Answering a question on Reddit.

by w3woody

Question: Kyle Rittenhouse was just acquitted of all charges. What do you think of this verdict, the trial in general, and its implications?

Personally I didn’t really follow the trial itself, and at a certain level the supposed crimes (or lack thereof) of a single individual doesn’t matter that much to me. Meaning I trust the judicial system to sort it all out and come to a reasonable ruling at the end.

(That said, I did encounter the bit when the prosecutor was questioning the guy who was shot and survived by Rittenhouse to admit he was shot only after he had pointed his gun at Rittenhouse on a blog post somewhere, which made me roll my eyes and think the prosecution didn’t know what they was doing. In the United States, if someone points a gun at you in a threatening manner and you have reason to believe your life is in imminent danger, you have a clear case of self-defense.)

However, I was fascinated by the media portrayal and the portrayal of the case on social media.

For me, the interesting part is not with what’s happening, but how it gets spun.

For example, in my cursory surfing on Reddit, the only remarks I had heard about the Rittenhouse case on the front page was when Rittenhouse broke down crying on cross examination by the prosecution–and many of the people were portraying him as crying crocodile tears. And a lot of hay was made in the media outlets I follow (NY Times, WSJ, some LA Times) about how the defense “stupidly thought” shrinking a video “edits the video.” (The phrasing made the conclusions apparent.) But the prosecution getting his supporting witness to confess to the fact pattern that made Rittenhouse’s self-defense a supportable proposition? Completely ignored.

So to me, the interesting part was not the trial itself–and frankly knowing nothing about the case I didn’t honestly care if Rittenhouse was found innocent or guilty. I figured after the trial I’d dig into the reasoning why and see if it made sense. (It usually does.) It’s the same approach I’ve had when, for example, some cop is put on trial for shooting some person on the street–only afterwards can you learn, for example, perhaps the cop shot unnecessarily. Or the person who was shot was on drugs and lunged at the cop with a knife. (You rarely can find these things out anymore prior to a verdict, partially because prosecution offices don’t want to taint the jury pool.)

And in this case, it was very clear the bias of most media outlets was showing pretty much from the day of the Kenosha riots.

The real problem, in my opinion, is that many media outlets, in order to support lagging readership numbers thanks to the Internet encroaching upon their near monopoly on printed news, and as a result of the reporting during the Watergate scandal of the Nixon Administration, has taken a more activist stance in their reporting.

In other words, news in the United States is less driven by a desire to find out, understand, and explain what’s going on–but by a desire by reporters to ‘make their bones’ (so to speak) in the same way Woodward and Bernstein did when it was popularly believed they toppled a President.

And because of the shrinking news budgets caused by readership who gets more and more news from the Internet (and even from Social Media), most news outlets devote less and less time to ‘beat reporting’–that is, assigning a reporter to become a subject matter expert on some topic which they can report about. (So, for example, we are missing a ‘beat reporter’ on Space who has been around the space program long enough to become a sort of expert on the issues of space launches and space probes, and who can ask intelligent questions of the scientists who, for example, work for Elon Musk. It’s why you get these 20-somethings whose education includes how to write a proper sentence and how to get published–but absolutely nothing at all about the sciences or politics or how policing works asking the most asinine questions.)

Activism reporting sells. And activism reporting can make individuals famous, such as Nikole Hannah-Jones, writer for the New York Times, with her controversial “1619 Project.”

But it makes for terrible quality news reporting, because inherently once you get beyond local news (where the victims and villains tend to be very clear cut), reporters want to look for the “truth” behind the facts, and tell narratives rather than outline information.

And narratives require reporters to pick and choose what facts are “relevant” and which ones are “not relevant”–which leads to important and narrative-changing facts being dropped on the floor.

In the extreme it has led to reporters making up facts wholesale to support their narrative, as happened with a recent accusation by the BBC on a report about climate change, where rather than interview climate skeptics, simply made up what they thought the climate skeptics would have said. (It doesn’t matter if they got the remarks right or not–the point is they didn’t ask. And in not asking, in order to support a narrative, they’re no longer reporting. They’re engaging in story telling.)

I think the long-term implication of all of this is a continued decline in readership–which was already being fueled by economics and by competition. But that decline will be accelerated as people find they’re not actually reading the news–but reading stories designed to support the egos of the readership by making those readers feel good about themselves and their supposed moral superiority over those these media outlets suggest are the villains, such as Rittenhouse.

And the real problem with media outlet activism and spinning narratives over stories is that the political “left” and “right” axes are not monolithic groups who all engage in “left-wing group think” or “right-wing group think.” In fact, individuals who label themselves “liberal” or “conservative”, “left” or “right” actually have beliefs on individual topics that are all over the place.

And a common grouping–where I suspect the majority of Americans actually lie–are those who are socially liberal, but economically conservative and politically anti-authoritarian. The “I believe in gay couples armed with guns” folks.

The risk is as newspaper activists spin more and more narratives along one axis or another, they’ll find themselves trodding into areas which offend parts of their readership. It’s inevitable. The “gays with guns” folks may get offended at a narrative that suggests couples protecting themselves with deadly force are evil assholes may look at the gay couple who (historically) see themselves as potential victims without weaponry and think “wait a second.”

That will cause the readership to shrink more and more.

It’s also bad for our political system because a lot of this activism influences what our politicians think their voters believe. Meaning I think a lot of the problems we’re seeing in Washington D.C. today (and going back perhaps 20 years–so I’m not complaining about the current President, but about an entire system) comes from the fact that in many ways, the folks inside the beltway believe what the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or the Chicago Sun-Times or the Los Angeles Times writes.

If there is anyone dumber than a 20-something journalism student asking questions about quantum mechanics or about rocket science, it’s a politician whose entire life was spent learning–and being very good at–running for office.

So D.C. winds up being completely out of touch with what’s going on in the country and with what their voters believe (having their beliefs shaped by ‘push-polls’ conducted by media outlets to support a narrative)–and you can’t solve a problem if you don’t understand the problem.

And I think this is only going to continue to get worse.

(The only saving grace of the United States is that we are a federated system of government where power is diffused across multiple jurisdictions. Meaning if one part goes bat-shit insane, the damage is limited.)

As an aside, because reporters and politicians who listen to them are increasingly out of touch with what people think and believe, and because reporters see their job as not reporting facts but–at a certain level–shaping society–I think they’re in for a world of hurt when suddenly major changes in fact patterns happen which violate the narrative.

Like the shock felt when the Democratic governor of Virginia lost the recent election–something which an honest reporter may have seen coming.

And that happens because reporters don’t shape society. They simply make polite people not speak their truths quite so loudly.

Ironically, I also think a lot of newspapers don’t understand their readership.

For example, my wife and I have an on-line subscription to the New York Times. But it’s my wife who mostly reads the on-line paper–and mostly she reads the travel stories, and me, I generally start at the recipes section.

Offend us enough and we’ll just stick to our NatGeo magazine subscription and I’ll subscribe to a cooking magazine.