Six on Press/Media: Instead of Trump’s propaganda, how about a nice ‘truth sandwich’?; Pundits Worry Threat of Nuclear War Is
philip panaritis
President Trump declared the news media the nation’s worst enemy. And time after shocking time, his acolytes demeaned or threatened reporters for doing one of their most basic jobs: asking questions of those in power.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a reporter in North Korea that it was “insulting and ridiculous and ludicrous” for him to be asked about details of the verification process for the vaunted denuclearization.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale suggested taking a CNN reporter’s credentials away after he shouted a question at the president.
It was ugly. Even uglier than usual.
And the president’s anti-media campaign is convincing at least some citizens that journalists have no worth.
Enter George Lakoff. An author, cognitive scientist and linguist who has long studied how propaganda works, he believes it’s long past time for the reality-based news media to stop kowtowing to the emperor.
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“Trump needs the media, and the media help him by repeating what he says,” Lakoff said.
That would be okay under normal circumstances, he told me, but “this situation is not normal — you have a sustained attack on the democracy and the news media.”
Unlike those who insist that what the president says is news and therefore must be reported, Lakoff proposes a radical reimagining of how the news media reports on Trump.
Instead of treating the president’s every tweet and utterance — true or false — as newsworthy (and then perhaps fact-checking it later), Lakoff urges the use of what he calls a “truth sandwich.”
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"But I would suggest that the single greatest driver of personal distrust is the device we all hold in our hands. The more virtual our relationships, the more they are conducted by text and post, the less experience we have at reading signals, learning body language, testing first impressions, building bonds that can survive dissent and disagreement. If each generation finds it harder to trust the people around them, it’s no wonder institutions of all kinds suffer as well.
In a country more polarized than at any time since Vietnam, people seek the news they want, the arguments that affirm them, and the communities that comfort them.
As the midterms approach, with a Presidential race to follow, as every day brings new tests of democratic resilience, this collapse of trust is no abstract or academic phenomenon. It’s more like a death threat.Without trust, every transaction is binary and zero-sum; I win, you lose. But for democracy to flourish, there is always another player at the table, a shared idea that there is such thing as a common good that is achieved over time through deliberation and discovery. And for that to work, sometimes the other side has to win. Sometimes you have to accept an IOU. Build a sufficiently intricate lattice of compromises and concessions and odds are everyone benefits over time."
"Hierarchies of virtue
The Great Western Narrative tells us something entirely different. It divides the world into a hierarchy of “peoples”, with different, even conflicting, virtues and vices. Some humans – westerners – are more rational, more caring, more sensitive, more fully human. And other humans – the rest – are more primitive, more emotional, more violent. In this system of classification, we are the Good Guys and they are the Bad Guys; we are Order, they are Chaos. They need a firm hand from us to control them and stop them doing too much damage to themselves and to our civilised part of the world.
The Great Western Narrative isn’t really new. It is simply a reformulation for a different era of the “white man’s burden”.
The reason the Great Western Narrative persists is because it is useful – to those in power. Humans may be essentially the same in our natures and in our drives, but we are very definitely divided by power and its modern corollary, wealth. A tiny number have it, and the vast majority do not. The Great Western Narrative is there to perpetuate power by legitimising it, by making its unbalanced and unjust distribution seem natural and immutable.
Once kings told us they had blue blood and a divine right. Today, we need a different kind of narrative, but one designed to achieve the same end. Just as kings and barons once owned everything, now a tiny corporate elite rule the world. They have to justify that to themselves and to us.
The king and the barons had their courtiers, the clergy and a wider circle of hanger-ons who most of the time benefited enough from the system not to disrupt it. The role of the clergy in particular was to sanction the gross imbalance of power, to argue that it was God’s will. Today, the media function like the clergy of old. God may be dead, as Nietzsche observed, but the corporate media has taken his place. In the unquestioned premises of every article, we are told who should rule and who should be ruled, who are the Good Guys and who the Bad.
To make this system more palatable, more democratic, to make us believe that there is equality of opportunity and that wealth trickles down, the western elite has had to allow a large domestic middle class to emerge, like the courtiers of old. The spoils from the rape and pillage of distant societies are shared sparingly with this class. Their consciences are rarely pricked because the corporate media’s function is to ensure they know little about the rest of the world and care even less, believing those foreigners to be less deserving, less human."
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Trump, Kim and American exceptionalism
"Maddow implied that Trump has taken this step out of fealty to Russia, and complained that pausing war games that threaten North Korea benefits Russia and China. She twice called the Kim/Trump summit a “wedding,” twice said that the two leaders “love” each other two times, and referred to Kim as Trump’s “best friend.” In other words, de-escalation is for wimps, and what’s needed is toughness, even if it risks nuclear war.
Not once did Maddow demonstrate the slightest concern with avoiding war. The message of her segment is that the US should subject all 25 million people in North Korea to the threat of nuclear annihilation until its leaders do what the US says, a threat that necessarily extends to the rest of East Asia, since it would be decimated in any nuclear exchange, to say nothing of the likely devastating effects on the rest of the world.
The editorial board of the Washington Post (6/12/18) says that diplomacy “is certainly preferable to the slide toward war that appeared to be underway last year,” but opposes taking steps to prevent another Korean War—a nuclear one, this time. The editorialists complain that the joint statement issued by the leaders of the US and North Korea makes no mention of “US terms for disarmament”: What the editorial, tellingly titled “No More Concessions,” is saying is that the predetermined outcome of diplomacy should be complete North Korea acquiescence to US demands—which, of course, isn’t diplomacy at all.In the same vein, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times (6/12/18) says that “it certainly is better for the two leaders to be exchanging compliments rather than missiles,” but describes the US suspending military exercises with South Korea as a “concession” for which America is getting “astonishingly little” in return. He purports to be against the exchanging of missiles, but thinks it’s a mistake to take steps to minimize the threat of exchanging missiles.
Opinion | Trump Was Outfoxed in Singapore
The United States made important concessions to North Korea, and got nothing tangible.
While acknowledging that Trump being “snookered” is “far better than war,” New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (6/12/18) worried that “the cancellation of military exercises will raise questions among our allies.”
“Astonishingly,” Kristof writes, Trump
even adopted North Korean positions as his own, saying that the United States military exercises in the region are “provocative.” That’s a standard North Korean propaganda line.The columnist failed to explain how military exercises on North Korea’s doorstep, involving 50,000 South Korean troops and 17,500 of their American counterparts, are anything other than “provocative,” but evidently Kristof would have no problem with joint DPRK/Mexico maneuvers near the US southern border pretending to launch an attack featuring 67,500 soldiers, along with simulated nuclear bomber attacks (FAIR.org, 4/3/13).
South Korea and US launch Ulchi Freedom Guardian drills | DW | 21.08.2017
Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)
South Korea and the US have begun their annual war games. In Seoul, President Moon Jae-in warned his nuclear-arm...
The Times’ editorial is as bemused as Kristof, writing that Trump “even endorsed the North Korean view of such joint exercises as ‘provocative.’”
