Chronicles Of The Narrative Engineers

     Does anyone else remember this piece? I stated my conclusion and theme quite plainly:

     If there’s anything that a conservative or libertarian must keep constantly in mind, it’s that whatever their enticements and cajolery, the Main Stream Media are not his friend. They’re not interested in his positions or his arguments for them. They’re not interested in presenting his ideas, or him, objectively to their audiences. They’re interested solely in making him look bad, if possible like a hypocritical monster. There are evolutionary reasons for this which I’ll delve into at another time. For practical purposes, the imperative of remaining constantly on guard against MSM reporters and allies is the critical item of wisdom….

     Whatever their justifications, they do it willingly. They have already decided as an unchallenged and unchallengeable moral precept that “conservatives deserve it.” It’s part of their “assumption of differential rectitude” (Thomas Sowell), by which they have rationalized that there is no tactic morally disallowed against enemies so foul.

     Never, ever trust them.

     The tale related in the above-cited piece is only one of innumerable examples of Main Stream Media deceits in furtherance of The Narrative: i.e., the “leftists are good / conservatives are bad” dichotomy” they’ve been trying to impose on Americans for many decades. Indeed, my high-school American History teacher – a difficult man with whom I didn’t get along, but nevertheless an honest and capable instructor – told us at the very beginning of the year that those who purport to “write history” were (and are) actually promulgating The Narrative. He made sure we were introduced to sources other than the usual ones, that we might become acquainted with the other side of the story.

     Well, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that the Narrative Engineers are still at it:

     CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that left-wing reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.

     In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.

     CBS edited the interaction that DeSantis had with Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly shouted at the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.

     This is on a par with what Mike Wallace did to Senator Bob Livingston twenty-eight years ago. Today, because of the World Wide Web, there are alternative channels for the distribution of news and opinion, so there are ways for such deceits to be revealed and castigated. Yet the Main Stream Media retain a terrible power. That power is augmented by the collaboration of Big Tech – Google, Facebook, and Twitter – which ruthlessly suppress all mention of those alternative takes.

     Needless to say, Democrat politicians and strategists write the libretto for that opera:

     [CBS 60 Minutes’ Scott] Pelley brought up an article on Cernovich’s website where a physician, who later outed himself as Orlando anesthesiologist Dr. Ted Noel, argued that an explanation for Clinton’s bizarre physical tics could be Parkinson’s disease. While confronting Cernovich about the oversold headline (“Hillary Clinton Has Parkinson’s Disease, Physician Confirms”), Pelley exposed his own credulous belief in an unproven claim:

Cernovich: She had a seizure and froze up walking into her motorcade that day [September 11, 2016].
Pelley: Well, she had pneumonia. I mean—
Cernovich: How do you know? Who told you that?
Pelley: Well, the campaign told us that.
Cernovich: Why would you trust the campaign?
Pelley: The point is you didn’t talk to anybody who’d ever examined Hillary Clinton.
Cernovich: I don’t take anything Hillary Clinton is gonna say at all as true. I’m not gonna take her on her word. The media says we’re not gonna take Donald Trump on his word. And that’s why we are in these different universes.

     Pelley has no answer for those six words — “Why would you trust the campaign” — as his entire profession goes berserk with literal-minded fact checks for every tweet from President Trump. Pelley also seems to forget the fakery that Clinton World attempted hours before its pneumonia statement — with the candidate smiling and waving outside her daughter’s apartment, greeting a little girl, and assuring reporters everything was a-okay.

     And let there be no doubt about it: the Narrative Engineers are everywhere hard at work:

     CBS News recently ran a report titled “Asian Americans Battling Bias: Continuing Crisis.” In its report, as well as other reporting, the news agency botched the statistics on hate crimes against Asians versus “hate incidents. ”

     “Nearly 4000 crimes against Asian-Americans have been reported since the start of the pandemic, an increase of about 150 percent in major U.S. cities,” CBS News said during its report, before showing videos of former President Trump calling coronavirus the “Kung Flu.”

     Those two statistics are not the same.

     Stop AAPI Hate, led by Arizona State University Professor Aggie Yellow Horse and San Francisco State University Professor Russell Jeung, started an incident tracker when it launched in March 2020. The tracker encourages people to anonymously report hateful incidents. The latest report showed nearly 4,000 hateful incidents, almost entirely “verbal harassment” and “shunning.”

     That sort of deliberate mixing of immiscible statistics is an important tactic in the Narrative Engineers’ toolkit. Thomas Sowell highlighted it in The Vision of the Anointed:

     One of the common methods of getting alarming statistics is to list a whole string of adverse things, with the strong stuff up front to grab attention and the weak stuff at the end to supply the numbers. A hypothetical model of this kind of reasoning might run as follows: Did you know that 13 million American wives have suffered murder, torture, demoralization, or discomfort at the hands of left-handed husbands? It may be as rare among left-handers as among right-handers for a husband to murder or torture his wife, but if the marriages of southpaws are not pure, unbroken bliss, then their wives must have been at least momentarily discomforted by the usual marital misunderstandings. The number may be even larger than 13 million. Yet one could demonize a whole category of men with statistics showing definitional catastrophes. While this particular example is hypothetical, the pattern is all too real. Whether it is sexual harassment, child abuse, or innumerable other social ills, activists are able to generate alarming statistics by the simple process of listing attention getting horrors at the beginning of a string of phenomena and listing last those marginal things which in fact supply the bulk of their statistics. A Louis Harris poll, for example, showed that 37 percent of married women are “emotionally abused” and 4 million “physically abused.” Both of these include some very serious things–but they also include among “emotional abuse” a husband’s stomping out of the room and among “physical abuse” his grabbing his wife. Yet such statistics provide a backdrop against which people like New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen can speak of wives’ “risk of being beaten bloody” by their husbands. Studies of truly serious violence find numbers less than one-tenth of those being thrown around in the media, in politics, and among radical feminists in academia.

     They will not turn honest. They will never “let up.” They can only be countered by honest men outside their corridors who relentlessly report the facts – regardless of whose agenda it serves or disserves.