Narrative, Fact, and “Fake News”

Suppose that you were to pick up a copy of the long-standing Liberal Party propaganda sheet that is considered to be Manitoba’s “newspaper of record” one day. I don’t know why you would bother. Let us say that you do it on a dare. The front page headline catches your eye:

 “Common Grackle Nears Extinction”.

 As it so happens, a specimen of said species has been annoying you all morning long with its obnoxious excuse for birdsong, (1) and this is far from being an uncommon occurrence.

 Intrigued but skeptical, you read on. The story that accompanies the headline tells you that the branch of the Manitoba government that keeps track of provincial avian populations has become alarmed at the shrinking percentage of Quiscalus quiscula versicolor – the local “bronzed” version of the Common Grackle – within the total bird population. Statistics are provided that demonstrate that each year for the past fifteen years it has dropped at least one rank on the catalogue of the most common birds in the province.

 “If this trend keeps up”, the Province’s Chief Ornithologist is quoted as saying “the Common Grackle will eventually be extinct. There are just under four hundred species of birds in this province. If the grackle continues to drop in rank, even by only one level a year, it will be practically extinct in less than four centuries, since it was not at the very top to begin with.”

The ornithologist and the article then go on to insist that urgent action is needed to prevent this imminent catastrophe.

You, having noticed that among the statistics cited in the article can be found the fact that whatever its percentage of the total bird population might happen to be, its own population size has not undergone a significant drop in absolute numbers within the province of Manitoba during the years in question, recognize that this is the only meaningful fact in the entire story and that it completely invalidates the “spin” of the narrative. 

You crumple the newspaper up and throw it away in disgust.

 Later that day, however, you find the same story is being highlighted on every local television news station. To your amazement, it continues to get top billing the next day, and the day after that as well. Polls are taken, which indicate that the vast majority of Manitobans agree that something must be done to “save the grackle.” This persists for week after week. You attempt, through a letter to the editor, to draw people’s attention to the narrative-invalidating fact, but are quickly branded a “denier” of the impending grackle holocaust, and start receiving threatening phone calls and e-mails, so you decide to leave the masses to their own irrational stupidity.

Now, the above scenario is, of course, fiction. The Common Grackle is classified by the conservationists as “Near Threatened”, which is the second lowest of their low risk categories. Its total North American population began to decline in the last half of the last century, after experiencing a boom in the first half. This is why it is not classified with the “Least Concern” category, but it is not likely to jump into any of the “Threatened” categories, or even the “Conservation Dependent,” for the simple reason that this species thrives on the kind of human activity – especially agricultural land development – that the conservationists argue endangers many other species. This partially explains both the boom and the decline of the last century. The decline of the population over the entire continent has not been reflected in the local population in this province – the narrative-invalidating fact from the fictional scenario is indeed a fact, even though the scenario itself is made-up.

The point of all of the above, if it is not already obvious, has nothing to do with grackles, birds of any sort, or conservation. It is about how people gullibly swallow media narratives even if the stories containing the narratives also include hard facts which completely invalidate them.

 Two obvious examples come to mind from this year alone. Beginning in March, the same mass media which two months earlier had labelled all talk of closing of travel in and out of China as “racist”, as soon as the World Health Organization declared a “pandemic” began pushing the narrative that the WHO’s recommendations – a universal quarantine/house arrest with the economically devastating closure of all business arbitrarily declared to be non-essential, and the socially/culturally/psychologically/morally devastating transfer of social interaction onto the internet to be draconically enforced by special enforcers armed with obscenely high fines and the encouragement of the kind of snitch-on-your-family-friends-and-neighbours culture previously associated with totalitarian regimes like the Third Reich and the Soviet Union – was the only option other than doing nothing at all. Since the world has survived previous pandemics without resorting to anything remotely close to this, the obvious implication of the media-peddled narrative of the “necessity” of this lockdown is that this pandemic is worse that all previous ones. The hard facts about the virus, however, from the same media sources, even the limited ones available back in March, never supported this thesis. Facts such as that a large percentage of people infected with the virus are completely asymptomatic, that the majority of those who do experience symptoms experience nothing more severe than the flu, and that even for those who do contract the harsh SARS form of pneumonia from the virus the risk of dying is quite low apart from the combination of age and multiple complicating health factors. What these facts all screamed was that even if this virus turned out to be more fatal than the seasonal flu, it is more comparable to the seasonal flu than to previous, far worse, pandemics. Which, of course, completely invalidates the narrative spin that says that inflicting all of this other damage upon our countries by embracing this form of medical totalitarianism was needed. Yet everywhere you go, you encounter people who accept that narrative, in spite of the facts.

The other example is that of the media narrative of the “peaceful protests” that Black Lives Matter organized following the death of George Floyd. Even as the media was telling us that these were peaceful protests, and that only fascists would consider the idea of quelling them by force, they could hardly cover up the arson, looting, vandalism and violence that accompanied these “protests” in most major American cities. Nor could they hide the fact that as these “protests” spread beyond American borders throughout all of Western Civilization, they began more and more to resemble the attempts by the Jacobins, Maoists, and Khmer Rouge – groups that belong at the top of the list of the most destructive and murderous of all of history’s revolutionaries - to raze history to the ground. All of which completely belies the description of these “protests” as “peaceful.”

In the last few years “fake news” has become a household expression. It has two primary meanings which are the polar opposites of each other. Captain Airhead uses the expression to refer to the spread of information in support of views which conflict with the narratives pushed by the mainstream media. The other meaning, of course, is that those narratives themselves are the “fake news.”

The events of this year have made it obvious for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, which of these two is the real “fake news.”

The question is whether anyone is left who has eyes to see and ears to hear.

 (1) My maternal great-aunt Hazel, before she moved out of her house, had a clock which would chime with a different birdsong for each hour of the day. When I would visit her there, and the clock would go off, we would look at it and I would make the joke “this clock is missing a few birds – where is the grackle, magpie, and raven?” Her answer would always be some variation of “if this clock had a grackle, it would be in the garbage.”

A Cave of Our Own Construction

Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G. Charlton, Buckingham, United Kingdom, University of Buckingham Press, 2014, 163 pp., £10

Among traditionalists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives and the rest of us who comprise what is usually called “the Right” it is customary, when the mass media is discussed, to maintain that it is heavily biased towards the Left. Our progressive opponents deride this claim, pointing to the television news channels, radio talk shows, and printed publications that offer an editorial perspective that is widely thought of as being “conservative”. In response we might point out that such media outlets offer a “neoconservative” perspective which is actually a form of liberalism – it is all about how democracy, capitalism and individualism are the hope and salvation of mankind, to be brought to the uttermost corners of the world by the force of the American military if necessary. A defense of actual conservative ideas and institutions, from a perspective that is critical of the modern assumptions that neoconservatives shared with the progressive and liberal Left is avoided by the media like the plague.

Recently, however, I encountered the following sentence which offers a rather different assessment of the relationship between the mass media and the Left:

Leftism is the Mass Media, and the Mass Media is Leftism, inseparable, the same thing: this of course means that Leftism (in its modern form) depends utterly on the continuation of the Mass Media (depends on itself!), stands or falls with the Mass Media. (bold indicates italics in original)

This remarkable sentence can be found on pages 26 to 27 of a fascinating new book entitled Addicted to Distraction. The author is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton, a physician and psychiatrist who is Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham. He is also a Christian and a prominent blogger in that right-wing sector of the internet known as the “Orthosphere” in the broader sense of the term that includes not just the website by that name but various others with a similar right-wing, traditionalist Christian perspective, including Dr. Charlton’s own site, where the term was originally coined, and this one.

The quoted sentence would elicit from many, probably most, people the response that it confuses the distinction between that which is neutral – in this case the technology of large-scale communication – and that which is charged – the thoughts and words conveyed by that technology. This is a conditioned response, one which is made without much if any thought being put into it, and it raises the question of how valid this distinction actually is. Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, George Grant, did not think it was valid and devoted much of his thought and writing to demonstrating that technology was anything but neutral. It was another Canadian of Grant’s generation, a pioneer in the study of media communications named Marshal McLuhan, who famously remarked that “the medium is the message” and it is from the launching pad of this insight of McLuhan’s that Dr. Charlton’s own reflections on the nature of the mass media take off.

This does not mean that the mass media that he equates with the Left consists merely of communications technology. Dr. Charlton distinguishes between two senses of the expression mass media. There is the technology itself – print, radio, television, internet, etc – and then there is the system into which all this technology is integrated, the “unified network of communications”. It is the latter which is the focus of his discussion.

Another important distinction he makes is between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Marxist Left of the trades unions and socialist parties was revolutionary but it was also utopian and visionary. It sought to overthrow the institutions of the existing order but with the idea that it would replace them with a new order that would be a Paradise on earth. The New Left is the Left of “Permanent Revolution” or “perpetual opposition”, which Dr. Charlton describes as the idea that:

The true revolutionary – such as the avant garde artist or radical intellectual – was intrinsically subversive; and would always be in revolt against whoever was in power, changing sides as necessary to achieve this. (p. 18)

If the New Left is always seeking to subvert, oppose, and to overthrow then its agenda is entirely negative. It seeks nothing but destruction and is essentially nihilistic. This, Dr. Charlton argues, is also the essential nature of the mass media.

He describes several specific techniques by which the mass media subverts the good. For example, when Anders Brevik killed all those kids in Norway a couple of years ago the media initially reported that he was a right-wing Christian. Brevik was not a professing Christian at all but the initial reports that contained the falsehood created a far deeper impression than subsequent retractions. Dr. Charlton calls this “first strike framing”, a technique whereby the media subverts something positive – in this case Christianity – by creating a false association in the first reports of an atrocity from which the lasting visceral response is derived. (pp. 71-75)

The subversiveness of the mass media does not lie merely in certain techniques, however. Nor is it to be found in some cabal of conspirators who pull the levels of the media behind the scenes, Dr. Charlton insists, but in the very nature of the system itself. The mass media, as he describes it, is an integrated network of communications technology that has so permeated society that it envelops and surrounds us. It generates a pseudoreality of image and opinion that distracts us from the real world in which we live. The images and opinions it generates are subject to change at any moment and may completely contradict those that preceded them but are presented to us as absolute truths disagreement with which renders a person a dangerous, crazy, outsider. This combination of short-term absolutism with long-term complete relativism, Dr. Charlton labels “Opinionated Relativism”. By distracting us from the real world, common sense, and personal experience and bombarding us with dogmatic but ever-changing opinions and images it subverts our confidence in that which is true, good, and beautiful. His characterization of it as evil and demonic seems entirely appropriate.

So what do we do about it?

While Dr. Charlton does not proffer a plan as to how the mass media system can be defeated as a whole – he indicates that the system will have to collapse on its own before there can be a large scale return to reality – he offers some helpful suggestions as to how we can deal with it as individuals. We are addicted to the false reality the mass media presents us, he argues, and rather than try to wean ourselves off of it, for those who think that they can pick out what is good from the mass media are the most deceived and deluded, we ought to quit it cold turkey. While the process of “detoxing”, by which we stop seeking out, paying attention to, and believing the media and turn our attention back towards reality is one that will involve failure – for we are immersed in the media in societies where everybody is an addict – there is hope, he says, at least for the Christian, because reality is superior to the falsehoods of the media.

Addicted to Distraction is a short book but one that is packed with insights the surface of which I have only begun to scratch in this review. I heartily recommend it.