Everybody's a critic

Lest you think the culture war would somehow fade into the scenery of the drone-haunted hellscape that is the presidential transition, here's a cross-media example of how and why it's here for a bit. Amid the thuggery, though, take a moment to enjoy the skill with which the players manage to step on even the most obvious of rakes.

First up is the Daily Signal, now purportedly independent but until recently the daily media arm of the Heritage Foundation, feeling very put-upon indeed:

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the Broadway cast of “& Juliet” in New York City this past Saturday. On the surface, Jackson is having fun and fulfilling what she said was a dream of hers, but the implications of such a stint are much more reprehensible than meets the eye.

“& Juliet” is a woke, jukebox musical reimagining of Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” with a twist.

Poor kids. Who's going to be the first to tell them about "West Side Story"?

According to the official website, “‘& Juliet’ asks: What would happen next if Juliet didn’t end it all over Romeo?”

Jackson was invited by the “& Juliet” team to perform a brief walk-on role written specifically for her, she told National Public Radio.

The musical also features a new character, “May,” Juliet’s nonbinary best friend who uses he/she/they pronouns. It is fitting for Jackson to join this type of show since she, when asked by Sen. Marsha Blackburn during her Supreme Court confirmation hearing to define the word “woman,” simply replied: “I can’t.”

If you're scoring along at home, the answer is "someone who covers her drink when [cabinet nominee of your choice] walks into the room." But there's a point here:

Jackson’s time on Broadway highlights the stark contrast in the way conservative and liberal justices are allowed to live their lives in the public eye.

Conservative Justice Clarence Thomas faced an ethics controversy for vacationing with longtime friend and Republican donor Harlan Crow and not reporting it on financial disclosures. Thomas claimed in a statement he had no reason to report these trips since Crow had no “business before the court.”

Jackson, on the other hand, is given a Broadway debut simply because it’s supposedly her dream, and she is celebrated in the name of “female empowerment.”

Let's work on that one a little, shall we? Take your time.

While Jackson attracts a large audience of excited theatergoers, conservative justices like Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito attract assassination attempts.

There is a demonstrable (and unsurprising) double standard in Broadway’s attitude toward conservatives, too. Brandon Dixon, a former cast member of “Hamilton” on Broadway, read a note to former Vice President Mike Pence from the stage at the conclusion of a performance Pence attended in 2016.

Dixon, speaking on behalf of the cast made up exclusively of racial minorities, lambasted the then-vice president-elect, who was still present, saying, “We are the diverse America who are alarmed that your new administration will not protect us.”

As Jackson takes time away from a still-in-session Supreme Court to grace the Great White Way, the stark contrast in attitude toward conservatives and liberals stares audiences right in the face.

Just a thought -- have you guys heard there's a train that can get you back from a Saturday night on Broadway in time for a Monday start? But the Heritage types aren't done with Justice Jackson, and Fox News is happy to help:

Read more »

What if it isn't a saber-toothed tiger?

There's actually something pertinent to say here about journalism's next few years, but first, enjoy the sourcing and other routines in Monday morning's lead story at the Fox homepage:

A New Jersey drone pilot says his device lost power and was forced to descend from a restricted chunk of airspace while the mystery flier he was trying to investigate managed to stay airborne despite a signal designed to shut down legal drones.

Michael B, a podcaster and paranormal investigator behind the Terror Talk Productions YouTube channel, lives near the Picatinny Arsenal, an Army facility near where dozens of sightings have been reported in recent weeks. He was flying in the area, attempting to get a closer look at a larger, unidentified object he believes is a drone.

"There was a drone just hanging out," he told FOX 5 New York. "I had full battery life. Not 3 minutes into the flight, I lost control of the drone."

Ever wonder why the national Fox operation is always well stocked with tales of episodic crime, Black People Behaving Badly and threats to the very fabric of society? One reason is that local Fox stations provide an endless supply of them.

He said he saw a warning flash across the screen of his controller and the battery died. 

... But while the restricted flight area shut down his drone, the mystery one he was trying to approach continued to fly.

It probably helps that local Fox stations don't seem to ask a lot of questions before they buy the magic beans. But here's how you can tell that Fox Central is doing real journalisms:

B did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment from Fox News Digital Monday.

And ... scene.

The Drone Mystery has led the Fox homepage at least once a day for the past six days (reminder, this is a set of four screen grabs a day of the top 10 stories). Since it first swam into our ken on Dec. 6, tensions have reached the boiling point, mysteries have swirled and Trump has Spoken Out. We've passed through the Five Stages of Fox: Americans On Edge, Republicans Demand Action, Biden Befuddled, Iranian Mothership and Grab Your Shotguns. Evidently, this has gone from being a mere story to a full-blown Issue.

Now, in the good old days, newsrooms had small cadres of people whose job -- in addition to fixing your spelling, reminding you that the Mississippi is on the other side of the state, and stopping the press for those late-breaking coups and earthquakes -- was pointing that It Isn't That Exciting. When the lead political reporter decided to proclaim that Inflation Remained at Record High, someone along the safety net would politely ask what the previous record was and how much it was broken by. Much as it is with the dreaded Reviewer 2 of the publication cycle, part of the job was asking if the data might add up to something other than the neat package handed over by officialdom. That way, should you insist on sourcing your stories to social media posts from angry Republican ex-officials:

"Last night, beginning at around 9:45 pm, I personally witnessed (and videoed) what appeared to be dozens of large drones in the sky above my residence in Davidsonville, Maryland (25 miles from our nation’s capital)," Hogan wrote on X Friday. "I observed the activity for approximately 45 minutes."

The former governor said he does not know if these drone sightings are evidence of a threat to public safety or national security, but he called out the federal government for a "complete lack of transparency" in the face of Americans' concerns.

... you reduce the risk of having to point out later that Sagittarius is usually considered a constellation, not a national security threat.

It's a safe bet that Fox has already gotten the effect it wanted from today's story and the others in the Great Drone Saga. The coverage hasn't changed what people think, but it has changed the balance of what they know. Small bits of learning can add up over time as long as they all go into the same containers: You deserve an answer. Something's going on, and you can't trust the government to tell you about it -- but you can trust Donald Trump.

The grownup media can't fix that, but they can counterflood: address the imbalance by adding to the containers on the other side. So a little less "DRONE REPORTS CONTINUE TO GO VIRAL" and a little more boredom might be in order:

Read more »

The construction of Fox reality

Now that Fox seems to have settled -- OK, sorry, air quotes, "settled" -- on a primary identity for the Alleged Ivy League Radical Leftist Accused Killer Suspect, let's look a bit further at the construction of Fox reality. Of particular interest in Wednesday morning's top three stories (captured around 7:30 Eastern US) are the issues that Fox manages to loop the seemingly isolated events into.

First off, congratulations. Some lucky Fox employee gets to use Lachlan Murdoch's parking space tomorrow for working OBAMA!!!! into the headline on the morning's top story. And we can point to authority for the idea: "former FBI Agent." How clearly might the text make the connection?

UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's alleged killer, once a private school valedictorian and an Ivy League graduate, may have been triggered by his age and an ObamaCare provision, according to a former investigator.

... "He's 26 years old, which is the year you get kicked off your family's insurance claim," retired FBI agent Scott Duffey told Fox News Digital. "Was he well insured or was he not? Those are the things that I would be asking as an investigator."

ObamaCare, also known as the Affordable Care Act, requires health plans that offer dependent child coverage to make the coverage available until the adult child reaches the age of 26, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.

"I'm not so sure he has remorse," Duffey added. "I feel like whatever took place in his life relatively soon… he made a conscious decision to go down this road."

I suppose it's some consolation that someone, somewhere, is training a large language model on this stuff. Anyway, even if our expert hasn't said the O-word yet. at least we know that the nonretired cops have thought some of the same things:

NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Mangione may have sustained a back injury on July 4, 2023.

"He was posting an X-ray on his social media. Some of the writings that he had, he was discussing the difficulty of sustaining that injury," Kenny told Fox News on Tuesday. "So we're looking into whether or not the insurance industry either denied a claim from him or didn't help him out to the fullest extent."

But back to the magic 8-ball investigator:

Duffey said he wonders when Mangione made the "turn" that led to his downfall, adding, "was it when he got into some sort of physical ailment and then perhaps medication … realized just how people are suffering and then got this guilt trip that… 'I've got to change the world?' Or did he suffer some sort of mental break?"

He could go on (and, indeed, he does). But if you're wondering why this particular fount of wisdom was chosen to illuminate this particular shooting, you might ask how often he's provided a similar service for Fox in the past six months:

Read more »

Schrödinger's apple

 

The lead story at the Fox News homepage, around 1 p.m. and 2:30 pm.. Monday.

I'm not at all sure Fox appreciates the gravity of the situation. Thanks, I'll be here all week. 

Just another day at the office

It might be an overstatement to say that Fox News lies about everything, but it's fair to suggest that Fox News will lie about anything, because nothing is too small for Fox News to lie about in service of the cause. So this story -- starting its career at the No. 2 spot on the Fox homepage Saturday, then taking a few cycles off, then returning to the same position Sunday afternoon -- isn't an example of the extraordinary; it's literally just another day at the office.

As usual, the homepage headlines are a tad bit livelier than the ones on the story itself, so let's start with Saturday's: Not "Bitter pill," which is just there to remind you of the deserts of sinners, but the subhed: "Fauci roasted for new paper pushing debunked Trump claim, COVID origin theory." Let's say three things have to be true for the hed to be true: Fauci has to have been roasted; his new paper has to have pushed a claim and a theory, and at least the claim has to have been "debunked." (Under a distributed reading, "debunked" could apply to the theory too, but the lede suggests the narrow reading.)

There are some different twists in the Sunday subhed, "Fauci scorched over new 'scientific' paper riddled with 'false claims.'" Scorching is also a fairly low bar to clear, but "riddled" is going to need an extra step: at least some degree of counting and judgment over and above a couple of angry tweets from conservative influencers.* Fox is asserting "riddled" on its own hook (hint: it's the same two claims), but the quote marks are murky. Is Fox explaining that this is a scientific (as opposed to a popular or trade) paper, or is it nudging you with scare quotes? In US practice, the quotes around "false claims" mean those are the exact words someone used, but in UK practice (Fox headlines often have a strong redtop flavor), they could be "claim quotes": placed around a phrase to indicate the substance of an assertion but not a direct quotation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the public face of the federal government's coronavirus pandemic response, is facing criticism on social media over a manuscript published in a top journal where he maintains his position that the virus originated in nature and cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus.

Well, there's your scorching and roasting.** "Criticism on social media" in this case means two regular contributors to the pool of right-wing Twitter accounts that Fox draws on when a Harris or Walz or Biden needs to be slammed, mocked or blasted, plus one newcomer from the National Review stable. No scare quotes around "top journal" (fair enough; the Oxford Academic homepage lists its impact factor as 8.2). And Fauci's offenses? He "maintains his position" on the virus's origin and "cites a debunked claim that President-elect Trump told Americans to inject themselves with bleach to stop the virus." The claim has been debunked, but Fauci doesn't make it. (Nor does the phrase "false claims" appear in the story, so that's a headline invention.)

Fauci, along with researcher Gregory Folkers, published a paper in the Clinical Infectious Diseases journal this week with the title, "HIV/AIDS and COVID-19: Shared Lessons from Two Pandemics."

Fauci, who faced intense criticism for his handling of the pandemic, was critical of Trump’s handling of the pandemic in the paper.

Oh, stop the press.

"With COVID-19, the role of political leadership at the highest level – or the lack thereof – was again shown to be critical," the authors wrote. "As COVID-19 exploded globally and in the United States, President Donald Trump frequently minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, repeatedly claiming that COVID-19 would just ‘go away’ In the first full year of the pandemic (2020, the last year of his presidency) he failed to use his bully pulpit to encourage people to use available ‘low-tech’ tools such as masks/respirators, better ventilation, and physical distancing to reduce the risk of infection."

All true. But here comes the scary part, still quoting Fox quoting the article:

Read more »

Today in hedge deletion

Making stuff up isn't the only way Fox News constructs the world for its followers. Many of Fox's strategies, indeed, mimic the rules of news -- closely enough that the resulting product is hard to tell from the real thing. Here's one from Oct. 28 illustrating how hedge deletion works.

This won't be news to those of you who have written more than a few headlines in your working lives, but headlines are shorter than stories. Things get left out or shortened or worked-around in the eternal battle to catch the audience's eye (or provoke a click), maintain the most (and the most necessary) precision, and fit the space you're given. That's how the Soviet Union became "RUSS" in the thundering broadsheet headlines of the 1940s: If "Afghanistan" wouldn't fit in one column yesterday, what makes you think it'll fit in one column today?

Many of the principles are so widely understood as to go unnoticed: when articles and linking verbs can go, when a colon can attach a speaker to an idea, and so on. Qualifiers and attributions are trickier. Sure, you can leave the "forecasters say" off "Beautiful day in store," but let's be a bit less footloose on "Mayor embezzles millions." And take a lesson from the sports pages before you delete the hedge in "almost pulled off a startling upset."

So -- speaking of compelling the audience to click through -- what to make of a homepage headline like "Harris supporter screams in toddler's face in front of shocked dad at rally"?* For one thing, the audience hates being let down. Here's the headline on the story itself:

Apparent Harris rallygoer screams at baby in stroller in shocking viral video

Oh. Well, let's see how well that's held up by the lede:

A video of a woman screaming at a toddler outside of Vice President Kamala Harris' celebrity-packed Houston rally is going viral on social media as critics slam the shocking behavior seen toward a child.

Harris' Texas rally Friday was joined by celebrities such as Beyoncé, Jessica Alba and Willie Nelson to make a last-ditch appeal to voters in the red state ahead of next week's election.

Enough background. Ready for some hedges and attribution?

A video posted to social media shortly after the event shows a woman in a light blue T-shirt standing outside what appears to be the Houston Metro station walking over to a little girl in a stroller among the throngs of people decked out in Harris-Walz apparel.

The woman in the light blue shirt is seen leaning down to the toddler in the stroller and screaming in her face. It is unclear what the woman said and what provoked the incident.

Read more »

Making stuff up at Fox

Ready for another lesson in how voters learned about the 2024 presidential campaign? We'll start with the No. 5 story on the Fox News homepage, around 8:30 a.m. Oct. 26.

First, a little gaffe context. This is Fox's 19th unique headline of 2024* using "gaffe." Of those, 12 gaffes belong to Biden, two to Tim Walz, and one each to Chuck Schumer (bad grilling technique in a social media post), Bill Clinton (something something border something crime), the Pentagon (too DEI for comfort), "Pittsburgh sandwich shop" (being mean to JD Vance) and Donald Trump (mentioned by Nikki Haley in a Republican debate after he had "seemed to confuse" her with Nancy Pelosi). Gaffing, you may fairly infer, is distinctly directional at Fox.

Now, was this actually a gaffe, and if so, what kind? We can (literally) go to the videotape on that, but first, let's enjoy the Fox text:

President Biden sparked confusion during a mumbling saga, remarking that there was ‘nothing wrong’ with him as he discussed Sen. Mark Kelly's wife in the past tense.

"I'm Joe Biden, I'm Jill Biden's husband. And God, thank you for the introduction to the Gila Indian River community here… the Gila… nothing wrong with me. The Gila River Indian community for welcoming me today," he said while visiting the Indian Reserve on Friday.

One lie is evident from the text: the "nothing wrong with me" bit has nothing to do with Gabby Giffords. You can find another lie from the video (at the one posted by the White House, it's around the 19:00 mark). The person he's addressing isn't "God," but "Gov" -- as in Stephen Lewis, governor of the Gila River Indian Community, who had just introduced him (and praised Jill Biden in the process, if you're wondering how she got into the quote). You'll also note a beat for reaction after the "Jill Biden's husband" line.

The big thing you'll probably notice is what "nothing wrong with me" is doing, which is speech repair. When you get a words couple out order of, as Biden did, you might or might not notice. If you do notice, you can either sail blithely on or fix it. Following Levell and Cutler (1983), you can cut down on the audience's confusion a bit by drawing attention to the repair. Note the beat after "nothing wrong with me"; the laughs suggest that the audience picked up on the repair correctly. But back to our story:

"You know, I say this with all sincerity, this, to me, is the most consequential thing I've ever had the opportunity to do in my whole career as President of the United States," he said. "It's an honor, a genuine honor, to be in this special place on this special day."

Another lie. Biden -- news flash -- mumbles a lot, but even if you're dickish enough to transcribe it as "wunnada" instead of "one of the," there's unquestionably more going on between "is" and "most consequential" than Fox indicates. And if you need another cue, "things" is clearly plural.

Those are also in the subtitles. If Fox wants to assert its journalistic independence by not trusting the White House transcription, that's fine, but -- OK, let's just say, leaving-your-business-card-at-the-crime-scene-wise, that Fox is not the sort of people you want on your side in a sophisticated fraud spree. But on to the substance of the gaffe:

Read more »