average media consumer — Trump: good or bad? — the BBC and the NYT is telling them bad; Fox News is saying good. Well, Fox News told them the truth about the thing they know for certain — what a woman is and isn’t — so the safe bet is on Fox News for Trump, too.
Ergo, trans got Trump elected. (I actually do stand by that argument. I genuinely think the trans debate tipped the electorate in favour of Trump.)
(oops, I’ve had an extended bout of thoughts again!)
And, I might add, the inverse is true as well: liberal journalists are using trans as a proxy for Trump, or as a proxy for what they perceive to be their job, which is to inform and guide the low-information, common-sense, mind-of-a-twelve-year-old masses towards higher-information, more cerebral, more complex interpretations of the world around them.
They probably spliced that Trump speech because they wanted to show the average American voter what Trump was doing in as simplified a way as possible. The splicing was an attempt to dumb down a long, rambling, unitelligible speech to a soundbite small and simple enough for a 12-year-old to digest it.
In the same way, they believe the common-sense view of sex has to be wrong BECASE it’s so simple, a 12-year-old can figure it out. So they believe it’s their natural duty to educate them in the more cerebral, more complicated, more abstract concept of “gender identity”.
To liberal journalists at the BBC and elsewhere, they see the common-sense view about sex as a threat, because if they got that so terribly wrong, then they just might be wrong about all their other cherished, more-cerebral ideas, such as that Trump is a con man (the thoughtful view) rather than a strongman hero (the simplistic view).
So trans becomes an ideological proxy for liberals just as much as it is for conservatives. Liberal journalists are effectively destroying their own credibility to spite Trump.
Bleeding heart trans activists are mutilating kids’ bodies to spite their MAGA opponents.
Actually, it isn’t unusual to splice together different parts of a speech or interview; they do it all the time. Ideally they are not supposed to change the meaning, but in a lot of cases, they actually do. For instance, I was interviewed about the first Earth Day our college ever did, my first year there. When I saw the interview, they had, of course, cut it. But they cut it in a way that made me say things I didn’t say. Frankly, I don’t remember saying ‘recycling’, but at some point, I must have, because my interview became about that.
After the newspaper interviewed me a few years later, I was horrified. There was not a single quote in the article that I actually said. I did write a letter that time, informing the editor that I never used the word ‘repurposed’ in my life.
Most of the time, I suspect it is just a matter of deciding what will be shown in the limited time. Other times, it is done with malicious purposes. Since Trump is shown with his words intact, just some of it not there between, I suspect it is the former. Since they didn’t change the meaning or content of what he said, they were just airing the relevant parts. They couldn’t possibly air the entire speech on a news broadcast.
I don’t think it was an example of bad journalism, it was an example of bad egoism on the part of the puffed up ego that occupies the White House. I wish they had stuck their ground and defended the thing; Trump probably hasn’t got a leg to stand on. All these people/institutions are caving to his demands, when lawsuits would almost certainly go their way. I realize that defending a lawsuit is expensive, but if the big pockets institutions aren’t willing to do it, who will?
For another example, this one more egregious even than what happened to me, see:
https://ffrf.org/fttoday/april-2010/articles-april-2010/the-mother-of-all-daily-show-ambushes/
The strange thing is that you only have to listen to Trump for five minutes (ten tops) to realize “Trump bad” without anyone telling you. I dare anyone to come up with five minutes of Tump speaking in public, since the time he ran for the Republican Presidential nomination where he doesn’t:
-turn the subject under discussion into something about himself
-claim to know all about whatever is being talked about (usually better than anyone)
-make some statement about something being the best/worst, most/least, etc., with the “better” always being the result of him doing something, the “worse” part always the fault of his opponents and/or enemies (let’s face it, in his eyes, they’re the same thing)
-use one of his few stock phrases, possibly repeating it
-lie
Add to that the fact (easily discrenable from his own words, without anyone’s pointing it out, if you’re listening directly, rather than reading something that’s sanewashed him) that he’s a thin-skinned, egotistical, boastful, bullying, pig-ignorant boor. I don’t need anyone to “tell” me that this guy’s bad news. I can’t imagine there’d be anything that any media outlet of any stripe could convince me otherwise. This is what he is. This is how he comes across all on his own. This is his brand. I don’t need to look beyond the packaging to know that whatever is on the inside is putrid, and dangerous to consume in any amount. The man is poison. That’s not “derangement”, that’s self preservation. How tens of millions don’t see this astounds me.
(I’m sure that there’s more I could add, but I don’t want to listen to him for five seconds so I’m not going die inside for five whole minutes.)
Yeah, but that’s all just an AI-generated deep fake. In fact this whole world is a deep fake. That’s why the MAGA bros keep talking about being “red pilled”. The real Donald Trump, who actually exists out there in the real world, is a friendly purple dinosaur telling everyone to just chill and not flush live kittens down the toilet.
The world authoritarian movement is claiming another scalp…