The Left's Growing Anti-Media Problem
I call it "reading defensively," and it's increasingly detached from reality
After gently chiding the left for media-bashing last week, I find myself following up today with thoughts on what I call “reading defensively.”
I’ve written on a lot of topics over my 30-plus years in journalism, and find that people tend to consume news media differently when it concerns something in which they have an emotional investment. It’s not terribly surprising: they tend to infer negative connotations, criticism, or unflattering tone that, in many cases, was not intended and that non-invested readers don’t see.
For example, an article about a hospital staffing-levels bill might, after summarizing the basic arguments on both sides, mention average nurse salaries, and whether they’ve been trending up. The writer and editors might not have had any agenda in doing so; most readers might not take it as an argument on either side; but nurses, reading defensively, might read it as a biased slam deliberately placed to make nurses seem overpaid and thus undermine their case.
Some people, of course, are quite emotionally invested in politics.
Thus, last week shortly after my previous post, a whole bunch of liberals on BlueSky took great umbrage at this CNN headline:
Their critique was that CNN was presenting a horrific agenda in banal terms—as if CNN only cared how this might impact the daily commute, as one much-reposted Skeet put it.
If you saw it that way, I suggest you should try to recalibrate your anti-media outrage hair-trigger. Most people would read this as quite a shock headline—and my searches on X suggest that most who commented about it did take it that way.
Plus, as the top-left logo indicates, this headline appeared in context of Zachary Wolf’s newsletter/column “What Matters,” implying that, well, this news matters and is not banal. The column itself pressed that argument, calling it significant that this was the one agenda item Trump expounded upon, in an interview in which Trump otherwise merely summarized policies. Wolf also explained what was different and controversial about the plan, pointing out that Trump explicitly cited Eisenhower’s action that was called “Operation Wetback” and caught legal residents up in its deportation fever.
Not all of this is included in the headline, granted, but the headline is awfully long as is. Point is, those who responded so negatively to the headline were, I suggest, reading defensively and seeing something wrong that just isn’t there.
Another example arose over the weekend, when liberals lambasted the Washington Post for a Kara Voght profile with the following hed/dek (as we in the dwindling biz call it): “For Laura Loomer, a Trump comeback is everything/The anti-Islam, anti-immigration crusader has repelled even would-be allies in the MAGA movement—with one major exception.”
No less than journalism maven Jeff Jarvis bemoaned on X that the Post gave “feature attention to such a noxious soul”—over a screen shot of the above hed and dek. which I should think explains the justification. The article itself explained quite clearly that, as pathetic and unliked as Loomer is, she has become influential not just with a segment of MAGA world (she has close to 900,000 followers on X), but with the potential next President of the United States: Trump frequently re-posts her on Truth Social, and reportedly tried to hire her onto the campaign.
It seem obvious to me that the news media should write about wildly out-of-the-mainstream, openly bigoted people advising the presumptive Republican Presidential nominee. But in addition, this profile —as suggested by that hed/dek—was about as unflattering as you’ll find in a mainstream news outlet. Raw Story, a liberal web site not shy about seeing anti-left media bias, wrote about the profile under the headline: “Trump-loving Laura Loomer compared to ‘radioactive waste from Godzilla’ in brutal profile.”
Defensive reading is, as I said up top, unsurprising and common. And there’s often good reason for it—the news media often does a fairly crappy job, in ways that are evident only to those closest to or most interested in the subject matter. Also, it’s the perceived slights against the things you care about that you notice and remember, and share with others; this leads to a distorted sense of how often, and how badly, the media screws up on that topic. That, in turn, makes people hyper-sensitive about those slights, leading them to read more defensively, and on it goes.
As a result, everybody thinks the media is especially bad at covering the thing they care most about. I will refrain from regaling you with stories illustrating this point, but trust me. That goes for people’s professions, their academic fields, and, for many people, their political bugbears.
Which is all fine, to a point. Criticism of flawed news media work is generally a good thing; I even think there’s a place for some well-intentioned, if biased, working-the-refs critiques. But, when you’re constantly bashing publications for inferences that only you are making, the refs end up dismissing you completely.
And, as I cautioned last week, the left in America should not want to follow the right’s wholesale rejection of the major mainstream media. Anecdotally, I’ve been seeing a lot of people who I think should know better proclaiming the New York Times and Washington Post—the two best and most important newspapers in the country—to be nothing but fascist-enabling propaganda, which they refuse to read.
I’ll say it again: I have plenty of criticisms of both of those outlets; I’m not saying they (or CNN, or any others) should be held beyond reproach.
I’m suggesting that it’s very easy, and frankly a little lazy, to constantly see fault in and lay blame on the major news media. In short, try not to be quite so defensive.
The other day, after Israel kicked out Al Jazeera, NPR interviewed an Al Jazeera spokesperson. NPR asked him to respond to Israel's position that AJ was a Hamas mouthpiece. In a nutshell, which I'm sure you can anticipate, the AJ guy responded that Hamas thought AJ was broadcasting Israeli propaganda. When NPR asked what kind of standards AJ used for reporting, AJ said that their standards are the same as NPR's, or those of any other respectable news organization. As of course, they are. (I assume that the NPR guy was asking questions he knew the answer to.)
I remember reading letters to the Editor in the local newspaper when I was still in elementary school where some letters decried the paper's liberal bias, while others were outraged by its conservative slant. This being the Dallas Morning News - a very conservative, if not reactionary, editorial page with a mostly conservative readership - most of the letters were about alleged liberal bias.
If elections were decided by subscribers to the Post or the Times, Dems would never lose an election. If elections were decided by people who actually read a few articles a day in the Post or the Times, and take time to process them, or by people who flyspeck heds and deks (I think I'm using those words right) and criticize them for giving the wrong impression, Dems would win in huge landslides. (I'd be very surprised if Laura Loomer picked up a lot of new fans after the Post's article.)
And about the people who complain that "the media" isn't covering this or that story - how could they know something that's not reported somewhere in "the media"? (It's particularly irritating when someone raises this complaint and then adds that they dropped their subscription to the Times some time ago.) I think part of what they mean is that if everyone knew this or that supposedly unreported fact, everybody's hair would be on fire; it'd be a truth universally acknowledged that Trump is a huge threat and democracy is hanging by a thread. Since the truth isn't universally acknowledged, it can only be the media's fault. (For example, if the media were "covering the stakes, not the odds," Trump would've been in the dustbin a long time ago.)
Well, I'm afraid that I'm beginning to sound like a letter to the Editor that never makes the paper, but goes in the "crackpot file" to be read at reporters' happy hours. So enough for now.