A day or two ago, Ron DeSantis sent out a press release. A professional reporter at Axios, Ben Montgomery, called it propaganda. Axios fired Montgomery for being tainted by stating his assessment that the press release was propaganda, not news. My initial reaction was the same as how Esquire describes it:
A point of personal privilege: Ben Montgomery is a friend, a vastly talented reporter and writer, and a member of an informal group of writers to which I am proud to belong. By contrast, Axios stands revealed as a creepy little band of Beltway-drunk dilettantes who, taken together, don't have the courage God gave the average assistant night city editor at a 30,000-circulation daily. If there's one thing I despise most in this business, it's suits who don't stand behind their reporters in the face of unjust, performative outrage and flinch before they're hit.
On Wednesday, Axios fired Ben. From the Washington Post:
The news release sent Monday afternoon said DeSantis, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, had hosted a roundtable “exposing the diversity equity and inclusion scam in higher education.” It also called for prohibiting state funds from being used to support DEI efforts. “We will expose the scams they are trying to push onto students across the country,” DeSantis said in the statement. Montgomery, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, replied to the email three minutes after getting it. “This is propaganda, not a press release,” he wrote to the Department of Education press office. About an hour after that, the Education Department’s communication officer, Alex Lanfranconi, shared Montgomery’s reply on Twitter, where it has since been viewed more than 1 million times. Montgomery said the news release had “no substance,” adding that he “read the whole thing and it was just a series of quotes about how bad DEI was.”
Here's the news release. If anything, Montgomery understated his case.
(I have a long-standing hatred for the rules of “objectivity” when they are used as an excuse for timidity and professional ass-covering by said echelons.) But this was a private communication between a reporter and a government official that the official shared in a public forum. Even the most hidebound traditional journalism ethics don't touch this. It's the apparatchik who should be fired for sharing a private communication for, yes, propaganda purposes.
But the official did so in the hope that Axios would prove to behave like the thoroughgoing chickenshits they've proven themselves to be. Presto! A Pulitzer finalist is out of work. The manipulative desk jockey probably will get a raise.
The press release is shown below:
Questions
So, did DeSantis put out propaganda or actual news? What if it is ~50% news and ~50% not news or not truths or sound reasoning? Is it responsible journalism to call out propaganda or not when it exists? Is there such a thing as propaganda? Did Axios goof or not?Context
In my opinion, this raises a critically important point about dark free speech, modern American politics and the mainstream media. It took the MSM months and months and thousands of of lies before a few in the MSM slowly, tentatively started calling Trump's lies lies. Before then they were usually called false or misleading statements. Lies differs from false because it asserts intent to deceive. It took me about a month in the weeks before before the 2016 election to realize that Trump was not ignorant or sloppy. It was obvious that he was a blatant liar. I had that figured out by May or June of 2016 after it became clear that Trump might win the GOP nomination. It took the MSM another ~18-24 months to figure it out, and some arguably still have not fully figured this out.
In those early days, every time I pointed out a Trump lie at a radical right politics site, I got vicious blowback and plenty of rancid insults. I was accused and vilified for allegedly lying about Trump being a liar. The radical right base rejected it completely, even when I cited and linked to the sources of my information.
Now here we are in 2023. Inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning are now routinely rejected out of hand by an authoritarian radical right political movement. The morally rotted radical right wealth and power movement routinely deploys copious amounts of divisive, polarizing, profoundly mendacious dark free speech, i.e., propaganda.
As far as I can tell, there really is such a thing as effective propaganda in politics. It does exist. And, it is undeniably enormously damaging to democracy, civil society and respect for inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning.
Questions again
Does that context put this in a different light? Did DeSantis put out propaganda or actual news? Is it responsible journalism to call out propaganda or not when it exists? Is there such a thing as propaganda? Did Axios goof or not? How should things like this be analyzed?
No comments:
Post a Comment