TUESDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2022
The problem with blue tribe semantics: In yesterday afternoon's post, we discussed Margaret Sullivan's childish theory of what was once wrong with our mainstream journalism.
According to Sullivan, our journalists weren't using the term "lie" often enough! Here is her deeply instructive attempt at an analysis:
SULLIVAN (10/16/22): [I]t seemed self-evident that the mainstream press was too often going easy on Trump. Well into his presidency, journalists didn’t want to use the word “lie” for Trump’s constant barrage of falsehoods. To lie, editors reasoned, means to intend to be untruthful. Since journalists couldn’t be inside politicians’ heads, how were we supposed to know if—by this definition—they were really lying? The logic eventually became strained, given that Trump blithely repeated the same rank mistruths over and over.
One word—very sad.
(Full disclosure: Due to her conduct during Campaign 2000, we're a tiny bit biased against Sullivan.)
In the passage we've highlighted, Sullivan correctly reports why journalists, by tradition, had been advised to be very careful before they used the term "lie."
That tradition made obvious sense. As Sullivan notes, a lie is a knowing falsehood / misstatement / untruth. That said, it's generally hard to know if a person actually knows that some statement or claim is false.
For that blindingly obvious reason, journalists were always warned to be very careful about accusations of lying. This journalistic practice made perfect sense. It was based on long-standing, very sound judgment.
In the passage we've posted, Sullivan attempts to explain why this traditional reasoning didn't work in the case of Donald J. Trump. To see how poorly our journalists reason, please take a second look at a different part of Sullivan's presentation:
SULLIVAN: [I]t seemed self-evident that the mainstream press was too often going easy on Trump. Well into his presidency, journalists didn’t want to use the word “lie” for Trump’s constant barrage of falsehoods. To lie, editors reasoned, means to intend to be untruthful. Since journalists couldn’t be inside politicians’ heads, how were we supposed to know if—by this definition—they were really lying? The logic eventually became strained, given that Trump blithely repeated the same rank mistruths over and over.
It's true! Donald J. Trump actually does "blithely repeat the same rank mistruths over and over."
Of course, it's always possible that someone does that because he actually believes that the rank misstatement in question is accurate! Stating the obvious, the mere fact that a person repeats a misstatement doesn't mean that the erroneous claim is a lie!
Has Donald J. Trump been telling the public "lies" down through all these years? In our view, the person in question is so disordered that it's hard to be totally sure.
That said, people like Sullivan aren't deep thinkers—a fact she proved, in 1999, as she joined the rest of her guild in pursuing Candidate Gore for his alleged lying. People are dead all over Iraq because of what those journalists did. That takes us back to the days when our tribal vanity had us pretending that we actually cared about life-and-death matters like that.
For the record:
For the record, the decision by blue tribe journalists to change the rules about the word "lie" didn't start with the presidency of Donald J. Trump! It started during the presidency of George W. Bush—more specifically, with a change in the rules specifically executed by David Corn in his 2003 book, The Lies of George W. Bush.
(For the record, we knew David back in the day. We like David Corn a lot.)
In the preface to his book, David explicitly said he was changing the rules about accusations of "lying." It was a very bad idea back then. By now, it has evolved into a tribally self-destructive, truly awful idea.
Our blue tribe has become the tribe of constant moral accusation. We see liars and racists wherever we look. We're stunningly eager to say so.
We'll continue to discuss this topic as the week proceeds. But if you don't understand why our tribe is so widely loathed, we'll recommend this culture of accusation—this devotion to moral denunciation—as one of the leading reasons.
We're dumb and obnoxious and nobody likes Us. Everyone knows this but Us!
ReplyDelete"One word—very sad."
Heh, we get it, dear Bob; two words: "made in America".
And that's the best you can do, being a liberal, right?
Tsk.
"It's true! Donald J. Trump actually does "blithely repeat the same rank mistruths over and over." "
Hmm. So, "mistruth" is something liberals hate to hear, and get triggered by? In that case, yes, it's true indeed.
"...if you don't understand why our tribe is so widely loathed..."
Ha-ha. But of course we do, dear Bob. Don't worry, everyone does. It's not the rocket science.
"For that blindingly obvious reason, journalists were always warned to be very careful about accusations of lying."
ReplyDelete30K+ lies during an administration means that Trump is no longer entitled to the benefit of the doubt about his intentions when he says something incorrect.
Somerby is Goofus today.
Speaking of the blindingly obvious, when Bob is looking, you will never find a liar or racist.
ReplyDeletePresident Obama was roundly called a
liar for telling people they could keep their
Doctors on the ACA, something that turned
out to be true better than 95 percent of
the time.
To be honest, it was true 100% because all current plans at the time of the ACA were grandfathered into the policy.
DeleteSomerby does not think reel hawd: he says we can't mind read and so can not know if someone is lying, BUT THIS IS ALSO TRUE OF ANY STATEMENT OR CLAIM ANYBODY EVER MAKES.
HELLO!
We can never know if someone is being honest, since we can not read their mind.
What a fucking moron, Somerby. Never bothered to consider his thesis for it's obvious flaws.
So he takes every right wing nonsense at face value, those noble savages.
Furthermore, America takes a dim view of things like murder, Blacks, rape, trans people, inner city crime, women; but lying? Not so much, they are pretty much ok with it, and it's cousin hypocrisy.
It wasn't true for me. My doctor dropped me the week that started.
DeleteLiar.
Delete7:20, your response makes zero sense. Thanks for playing.
Delete"It's true! Donald J. Trump actually does "blithely repeat the same rank mistruths over and over."
ReplyDeleteSo did Reagan, George Bush, Palin, Dan Quayle -- all before Trump came along. Letting Republicans tell lies has been a journalistic tradition. It would be nice if it were over with Trump's gross untruths.
Republicans made it OK to lie with impunity during campaigns (and the rest of the time too). The press has fact-checked them but Republican voters don't read the fact-checks or don't care. As a result, the entire concept of truth has become an endangered species, to the point where Somerby thinks he can gaslight readers into thinking there is no such thing as facts, truth, correct statements, expertise, education, and academic knowledge. No such thing as higher learning. And when that becomes true then Q's opinion is worth as much as Farhadian Weinstein's and any fool can be president. And we have all seen where that leads: 1. 1800 Katrina deaths, 180 Ian deaths; 2. hundreds of thousands of preventable covid deaths; 3. 2800+ Iraq war deaths and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi citizen deaths when they had no WMDs and no involvement in 9/11 and were enemies to Al Qaeda; 4. the real estate meltdown and financial collapse in 2008 due to unregulated trading in worthless subprime mortgage instruments, which caused a recession because Bush wasn't paying attention; 5. the Iran Contra drug deals that caused suffering and crime in black neighborhoods to fund Reagan's foreign adventures; 6. a lack of governance while Reagan had dementia and Nancy Reagan made govt decisions for him; 7. the various Republican tax cuts which destroyed the budget and benefitted mostly the wealthy...and many more instances of Republican wrongdoing that were lied about to the public. George Bush was told that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the US, well in advance and almost daily up until 9/11, and Bush said "who could have known?"
We don't need any more incompetent presidents. We don't need any more incompetent Senate and House members. How can we know who is competent and who isn't? We can listen when the press tells us about those lies and untruths and attempts to bullshit through legitimate questions. As they apparently did with MTG -- but Somerby never called a single one of her statements lies. He has been blaming her on Margaret Sullivan -- and that is a huge joke, since she is the one person who HAS been calling out the failure of journalists to report lies and the lying liars who tell them. Somerby and Sullivan should be BFFs, but he is attacking her. But that is no surprise given that she is a journalist and female. If she were also black, Somerby would talk about her for a week or more, instead of the two days he has spent as of today.
There were two years of lying with impunity about "Russia collusion" and Hunter's "Russian disinformation laptop" among other lies upon lies in service of the Democrat agenda of pandering to the mentally ill proponents of child mutilation.
DeleteHere is another example of a Republican big lie. There was an investigation of the collusion accusations and Mueller found evidence of Russian meddling. He did not charge Trump with anything, but that was because Trump was in charge of the govt, Bill Barr covered for Trump, and the obstruction was never overcome to gain the level of proof that would have made these denial untenable. But the Mueller report contained enough info to make these sorts of assertions obviously untrue and the accusations of collusion highly likely to have occurred. Yet Republicans keep returning to blogs with these blatant lies about hoaxes and laptops, and Hunter Biden, who has not been found to have done anything wrong.
DeleteThere are no instances of child mutilation in the US, as it is meant by this troll.
Why are Republicans eating the mutilated genitals of children? That isn't even bigoted.
DeleteRight wingers are obsessed with child abuse because they are the result of child abuse themselves.
DeleteRepublicans=right wing=fascism=neo feudalism=white nationalist=christian nationalist
There is no ideology among these people, who are all the same in crucial fundamental ways, they are the result of unresolved childhood trauma.
Somerby (supposedly) wants to put his head in the sand, but that is of no use; we need to understand these people so we can resolve their problems and rid our society of this awful right wing anchor dragging us down.
"That said, people like Sullivan aren't deep thinkers—a fact she proved, in 1999, as she joined the rest of her guild in pursuing Candidate Gore for his alleged lying. People are dead all over Iraq because of what those journalists did. That takes us back to the days when our tribal vanity had us pretending that we actually cared about life-and-death matters like that."
ReplyDeleteSomerby wants to blame everybody except Al Gore for losing to George W. Bush. Unfortunately, Gore made a lot of serious mistakes that were much more important than trivialities over the statements people mocked, such as that he created the internet. All candidates get some bad press. The public watches how they handle it, since a president must also have some character and strength to do the job. Gore flubbed that but Margaret Sullivan is to blame? I don't think so.
The press is more to blame for Judith Miller's reporting on WMD's, just as it is to blame for the way it trashed Hillary in 2015. But Somerby isn't complaining about that real malfeasance on the part of the media. He is still defending Al Gore, who blew his own election. How? By choosing Lieberman as VP, by refusing to claim the undeniable successes of the Clinton administration (which he was part of), by failing to explain fund-raising scandals, by allowing Tipper to attack rock and roll lyrics and making a stiff-necked laughing stock of them both, by failing to figure out how to address Republican attacks, such as that he lied about living in a hotel as a boy. None of that was anyone's fault except Al Gore's. And if he couldn't figure that stuff out, how could he be a good president?
It has always puzzled me that Somerby claims to care about the truth in media reports but he never talks about the work of the fact-checkers, never even cites them. He pretends it is impossible to know whether someone is lying or not, but in the meanwhile, he never directs his readers to sources of correct info so that they can disentangle the content of Republican lies. And that is a huge oversight, in my opinion. That is one of the things that suggests to me that Somerby has no real interest in lies, but mainly wants to defend Trump and other Republican liars. He just doesn't care about the truth, based on his actions here.
Gore made many blunders, he was also all but raped by the Press Corps. Both things can be true.
DeleteI may be lying, or just delusional, but Gore's poor campaigning was considerably more of an impact than the unfair challenges he faced with the press.
DeleteThe world would only be marginally better if Gore had accepted his winning of the presidency. Gore was a neoliberal just like Clinton, it is late stage capitalism (neoliberalism) that is the root of things like Iraq, and bad journalism for that matter.
Weird how Somerby has no clue on how to pick the right battles. It's almost as if...
That’s an exaggeration.
DeleteI don’t know if your lying, you are certainly wrong. W’s “what me worry?”
Deletetake on terrorism all but assured 9-11.
Environmental issues? Gore was more
progressive than progressives. It’s
true Lieberman was a rotten choice
but his awfulness was not fully
established as it one day would be.
Gore was probably genuinely
appalled by the stupidity of the
Lewinsky scandal,but also goaded
by the press into making too much
of it.
Somerby says David Corn changed the rules in 2003 about calling a liar a liar, but so did Al Franken:
ReplyDelete"Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is a satirical book on American politics by Al Franken, a comedian, political commentator, and politician. It was published in 2003 by Dutton Penguin. "
"Our blue tribe has become the tribe of constant moral accusation. We see liars and racists wherever we look. We're stunningly eager to say so."
ReplyDeleteNotice how Somerby starts out talking about calling people liars when they tell lies all the time, then he shoves the word "racists" into his sentence, so that he can condemn both practices, even though he has made no arguments against calling people racist when they are clearly racist.
This makes it seem like Somerby is against calling anyone what they are, and not because it is difficult to tell whether someone is a liar or not, but because Somerby doesn't like the terms, as he dislikes anyone calling anyone else racist, whether they are racist or not.
Somerby has argued previously that racism is no longer a problem and that calling out racism is counter-productive (which means the racists don't like it). These are not the same arguments as he has made about lying -- that it is too hard to tell when someone is lying versus just wrong. Is he suggesting by this conflation that racists may believe the racist shit they inflict on others is justified or correct? Is he trying to say that racists believe they are right to be racist? If so, that is all the more reason to correct their mistaken beliefs by telling them that their attitude or behavior is wrong, socially inappropriate, unfair and even cruel to minorities. Does that logic also apply to liars? Not if they are lying deliberately, but if they are mistaken in their sincerely held beliefs, then all the more reason to tell them they have things wrong. It is a service to tell someone they are lying, just as it is a service to tell racists that everyone doesn't share their racist beliefs and that good decent people don't tolerate their racist behavior.
So, I think Somerby is wrong about this. He should be encouraging more people to call out both racism and lying, as often as it occurs, for the good of those who are telling lies and behaving badly without knowing it. That way, whoever is left can be more readily identified as the lying racist pieces of shit that they are.
Somerby forgot to mention that Ezra Klein, in his discussion with Rachel Maddow, said that Republicans are lying and engaging in desperate behavior to hold on to power because they are losing the demographic battle and soon will be unable to elect anyone except in small rural enclaves. He said that this is why they are trying to dismantle democratic electoral procedures in order to stay in power -- they know they cannot win in a fair election and definitely will be unable to do so in the future, as the demographic balance shifts more. So they want to rig our democratic practices in their own favor now, while they can still do something about it. Note that Rachel didn't say this, Klein did.
ReplyDeleteI think this explains the lying too, and the fearmongering and the violence. These are all desperate acts because Republicans know they are losing and they know they cannot win a fair campaign. So they are cheating.
If Somerby were a fair-minded person, he would have said something about this, as he discusses everything but the Republican malfeasance. Can we liberals prevail in elections that should be ours if we tie our hands behind our back by refusing to notice what Republicans are doing? That is exactly what Somerby keeps urging us to do, as if we are the problem, and not the power-hungry miscreants on the right, who will do anything except serve their constituents in good faith.
Lauren Boebert is close to losing her reelection campaign in a solid red rural district because her constituents are disgusted with her fooling around, her lack of performance in the House and her inability to help the people of her district with their issues. Even Republicans in the area are endorsing her Democratic opponent. This is what should happen all over the US, in a sane world without people like Q or Somerby.
The phenomenon of Q-Anon has come between husbands and wives, parents and children, all over our country. It is more like a cult than a disagreement over politics. I find myself wondering if this is what happened between Marjorie Taylor Greene and her husband, who recently filed for divorce. Yes, there have been cheating allegations, but what does a spouse do when their husband or wife goes off the deep end for Trump, MAGA extremism and Q? You can't talk them out of it and they demand that you follow along when Q says everyone needs to go to Dealy Plaza to see JFK Jr. come back from the dead. Or they insist that you not wear a mask even though covid is not gone yet. Or they want to empty the joint savings account to send more money to Trump and every single candidate he has endorsed. This isn't something where you can agree to disagree.
ReplyDeleteSomerby's advice about assuming liars aren't lying doesn't help people who need to convince loved ones that they are being led down a path for Trump's benefit.
"We're dumb and obnoxious and nobody likes Us. Everyone knows this but Us!"
ReplyDeleteSomerby is such a liar! There are more Democrats than Republicans in this country. We won the presidency, the House and the Senate in the last election. We are winning the generic ballot. The main people who don't like us are Republicans, but that is because they listen to Fox News. And what happened to Somerby's constant claims that the people he criticizes here (mostly liberals) are good decent people? Was he fibbing when he said that?
He cautions us that we will lose Republicans if we call them names. Then he launches a spate of name-calling at us, as if this will finally convince us that he is right about making nice with Fox and friends.
Somerby has lost it. No one is being obnoxious and dumb here today except him.
Nobody likes liberals. They don’t even like themselves.
DeletePoor Bob. Suckered by a two-bit, failed real estate developer from Queens.
ReplyDeleteHarvard must be proud.
DeleteSee the Carny axiom, nobody gets
Deletesuckered unless the really want to.
This is just plain racist, and yet Somerby thinks liberals should not use that word to describe it. Why not?
ReplyDelete"One of the ads, from the National Republican Senate Committee, ends with a shot that brands Barnes, who is black, as “different” and “dangerous” as it pictures him alongside three congresswomen of color who are members of “The Squad,” none of whom has campaigned with him. For good measure, the state Republican party sent out a mailer in which the color of Barnes’s skin has clearly been darkened.”
Anyone who isn't a bigot, or isn't perfectly fine with bigotry, left the Republican Party more than two decades ago.
Delete