Gosh, this is going to turn into a news analysis blog if I’m not careful, but I think I’ve finally observed that the unusual times in addition to many of the traditional news media currently scrambling to find ways to cover stories under stay-at-home orders and travel bans, I’m hearing a lot of new voices.
And it’s pretty great, but that’s not what I’m talking about.
The extremely unusual nature of so many of our circumstances, not least of which are world leaders taking the law into their own hands and making it up as they’re going along, is leading to an editorial nature that isn’t usually so up front and plain.
I’m not complaining. I’ve always been the sort who prefers a paper or a news channel have an angle, and say what it is, then make arguments and give evidence to support it. In the olden days when newspapers were a massive cash cow, this was common. It was basically the only way. As George Orwell says in his essay Why I Write, “…the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more of a chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”
In the digital era, this has not been the case. And the more traditional news organs, more or less having established editorial credibility, for many programs don’t actually provide a wealth of detail in presenting their information in some venues, like say their podcasts. These usually are the driest, plainest distillation of their plainest, driest hard news, from the lens of the provider.
So imagine my surprise when I heard the below (excerpted from this update) first thing Monday morning in my Google Assistant:
I’m not here to summarize the news. At the time this was broadcast, it had just happened a few hours before, and there were lots of things to say about it, from many streams of fact-checked, court-decided, very straightforward perspectives.
All of them way too complicated to discuss here, but they involve precedents in immigration reform, ruling by decree, and other aspects of American legal sausage- and news-making that have had a lot of ink spilled over them, so in terms of a sober, just-the-facts-ma’am they could have presented.
Instead, they were very straightforward about their perspective, which was the sole motivation of the world leader’s statement was to manipulate and control the news cycle.
And speaking of that person, that’s not actually very surprising or interesting in and of itself. But Al Jazeera is a world news network. It is absolutely unthinkable for them to editorialize with a piece about a head of state’s manipulation of the media, let alone deploy sarcasm.
That means they’re reporting the manipulation of the media as news. Just like they do with Bolsonaro, Jong-un, Putin, et al.
If Al Jazeera were a speech app, they’d have seen enough statements like this one before that, despite the words all having very specific meanings that suggest other intents, the actual meaning of the speaker is best captured with something like NewsCycle_Manipulate as opposed to Pandemic_TravelRestrictions or Immigration_TemporarySuspension.
What they’re doing is intent capture.
And that’s chilling indeed.