The utility of the mainstream media is becoming harder to find. Much of the media is still useful, it's just hard to find the useful parts. The attention given to appeasing a narrative over disseminating facts is concerning and for many readers it is increasingly difficult to separate the two. This is not the readers fault, but the media's fault. It has subtly become the Ship of Theseus - a legendary naval ship in ancient Greece, memorialized so the Greeks could visit it. As the ship's boards would begin to rot, people would replace a rotting board with a new board. One day a group of people were viewing the ship. A philosopher walked over to the people and asked what they were looking at? A man responded, “The Ship of Theseus.” The philosopher said, “That's not the Ship of Theseus, that is (pointing to a large pile of rotting boards).” The question is at what point is the Ship of Theseus no longer the Ship of Theseus? At what point is the media no longer the disseminator of facts, but something else that just looks like a disseminator of facts?
Andrew Sullivan recently tweeted, “2016 election. Rittenhouse. Covington. Russian collusion. Vaccines. Bounties on US soldiers. Lab-leak theory. Jussie Smollett. The Pulse shooting. The Atlanta shootings. Hunter Biden laptop. Inflation. Steele Dossier. The MSM (mainstream media) got every single one wrong.” He is not wrong. The most recent of which is Kyle Rittenhouse.
The shootings in Kenosha last year by Kyle Rittenhouse dominated the media coverage. Most of the narrative centered around a white kid sympathetic to blue lives matter, drove across state lines with a rifle to “protect” businesses. Trevor Noah summarized it as, ““Let me tell you something, no one drives into a city with guns because they love someone else’s business that much – that’s some bulls***. No one has ever thought, ‘oh, it’s my solemn duty to pick up a rifle and protect that TJ Maxx’, they do it because they’re hoping to shoot someone.” Maybe it is true that Kyle was using the protests that led to a destruction of property as a veil for his real motive of wanting to kill or at least shoot someone. It is possible. But the telling part that the media played was what wasn’t said.
The most shocking of which was until the trial this week, I did not know that Kyle has a large portion of his family living in Kenosha, including his Dad and Grandma. Given all the coverage and all the talks about a kid driving over state lines to protect businesses, wouldn’t one think that there would have been some coverage on the fact that he has family living in Kenosha? Maybe that doesn’t change the way some people feel about the case, but it does seem to at least somewhat complicate the narrative a little more. Furthermore, the phrase “crossing state lines” is effective at making it seem like someone really went out of their way to take part in the events of that evening. But a few things are important here. First, Kyle had a part time job in Kenosha (something I vaguely remember being referenced at some point). So it is not as if it was unusual for him to be in Kenosha. Also, he was already in Kenosha when the BLM protests began because he was working at his part-time job. So his “driving across state lines to defend businesses” was never really true since he was already in Kenosha. But lastly, consider the distance from Antioch, Illinois to Kenosha, Wisconsin. It is 20 miles. Dekalb, Illinois is 27 miles from Aurora, Illinois. It’s not a trip I would just make for fun, but it’s also not exactly time consuming. Turn on one of The New York Times Daily Podcasts (30 minutesish) and maybe listen to one song and you will be there.
Even after knowing all this, it is still somewhat reasonable for some people to find Rittenhouse’s role to be highly suspect, but the thing is we should know this information. The benefits of a healthy media is that the public is more informed. Leaving out some pretty critical information and in some cases actively characterizing untruthful information is no way to gain the trust of the public.
There is a part of all this that readers and listeners of mainstream media have a role and responsibility to play. It is no secret that the mainstream media has been losing money since access to articles became widely available online. It has led to a loss of funds and a new business model - one that tries to get clicks in order to sell ads. It means readers should be doing what they can to separate facts from opinions. The Washington Post has a database of police shootings nationwide. It is a useful source of facts about who is killed. Opinions are often drawn using the database, which lends itself to readers believing the opinions they read are facts, rather than opinions.
We need the media. As much as right wing people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater (see mainstream media fall apart because it favors the Left) we still need something that does what the media does. The real benefit of a well funded independent media is that it can do the investigative work average citizens are unable to do. They are one aspect of really being able to hold the government and other powerful people accountable. When we see the media failing in its duty to inform the public, in favor of sensationalizing its consumers, we should share a collective sigh of disappointment.