Media

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (4): Patterns of Conflict

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I am not sure if you have been following the saga of the North Carolina GOP nominee for governor, Mark Robinson. Last week CNN’s K-File, “the leading investigation team for the social, mobile generation,” reported that “more than a decade ago” Robinson had posted various comments to an … um… adult web site under a pseudonym.

CNN provided several pull quotes of Robinson’s supposed comments that expressed fondness for certain genres of the adult industry, another stating that “I’m a black NAZI!” and another that “slavery was not bad.”

CNN has been going to town for the past week on this, reporting on what Robinson wrote, then reporting on reactions to what he wrote, then reporting on his campaign crumbling based on what they reported, and then reporting on reactions to the campaign crumbling… you know the drill. This story showed up on every corporate media outlet with every story stating, often several times, that Robinson was “Trump endorsed.”

Did I mention that the Robinson story got more and longer play than the second attempt on Trump’s life?

Let’s face it, while Robinson denies the story and we can poke holes about a few sensational quotes and the larger context, Robinson is politically finished. He was already behind in the polls before the story broke and people, or enough of them, exercise an abundance of caution when it comes to casting votes for people they suspect might be p**n-watching Black Nazis. That’s just the way life is.

Early in my career I was taught an early version of “dance like no one is watching, but text and e-mail like it will end up in court” — or as my mentor said “act like what you are doing is going to end up above the fold of a newspaper.” I also recognized, thirty years ago, that the Internet is forever.

I’m not going to excuse what Robinson wrote, and if as a Christian he is being a hypocrite in some ways, well, so are many of the people I see on Sunday. We are all dependent on God’s grace. Robinson is finished. His staff is quitting, no doubt fund-raising is collapsing faster than his polls.

However, let’s leave Robinson the man aside for a moment and focus on the larger structure of the story.

A man running for governor, in a race and state that has little to no national significance, made some inane and perverted comments on an adult web site, more than a decade ago and long before he entered public life. CNN did not provide any evidence that Robinson has engaged in any such behavior since then, let alone while being in public office.

This same man who is running for governor has been dropping in the polls for the past three months — from a tie in June to 14 points down at the beginning of September — long before this story broke.

So in the middle of one of the most contentious elections in our nation’s history, already studded with extraordinary events such as multiple attempted assassinations of one candidate and the last-minute withdrawal of an incumbent president, CNN decides to focus its “crack” K-File team on this obscure state-level race.

CNN made an extraordinary investment of resources into investigating Robinson. The piece on Robinson runs more than 1,800 words, nearly 2x the average word count for the other K-File stories which deal almost exclusively with people and issues on the national tickets. The Robinson exposé broke with the general “he-said, she-said” pattern of those other stories and actually involved some real digging through primary material. CNN traced Robinson’s supposed pseudonym through other sites and forums, through Twitter. A real, honest-to-goodness investigative report.

Then there was the aforementioned broad coverage that CNN gave to its reporting on Robinson, giving it multiple spots every day on its network and top-page coverage on its web site. The story got national play across multiple outlets for several days. This incredible focus on an obscure race in North Carolina came during not only the final weeks of the most tense national elections in our history, but a few days after the second assassination attempt against the Republican nominee.

Note, again, for all of the work that went into the story, CNN provided no evidence that Robinson has visited any such adult sites or made any related remarks in more than a decade.

So why did CNN do it? Why run this hit piece? A proverbial mountain out of a mole hill? In the doldrums of an off-year election, this might have been a one-day story with maybe a follow-up or two but not the multiple day media frenzy it became. A story of local or regional importance but not this national feeding frenzy. Why?

Was it another entry from the old playbook of “exposing the high holy Republican hypocrite?” No, Robinson is too small-game given the circumstances.

Maybe to hurt Trump in the swing state of North Carolina by depressing Republican turn-out? Perhaps, but if so, a little overboard. The story did break right before ballots were printed, so Robinson is going to be an albatross on the NC GOP from now until Nov. 5. But that’s too local and regional.

Provide a little stray voltage to switch the topic from the second Trump assassination attempt? No, this story was in the works for weeks, and plus, the lefty media has already latched onto the P. Diddy story to provide that electrical juice.

Provide a pretext to keep mentioning the words “Trump,” “slavery,” “Nazi” and “p**n” together in the same sentence for several days? Yeah, now I think we’re onto something. The other night I heard the opening from Monday’s Rachel Maddow show where she repeated Robinson’s comments, linked him to Trump, and came to the conclusion that this was what Robinson (and Trump) had in store for all of us if elected.

This is nit-picking on steroids, but it’s information warfare par excellence. After all, the media isn’t looking back in time to report on how more-important figures than Mark Robinson also have shady pasts: Tim Walz and China, Bernie Sanders and his cozying up to Nicaragua and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

CNN’s hit piece is accomplishing three goals for the Left. First, it is appealing to swing voters by pointing to what they can sell as a real-life Republican fascist (Robinson). Second, it’s strengthening cohesion among the Democratic base by using Robinson as a symbol of the stakes involved. Three, and I think most important, it’s sowing confusion and doubt among parts of the Republican coalition, both by exploiting exising fissures and by spreading demoralization at a critical time.

Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt.

John Boyd had a lot to say about the psychological aspects of conflict, from “Organic Design for Command and Control”:

Operate inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action loops to enmesh adversary in a world of uncertainty, doubt, mistrust, confusion, disorder, fear, panic chaos … and/or fold adversary back inside himself so that he cannot cope with events/efforts as they unfold.

Cohesion vs. Disruption

That’s what the Robinson story is about.

If he was around today, Boyd would have a lot to say about what’s about to go down over the next several months.

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (3): Chaffapalooza Edition

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Wrapping up from Monday’s post

First, from the comments section, Nate Winchester writes:

I like to call the second method the “chaff” method (referencing missile defenses of planes). Especially since it’s pretty effective to throw up so much stuff people get too exhausted to ever bother seeking out the truth.

Chaff, that’s perfect and catchier than my term “diversion.” Thank you, Nate. Consider your idea stolen.

Second, regarding the media’s use of chaff, I cited a clip from NBC News which placed the second Trump assassination attempt within the context of “increasingly fierce rhetoric” by implicitly linking Republican claims about Haitians in Springfield to bomb threats in that city.

This is the classic “tomato, tomahto ploy” used to depict both sides as guilty of a misdeed (when only one is), so let’s just call the whole thing off. Except that on Monday, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine stated:

“Thirty-three threats; Thirty-three hoaxes,” Gov. Mike DeWine announced during a press conference. “I want to make that very, very clear. None of these had any validity at all.”

DeWine said during the press conference that many of the threats came from “overseas.”

“We have people unfortunately overseas who are taking these actions,” DeWine added. “Some of them are coming from one particular country.”

Overseas? Well now. I doubt there are many people overseas who are being incited by JD Vance to call in bomb threats, so what do you think is going on? DeWine used the term “many” and not “all”, but I bet the rest of them stemmed from the same information warfare campaign chaff dispenser, one that also has the dual purpose of depicting the average Trump voter as a “gap-toothed Cletus.”

As far as Lester Holt and NBC News goes, mission accomplished.

And… as far as the identity of that “one particular country,” does anybody know what Thierry Breton is up to these days or where he is? He’s all into misinformation, meddling in our elections, and I heard he’s got time on his hands. 

 
Third, I had the over/under of the Trump assassination story disappearing as Thursday. Well it looks the under was the way to go. Yesterday the top headlines on CNN, New York Times, and the Washington Post were P. Diddy, exploding pagers, and Kamala at NABJ. Well yes there is the NY Post and Fox, but only them. As for the through the day, a story or two about the near-assassination would emerge way down below the digital fold, like the body of a Mafia victim that briefly bobbed to the surface of the water before sinking forever into the deep.

The Most Wrecked House on the Market

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So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is a painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.

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You Don’t Hate the Media Enough (2)

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Stories like the second Trump assassination attempt allow us to view the various media strategies of the Left unfolding in real-time. I alternate between horror and fascination, watching how the media tries to grapple with impossible stories and tries to gaslight us yet again. L’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace.

We need to understand the framework in which the media operates. As a longtime mentor once said to me, the media reports stories, they don’t report events. Events are data, stories sell papers/ads/impressions. It seems at times most stories in the media fall into one of the two masterplots, stranger comes to town or hero goes on a journey.

Of course there is the (false) assumption that the story being told is an accurate portrayal of events. Forget bias and sleaziness, that assumption just fails as a matter of epistemology.

The story paradigm has two other aspects that are important. The first is that stories have a limited life span. Not only do stories get stale over time and fall out of the public’s consciousness, but stories can be replaced in that consciousness by newer stories. The second is that media stories for the Left are never about the story as much as they are about the story ending and its lessons for society as a whole: gun control, misogyny, Orange Man Bad. The media writes every story not just about the present, but based on the story’s past, for its future.

The media typically knows the story they want to write and they will then find the facts to back it up. A reporter or editor knows the right name in their Rolodex that will provide them with the pull quote they are looking for to justify their actions.

The second assassination attempt comes at an awkward time for the Left, so, clearly, they want it squelched. Going back to what I wrote about Audrey Hale, a smart media outlet which doesn’t mind acting as the PR firm for the Left can roll even with the worst of stories, if it understands that you don’t have to “defeat” a story on its merits if you understand how to manipulate its arc.

So we can expect the media to use two strategies.

The first is suppression. Unlike with the Audrey Hale story, with the second Trump assassination attempt there is no manifesto to suppress. And unlike Thomas Matthew Crooks the second shooter is alive. However, the media uses an important trick in how it gathers information. If it wants to speed up a story’s arc and keep the story alive with new revelations, it will deploy assets into the field and keep digging up new information — new, exciting stuff to write every day. It will then juice the story with the appropriate pull quote from an “expert” from the media Rolodex.

If the media wants to slow down a story it will rely on news releases, such as they are, from investigators or authorities. It’s that relationship with authority which determines where the story is going to go, and who is going to define the story — the media or the investigating authority?

A good example of this is a headline from last night’s Washington Post:



“Investigating” “Potential” “Attempt” “FBI”? This is the type of damage control verbiage a press agent would use for a client who got caught on the 2024 equivalent of Epstein Island (not that we would ever know). How much actual digging is the WPost going to do on this story — or are they just getting their pull quotes so that they can consider it case closed? Something to watch for, going forward.

Another example of this phenomenon was the “Cats of Springfield” story, which the media claimed had been debunked on the basis of a phone call to an official in Springfield. The right quote from the right authority and case closed. No media outlet actually went to Springfield and conducted an investigation. If anybody does get around to conducting an investigation, the results will come, much like the eventual revelation of Hale’s writings, too late.

It’s good DeSantis is going to launch his own investigation regarding the assassination attempt, because otherwise we would probably start getting results by next Christmas.

The second strategy is diversion to another story line, through the use of stray voltage or simply by putting up other dust to cloud the immediate picture and slow down the clean narrative of someone trying to kill the Republican nominee (again). In less than 12 hours after the aborted assassination attempt we had the following:

-There is the “Trump had it coming due to his rhetoric” narrative, which is the equivalent of the “short skirt” argument in a rape case. No word yet if the media will investigate itself for its own rhetoric calling Trump Hitler or a Caesar who would destroy the American Republic.

-There is the attempt to draw an equivalence between the assassination attempts and Vance’s rhetoric regarding Springfield narrative. You know where this is going, the “tomato” “tomahto” argument — so let’s just call the thing off.

-Then there is the pure stray voltage angle of this is an election campaign stories that are always just around the corner. I’m sure there will be a story coming soon, breathlessly reporting Kamala buying a bag of Doritos.

The over/under of this story disappearing without a trace, unless DeSantis or someone else can grab control, is this Thursday.

Visible Signs

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My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.

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