Category Archives: The Press

Non-fiction, The Press

Many Foxes grow grey, few grow good

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Another chapter in Carl Trueman’s 2010 book Republocrat deals with Fox News and many people’s uncritical support of it. You’ve heard some of this before; it’s a common complaint that people are not more discerning of their news consumption, just as it is common to praise someone’s wisdom when they agree with you. Trueman begins his critique from a more British angle.

He says he grew up conservative in the British sense and began to question that when conservative leaders showed themselves to be just as self-servingly corrupt as the opposition party was supposed to be. Then the UK had to turn Hong Kong over to the Chinese in 1997. The last governor of Hong Kong as a British colony was Chris Patten, and he pressed as hard as he could to move the region into safe, democratic territory before he left. Everyone knew it was an uphill struggle, and Patten intended to publish his thoughts in a book (entitled East and West when finally published).

His contract was with HarperCollins, a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch, a man Trueman believed to be a champion of free speech and the free world. His news empire would help guard the world against the Soviet Union and all the evils therein. But Murdoch got Patten’s book cancelled under the guise that it was substandard and boring. That caused what The New York Times called “a week of relentlessly bad publicity” and provoked the publisher to issue a public apology.

The apology represents an unusually public embarrassment for Rupert Murdoch, News Corp.’s chairman, who ordered that the book be canceled because of its highly critical stance toward China, a country in which Murdoch has considerable business interests and even more considerable financial ambitions.

The top brass ordered Patten’s editor to make excuses and cancel the book, because it could threaten Murdoch’s relationship with people Rush Limbaugh calls “the Chi-Coms.” Editor Stuart Proffitt was already on record praising the book, calling it a upcoming bestseller, so a public 180 would embarrass him personally. He refused and was suspended.

This event and others like it caused Trueman to question what the good guys were up to. Were they really standing up for freedom or their business interests? As we’re seeing in the NBA and Disney Studios today, Trueman writes, “Freedom, it seems, was only important so long as it did not do damage to profit margins.”

This is the man behind Fox News and many other news organizations, including Britain’s popular tabloid The Sun, which delivered nude photos to its readers daily on Page 3 and spurred its competitors to do the same. That’s enough to raise serious questions about Fox’s moral authority and general objectivity, particularly to those who think it is the one unbiased news source on the air.

Photo by Martin Sepion on Unsplash

Non-fiction, Reviews, The Press

New Viking book by Neil Price

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Via our friend Dave Lull, a London Review of Books review of Neil Price’s new book on the Vikings: Children of Ash and Elm.

In one of several vignettes, Price imagines a younger son on the impoverished west coast of Norway, whose childhood sweetheart has a new brooch: a present from a boy who spent a successful summer raiding. What is young Orm or Gunnar going to do? Not only does he need money for the bride-price paid to her family, he needs a reputation: ‘The act of acquiring silver was as important as the silver itself.’ And if he went raiding he might in any case acquire a woman for free. DNA has shown that ‘a very large proportion – even the majority – of female settlers in Iceland were of Scottish or Irish heritage.’

Looks like the kind of book a man of my pretensions needs to read. It’s coming August 25th.
The Press

Ratings Distort Content: How the News Isn’t Just News

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Television producer Ariana Pekary left her job at MSNBC recently, saying it’s a bad time to leave, but she can no longer stay. Her criticism touches more than this particular network.

It’s possible that I’m more sensitive to the editorial process due to my background in public radio, where no decision I ever witnessed was predicated on how a topic or guest would “rate.” The longer I was at MSNBC, the more I saw such choices — it’s practically baked in to the editorial process – and those decisions affect news content every day. Likewise, it’s taboo to discuss how the ratings scheme distorts content, or it’s simply taken for granted, because everyone in the commercial broadcast news industry is doing the exact same thing.

But behind closed doors, industry leaders will admit the damage that’s being done. “We are a cancer and there is no cure” . . .

I’ve even heard producers deny their role as journalists. A very capable senior producer once said: “Our viewers don’t really consider us the news. They come to us for comfort.”

Fiction, Reviews, The Press

Nat’l Review on D. Keith Mano’s ‘The Bridge’

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“We of the Council, convened in full, have decided that man in good conscience can no longer permit this wanton destruction of our fellow creatures, whose right to exist is fully as great as ours,” the decree states. “It is therefore decreed that men, in spontaneous free will and contrition, voluntarily accede to the termination of their species.” The operative word is contrition. Guilt is a force eating people from inside. Citizens are too cowed, too stricken with guilt, to mount any organized resistance to the Council’s diktat. Although not all have chosen to give up on life, everything is in ruins and life expectancy for citizens is low indeed.

Our friend and instigator Dave Lull is well aware of my fondness for the late author D. Keith Mano. He sent me a link to this recent article from the National Review on one of Mano’s nearly forgotten but uncomfortably relevant novels, The Bridge.

Perhaps the scenario evoked in The Bridge is too general in nature to belong to Mano or to any one writer. But anybody who reads Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road and Mano’s The Bridge, published 33 years earlier, will quickly see how much the later novel has in common with the earlier one. 

I thought myself audacious (and feared I was prescient) when in my Epsom novels I postulated a near future in which “Extinctionism” was a popular movement. I in fact cherished a hope that I could manipulate Fate by exploiting its reluctance to ever prove me right. But we’ve seen Extinctionism begin to take hold in recent years, and one looks at imagined futures like those of The Road and The Bridge, today, with growing alarm.

The Bridge, writer Michael Washburn notes, is out of print but can be obtained online. It sounds intriguing, but – honestly – I’m afraid to read it. Also, look at the price on Amazon!

Authors, Reading, The Press

Sigrid Undset, the I.S.I., and I

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I wrote an essay on Sigrid Undset for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s web site:

Like one of her own characters, Sigrid Undset followed her heart, confronted the consequences, and learned. Enabled by a government grant to live abroad, she began an affair in Rome with a married Norwegian painter, Anders Castus Svarstad. They married in 1912, after his divorce, and divorced in turn in 1919. By that time, they’d moved back to Norway, where their third child was born. Their second child, a daughter, was mentally handicapped. When Sigrid learned to her horror that Svarstad’s ex-wife had placed her children by him in an orphanage, Sigrid adopted them. One of these was also mentally handicapped. (Years later, when she received her Nobel Prize, she would donate the entire sum to children’s charities.)

Read the whole thing here.
Music, The Press

Take Five, Reporters

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Here’s a correction to the November 6 article “Journalism officially goes non-profit” in the Financial Times.

Now, those reporters may get the West End Blues if they don’t take a night in Tunisia once in a while.

The Press, Uncategorized

Brutal Opposition (Sometimes Fictitious)

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Journalist Andy Ngo has spent a good bit time looking at hate crimes and hoaxes of them. He said, “If you constantly tell the public that bigotry is everywhere, some will do anything to seek it out or even create it when they can’t find it.” This piece backs up that assertion, in which Ngo starts with the lawsuit Oberlin College lost to a local bakery and notes the numerous hoaxes its student body has generated. He reports,

In 2013, students at the elite liberal arts college panicked after someone reported seeing a person in a Ku Klux Klan robe on campus. The administration cancelled all classes for the day. The phantom klansman was never found, though police did find someone wrapped in a blanket. This overreaction was preceded by a month-long spate of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-gay posters around campus. These, too, were found to be hoaxes. 

Twitter is good at these misdirections. Today people are noticing a trending hashtag #NotMyAriel, supposedly in response to the adorable Halle Bailey being cast in a live action remake of The Little Mermaid. However of all the comments pushing back on her casting, none of them use that hashtag. You’re yawning; I can tell. Am I boring you?

Ngo’s reporting is far more serious than unused hashtags. He has worked to expose Antifa for the dangerous group it is. In Portland, Oregon, last Saturday, he was attacked by protesters and consequently hospitalized. Quillette magazine states, “Like schoolboy characters out of Lord of the Flies, these cosplay revolutionaries stomp around, imagining themselves to be heroes stalking the great beast of fascism. But when the beast proves elusive, they gladly settle for beating up journalists, harassing the elderly or engaging in random physical destruction.”

Ngo has written more on the attack in this piece for the Wall Street Journal, going so far as to say Portland is growing into a sanctuary city for “domestic terrorists.”

The Press

Have Journalists Connected Dots that Do not Add Up?

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Despite the connect-the-dots graphic in its other story, and despite the astonishing, emotion-laden editorial the paper also ran suggesting “We don’t need to read the Mueller report” because we know Trump is guilty, Baker at least began the work of preparing Times readers for a hard question: “Have journalists connected too many dots that do not really add up?”

. . .

There was never real gray area here. Either Trump is a compromised foreign agent, or he isn’t. If he isn’t, news outlets once again swallowed a massive disinformation campaign, only this error is many orders of magnitude more stupid than any in the recent past, WMD included. Honest reporters like ABC’s Terry Moran understand: Mueller coming back empty-handed on collusion means a “reckoning for the media.”

Of course, there won’t be such a reckoning. (There never is). But there should be. We broke every written and unwritten rule in pursuit of this story, starting with the prohibition on reporting things we can’t confirm.

From a chapter released today of Hate, Inc. by Matt Taibbi
Fiction, The Press

‘The High Costs of Fantasy Sainthood’

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It’s always nice — rare as it is — to be cited as an author. Jessica McAdams praises my novel, The Year of the Warrior in an article just published at Tor.com. My book even closes the show:

I love this book for its clear insistence that sainthood requires transformation. In order to follow the call, Aillil must change. He can’t stay the man he is: sort of bad, sort of good, mostly selfish and sorrowing. He has to be courageous—worse yet, he has to be charitable. If there is real evil in the world and real good, he has to pick a side, and then he has to let that choice manifest itself and become real in his own self—living it out in his own inclinations and actions and habits.

And that might be the most costly sacrifice of all.

Read it all here.

Authors, The Press

A Rising Shame Culture

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Perhaps the most poisonous aspect of current media culture is how it facilitates our impulses to condemn and shame others. Whether by open letter or twitter storm, some of us wake up primed to take a stand against some unthinkable person somewhere. Any accusation is credible without need of investigation. Any social post is up for scrutiny, no matter the age of the poster at the time. Consider our virtue signaled.

Helen Andrews reviews a shameful public incident that has followed her for years in this essay in First Things. Her story is grueling, but there are many more, allowing us to see a pattern.

At the risk of insulting the reader: No one actually believed Williamson was a threat to his female colleagues. It was only a pretext for what was really an exercise in raw power. People made the same kind of excuses when it was my turn in the dunk tank. Again and again, I read commenters insisting that what might at first glance appear to be prurient gossip was, in fact, fair political commentary, because I was a family-values scold and thus open to charges of hypocrisy, or because I was a hard-core Randian who needed a lesson in the dog-eat-dog heartlessness advocated by my idol. As far as I can tell, these characterizations were extrapolated from the fact that I worked at National Review. Certainly, they had no basis in anything I’d written (an Objectivist, really?).

The truth does not matter in the shame storm–only what can beat down the victim.

What solution is there? Look at what Jared Wilson posted today: “Christian, the Lord knows you are not an asset to the organization. He knows what a tangled-up knot of anxiety, incompetence, and faithlessness you are. He knows exactly what a big fat sinner you are. He knew exactly what he was getting into.”

Photo by Victor Rodriguez on Unsplash