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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

Lonely Are the Brave (Also the Sane)
Reporting on a Republican who nailed QAnon, the Times actually gets its
description of the right right

This Times story about "One Republican's Lonely Fight Against a
Flood of Disinformation
"
by Jeremy Peters is quite good. First, it's inspirational. Here, after
all, was Denver Riggleman, a freshman Republican (and former Air Force
intelligence officer) speaking on the floor of the House about QAnon:
"Will we stand up and condemn a dangerous, dehumanizing and convoluted
conspiracy theory that the F.B.I. has assessed with high confidence is
very likely to motivate some domestic extremists?" Riggleman had
already lost his G.O.P. primary race for re-election, of course, but not
for this. His sin, rather, was officiating at a gay wedding. Now he is
engaged in a crusade against what the Times calls "radicalism within
the G.O.P." but what I would call "mass insanity coupled with
cynical dishonesty"-which explains how a recent poll from Suffolk
University and USA Today could have found that "58 percent

of Trump voters wrongly believed the storming of the Capitol was mostly
inspired by far-left radicals associated with antifa and involved only a
few Trump supporters." Aside from that one "radicalism" euphemism,
the Peters piece's portrayal of the Republican Party is accurate, and
the efforts of one of its genuinely conservative members to address
this-and put himself and his life, alas, on the line-is heartening;
inspirational, even. What would be nice would be if the truths were
reflected everywhere in the paper, instead of forever pretending that
Republicans are on the level when they spout their lies, conspiracy
theories, and racist dog whistles.

This other piece, however, on FiveThirtyEight purports to explain "Why
Being 'Anti-Media' Is Now Part of the GOP Identity
"
and explains: "Part of this is because Republicans are often more
vocal

in their criticism of the media and have long perceived it as having a
liberal bias
.
But now they are also more likely to say that being 'anti-media' is
part of their political identity, and this is likely driving the
staggering gap in media trust that we are seeing." Note that nowhere
in this piece does its author note that by being "anti-media," the
GOP is being anti-truth, even anti-reality. It's just a thing one can
choose to be, like a Deadhead or a fan of cubism or Willa Cather. But in
this case, anyway, the media, as Marshall McLuhan did not say, is the
messenger. Reality, to the degree it can be represented, is the message.

I took a look at these two studies, linked below, which the author of
the FiveThirtyEight piece references. One compares left and right when
weighing "the consequences of online partisan media
." It is interesting
as an academic exercise, but irrelevant in the real world. When you look
at the size and reach of the right-wing media and that of the
progressive media, they are, for practical purposes, incomparable. This
is, incredible as it may seem, even truer on social media

than print and broadcast. (Kudos, alas, for not treating the mainstream
media as the "progressive" alternative to Fox et al., as is so
frequently the case with the "so-called liberal media
" when discussed
elsewhere.)

In the second study
,
we find that the general public ranks PBS and NPR highest of all news
sources when it comes to trustworthiness, while Fox

comes in at number eight, below ABC for some reason, but above every
other network as well as USA Today. In the study, Breitbart

is seen as slightly more reliable than Vox or Mother Jones. What does
this mean? For starters, that lying, conspiratorial crap has the same or
greater value in the American "marketplace of ideas" as actual
facts, and that we need to start treating public-opinion data as
infected by this, and Rupert Murdoch and all Fox employees as the
equivalent of the moral and intellectual contaminants.

There seems to be some confusion as to whether to take notice or make
mockery of the fact that the eminent University of Chicago political
scientist Robert Pape
has
announced his conclusion

that most of the people who took part in the murderous January 6 assault
and attempted coup "were awash in fears that the rights of minorities
and immigrants were crowding out the rights of white people in American
politics and culture." They were not, alas, motivated by economic
insecurity.

Well, yes, we knew this. We could tell from the "Camp Auschwitz"
T-shirts and presence of so many people with KKK-style backgrounds. We
knew it when the media were promoting the same nonsense in the so-called
"Tea Party." We knew it about Pat Buchanan's 1992 and 1996
presidential campaigns. I wrote in Lying in State

that "In reality, Tea Partiers were far more motivated by fear and
anger over the belief that 'real Americans'-meaning white
conservative Christians like themselves-were losing the country to the
kind of people who made up Obama's victorious coalition. Their
concern, as enunciated by the conservative pundit and early advocate of
what would become Trumpism, Pat Buchanan, was the transformation of the
United States into a 'multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial,
multilingual "universal nation" whose avatar is Barack Obama,' and
how to stop it." (I footnoted Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson's
2016 study The Tea Party and the Remaking of Republican Conservatism for
its research into the former.) So I see that Mr. Pape, who has made a
career of studying international terrorism, has come to the conclusion
in the Times

that "If all of this is really rooted in the politics of social
change, then we have to realize that it's not going to be solved-or
solved alone-by law enforcement agencies. This is political violence,
not just ordinary criminal violence, and it is going to require both
additional information and a strategic approach."

This is all to the good. In the past, Pape's research on suicide
bombers led him to what the Times called

"a remarkable discovery: Most of the bombers were secular, not
religious, and had killed themselves not out of zealotry, but rather in
response to military occupations." We knew that, too. But if the job
of the careful scholar is to provide evidence for or against whatever it
is we think we already "know," then let's salute Professor Pape
for breaking through the usual wall of contempt that smug smarty-pants
reporters tend to have for such scholarship and move on to "What
now?"

This Week in Cancel Culture:

* Florida GOP pushes bill that would allow college students "to record
classroom lectures without a professor's consent ... to use in
preparation of a civil or criminal case against a higher-education
institution." (Miami Herald
)

* A bipartisan group of House legislators reintroduced a bill on Monday
calling for a State Department assessment of lesson plans created by the
Palestinian Authority and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency
(UNRWA). (Jewish Insider
)

* Top court allows minister to withhold Israel Prize over BDS
accusations. (Note: Professor Oded Goldreich supports only boycotting
Israeli universities located in the occupied West Bank, not Israel
proper.) (Haaretz
)

* Also, congrats to those San Francisco schools that have decided to
keep the names of Jefferson, Lincoln, and Washington now that the damage
has already been done and they have given Tucker and Laura Ingraham
their thousands of hours of whining about silly liberals. (New York
Times
)

I don't know that I can blame this on the internet, but a lot of silly
people got excited this week about a comically foolish op-ed published
by NBC News that attacked Paul Simon for not being Bob Dylan. In the
olden days, that probably would never have been published. It would have
been rejected for its transparent idiocy. But idiocy, if it's the
right kind, is today's clickbait, and outrage-inspired clicks bring
just as much advertising revenue as clever and life-affirming ones. So
NBC published it (and I am not linking to it), even though no
intelligent person, much less a competent editor, could likely defend
it. I am, instead, linking to this fascinating interview that Simon gave
to Dick Cavett in which he explained the creative process that led to
the writing of "Bridge Over Troubled Water
." This somehow led me
down a rabbit hole that landed me in Lou Reedville below. I hope some
readers enjoy it as much as I did.

Sweet Jane: An Altercation Tutorial

* Here is Lou Reed doing "Sweet Jane"

in 1973 at the Academy of Music and at the Olympia Theater in Paris,
sort of, at the same time.

* Here's Lou doing it in 1984 at the Capitol Theater
.

* Here is Lou explaining the song's secret chord
to
Elvis Costello.

* And here are the Cowboy Junkies doing it on The Tonight Show in 1989
.

* Here's the official Cowboy Junkies "Sweet Jane" video

that I guess came out around the same time.

* Here, again, are the same Cowboy Junkies doing it somewhere in Canada
in 2015
.

* Here is Margo Timmons talking about doing the song on something called
"Behind the Vinyl
."

* And OMG, here is Miley Cyrus doing it on MTV

in October of last year.

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Donate to The American Prospect

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 11 books, most
recently Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie-and Why Trump Is Worse
(Basic, 2020). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal Media"
column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman

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