Just go ahead and say 'CACKLE!!!'

OK, if your question is "Does the Times have its thumb so far up its own ass it could pick its nose from inside?", the answer is an unqualified "yes." But it's not as bad as it looks! National Review editor Rich Lowry is actually trying to offer some theory-based advice:

For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol* — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.

A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to making the case against Kamala Harris.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Time out for a quick summary of Bill Benoit's functional theory of political communication. Campaigns are about winning, and campaign messages are focused on making the audience compare you favorably with the other guy. Messages do this with one of three functions -- acclaim (why you're good), attack (why the other candidate is rotten) or defense (why you're not as rotten as the other candidate says you are) -- using one of two topics: policy or character. Comparing how function and topic proportions vary by incumbency, ethnicity, gender, level of office, national political culture and so forth can be a pile of fun.

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

But this gets things confused. Attacks aim to "disqualify" the other candidate, but they're not definitionally more effective -- or more attack-y -- if they aim at character rather than policy. Attacks can address qualifications ("my opponent spent a mere six months as dog-catcher") or personal shortcomings ("my opponent is a felonious old sex offender"). And Lowry hasn't explained how he would support his claims about the empirical world of measurable data.**

... Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.

Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class.*** The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.

To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

None of which bear on the idea of fitness for the high office once held by (ahem) Donald Trump. But there's more!

… Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way, and still get a better handle on the campaign.

One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.

For (ahem) empirical analysis, those would be acclaim/policy and attack/character. This coding scheme doesn't get into whether a policy claim is an out-and-out lie, but you may draw your own conclusions about Lowry's values on that question. 

He has also, in the past, been able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underling Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.

The Times is right, in its own little way: Trump can't win by saying "nonfarm payroll job creation," but he could win by bellowing "CACKLE!!!" -- or "PANTSUIT!!!" or "MARXIST!!!" -- as often as the moderators let him. And that seems to be the point of Lowry's advice.

* I didn't say Lowry was going to magically turn into a good writer overnight, did I?
** Or that he was no longer prone to randomly making things up.
*** Or that Bill Buckley wouldn't slap him upside the head for the parallel structure fault. 

Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

Fox and the rules of news

 

A brief lesson on how the Rules of News® work, by way of explaining how the public agenda is set by the homepage of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The Fox homepage has a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: 10 top stories, with a clearly identifiable lead and the rest in an easy top-to-bottom, left-to-right layout, before you get to the promotional content. Here's the No. 6 story as of 11 a.m. Eastern US time (it's moved up a notch since 8 a.m.). 

Time -- the "THIS JUST IN!!!" -- element -- has been a central component of news ever since we had to out-shout the balladeer on the next corner in Elizabethan London. In US headline dialect, the time rules are well established. The present tense ("removes") signals the "immediate past": the "since Thursday's edition" or "since we updated the homepage" that tells you why today is different from yesterday. That's part of a bundle of practices that, in turn, help the audience sort events into issues. In basic agenda-setting terms, that's how "the news" tells the audience whether a campaign stop is "about" crime, the economy, foreign policy or whether the candidate laughs at the wrong time.

Here, the time element helps us sort this into a "culture war" basket: An "airline" has added to a set of daily outrages against the icons of American life that indicate -- oh, what's the phrase? -- a "nation in decline." Except that Fox is cheating. Watch the pivot foot: 

Over the last few years, Delta Air Lines has embraced the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda under the purview of a chief officer who believes that the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" isn't inclusive. 

Delta's Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Impact Officer Kyra Lynn Johnson has said publicly Delta is striving to "boldly pursue equity" which has impacted every level of the company, from its hiring practices to the language it uses in gate announcements. 

"So we're beginning to take a hard look at things like our gatehouse announcements. You know, we welcome ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ And we've asked ourselves, ‘Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’" Johnson said during a February 2021 panel with other DEI insiders. "You know, we're looking at some legacy language that exists in some of our employee manuals. And getting to the root of the way some things are described and saying, ‘Does that actually send a message of inclusivity?’"

Delta released an inclusive language guide in December 2020 which advised employees and leaders against using terms that reinforce the notion that there are only two genders.

See the move? We've gone from "THIS JUST IN!!!" to a panel discussion in 2021. Nothing in the text, even the comments Delta provided to the inquiring Fox reporter, indicates that a decree has gone out from Caesar Diversus to stop saying "ladies and gentlemen." If you're a reader, you have a right to be annoyed -- though if you're a Fox reader, you might more likely be filled with existential dread, because that's the proper slot on the agenda.

An important takeaway from the agenda-setting enterprise is that agenda-setting isn't a practice; it's an outcome of practice. The "media agenda" is what happens when practitioners commit journalism on Lippmann's "blooming, buzzing confusion" of daily events. Fox isn't really a different world; it's a different map with HERE BE GERBLINS drawn in different places.