Increasingly, I ignore “news stories” in newspapers and websites because they’re more unbelievable month-by-month. Opinion columns, no matter how disingenuous, chock-full-of-nuts, self-aggrandizing or intellectually acute, at least have the author’s name attached and he or she can be held accountable. For example, Peter Beinart (the enemy of hard-core Israel supporters in the media and Democratic Party because of his virulent sympathy for Palestinian rights) used his New York Times “Guest Essay” pulpit on July 6th to provide a “teachable moment” for readers about how the “elite” Democrats are out-of-step with “ordinary” members of the Party.
Beinart, an Orthodox Jew, warns the establishment (linking to several polls, which are hardly reliable, as the former New Republic editor/professor/MSNBC contributor knows) that in 2028 the Democratic candidate will lose unless he or she follows Zohran Mamdani’s example last month in “exploiting the chasm between his party’s grass roots and its elites.” He compares Mamdani to Trump in 2015—not inaccurate—and calls for the Democratic leadership to abandon its reflexive support of Israel. Maybe that’s correct, maybe not, but at the least a reader knows where Beinart stands. (There’s the bonus of Commentary editor John Podhoretz trashing Beinart on Twitter, with juvenile personal insults—his specialty—to which Beinart, with considerably more dignity, sometimes responds.)
By contrast, I read a July 7th Axios (I doubt anyone takes the website seriously aside from its staff and their friends) story by Andrew Solender that had the stench of Stephen Glass running through it. The “If it bleeds, it leads” headline was: “Democrats told to ‘get shot’ for the anti-Trump resistance,” and it worked on me. An anonymous Democratic House member said, “’Our own base is telling us that what we’re doing is not good enough… [that] there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.’” It’s possible that’s true, that one person told the anonymous Democrat that the Party needs an assassination attempt like the one on Trump last July in Butler, PA (not incidentally, I wonder when more details of that weird event in a weird political year will be unveiled, even if Trump lately seems unconcerned about the plot), but how can the reader take it at face-value given the irresponsible condition of today’s media?
Solender continues: “Axios spoke to more than two dozen House Democrats for this story, with many requesting anonymity to offer candid insights about their interactions with constituents and activists.” Nine “lawmakers” made comments (far less interesting than the Village Voice’s Michael Musto’s occasional “blind items” columns decades ago) and just two spoke on the record: Brad Schneider (D-IL) and Ro Khanna (D-CA); the latter gave Axios this anodyne, boilerplate quote: “The most effective pushback to Trump’s unconstitutional actions is to model a reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law.” Thanks to Mr. Khanna, I had a refresher of my fifth-grade history teacher’s two-week study of the U.S. government. Mr. Grad, a staunch Democrat, was more forthcoming—on the morning after Election Day in 1966, he refused to speak, except to say, “They elected an actor as governor of California.”
Walter Kirn (co-founder of the bimonthly, and excellent broadsheet newspaper County Highway, who also hosts the podcast “America This Week” with Matt Taibbi) was on the mark about today’s media. He posted on Twitter: “The fog of some strange, half-hidden political war is settling over the land right now and the stories and headlines coming out are best not believed, at least not as presented. Stand back. Way back. It's disengagement time.” Kirn definitely won’t disengage (it appears he’s having a whale of a time as America’s Contrarian), although more and more Americans are doing just that. I won’t: despite the purposely deceptive “stories and headlines” (across the political spectrum), I retain my lifelong interest in political/pop culture, even in its decrepit state. But, as noted above, it’s best to chew over signed opinion columns, which, while also “click-bait,” do have a level of veracity (low bar).
One more note: This snippet from Michel Houellebecq’s put-me-on-the-express-elevator novel Annihilation is more compelling than almost anything in the media today. “That phrase of Raymond Aron’s, about men ‘not knowing the history they make,’ had always struck [protagonist Paul] as a weightless bon mot, and if that was all Aron had to say he might as well have kept his mouth shut.”
—Follow Russ Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER2023