Asymmetry Between Professional Journalism and Propaganda

Ronan, a fine young man in a complicated world

CONTEXT

Professional new reporting is tedious, difficult and complicated. Information sources often lie, have secret agendas and/or withhold or distort key facts that undermine a narrative they want to convey. To make the situation worse, reporters face enormous time pressure and a need to deliver clean dramatic narratives to a public that is easily bored with just facts and sound reasoning. Drama and violence catches the attention of eyeballs and minds, not dull facts, nuance and shades of gray.

Some of that (~40% ?) reflects how the human mind evolved. Humans like bright shiny things that are easy to comprehend and outrage, laugh or feel smug and self-righteous about. That emotional reacting is a lot of fun. But some, probably most, of that pro-infoTAINMENT mindset results from our culture and its relentless winner-take-all, polarized for-profit lack of morality. The market for human attention is intense and full on 24/7/365. Almost everyone with something to sell is desperate for the attention of as many people as possible. The ones not desperate for attention are usually selling something illegal.

Dissecting a reporter

A New York Times article, Is Ronan Farrow Too Good to Be True?, goes through some of Farrow's reporting and raises concerns about how close to, or over, the edge of professionalism vs sensationalism the reporter has come on several occasions. The article is full of tedious facts, context and analysis. It is definitely not infotainment. It is info. The key point of the article is that coming too close to the fuzzy gray line or crossing into or past it imposes a serious cost on professional journalism. Call it the damage zone.

The NYT is clear that Farrow did not make anything up. He just crossed into the damage zone several times. That hurts the credibility of all professional journalism. In these polarized times with rampant mass propaganda, coming into to the damage zone gets exaggerated and used to smear everyone else the tribe does not like.

The NYT writes about one incident:

“It was a breathtaking story, written by The New Yorker’s marquee reporter and published with an attention-grabbing headline: “Missing Files Motivated the Leak of Michael Cohen’s Financial Records.” 

In it, the reporter, Ronan Farrow, suggests something suspicious unfolding inside the Treasury Department: A civil servant had noticed that records about Mr. Cohen, the personal lawyer for President Trump, mysteriously vanished from a government database in the spring of 2018. Mr. Farrow quotes the anonymous public servant as saying he was so concerned about the records’ disappearance that he leaked other financial reports to the media to sound a public alarm about Mr. Cohen’s financial activities. 

The story set off a frenzied reaction, with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes calling it “an amazing shocking story about a whistle-blower” and his colleague Rachel Maddow describing it as “a meteor strike.” Congressional Democrats demanded answers, and the Treasury Department promised to investigate. 

Two years after publication, little of Mr. Farrow’s article holds up, according to prosecutors and court documents. The Treasury Department records on Michael Cohen never went “missing.” That was merely the story put forward by the civil servant, an Internal Revenue Service analyst named John Fry, who later pleaded guilty to illegally leaking confidential information.”

What happened was that Cohen’s financial records were just put on restricted access. That is a normal practice in government to prevent leaks. The records never disappeared. Farrow's source either lied to him or was unaware that the records were simply subject to restricted access. The now-disgraced lawyer, Michael Avenatti, encouraged Fry to leak the documents. The NYT article comments that Avenatti was “barely mentioned in Mr. Farrow’s article.” The NYT characterized Avenatti as “a passionate antagonist of Mr. Cohen.”

Scrupulous attention to mind numbing details like this is what distinguishes professional journalism from dark free speech.[1] The NYT analysis of content that Farrow generates indicates that it is sometimes misleading. That fits my definition of crossing into the damage zone. NYT puts it like this:

“His work, though, reveals the weakness of a kind of resistance journalism that has thrived in the age of Donald Trump: That if reporters swim ably along with the tides of social media and produce damaging reporting about public figures most disliked by the loudest voices, the old rules of fairness and open-mindedness can seem more like impediments than essential journalistic imperatives.

That can be a dangerous approach, particularly in a moment when the idea of truth and a shared set of facts is under assault.”

What is the point here?

The point to be made is that the line between journalistic professionalism and most everything else is often complicated to clearly see, hard to avoid and easy to step into or across. As the NYT points out, when a reporter fails to disclose what they do not know for sure, a dull story is converted into a dramatic story. Telling people a great story, but then saying that although X is true, Y and Z have not been corroborated. That is a real buzz kill.

What it does show is, among other things, (1) how the human mind greatly prefers the simple dramatic to the complicated and/or ordinary, (2) how the human mind rapidly and unconsciously fills in undisclosed details to make an incomplete or ambiguous story into a satisfying but dramatic narrative, (3) how easy it is for a reporter trying to be professional to cross into the damage zone, knowingly or not, and (4) how much professional, social and economic pressure there is to cross into the damage zone, morality be damned.

For professional journalists, if the world of things they can say without entering the damage zone is X, the world of things the dark free speech artist can say is literally about 1,000X. Think about that. The playing field is heavily tilted to favor dark free speech over honest free speech. Dark free speech has about 1,000 players on the field for every player that honest free speech can muster.

That is how the human mind evolved. That is how our morals be damned, for-profit culture plays the game.


Footnote:
1. Dark free speech: Constitutionally or legally protected (1) lies and deceit to distract, misinform, confuse, polarize and/or demoralize, (2) unwarranted opacity to hide inconvenient truths, facts and corruption (lies and deceit of omission), (3) unwarranted emotional manipulation (i) to obscure the truth and blind the mind to lies and deceit, and (ii) to provoke irrational, reason-killing emotions and feelings, including fear, hate, anger, disgust, distrust, intolerance, cynicism, pessimism and all kinds of bigotry including racism, and (4) ideologically-driven motivated reasoning and other ideologically-driven biases that unreasonably distort reality and reason. (my label, my definition)