MEMPHIS / STORYLINE: When the New York Times editorialized...

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2023

...it offered quick Storyline: Events in Memphis were somewhat hard to square with standard Storyline. 

Perhaps for that reason, at least in part, blue tribe tribunes quickly abandoned the topic. A big white balloon took over the discourse, and our tribunes quickly returned to dreams about Stormy Daniels sending Trump to jail.

That said, Storyline was everywhere when Memphis was being discussed—Storyline and its first cousin, Apparent Indifference. 

Storyline often enters the scene to take the place of Real Engagement. Headline included, consider this short opening passage from a New York Times editorial about the brutal beating death of Tyre Nichols in Memphis:

Watching the Watchmen

American communities need robust law enforcement, and the vast majority of police officers are public servants performing dangerous work with dedication. The footage of Memphis police officers killing Tyre Nichols in early January, however, is all the more unbearable because Americans have seen the likes of it so many times before. Too many Americans today live in fear that they may suffer abuse or excessive force at the hands of police officers who are sworn to protect them.

Police officers killed 1,096 people in the United States last year, according to The Washington Post, which painstakingly tracks the death toll because the government does not keep a complete count. That was the most such deaths in any year since 2015. The victims, including Mr. Nichols, are disproportionately young Black men.

Ignore some of the lazy silliness found in that short passage: 

Too many Americans live in fear that they may suffer abuse from police? What would be the appropriate number of people consigned to live in such fear? 

So writing will go, some people will say, when tribunes don't exactly care.

That type of stumble is often made; let's just set it aside. We were struck by some of the statements the editors made in the second paragraph of that editorial—statements which may suggest a certain lack of engagement, and which may come from Storyline.

Let's start with the errors. We'd say that several lurk here: 

"Police officers killed 1,096 people in the United States last year, according to The Washington Post, which painstakingly tracks the death toll."

Actually, no. The Washington Post doesn't track the number of people killed by police officers each year. 

In what was once a quite valuable service, the Post tracks the number of people who are shot and killed by police officers. The total number of people killed would of course be higher. 

It would, for example, include the beating death of Tyre Nichols. The Post's enumeration of shooting deaths doesn't include such disasters.

That may seem like a minor error. To us, it may also seem like an error of inattention. So too, perhaps, with the cheerful claim that the Post "painstakingly tracks the death toll." 

That was much more true at one time than it is today. In recent years, it has become clear that the Post now puts much less effort into tracking the race and ethnicity of the decedents than it did, very constructively, when this project began. 

Apparently, the Post has reduced its once-admirable degree of effort in this area. It seems to have done so even as it lays on additional resources to clutter its online edition with all manner of insulting trivia from the realms of Lifestyle, Advice and Well + Being, with a great deal of Help Desk thrown in.

Presumably, this has been done in the search for more readers and in the search for more profit. The Post cut back on police shooting deaths and focused on Help Desk instead.

We're going to guess that the editorial board at the Times isn't super-deeply invested in this difficult, challenging topic. That's another way of saying that it isn't clear that the board really cares about these deaths all that much.

And sure enough, and alas! When we don't care all that much about some topic, Storyline may tend to prevail. So it was when the editors signaled their good faith by adding this (accurate) piece of Storyline to their editorial:

"The victims, including Mr. Nichols, are disproportionately young Black men."

As noted, Mr. Nichols isn't one of the victims who would appear in the Post's tabulation. But it's certainly true that young black men are disproportionately represented in any tabulation of this type. 

If we really did care about such people, we'd want to know why that is. We've often said that the evidence may seem to suggest that our tribunes may not hugely care about such people—that they may perhaps be more deeply involved in the performance of deep concern.

What explains the disproportion referred to above? Our blue tribe loves the simplest of all single explanation and tends to "disregard the rest."

We also tend to disregard the suffering which underlies that disproportion. 

We refer, for example, to the suffering David Graham described in his profile of crime and policing in Memphis for the Atlantic last fall. In this early passage from his report, he's describing the North Memphis neighborhood called Smokey City and one of its (many) good, decent residents:

GRAHAM (11/2/22): [Mary] Wainwright is the kind of person you’d want as a neighbor: She’s quick with a joke, blunt and no-nonsense, and ready to help out. When the coronavirus pandemic struck, she canvassed the neighborhood handing out masks. When vaccines first became available, she knew that many of her neighbors didn’t have computers or internet access to make appointments, so she convinced officials to set up a pop-up clinic at her church. The line stretched around the block.

Even so, you might not want to live near her in Smokey City these days. Crime and violent-crime rates in the area and its next-door neighbor Klondike are routinely two to three times as high as in Memphis overall, according to statistics gathered by Whole Child Strategies, a nonprofit that works in the neighborhood. The homicide rate is four to five times as high.

When Wainwright got a new car not long ago, her son begged her to get something other than the Infinitis she’s long preferred—drug dealers like them too much and she might get carjacked, he warned. Wainwright has seen two people killed on her street. “One was laying up under my car. The other one, he got shot, ran around the church,” she recalls.

Wainwright’s sister, who lives nearby in the house they grew up in, is paralyzed on one side, but she doesn’t want to leave the neighborhood where she’s always lived, and her disability checks won’t cover much else anyway. “She spends 40 percent of her time on the floor, because of guns, shooting, just every day. During daylight hours,” Wainwright says. “That’s how bad it is in the neighborhood. You know, it is what it is. We live from day to day, and we pray at night, pray all day, pray in the morning when we get up, that we can survive the neighborhood.”

Graham's report on crime and policing in Memphis continues at length from there. Perhaps somewhat oddly, he never mentions the Scorpion unit which became famous in recent weeks. That said:

Stating what is blindingly obvious, that painful profile of Smokey City and Klondike help explain, to some unknowable extent, the piece of mandated Storyline the editorial board quickly inserted into its editorial this week.

That said, we'll now tell you this:

You'll never hear about Smokey City from your favorite stars on blue tribe "cable news." You'll never hear about Mary Wainwright, or about her terrified sister.

Rachel won't make you consider such topics; neither will Nicolle or Lawrence. These millionaire stars would hold hands and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge before they'd stoop to such discussions, and if they tried to break bad in that way, their owners would make them stop.

Instead, they feed you Storyline when necessary. After that, they return to the principal product they sell you:

Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail.

Mary Wainwright could lay on the floor all day. Her plight wouldn't be offered on cable.

Storyline is a ubiquitous, performative substitute for actual discussion of such actual topics. Our discourse is run by Storyline, even among tribal favorites.

It's almost like our tribal tribunes "hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest!" Why does this winnowing process occur? Consider a guest essay in today's New York Times.

The essay was written by Eric Reinhart, a political anthropologist and physician at Northwestern University. Headline included, his essay starts as shown:

Doctors Aren’t Burned Out From Overwork. We’re Demoralized by Our Health System.

Doctors have long diagnosed many of our sickest patients with “demoralization syndrome,” a condition commonly associated with terminal illness that’s characterized by a sense of helplessness and loss of purpose. American physicians are now increasingly suffering from a similar condition, except our demoralization is not a reaction to a medical condition, but rather to the diseased systems for which we work.

The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care‌ to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, ‌at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive.

According to Reinhart, American physicians are increasingly demoralized. He traces this problem to "the diseased systems for which we work"—more specifically, to our nation's "lucrative system of for-profit medicine."

This is another topic you'll never see discussed by Rachel or Lawrence or Nicolle. They keep serving  the tribal food product they seem to know that we prefer—and they do so because our nation also maintains "a lucrative system of for-profit pseudo-journalism."

They'd rather talk about Stormy Daniels. Mary Wainwright, and her sister, need not apply!

These blue tribe tribunes today! When an event like Memphis occurs, they tend to fall back on Storyline, and then they quickly move on. 

Tomorrow, we'll start to look at what we can learn from the events which won't be discussed within their lucrative system. What types of information get thrown down the well, replaced by Storyline?

Tomorrow: Where the officers are


35 comments:


  1. Tsk, how horrible. All this, and without even considering the incoming nuclear destruction (not one of your brain-dead tribe's storylines, clearly)...

    ...any good news, dear Bob? Is your tribe, by chance, getting smaller? Anything?

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  2. I'm surprised we still have such a huge gun problem n this country, what with al the virtue-signaling (thoughts and prayers) those who are in a position to do something about it offer.

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  3. "Perhaps for that reason, at least in part, blue tribe tribunes quickly abandoned the topic. "

    No one has abandoned the topic. Members of the black congressional caucus wore pins at the State of the Union address saying "1870". That is the Henry Truman, a black unarmed man, was killed by police. Biden called for the passage of the George Floyd Police Reform Bill in his speech. None of that suggests that anyone in the blue tribe has abandoned the demand that police stop killing unarmed black people who they are sworn to protect not murder.

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  4. "That said, Storyline was everywhere when Memphis was being discussed—Storyline and its first cousin, Apparent Indifference. "

    Somerby seems to believe that everyone else feels the same way he does, but that is untrue. Would he call Cory Booker indifferent? Does he even know what Cory Booker has been doing? I'll bet he doesn't, based on his own silence about efforts on the left to change policing. Or does Somerby think that reform efforts only count when they are in the newspaper? Apparently so.

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  5. "Too many Americans live in fear that they may suffer abuse from police? What would be the appropriate number of people consigned to live in such fear? "

    None, why does Somerby even have to ask?

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  6. "The Post's enumeration of shooting deaths doesn't include such disasters."

    While Somerby is doing his nit-picky examination of a report that is largely accurate, after complaing that the left has "apparently" lost interest in police reform, he chooses some inappropriate words himself.

    What happened to Tyre Nichols was not a "disaster." It was second degree murder.

    disaster definition: "a sudden event, such as an accident or a natural catastrophe, that causes great damage or loss of life"

    What happened to Tyre Nichols was not an accident. Although the intent may not have been to kill him, the beating was deliberate, as was the delay administering medical attention after the EMTs arrived. Nor was any of this an act of nature.

    Somerby's word choice seeks to minimize what should be called a preventable tragedy, an atrocity, an abuse of police power and neglect of duty by the EMTs.

    Words matter. They also reveal attitudes. Somerby's words reveal his own indifference, which he today projects onto the so-called blue tribe. But Somerby has no idea what the rest of us feel about this death. He is trying to tell us how he wants us to feel, but in the process he shows us his own bankrupt soul, his lack of caring, his right wing desire to make this issue go away, even if he has to pretend it is already gone (hint: it isn't).

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  7. "You'll never hear about Smokey City from your favorite stars on blue tribe "cable news." You'll never hear about Mary Wainwright, or about her terrified sister."

    Oddly, we've never heard about this from Somerby either. He only raises such issues to batter Rachel Maddow and others on cable news, whose job is not to report on sociological topics or chronic conditions in the inner cities. Rachel is only on TV one day a week now, but is still Somerby's favorite whipping post. Why? And is Somerby really complaining that there is too little news about racial issues these days, after complaining that race has been mentioned too much?

    And notice the echoes in Somerby's essay today. You can hear the call: "what about black-on-black crime". This arises every time a black unarmed man is shot by police. And what can conservatives be thinking when they point this out? That black people shouldn't care about police killings because they kill so many of their own people? That murder is no big deal to black people in bad neighborhoods? (This Atlantic article clearly contradicts that idea.) Does one police failure (the failure to protect black people in such neighborhoods) excuse another (the failure to keep a traffic stop from becoming an execution)?

    Lately Somerby has been going full-on bigot. Today is no exception. As he performatively dotes on old black ladies dodging bullets, he suggests that liberals don't care about real crime (gun violence by black gangs), just unarmed citizens killed by cops. And this is a conservative meme, one that David in Cal has been raising every time liberals complain about yet another police killing. This is the standard gun industry response to gun violence in black neighborhoods. It is the standard excuse for ignoring the causes of such violence on the right. It translates to: liberals don't care about black people shooting each other, they only care about calling police racist.

    If there were any doubt about where Somerby stands, this should make it clear. Somerby should be ashamed, but he won't be. Conservatives never are.

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  8. "After that, they return to the principal product they sell you:

    Trump Trump Trump Trump Jail."

    Yes, I agree. Trump should got to jail. But what has that got to do with gang violence and domestic violence in Memphis?

    And why isn't Somerby reminding us that it is the Republicans who opposed the Domestic Violence Against Women Act Reauthorization in 2022? Not all of the shots fired in black neighborhoods are gang-related. Of course, that is true in white neighborhoods too, where murder is up considerably since 2019. Does Somerby only care about murder when it is black people committing it? Is this a racial thing with Somerby, where he turns a blind eye to the white-on-white crimes in his own backyard? Yes, even Baltimore has such crimes! I've never seen Rachel talk about those either -- because she doesn't report on the murder rate anywhere.

    Who does? I've seen Deon Cole, Wyatt Cenac and John Oliver talk about guns and crime in inner cities. But I've never heard Somerby call out a single Republican Senator or House Member because of their lack of interest in controlling gun violence. (And yes, murders can be committed using other weapons, but those shootings into the living rooms of old black ladies are not being done with knives, or poison or ropes, so let's get real here.)

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  9. Believe it or not, there was a time Bob
    wasn’t interested in “guessing” what the
    the press is “not super interested” in.
    It’s hard to fathom now, but Bob once
    seemed to be a serious person.
    There is a lot of bad to be reckoned
    with in the mostly left press’s coverage
    of deaths from police violence. But when
    Bob talks about “standard storyline” he’s
    telling you all the cases seem the same to
    HIM, and jeering that the cops were black
    this time. I see no evidence that the press
    had abandoned the story,
    Bob complains about “disregarding the
    rest” when he won’t consider the freakish
    crisis of Trump in any serious way. not because he
    necessarily likes Trump (though Bob often
    displays a rancid, mean spirited tendency
    Trump may massage) but because he is
    too chickenshit to face what the right has
    become as it clearly illustrates that lefties
    (Horrors!) are smarter, better people. And they
    were so mean to the confederacy!
    So Bob brings the hate today.
    The State of the Union Speech looks like
    a line in the sand, with the degenerate
    extremists of the right exposing themselves
    with naked intensity. Bob may not
    be able to comment on his friends
    actions last night.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. The media has certainly not been super interested (and super politically performative) in the murder of Eunice Dwumfour.

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  10. "Storyline is a ubiquitous, performative substitute for actual discussion of such actual topics."

    It is the nature of the news that it consists of brief stories about current events, not deep dive sociological treatises about crime in inner cities. As Somerby himself illustrated (with that Atlantic article), magazines can go into more detail. Journal articles are more scholarly and consider causes and possible remedies more than trade magazines like Atlantic, but books go even deeper. All of these exist for people to read, self-selected based on the depth with which they wish to consider an issue. If Somerby doesn't know this, his mother's Harvard tuition money was wasted. Knowing what to find in different sources is part of literacy.

    So, why does Somerby keep looking for the wrong info in the wrong places? Basically, he wants to denigrate the media, undermine public faith in its information, so that readers will be more open to the disinformation spewed by the right wing. The right has been attempting to undermine the media for decades. It is basic to how authoritarian leaders seize and hold power. It opens the door to people like Trump and DeSantis who lie and manipulate artificial issues in order to distract and control followers.

    It cannot be an accident that Somerby is doing this. The only question is why he went from being a Bernie-style leftist to supporting Trump and the right. Given the intrusion of Russia into the election, I suspect that he was offered some money at a period when he was mad because Hillary was preferred over Bernie, which let him blame the Democrats for making the wrong choice and justified his choosing the cash over commitment to liberal values. Now he is stuck, but perhaps he has learned to enjoy free expression of bigotry enabled by Trump and his ilk. But that is all speculation. There is no way to know for sure -- I wouldn't even trust what he says here, were he to "come clean" about his motives. Too many lies have been told. You can believe Somerby and become a right winger or you can distrust Somerby and stick with what you know to be true in the world. I choose the latter. YMMV

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    1. Not Corby. Corby left the building a long time ago.

      Delete
    2. Harrassing other posters is against the Google Terms of Service and can be reported as abuse.

      Delete
    3. No I am not Corby.

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    4. No ma'am, YOU are Corby. You've always been Corby.

      I ought to know: I've always been here.

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    5. If you have always been here then you know that Corby hasn't posted anything here in literally years. You are obviously off your meds again. Go ask whoever you live with to help you calm down.

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    6. Did you know, Corby ... that you are attempting to bring an outside party into this situation? Did you know that? You are, Corby.

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    7. Note to Cecelia -- do you understand now why some people prefer not to use a nym on the internet?

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    8. Corby is not a woman's name, so why are you referring to the person you think is Corby as "ma'am"? Would you be attempting to harrass Corby if you thought he was male?

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    9. Anonymouse 5:22pm, that makes no sense. This anonymouse engaged in these shenanigans is obviously a cretin.

      I’m often accused of writing posts anonymously and of being in drag. I’m also charged with lying about being married and a mom.

      Is that harassment?

      If so, I haven’t taken it that way.

      It’s merely felt like anonymouse pettiness and pique.

      Just like that of your cretin friend.

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  13. "The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care‌ to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. "

    The reason why the democracies in Europe have public health care is because the economic and social disruption following WWII provided both the need (to treat veterans and civilians injured in the war, disease following the war) and the political opportunity to revise their health care system from the ground up. It takes a major upheaval to make major changes in entrenched systems. Under a different leader, we might have made progress in changing our health system under covid, but we had Trump and he barely addressed the pandemic at all, much less revising how hospitals treated cases. Now we are in a worse situation than before, although Republicans have not been able to damage ACA.

    Somerby acts as if this is the fault of liberals, when WE did not elect Trump. Somerby helped do that, by attacking Hillary and repeating conservative memes during Trump's campaign. He did the same in the run-up to 2020, telling us that ALL of the Democratic candidates for the nomination were bad, and criticizing various ones. That isn't how you achieve change in health care (or change of any kind except the dismantling of what progress has been made). That makes it hard to believe that Somerby is sincere when he calls for improvement of our health care system.

    I did read the article that Somerby quotes on physician burnout. It is wrong to say that physicians are not burned out because of the pandemic and because of overwork. So many nurses and technicians quit during the pandemic (some taking higher paid floater jobs) that hospitals were chronically understaffed, which means more work and more stress for those remaining. This strain may have made the weaknesses of the system more obvious, but it doesn't provide the resources to improve anything.

    Profit is an easy target, but profit-taking wasn't the cause of much of the dysfunction. Even a public health system needs to be organized, staffed and supplied properly.

    But Somerby is incapable of a serious analysis of what is wrong. He is using this issue to complain at his favorite targets again. Why isn't Rachel proposing a plan to deal with these problems? (She is too busy pointing out that Nazis pose a serious problem to our democracy, even today, and more power to her!) I predict that Somerby will become even more negative about American health care as his own health problems increase (as they do in old age). It is hard to separate one's personal discontents from systemic issues, but it is easy to grab a discontented doctor's opinion piece and wave it in our faces. I found the physician's insistence that this was not due to covid to be unsupported and unconvincing. And no, doctors are not quitting because they dislike being well-paid. But we are not going to become Sweden while Somerby supports Republican memes.

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  14. "They'd rather talk about Stormy Daniels. Mary Wainwright, and her sister, need not apply!"

    Stormy Daniels made news by suing the president. Mary Wainwright may be a good person, but she didn't do anything to be reported in the news.

    This isn't rocket science. Imagine how long the news would be if it reported on every discontent of society, every wrong in any person's life. If Mary Wainright should be in the news, what about her next door neighbor or the guy across the street?

    Somerby is being foolish. But what else is new? (No, that shouldn't be reported in the news either.)

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  15. The biggest thing in the news today is President Biden's State of the Union address. Somerby says nothing whatsoever about it. What liberal wouldn't take a moment to acknowledge the strength of Biden's message to the nation?

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    1. Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby Corby







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    2. No, I believe Corby would take a moment to acknowledge Biden’s speech. So you’re wrong, 3:32 breath.

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  16. The Atlantic, a long time member of the mainstream media, published David Graham’s article that Somerby found worth quoting. That is an example of the mainstream media doing its job, even according to Somerby’s standards.

    He accuses the New York Times of not caring about the deaths it talks about in its editorial. It’s difficult to judge the truth of that assertion.

    Then he says “We also tend to disregard the suffering which underlies that disproportion.”, “we” meaning , I dunno, the New York Times editorial board and MSNBC, but not, presumably, the Atlantic?

    At any rate, by “disproportion”, he means the proportion of blacks who are killed by police.

    But Somerby, who has brought the Atlantic article into his discussion, has not shown that the high crime rate in areas like Smokey City is the cause or even a cause of policing problems. The suffering of the residents in high crime urban areas is certainly real, but systemic problems in policing (which even the conservative David French now acknowledges) can and do exist as a separate phenomenon. And that is the focus of the Times editorial.

    And since, as Somerby has pointed out before, many of those 1,096 killed by police were white, what do conditions in the predominantly black Smokey City area of Memphis have to do with those (white) deaths?

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  17. Asking whether the New York Times editorial board, or any writer or speaker in general, really “cares” about the people they discuss, is a fool’s game that Somerby used to explicitly eschew. Does Somerby really care? Does Graham? Does Ms Wainwright?

    A biased or sour blogger can always find a way to answer in the negative. But it is important to discuss and publicize the issue, and that in itself serves a worthwhile purpose.

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  18. "The United States is the only large high-income nation that doesn’t provide universal health care‌ to its citizens. Instead, it maintains a lucrative system of for-profit medicine. For decades, ‌at least tens of thousands of preventable deaths have occurred each year because health care here is so expensive."
    Our corporate mass media, which takes in millions in ad revenue from that greedy industry, led the attack on anyone who tried to change that. The main example that comes to mind is the vicious attacks on the two candidates who made Medicare-for-all the center of their campaigns: Howard Dean in 2004 and Bernie Sanders in 2016, and 2020.

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    1. Come come now, Hillary Clinton was on it long before those two pretenders. And she got bombed in 2016 by corporate mass media.

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