By Matthew Continetti
Saturday, April 13, 2019
I used to laugh every time I heard someone like Elon Musk
say that we are living in a Matrix-like simulation. These days, not so much.
Don’t call the funny farm just yet. On the major question
of the nature of sense experience, I remain with Aristotle and against Bishop
Berkeley. Matter is real. But there is also the question of how we perceive
“the news”; how established media institutions present and frame information;
how we are supposed to respond to the “takes” purportedly expert and
knowledgeable voices serve up to us by the second on social media. And here,
I’m skeptical.
It’s hard not to be. Think of the headlines we’ve
encountered since the beginning of this year. We were told the Covington
Catholic boys were smug racist Trump supporters on the basis of a snippet of
video. A young man, a private citizen, whose only offense was traveling to
Washington, D.C., to march for life, was transformed at light speed into a
symbol of hate and systemic oppression. However, just as Nick Sandmann’s
reputation as a villain was about to set in stone, additional videos revealed
that the students’ encounter with a far-left American Indian activist and the
Black Hebrew Israelites was far more complicated than initially reported. The
Covington Catholic boys had been smeared. People who cast themselves as agents
of professional knowledge, expertise, and moral authority had circulated and
amplified a lie in the service of a political agenda. Not for the first nor
last time.
We were told Jussie Smollett, a rising gay
African-American actor and singer, had been the victim of a hate crime
committed by MAGA-hat-wearing Trump supporters in the dead cold of a Chicago
night. Journalists and bloggers who asked questions about Smollett’s story were
decried as bigots, even as key details went missing and the shifting timeline
became more and more curious. Then the city’s African-American police
commissioner announced Smollett had been arrested for orchestrating a bizarre
hoax. The state’s attorney filed charges — charges subsequently dropped after
behind-the-scenes lobbying by Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff.
We were told that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were in
cahoots to hack the emails of the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary
Clinton campaign; that Trump might have been a Russian agent since the late
1980s; that the key to the conspiracy might be a server in Trump Tower relaying
information to a Russian bank; that the indictment of Donald Trump Jr. was
imminent; that Trump Sr., according to the former director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, had committed “treason”; that Michael Cohen had met with
Russian intelligence operatives in Prague; that Trump had directed Michael
Flynn to speak to the Russians prior to Election Day 2016; that Trump had
instructed Michael Cohen to lie to Congress; that Paul Manafort had met with
Julian Assange in the Ecuadoran embassy in London during the campaign; that
secret indictments in an Alexandria courthouse would be unsealed on the day
Robert Mueller filed his report on possible collusion between the Trump
campaign and Russia. None of it happened.
We were told that Michael Avenatti, a trial attorney who
appeared seemingly out of nowhere to represent Stephanie Cliffords, a.k.a
“Stormy Daniels,” in her (tossed-out) defamation suit against Donald Trump, was
a defender of the rule of law and election integrity who posed, in the words of
Stephen Colbert, an “existential threat” to the Trump presidency. Avenatti
appeared incessantly on cable news, earning the equivalent of $175 million in
media exposure between March and May 2018. Last September, an article in Politico Magazine carried the headline,
“Michael Avenatti Is Winning the 2020 Democratic Primary.” When Avenatti said
he represented a client who had been a victim of gang rapes and druggings at
parties attended by Brett Kavanaugh during high school, NBC News interviewed
the client despite being unable to verify her (ludicrous) accusation. By last
November, when he was arrested for domestic assault in Los Angeles, Avenatti
had appeared on television more than 200 times in the space of eight months.
On the morning I wrote this column, a federal grand jury
indicted Avenatti on 36 counts, including fraud. “Defendant AVENATTI would
embezzle and misappropriate settlement proceeds to which he was not entitled,”
reads just one sentence of the mind-boggling 61-page indictment. What media
authorities had presented as true — that Avenatti was a serious attorney whose
evidence would destroy the Trump presidency — has been revealed, once again, as
utterly fallacious, a con. It’s up to the jury to decide if Michael Avenatti is
a criminal. What’s beyond dispute, has been for a while, is that he is an
unserious person, out for attention, celebrity, the notoriety and status fame
brings. In the months of his ascendance, however, cable anchors and journalists
did their best to avoid or downplay the truth of Avenatti’s character, lest it
distract from their attack on the president’s.
As the influence of establishment media outlets has
waned, their attempts to control the narrative have intensified. The cable
networks and major print outlets have become more politicized, not less, as
social media and streaming video make it much easier to expose hoaxes and
puncture holes in the received wisdom. The Sentinels who protect the liberal
media matrix are vigilant against thoughtcrime, they anathematize dissent, but
they are less interested in the canons of professional journalism, such as
presenting both sides of a story and refraining from baseless speculation.
Right now, they are heralding Ilhan Omar for her courage, turning Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez into the flag-bearer of the Democratic party, and confident that
no matter the opposition Trump will be defeated. Best be skeptical. As with all
the other bogus stories, reality will make itself felt in the end. It always
does.
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