Worth reading djf WSJ columnist warns of diabolical cleverness behind 45's media feud

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Kimi Wei <kimiwei88 () gmail com>
> Date: February 27, 2017 at 3:54:56 PM EST
> To: David Farber <dave () farber net>
> Subject: A WSJ columnist warns of diabolical cleverness behind 45's media feud
>
> http://time.com/4675860/donald-trump-fake-news-attacks/
>
> Don't Dismiss President Trump's Attacks on the Media as Mere Stupidity
> Bret Stephens
> Updated: Feb 26, 2017 6:59 PM EST | Originally published: Feb 18, 2017
>
> Bret Stephens writes the foreign-affairs column of the Wall Street Journal, for which he won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize 
> for commentary.
>
> Bret Stephens delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week at the University of California, Los Angeles. 
> Read the full text of his remarks below:
>
> I’m profoundly honored to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall 
> Street Journal.
>
> My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump. I suspect this is a theme that would have 
> resonated with Danny.
>
> When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust — the latter flowing exclusively 
> from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and 
> editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual.
>
> Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and 
> exclusively factual. And therefore trustworthy.
>
> This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a 
> story.
>
> In the 15 years since Danny’s death, the list of murdered journalists has grown long.
>
> Paul Klebnikov and Anna Politkovskaya in Russia.
>
> Zahra Kazemi and Sattar Behesti in Iran.
>
> Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff in Syria.
>
> Five journalists in Turkey. Twenty-six in Mexico. More than 100 in Iraq.
>
> When we honor Danny, we honor them, too.
>
> We do more than that.
>
> This is an undated file photo of Wall Street Journ
>
> Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl disappeared in the Pakistani port city of Karachi on Jan 23, 2002 after 
> telling his wife he was going to interview an Islamic group leader.  AFP/Getty Images 
>
> We honor the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; 
> that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying 
> fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”
>
> And we honor the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful 
> people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with.
>
> So that’s the business we’re in: the business of journalism. Or, as the 45th president of the United States likes to 
> call us, the “disgusting and corrupt media.”
>
> President Donald Trump mounted a vigorous defense of his presidency and accused America's news media of being "out of 
> control" at a White House news conference Thursday, vowing to bypass the media and take his message "straight to the 
> people."
>
> Some of you may have noticed that we’re living through a period in which the executive branch of government is 
> engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.
>
> The President routinely describes reporting he dislikes as FAKE NEWS. The Administration calls the press “the 
> opposition party,” ridicules news organizations it doesn’t like as business failures, and calls for journalists to be 
> fired. Mr. Trump has called for rewriting libel laws in order to more easily sue the press.
>
> This isn’t unprecedented in U.S. history, though you might have to go back to the Administration of John Adams to see 
> something quite like it. And so far the rhetorical salvos haven’t been matched by legal or regulatory action. Maybe 
> they never will be.
>
> But the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than 
> what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.
>
> Ideologically, the president is trying to depose so-called mainstream media in favor of the media he likes — 
> Breitbart News and the rest. Another way of making this point is to say that he’s trying to substitute propaganda for 
> news, boosterism for information.
>
> His objection to, say, the New York Times, isn’t that there’s a liberal bias in the paper that gets in the way of its 
> objectivity, which I think would be a fair criticism. His objection is to objectivity itself. He’s perfectly happy 
> for the media to be disgusting and corrupt — so long as it’s on his side.
>
> But again, that’s not all the president is doing.
>
> Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly asks:
>
> Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say things that you can’t back up factually, and as the 
> President you say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t have the data to back that up, some 
> people are going to say that it’s irresponsible for the President to say that.
>
> To which the president replies:
>
> Many people have come out and said I’m right.
>
> Now many people also say Jim Morrison faked his own death. Many people say Barack Obama was born in Kenya. “Many 
> people say” is what’s known as an argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of logicians, we would dismiss the 
> argument as dumb.
>
> We are not a nation of logicians.
>
> I think it’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as dumb. We ought to assume that it’s darkly 
> brilliant — if not in intention then certainly in effect. The president is responding to a claim of fact not by 
> denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts are supposed to have on an argument.
>
> He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most 
> people understand the term, don’t matter: That they are indistinguishable from, and interchangeable with, opinion; 
> and that statements of fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either sufficiently powerful to ignore 
> them or sufficiently shameless to deny them — or, in his case, both.
>
> If some of you in this room are students of political philosophy, you know where this argument originates. This is a 
> version of Thrasymachus’s argument in Plato’s Republic that justice is the advantage of the stronger and that 
> injustice “if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice.”
>
> Substitute the words “truth” and “falsehood” for “justice” and “injustice,” and there you have the Trumpian view of 
> the world. If I had to sum it up in a single sentence, it would be this: Truth is what you can get away with.
>
> If you can sell condos by claiming your building is 90% occupied when it’s only 20% occupied, well, then—it’s 90% 
> occupied. If you can convince a sufficient number of people that you really did win the popular vote, or that your 
> inauguration crowds were the biggest—well then, what do the statistical data and aerial photographs matter?
>
> Now, we could have some interesting conversations about why this is happening—and why it seems to be happening all of 
> a sudden.
>
> Today we have “dis-intermediating” technologies such as Twitter, which have cut out the media as the middleman 
> between politicians and the public. Today, just 17% of adults aged 18-24 read a newspaper daily, down from 42% at the 
> turn of the century. Today there are fewer than 33,000 full-time newsroom employees, a drop from 55,000 just 20 years 
> ago.
>
> When Trump attacks the news media, he’s kicking a wounded animal.
>
> But the most interesting conversation is not about why Donald Trump lies. Many public figures lie, and he’s only a 
> severe example of a common type.
>
> The interesting conversation concerns how we come to accept those lies.
>
> Nearly 25 years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the great scholar and Democratic Senator from New York, coined the 
> phrase, “defining deviancy down.” His topic at the time was crime, and how American society had come to accept 
> ever-increasing rates of violent crime as normal.
>
> “We have been re-defining deviancy so as to exempt much conduct previously stigmatized, and also quietly raising the 
> ‘normal’ level in categories where behavior is now abnormal by any earlier standard,” Moynihan wrote.
>
> You can point to all sorts of ways in which this redefinition of deviancy has also been the story of our politics 
> over the past 30 years, a story with a fully bipartisan set of villains.
>
> I personally think we crossed a rubicon in the Clinton years, when three things happened: we decided that some types 
> of presidential lies didn’t matter; we concluded that “character” was an over-rated consideration when it came to 
> judging a president; and we allowed the lines between political culture and celebrity culture to become hopelessly 
> blurred.
>
> But whatever else one might say about President Clinton, what we have now is the crack-cocaine version of that.
>
> If a public figure tells a whopping lie once in his life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he lies morning, noon 
> and night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to its own 
> ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark that the death of one man is a tragedy but the 
> death of a million is a statistic.
>
> One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing 
> that would surely break the back of his candidacy.
>
> Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur about John McCain’s record as a POW? Or his lie about 
> New Jersey Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his attacks on Megyn Kelly, on a disabled New York Times reporter, on a 
> Mexican-American judge? Would it be him tweeting quotations from Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to David Duke 
> and the alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Vladimir Putin? Would it be his refusal to release his tax 
> returns, or the sham that seems to been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his Trump U courses? Would it be 
> the tape of him with Billy Bush?
>
> None of this made the slightest difference. On the contrary, it helped him. Some people became desensitized by the 
> never-ending assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others seemed to positively admire the 
> comments as refreshing examples of personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
>
> Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest 
> political strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the more skin he showed, the more his core 
> supporters liked it.
>
> Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” 
> Donald Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s exhortation in reverse.
>
> Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and scandal: It’s entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it 
> for most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and dull.
>
> Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence in the White House is a daily extravaganza of 
> sticking it to pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake up every day with some fresh 
> outrage to turn over in your head and text your friends about.
>
> Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more 
> intense and consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts administration is that fiction can take you 
> anywhere.
>
> Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed his administration is running like a “fine-tuned 
> machine.” In actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National Security Adviser was forced out in 
> disgrace, and the Intelligence Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he might compromise 
> sources and methods.
>
> But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a presidential press conference like that? Since when has the 
> denial of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?
>
> At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. 
> If Trump can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint of embarrassment, remorse or 
> misgiving—well, then, that becomes a new basis on which the president can now be judged.
>
> To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged 
> not on some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”—which is to say, whether he brazened his way 
> through it. And the answer to that is almost certainly yes.
>
> So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we have come to accept the president’s behavior.
>
> The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
>
> The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us. By putting aside our usual moral filters—the ones that 
> tell us that truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to be done in a certain way—we have been 
> given tickets to a spectacle, in which all you want to do is watch.
>
> And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which politics becomes more about perceptions than 
> performance—of how a given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the New York Times says that 
> Trump’s press conference probably plays well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play well in 
> Peoria.
>
> Let me add a fourth point here: our tendency to rationalize.
>
> One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call 
> the “TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would give a speech or offer an answer in a debate that amounted to little 
> more than a word jumble.
>
> But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the 
> TrumpXplainers would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our political semioticians, ascribing 
> pattern and meaning to the rune-stones of Trump’s mind.
>
> If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, you could count on someone to provide a complex tariff scheme to 
> make good on the promise. If Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once there, we should have 
> “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly high-flown explanation as to how we could engineer this theft.
>
> A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign policy to the New York Times’s David Sanger, the 
> reporter asked him whether it didn’t amount to a kind of “America First policy”—a reference to the isolationist and 
> anti-Semitic America First Committee that tried to prevent U.S. entry into World War II. Trump clearly had never 
> heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and made it his own. And that’s how we got the return of America First.
>
> More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative Washington Times: “How Trump’s ‘disarray’ may be 
> merely a strategy,” by Wesley Pruden, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. In his view, the president’s first 
> disastrous month in office is, in fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of Washington and 
> Lincoln’s cabinet of rivals. Sure.
>
> Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump 
> says X. What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s giving voice to the angers and anxieties of 
> Z. Who, by the way, you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and anger are their own 
> justifications these days.
>
> Watching this process unfold has been particularly painful for me as a conservative columnist. I find myself in the 
> awkward position of having recently become popular among some of my liberal peers—precisely because I haven’t changed 
> my opinions about anything.
>
> By contrast, I’ve become suddenly unpopular among some of my former fans on the right—again, because I’ve stuck to my 
> views. It is almost amusing to be accused of suffering from something called “Trump Derangement Syndrome” simply 
> because I feel an obligation to raise my voice against, say, the president suggesting a moral equivalency between the 
> U.S. and Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
>
> The most painful aspect of this has been to watch people I previously considered thoughtful and principled 
> conservatives give themselves over to a species of illiberal politics from which I once thought they were immune.
>
> In his 1953 masterpiece, “The Captive Mind,” the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz analyzed the psychological 
> and intellectual pathways through which some of his former colleagues in Poland’s post-war Communist regime allowed 
> themselves to be converted into ardent Stalinists. In none of the cases that Milosz analyzed was coercion the main 
> reason for the conversion.
>
> They wanted to believe. They were willing to adapt. They thought they could do more good from the inside. They 
> convinced themselves that their former principles didn’t fit with the march of history, or that to hold fast to one’s 
> beliefs was a sign of priggishness and pig-headedness. They felt that to reject the new order of things was to 
> relegate themselves to irrelevance and oblivion. They mocked their former friends who refused to join the new order 
> as morally vain reactionaries. They convinced themselves that, brutal and capricious as Stalinism might be, it 
> couldn’t possibly be worse than the exploitative capitalism of the West.
>
> I fear we are witnessing a similar process unfold among many conservative intellectuals on the right. It has been 
> stunning to watch a movement that once believed in the benefits of free trade and free enterprise merrily give itself 
> over to a champion of protectionism whose economic instincts recall the corporatism of 1930s Italy or 1950s 
> Argentina. It is no less stunning to watch people who once mocked Obama for being too soft on Russia suddenly 
> discover the virtues of Trump’s “pragmatism” on the subject.
>
> And it is nothing short of amazing to watch the party of onetime moral majoritarians, who spent a decade fulminating 
> about Bill Clinton’s sexual habits, suddenly find complete comfort with the idea that character and temperament are 
> irrelevant qualifications for high office.
>
> The mental pathways by which the new Trumpian conservatives have made their peace with their new political master 
> aren’t so different from Milosz’s former colleagues.
>
> There’s the same desperate desire for political influence; the same belief that Trump represents a historical force 
> to which they ought to belong; the same willingness to bend or discard principles they once considered sacred; the 
> same fear of seeming out-of-touch with the mood of the public; the same tendency to look the other way at comments or 
> actions that they cannot possibly justify; the same belief that you do more good by joining than by opposing; the 
> same Manichean belief that, if Hillary Clinton had been elected, the United States would have all-but ended as a 
> country.
>
> This is supposed to be the road of pragmatism, of turning lemons into lemonade. I would counter that it’s the road of 
> ignominy, of hitching a ride with a drunk driver.
>
> So, then, to the subject that brings me here today: Maintaining intellectual integrity in the age of Trump.
>
> When Judea wrote me last summer to ask if I’d be this year’s speaker, I got my copy of Danny’s collected writings, 
> “At Home in the World,” and began to read him all over again. It brought back to me the fact that, the reason we 
> honor Danny’s memory isn’t that he’s a martyred journalist. It’s that he was a great journalist.
>
> Let me show you what I mean. Here’s something Danny wrote in February 2001, almost exactly a year before his death, 
> from the site of an earthquake disaster in the Indian town of Anjar.
>
> What is India’s earthquake zone really like? It smells. It reeks. You can’t imagine the odor of several hundred 
> bodies decaying for five days as search teams pick away at slabs of crumbled buildings in this town. Even if you’ve 
> never smelled it before, the brain knows what it is, and orders you to get away. After a day, the nose gets stuffed 
> up in self-defense. But the brain has registered the scent, and picks it up in innocent places: lip balm, sweet 
> candy, stale breath, an airplane seat.
>
> What stands out for me in this passage is that it shows that Danny was a writer who observed with all his senses. He 
> saw. He listened. He smelled. He bore down. He reflected. He understood that what the reader had to know about Anjar 
> wasn’t a collection of statistics; it was the visceral reality of a massive human tragedy. And he was able to express 
> all this in language that was compact, unadorned, compelling and deeply true.
>
> George Orwell wrote, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” Danny saw what was in front 
> of his nose.
>
> We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s nose, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything 
> else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity.
>
> Not to look around, or beyond, or away from the facts, but to look straight at them, to recognize and call them for 
> what they are, nothing more or less. To see things as they are before we re-interpret them into what we’d like them 
> to be. To believe in an epistemology that can distinguish between truth and falsity, facts and opinions, evidence and 
> wishes. To defend habits of mind and institutions of society, above all a free press, which preserve that 
> epistemology. To hold fast to a set of intellectual standards and moral convictions that won’t waver amid changes of 
> political fashion or tides of unfavorable opinion. To speak the truth irrespective of what it means for our 
> popularity or influence.
>
> The legacy of Danny Pearl is that he died for this. We are being asked to do much less. We have no excuse not to do 
> it. Thank you.
>
>
> Kimi Wei
> kimi () thewei com  @kimiwei
> facebook.com/thekimiwei
> 862-203-8814



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