Story Laundering: Fusion GPS, Fake News, Russians and Reporters, by Daniel Greenfield.
“The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns,” Ben Rhodes gloated. “That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer”, was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily manipulated useful idiots.
The media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just didn’t want outsiders to know it.
What ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. What were the professional reporters doing while Rhodes was manipulating the 27-year-olds? They were working at places like Fusion GPS and ‘story laundering’ narratives to the kiddies. …
Why today’s media is so dissatisfying, even if you are PC and swallow their line:
The media is trying to cash in on the institutional legacy of the corporations that bear the old names, but have no functional resemblance to what the news business used to be. Today’s media isn’t in the news business. Its outlets report the news only to the degree that they have to. And when they do, they rely on viral stories or rewriting an original report.
The media’s real business is serving as a clearinghouse for narratives. These clearinghouses operate out of major urban power centers. They know next to nothing about much of the country. And they don’t care. It’s why they didn’t see Trump’s victory coming. …
As the media moved from biased reporting to political gatekeeping, it sharply narrowed the range of permissible opinions. Every story became an ‘ad’ for one cause or another. Fewer stories existed for their own sake. Instead each story promoted a political or cultural agenda. Even if a story was not overtly political, a political ‘advertisement’ of some kind had to be slipped in there somehow.
Most people didn’t realize that they were reading, watching and hearing a bunch of non-stop political ads disguised in a thousand different styles from reporting (“Gun Violence Strikes Again in American City) to explainers (“10 Things You Need to Know About Gun Violence”), but they found the product stifling and artificial. When everything is an ad, then nothing feels real. …
The new reality:
The media is no longer a journalistic institution. It’s a political institution. It’s a component of a political infrastructure of unelected officials, bureaucracies and institutions that controls our government.
Fake news, Fusion GPS, internet censorship and all the rest are symptoms of this overriding problem.
hat-tip Scott of the Pacific
