After the Future

CNN and Bias in Journalism

Journalism can never be unbiased because human beings can never be unbiased. The best we can expect from journalists, as is the best we can expect from human beings, is that they give a reasonable account in defense for their more controversial stories. So what constitutes a reasonable account? Well first of all a firm grounding in the facts. The problem is that the more controversial the issue, the more difficult to establish and prioritize the relevant facts. 

Have you ever had an argument with a 9/11 Truther? If they lean Left, they believe it was a Bush administration inside job, and if they lean Right, they'll argue that it was  coordinated by the Israelis or some other conspiracy. When you ask them what are the sources for their facts, they direct you to websites or podcasts where experts in engineering, explosives, etc., make a factual case for why the official explanations cannot be possibly correct, and so then select and present the facts and quasi-facts that support alternative narratives that they argue connect the dots in ways that make much more sense.  

They do not make irrational arguments, but they do make arguments that reek of confirmation bias in matters where the facts are hard to pin down. Am I guilty of confirmation bias in rejecting their conspiracy narratives? Maybe. But the official Osama bin Laden story makes enough sense for me that I choose to believe that it, or something like it, is the most likely explanation, even if the real truth is much more complex and thorny. 

But the bottom line comes down to this, I don't want to spend my time and energy going down these rabbit holes. I've got better things to do. But this gets to the nub of the issue when it comes to trusting journalistic narratives. Most people when it comes to the reporting of the everyday news don't have the time and energy to chase down the truthfulness of what they hear and read. They trust their sources, and they trust them to a large extent because of their own confirmation biases, i.e., because these sources tell them what they already believe and want to hear.

Nevertheless, despite the unavoidable bias, an essential criteria for trusting a news source is the quality of their fact checking. And so when I read the NY Times or The Atlantic or the New Yorker, I know that they take fact checking very seriously. Certainly in a way that FOX or any of the MAGA supporting media do not. Will the Liberal interpretation of the facts render their stories as unbiased? Of course not. Might the facts they choose to foreground as more salient and which to background be biased? For sure. But I trust that these media make a good-faith effort to write stories that are rigorously fact checked and reasonable. And I try to be aware and critical as I can be of their biases--and my own--in evaluating the truth value of the story.  

And this is really the difference between the cultural Left and cultural Right at this moment. They both read or listen to media that confirms their biases, but the Liberal media have far higher journalistic standards for basing their stories in facts. The MAGA Right doesn't believe that. They believe that the stories reported in the MSM are just as factually baseless as the stories the Right media put out. But it's just not true. There's a huge difference between stories that have no factual or evidentiary basis and biased stories that do have a factual and evidentiary basis. You can have a reasonable argument with the latter; you can't with the former. 

Both Left and Right media focus on stories that support their biases because they both foreground facts that are shaped by those biases, but one is far more trustworthy than the other. One provides stories or makes arguments that are reasonable because they make a good faith effort to be grounded in actual facts, and they are far more open to engage with alternative arguments that interpret the facts differently or emphasize facts that were backgrounded or de-emphasized. You can argue with people with whom you disagree but who are committed to factuality; you can't with people for whom facts don't matter.

This is why Chris Licht was doomed from the start at CNN and why his previous bosses Joe Scarborough and Stephen Colbert told him not to take the job. The picture of him that emerges from the Tim Alberta story that apparently did him in was that he was well-intentioned, but astonishingly naive in his belief that he could make CNN a place that was factually rigorous and still be a place where Republicans could feel comfortable. Why was this so naive? Because the only Republicans and conservatives who respect the facts are Never-Trumpers.

Liberal media is saturated with Conservatives who are never Trumpers. But none of them are in office because any elected Republican politician cannot remain an elected Republican politician unless he or she endorse Trump's egregious, over-the-top lies. To be a Republican who is not a Never-Trumper means that you cannot tell the truth when you appear on any media--whether Liberal or Conservative. Some will tell reporters off the record that they think Trump is a sociopathic liar, but they won't do it on the record. To be a Republican with a future in politics requires that you either lie or refuse to refute the lie. You can rationalize it as the price of remaining in business, but it makes no sense to appear on any media where the fundamental lying will be challenged. Why expose yourself to that?  

That's why no elected Republicans (hardly ever) appear on CNN or MSNBC. It's not because of Liberal bias; it's because they don't want to be confronted with the facts because to acknowledge them is political suicide. The best they can do if they choose to appear on Liberal MSM is refuse to answer questions and filibuster talking points that they've prepared in advance. There is no possibility of a good-faith argument or debate. Chris Christie when he was a Trump surrogate was an outlier in willing to debate on Liberal media platforms, but now even he's a Never-Trumper. 

And so in the end, whatever might have been good faith in Chris Licht's attempt to make CNN more MAGA-friendly was always impossible if CNN was to retain any journalistic integrity. The absurdity of the CNN platforming the New Hampshire town hall proves it. Trump gets everything he wanted if he is to condescend to appear on CNN, and this means giving him an open platform to promote his lies. Sure, there would be a pretense of fact-checking, but in front of a live MAGA audience that has no interest in the facts. It only cares about retaining its delusional narrative of election fraud and Liberal moral turpitude.

And so Kaitlan Collins, the CNN host, tried her best to challenge the lies, but they came so fast and furious that she couldn't keep up. And so the whole thing  blows up in CNN's face: Rather than presenting itself as media where MAGA can feel comfortable, MAGA folks walk away thinking that CNN is just what they always thought it was--hostile to Trump. Was any other outcome possible? The goal of having a fact-based forum with Trump in which MAGA world would feel comfortable was from the beginning an impossibility. To care about the facts and expect MAGA to thank CNN for insisting on them are two mutually exclusive goals. In the end CNN does not get its win. It just gives Trump another opportunity to excrete his lies and to give MAGA good reason to continue to hate CNN. 

Normies vs Kooks

Is there a scenario in which DeSantis can win the GOP nomination? Maybe. I don't think that DeSantis or any of the others running for the GOP nomination can win the nomination unless Trump's legal problems cripple his candidacy. We just don't know yet how the coming indictments will affect him politically. For now, at least, I'm in the camp that believes his legal jeopardy strengthens his candidacy with the MAGA base, and so makes it extremely difficult for DeSantis or any of the others in a split field to emerge strong enough to beat him.

But we don't know what's going to come out about Trump as these indictments start hitting, and there's good reason to believe that as bad as is everything we already know about Trump, the reality is probably much worse. People like DeSantis are in position to make the case that for the MAGA cause to win and flourish, it needs a leader without Trump's liabilities, and I don't see any of the other candidates as in a better position to assume the MAGA mantle than DeSantis. 

So while the media for now tend to look at DeSantis as an unlikeable Nixonesque bumbler, Nixon proved that being an unlikeable Machiavellian sociopathic schemer doesn't make one unelectable. Besides, he has time to get his act together by next spring when people are actually paying attention. He is in the strongest position to win the nomination should Trump become broadly perceived by the MAGA base as unelectable in the general. He already is unelectable, but MAGA World doesn't believe it yet. That might change by this time next year. If it does, DeSantis will probably be the guy most capable of elbowing his way to the front of the MAGA parade. 

But the bottom line is that a constrained sociopath like DeSantis scares me far more than an unconstrained one like Trump because DeSantis can fake being a Normie in a way that is acceptable to swing voters. Florida swing voters bought his act in '22, but would they re-elect him in '26? Not sure, but if not it's because Florida swing voters have seen up close what post-Covid authoritarian DeSantis is like in a way that swing voters in other states can't from afar. So while Biden might still be able to beat DeSantis, it will be much, much harder. Nevertheless, it won't be a cakewalk for DeSantis because he will have the very difficult job of retaining the MAGA Kooks while broadening his appeal to Normie swing voters. (See Note 1) It remains to be seen whether he has the political chops to do that. But he'll have the massive support of conservative media and the broader business community who care more about deregulation and taxes than they do about what their HR department says should be their DEI policies.

Your typical swing voters don't think their votes for president in '24 are about the survival of democracy in the U.S. They see only Kooks on the Left and Right believing that. They're wrong, but that doesn't matter. For them it comes down to Normies vs Kooks. If MAGA works against the GOP in the general, Woke works against the Democrats. The country elected Biden in 2020 because in an election between Normies vs. Kooks, Biden wins the Normie vote. The election in '24 will also largely depend on who wins the Normie vote.

Will most swing voters associate the GOP with the MAGA Kooks, or will they associate the Dems with the Woke Kooks? Remains to be seen. But you can be sure that the the GOP will make the anti-Woke Kook theme the core of their campaign, and it's not clear to me whether Dems understand their vulnerability. Their cosmopolitan smugness blinds them in that respect, and Dem Pols still seem quaintly to believe, based on their talking points on TV, that what most voters really care about is policy. 

See also Why I Prefer Trump 1 and Why I Prefer Trump 2.

Note 1: I disagree with Miller in this regard--the question is not who would be worse--Trump or DeSantis--but who is more electable. If the American electorate is so insane as to elect Trump again, well that's the end. America goes out with a bang. If DeSantis gets elected, which is far more likely, America goes out with a whimper. MAGA wins either way. Choose your poison--cyanide or arsenic--the result is the same.

A Simulacral Age

The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of us who turn to humor to help process the nonstop parade of weirdness, a new cultural trope was addictive: imagining that it is, indeed, all made up, that any improbable piece of news is a plot twist in a TV series or movie or digital simulation.

The writers’ room ran out of ideas (Donald Trump choppering from his Covid hospitalization back to the White House for a Mussolini balcony moment). This new show is so meta (the Ukrainian comedian who played an Everyman who became president and actually became president) and so implausible (who stopped a superpower tyrant’s blitzkrieg). That season finale really jumped the shark (Jan. 6). And then last year’s hearings of the Jan. 6 committee — astonishingly effective because a former ABC News president shrewdly produced them, unlike any before, as a 10-episode multimedia TV series.

In America at large, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy isn’t merely fascinating. Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.

During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, “I love you, but you are not serious people.” He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions.

Kurt Andersen

We can take a splinter of truth and with it build a huge edifice of illusion. We can do it alone, but we prefer to do it with others because of the way others seem to give the illusion a solidity and stability that it otherwise lacks. Can we snap out of it? Yes, but if only if you're motivated--or inspired--to do so. Why would you be motivated? Because you are deeply interested--inpired--to get a deeper grip on reality. How do you get a deeper grip on reality? You must emulate Socrates.

It was not that Socrates knew more in some quantitative way but that he knew better in a qualitative way. The Socratic challenge is not to know more with certainty but to know more wisely, if by wisdom we mean a way of being in the world that has a deeper, richer cognitive, i.e., more deeply engaged, relationship with the Living Real.

Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because in a remarkably precocious way he had a such a deep grip on reality, a grip that would not have been possible had he not understood first that he knew nothing, which is another way of saying that what we all take for knowledge isn't really knowledge--it's just a map or a simulacra of the real. Is it possible to see what's behind the map? I think it is, but that's a different topic than I want to get into here. The task is not to have some experience of Abosolute Being, but rather to progressively come into deeper contact and relationship with its presence in the world around us. The first step in coming into deeper contact with reality is to realize all the ways our lives are structured to estrange us from it. 

What does that require? An attitude of humility and an openness to be corrected. Humility requres that we acknowledge that whatever we know is dwarfed by what we don't, and it's ok. Because then our life becomes much more interesting as we come to understand it as continuous process that progresses qualitatively--not quantitatively--toward greater levels of wisdom.

Qualitatively in the sense of the way our relationships are qualitative. The goal is not to know more, but to develop a better, deeper, richer relationship with the Living Real, i.e., to use a Vervaeke phrase, to fall in love with reality, which is what happens when you develop such a relationship. And so as we grow in wisdom we grow in love because the one cannot exist without the other.

The wise are not people who know more but who know better because they have this kind of relationship with the Living Real. That was the Socratic project--to get his interlocutors to undestand first that what they thought they knew was mostly wrong not in some propositional way but in this qualitative way because their relationship to the Living Real was obstructed or blocked but needn't be.  

Last Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated the feast of Pentecost. It is the celebration of the presence and movement of the Living Real in our lives. As Bishop Maximus says in the conversation with John Vervaeke that I commented on here, Christianity took what the great sages and saints knew, and made it more broadly available.There was still the life of the monk within the Christian tradition who sought this encounter with the Absolute, but there was made available to everyone after Pentecost a grace that enables us to find the presence of the Absolute everywhere, and that inspires us--or should--to look and pay attention more carefully so that we may find it wherever it would disclose itself to us. And our attending and responding over time is the way we humans come to renew the face of the earth. 

Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Truth, that it works in us and inspires us to overcome our tendency to self-deception and self-destructive behaviors. It is that which inspires us to move into a deeper relationship with Reality, which is the only solution to the alienation that is the source of our delusional thinking. It is that which illumines our minds with insight which is the experience of deepening that relationship. It's what gives us hope that we might live in a Real world rather than in a simulacral one. It's a grace and power that is working there whether we're Christians or or not. It's just there, it's available to all people of good will who have a supple enough heart to acknowledge its presence and to hearken to it.

The problem is that to many who sense the presence of the Living Real don't know how to hearken to it. The problem with too many people who think of themselves as spiritually motivated is that they have neither Socrates' humility nor his openness to be corrected. They think they know when really they do not; they think they are right because if God is with them, how can they be wrong? But God cannot be with them if he is the cause for their fear, hatred, and desire for violence and retribution. This is where Socrates becomes an essential resource. We need his humility; we need his openness to be proved wrong, we need his hunger to come into deeper contact with the Living Real. 

Pentecost is an invitation to enter into a deeper relationship with the Living Real, and as in all relationships that are worthy of the name, so does our relationship with the Living Real grow and develop and become richer. If that's not true for you in the relationships you have with the people in your life, how can you expect it be true for your relationship with reality? And so we must all ask ourselves whether the people in our lives are an occasion for our overcoming our inclination to live in a simulacra, or are they there to reinforce it? 

See also "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" and "Habitus as Heuristic".

Why I Prefer Trump 2

 From a Firing Line interview with Charlie Sykes:

HOOVER: So, Charlie, what happens in a general election then if it is Trump versus Biden? 

SYKES: Then I think the election becomes a referendum on Donald Trump. And I think this is the decision the Republicans have to make. 

HOOVER: A referendum on Trump? 

SYKES: Yes, because I think under normal circumstances the general election is a referendum on the incumbent president. And if it’s any other Republican other than Donald Trump, the 2024 election will be a referendum on Joe Biden and his record and his agenda. But if it’s Donald Trump, it becomes completely reversed. That election becomes about Donald Trump. And that will determine what the turnout is. That will determine the levels of enthusiasm. Joe Biden does not need to gin up enthusiasm among the Democratic base if Donald Trump is on the ballot. The formula shifts.

This is another way of making the point I argued in my earlier piece Why I Prefer Trump 1. If DeSantis runs, it's a referendum on Biden, and Biden is more likely to lose for all the reasons his approval ratings are so low now. It will seem more like a normal election. If Trump runs, it's a referendum on Trump, and it's far more likely that he will lose because most voters, if they are not disgusted by him, are tired of him. He's a known quantity now. Biden as a known quantity should defeat Trump as a known quantity. Biden against DeSantis?  Not so clear. For the typical swing voter, DeSantis is still an unknown quantity. (See Note 1)

So is Trump worse than DeSantis? That's not the important question. They are both sociopaths, and we just don't know how bad DeSantis is yet. And in the short run, that's his primary advantage in the general election. To the swing voter, he's seems kinda normal. The people in Florida seem to love him. Liberal media hate him. How bad can he be? He's young. He's new and fresh. He has a pretty wife. Let's give him a try. 

The problem is neither Trump nor DeSantis--it's MAGA. Both Trump and DeSantis in their different ways are human ciphers who are vying with one another to get out in front of the MAGA parade. If, as I believe, the enemy is not Trump or DeSantis or any one personality, but MAGA, it doesn't really matter who leads it because nobody is really leading it. Anyone who wins with MAGA support will be a Kevin McCarthy-like creature of MAGA. Nothing is more important than crushing and delegitimating MAGA through the electoral process. 

If you think that DeSantis represents a more acceptable version of MAGA than Trump, you really don't get it. If anything, he's the next evolutionary step in its emergence from the slime. If MAGA wins the White House in '24, America as an open society is very likely over. So the really important question is not who's worse, DeSantis or Trump--or anybody else who wins with MAGA support--but who is more likely to deliver a victory for MAGA in the general election, and that is the MAGA candidate who can win in the swing states.

I'm not saying that Trump can't win, but extreme MAGA has been a loser in the last two cycles. DeSantis has a far better chance of winning because he appears  less blatantly MAGA to swing voters, many of whom have come to see the Democrats as having lost their minds on gender issues. Most swing voters are normies, and they tend to agree with DeSantis on sex and gender. Democrats and those influenced by the cosmopolitanism of Liberal media are so caught up in their own sanctimony that they  have no clue how much they scare normies on these issues, and how easy they are making it for Republicans to frame the election as normies vs kooks.

This is largely what the last election was about, and that's why Biden won. He was perceived to be the normie and Trump the kook. Will that be true again if Biden runs against DeSantis? I don't think so--at least insofar as the Dems allow themselves to be framed as the anti-normie party. It's in this sense that DeSantis will be able to make the general election a referendum on Biden and the anti-normie Democrats in a way that Trump would not be able to do.  

So "lucky" for us, Trump is the more likely GOP candidate in the general. It will be another circus, but he likely loses again in an election that I believe will be framed again as kooks vs. normies. His mounting legal troubles might help him with the MAGA base to secure the nomination, but they will not help him with swing voters in the general. The swing voters have already rejected him, and there's no reason so far to believe they won't do it again. DeSantis, on the other hand looks a lot more like Youngkin, a GOP winner in a state that was trending blue, and there's good reason to believe that he will get much of the national purple vote--certainly more than Trump would do.

That's why DeSantis scares me far more than Trump does. Trump was the wrecking ball that threw the country into chaos. DeSantis will present himself as the philosopher king who will restore order.  It's a one-two punch: Trump--vicious jab to the jaw; DeSantis--crippling uppercut to the gut. 

 

Defending the Western Canon

A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt--and really anybody who is truly culturally literate--have spent so much time with Plato and St. Augustine. The former recognize how the latter wrote the cultural software that runs Western Civilization. If you don't understand how Plato and Augustine did that, then you don't understand what or why you think what you think and believe what you believe. For one of the best explanations for why the Western Canon is important from a Progressive perspective, read director of Columbia University's core curriculum Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates or this piece in Jacobin by Liza Featherstone entitled "The Left Should Defend Classical Education". 

So I get a little frustrated when the more public-facing defenses of classical education are showcased in the MSM as part of the conservative social agenda. The results are predictable when a conservative businessman like Jeremey Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test (CLT), gets interviewed by a conventional progressive like the NY Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Why is Tate worthy of the attention of the NY Times? Because Ron DeSantis is pushing to replace the SAT with his CLT in the Florida State education system. 

I am no defender of SAT or of the whole standardized testing regime in general, including Tate's CLT. But I get pretty frustrated when guys like Tate become the frontmen for defending the Western canon. He doesn't have a prayer against Garcia-Navarro. He's at best a well-intentioned businessman who says, rightly, that a classical education should not be either conservative or liberal--but human. But he's a conservative guy trying to run a company. He'is worried about making payroll, and if the conservatives want to be his customers, then hoo-rah for conservatives.

He gives a ridiculously naive explanation for why public schools are failing and for why even Catholic schools like the one his daughter attends shape their curricula to the test. If the school is daughter attends was serious about their values, they would determine the curricula by their own pedagogical standards, not by what the SAT requires. (See Note 1) And so with such defenders of a classical education as Tate and DeSantis, it is easily condemned as guilty by association by the liberal consumers of the NY Times. Liberals used to know better, but don't now precisely because of the consumerist design and career-training ethos that has become the default in university curricula in the last several decades. Why would anybody in their right minds waste their tuition money on a philosophy or literature course?

I was going to do a more detailed analysis of how the presuppositions of both Garcia-Navarro and Tate gurantee that they will talk past one another, but who really cares? It's the same old, same old. Garcia-Navarro is smart and she asks fair questions, but it's clear that she's in the why-should-we-care-about-what-dead-white-men-think camp. Her audience would be better served if she interviewed Roosevelt Montas or Cornell West (who has a seat on the CLT board), both of whom would be far more capable of defending the importance of the Western canon from a non-conservative perspective than Tate is. She might learn something if she were to do so. 

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Note 1: One of the more significant absurdities in Tate's justification for the CLT is the story he relates about how this Catholic School offers an elective philosophy course that no students sign up for. Why? Because, according to Tate, it doesn't give them AP credits or isn't covered in the SAT. Waste of time. So, in Tate's mind, if curriucla are determined by the standardized test, then you must change the standardized test. It never seems to occur to Tate that if this Catholic School were truly effective in shaping the souls of its students, they should all be chomping at the bit to take this philosophy course for intrinsic motivations. But clearly this school is just turning out kids like every other elite high school, i.e., kids who don't care about learning but about getting ahead. They make choices not according to criteria that Socrates or Aristotle might approve but by what a Neoliberal careerist agenda approves. They are so many young Hippocrates-es looking for a life that Protagoras would train them for.