Covington High School Issue

[*michaelsean*]

(01-30-2019, 10:58 PM)Dill Wrote: Finally back on the computer.  I am going to answer this response first today, to explain what makes it "interesting" for me.

In 2016, as Trump began his successful run for president, longstanding concerns about the cumulative political effects of alternative (right-wing, non-MSM) media suddenly became more urgent, creating a spike in publications by philosophers, historians, ex-military and intelligence analysts,  social scientists of all stripes, and even conservative never-Trumpers examining the damage to social authority, democratic institutions, and public discourse as the promotion of spectacle has displaced logical, fact-based inquiry into social and political issues in news and social media--to the point that MILLIONS of voters comfortably accept, for example, Trump's view of ISIS or Iran or Russia or NK or the southern border over professional intel assessments by our intel community.  

One element of this larger response to fragmenting authority and trust in public institutions has been the attempt of journalists seeking both to describe the logic of the new mediascape and to combat its ill effects by increasing critical media literacy.  This has been a largely losing battle as, for example, Trump's definition of "fake news" has come to dominate public discourse even in this barely liberal leaning forum, rather than the more useful and critically limited one which journalists originally coined to refer to the use of fake news sites purveying outright lies--not real news produced by real news organizations which can be mistaken or slanted or just anti-Trump. 

So it is in the context of this general effort of journalists and others seeking to get a handle on how the media "works" today that I read all three of the articles I posted on the Covington HS incident. Their value for me is whether how well they advance our understanding of this new media environment. The Covington boys are best the secondary object of critique in these essays, which are focused on media response and the dialectic between "left" and right media.

What you've dismissed as more "liberal speak" in Molly Roberts article appears to me as yet another of these efforts to describe the logic of the new media, this time in response to the Covington HS moment and focused primarily on what many would call the "liberal" or MSM.  The first version of the video is "concocted" with help of "inauthentic internet actors."  She acknowledges the deplorable "hate mobbing" that followed the first video version of the event. That is no defense of "horrendous reporting" at least.   

She argues that NEITHER the liberal nor the "Republican" version capture the truth, referencing the "mess of different segments" of video which can be cobbled together in various ways.  Given this constantly recurring problem of fragmentation and decentering in today's reporting (which, to my knowledge, "liberals" have not been complaining about for the last 20 years) she argues that "context demands more than watching a single event from all possible angles." It requires "understanding the world in which the event happened"--which I take to mean historical/social contextualization of some sort. Thus she still affirms that the loathsome character of boys behavior in the original behavior is unredeemed by later revelations that others were acting badly as well or "they did it first." This is not the same as picking whatever version fits one's ideology and agenda, and then running with that, since there is still the requirement of empirical verification--a requirement ignored in the final liberal assessment of the incident in its hurried response to the right-wing media's accusations of bias.  If I understand her correctly, she is arguing that many versions of the "same" event doesn't mean all versions are equally valid, nor does it mean that constructing and accepting a final version is simply adjusting events to a pre-existing agenda. If liberal media has traditionally been more evidence- and less spectacle-based in the past, it may now be coming unmoored, capable of being knocked out of its lane, so to speak, by the more aggressive right wing media, making for an even more unstable media environment.  That is the central problem Roberts addresses. 

First of all, this assignment was due Tuesday night so you're lucky I even read it.  I'm going to have to reread the articles, but you seem to give a lot of credit to the authors here.  When I see the basically complete omission of Phillipps from the dialogue, then I have a hard time believing this is some unbiased attempt to look at the bigger picture.  If I walked into a group of Native Americans, and belted out Dies Irae five inches from some dudes face, and some of them started saying nasty things to me, I doubt I would be all but left out of the conversation of the bigger picture as far as complicity.  I notice a lot of keep your religion in your church people thinking his intervention was just dandy because it was religious.