By Kyle Sammin
Friday, September 06, 2019
Bolsonaro and the Amazon fires. Johnson and Brexit. Trump
and trade, immigration, and nearly everything else. All are examples of
completely normal things being treated as awful and unprecedented because they
occur while the man in charge is someone the press doesn’t like.
What began as a quirk of American mainstream media has
now leapt international borders to Europe and South America. Journalists, once
the self-proclaimed neutral gatekeepers of analysis in discrete areas, are
relying on their readers’ ignorance of these topics to impose their views at
the expense of the truth.
It works because the press downplays bad news when its
friends are in charge, for even though reporters are often dealing with the
same actions on both sides, many think the effect is not as bad because their
favored politicians mean well, while the Republicans don’t. Many in the press
brush aside bad things and cover normal things matter-of-factly, if at all. So
it is no surprise that people remain ignorant and rightfully get mad when the
press tells them this thing, whatever it is, is awful and norm-breaking, and
we’re all going to die from it.
The Media Exaggerated About
the Amazon Fires
Environmental causes always produce the greatest
hysteria, and each new development, big or small, is accompanied by the
proclamation that the result will be the death of millions. So it has been with
this year’s fires in the Amazon. The “lungs of the world” were blazing away at
unprecedented rates, the press told us. Twenty percent of the world’s oxygen
comes from the Amazon rainforest, they said, and it was being destroyed as
never before because of the wickedness of man.
Only none of that was true. As The New York Times noted
in an even-handed article on the subject, the land being burned had mostly
already been cleared years earlier. To the extent there were a bunch of fires —
and there were — it was roughly in line with the fires of the last decade.
Deforestation was way down from decades past, and that remained true in 2019.
Even those well-worn claims about the Amazon being particularly important to
the world’s oxygen supply were found to be vastly exaggerated.
Why now? Why was this annual event of land-clearance
trumpeted as an unparalleled catastrophe? It might have something to do with the
political leadership in Brazil. While that nation’s chief executives from 2003
to 2016 were members of the socialist Workers’ Party, Brazil’s current
president is Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist.
Socialist presidents made the right noises about protecting
the environment, while Bolsonaro hasn’t, yet this year’s fires are within the
parameters of the last decade’s burns. When the media and celebrities are
forced to choose between the facts and their feelings about right-wing
populists, feelings win the day.
The Press Inflated Johnson’s
Prorogation of Parliament
The Trump effect also affects news coverage across the
Atlantic since Britain’s new prime minister, Boris Johnson, has taken office.
In many ways, Trump and Johnson are opposites, but both rode into their
countries’ top political jobs on a wave of populist excitement, so they get
lumped into the same group. It does not help that the biggest issue in Britain
at the moment is Brexit — something Johnson is for and the establishment press
is against.
The way the press has treated Johnson’s recent
prorogation of Parliament fits this Trump-style pattern precisely. Prorogation
has no exact equivalent in the U.S. Congress, but is something between a recess
and the end of a session. While no new election is called, parliamentary
business stops, members may go home for a time, and any pending legislation
that has not passed must be reintroduced in the next session. The queen has the
sole power to prorogue Parliament, but under Britain’s modern unwritten constitution,
she only does so if the prime minister asks.
Johnson asked the queen to prorogue Parliament last week
as a part of his plan to reintroduce a Brexit plan in the next session, and all
hell broke loose in the press and among leftist voters. They called the move a
“coup,” among other things, and gave the general impression the move was
unprecedented and arguably unconstitutional.
Was that true? Parliaments are often prorogued after a
long session to give the government a chance to start fresh with a new speech
from the throne, which sets out a new agenda for Parliament to consider. And
the session of Parliament that just ended was an extraordinarily long one. Back
in May, The Guardian noted the session was already the longest in 400 years.
Hitting the reset button through a brief prorogation is to be expected under
those circumstances.
Johnson’s detractors then note that by keeping Parliament
out of session until Oct. 14, the PM is suspending Britain’s very democracy for
an intolerable length of time. Yet, as the BBC noted the day the news was
announced, the length of the prorogation is not that great, even by modern
standards: “The last two times Parliament was suspended for a Queen’s Speech
that was not after a general election the closures lasted for four and 13
working days respectively. If this prorogation happens as expected, it will see
Parliament closed for 23 working days.”
While the prorogation would be the longest since 1945, it
also includes three weeks when Parliament would already be in recess for party
conventions, so comparatively little actual working time is lost. Why the
uproar? Because a prime minister the mainstream press hates initiated the
parliamentary maneuver in pursuit of a policy goal the media despises. Again,
mainstream journalists presented an ordinary act as extraordinary because it
conflicts with their politics.
Journalists Constantly
Disregard Facts To Attack Trump
Even before seeing this sleight-of-hand journalism in
Britain and Brazil, we have seen plenty of it in the United States. By now, the
instances are almost too numerous to mention. Some were harmless, such as the
online freak-out when Trump proclaimed “Loyalty Day” on May 1, 2017, conjuring
images in the Resistance hive mind of creeping fascism (as nearly everything
does for them). But, as NPR reassured them, every president has issued a
similar proclamation since 1955: “Despite some initial alarm on Twitter,
Loyalty Day is not unique to President Trump. In fact, it’s been around for
decades.”
There are more serious “confusions” about Trump policies,
as well. As the press began to notice in 2017, illegal entrants into this
country are often held in detention centers. Once Trump was in charge of the
executive branch, these centers suddenly became, in Rep. Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez’s memorable phrase, “concentration camps.” The press treated us
with wall-to-wall coverage of these sites, with members of Congress
performatively crying in parking lots. To be fair, conditions there, especially
concerning illegal entrant children, were not ones most Americans would
consider ideal.
But as quickly became apparent, these detention
facilities did not spring up overnight. In fact, many of the abuses
breathlessly cited in forwarded and retweeted articles were from 2015 and 2016,
back when Trump was still a private citizen and Barack Obama was the chief
executive. In 2014, these same detention centers were considered merely “a
headache” for the Obama administration. Swap out the Democratic president for a
Republican, and the same centers are a national crisis.
Last week’s kerfuffle over an immigration regulation is a
more recent example. When the news broke, people read the summary of the
regulation quickly and decided it meant that children of American servicemen
and diplomats born overseas would no longer be citizens. That would have been a
horrible rule and almost certainly would have required a change in the law, not
just a rule-making. So why did the administration do it?
The answer, as became clear when knowledgeable people
read the rule, was that it didn’t. The rule had nothing to do with the children
of citizens, whose status is unchanged. Even most children of legal permanent
residents are not affected. Actual immigration lawyers explained on Twitter and
elsewhere the narrow, technical change the new regulation put forth, but by
then, the revived echoes of “Trump Hates Immigrants!” had already circled the
globe several times. The media issued corrections, but most people will never
read them.
The press does this constantly. They are ignorant, and
they fill the gaps in their knowledge with bias. The death of journalism is a
part of the problem, but there have always been writers who didn’t completely
understand their beats. The difference now is that every journalist opines —
not reports, opines — on every topic,
and when they don’t know what they are talking about, they just fill in the
partisan bent they otherwise pretend not to have. Reporting on Trump has always
been bad, but its echoes around the world show things are only getting worse.
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