Like most of us, I can’t spend the day scouring news. Stories that receive vastly different and politically consequential treatment in, say, the National Review and the New York Times sometimes end up unresolved in my mind. I find out now and again that a story came out weeks ago that provided the resolution I’d sought. But I’d missed it.
That’s life. I’m an adjunct professor, the most oppressed category of worker in America. (“Is he joking? Does he know if he’s joking?”) I have two other side jobs. My daughter’s a toddler that requires special care. Time is difficult to come by, and my academic research isn’t going to get short shrift while I research the childhood secrets of January 6th committee witnesses. So both rightwing and “legacy media” takes simply get shelved.
Or, again like most people, I make a judgment call. Without a way to quantify my half-conscious motives, I’ll never be sure, but I suspect this happens more often than irresolution and shelving.
How do I make this judgment call? Easy. I assume that mainstream media sources are on the whole more trustworthy than their rightwing counterparts. When I read most rightwing sources, I have my guard up. I assume they may have left out important details, made unwarranted connections, or used what appears on their frontpage to create a context for an article that distorts its importance.
If you consume rightwing media, you’re doubtless offended, incredulous, and perhaps even tempted to offer me some not-so-choice words on Twitter. But I have reasons that I consider well-nigh irrefutable for taking this tack. I assume these sources may be offering me an untrustworthy take because, unlike mainstream media, these news outlets self-identify as rightwing, partisan sources, and I don’t assume that reality votes Republican.
Consumers and many purveyors of conservative media object that National Review, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Breitbart, Andy Ngo, Unherd—really, almost every conservative news source originated as a reaction to the liberal drift of the media. I don’t doubt that there’s truth in this. I can even affirm the “they do it too” argument: CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other major outlets have been caught with their pants down from time to time, toeing the liberal line when the truth favored the right’s talking points. CNN never fully corrected its reportage from 2019 about boys from Covington Catholic High School threatening and surrounding an older native American man after it came clear that the older, drum-beating protester was the one at fault. Attacks on crisis pregnancy centers in the wake of the Dobbs decision have got almost no coverage. Just this year the inflation crisis, the behavior of border patrol, and certain police shootings of African Americans all inspired coverage that fit a progressive cultural narrative, and major outlets failed to self-correct or did so very quietly when facts emerged that didn’t fit their story.
So then why not read rightwing news? Answer: rightwing news sources openly admit that they offer a partisan narrative while it’s a scandal (covered in rightwing news!) when mainstream media does so. In other words, unless you believe that reality matches the right’s political narrative more or less exactly, you have no reason to believe the aim and intent of rightwing news sources is to provide you with true information. Their aim is to offer their audience a version of events that’s palatable and different from the mainstream narrative.
Bear with me while I lay out an example: the Hunter Biden laptop brouhaha. The major scandal rolling in the rightwing media right now is that the FBI worked with Twitter and Facebook to squelch the New York Post’s initial story about the laptop even though they possessed the laptop since 2019 and knew at least parts of the story to be true. The background to the story, rightwing outlets tell us, is that Hunter Biden set up a meeting between his then-V.P. father and Burisma board advisor Vadym Pozharskyi. Hunter Biden himself was on the board. The Biden campaign denied the meeting took place, later adding that if it did, it must have been very brief.
Donald Trump and rightwing journalists, by contrast, claimed that it did, and that it provided additional evidence that Vice President Biden had threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine unless the Prosecutor General of Ukraine who was investigating Burisma, Viktor Shokin, was fired. This in fact happened in 2016.
Concerning, right? Yes, it would be. Except that, as usual, the rightwing media has left context, details, and critical information out of their reporting in order to create a picture that suits their cultural and political narrative. Two major points here will have to do for now. First, literally everyone—the EU, World Bank, IMF, all the major players—agreed that Shokin was corrupt. And the problem was mostly that he was failing to investigate and charge big players in Ukraine who were also corrupt. Eyes, in any case, were already on him. Even if the move did end up benefiting Hunter Biden and even if Hunter Biden were engaged in some sort of corruption, President Biden would not be clearly implicated in any illicit or even questionable activity. Further, board members are paid for their work on behalf of a company, and part of that is making connections, including political connections. It would be surprising if Hunter had never connected Burisma in any way with his father, whatever the Biden campaign might say about it. But that does not mean that Joe Biden did anything illegal or even untoward vis-à-vis Burisma or Viktor Shokin.
Secondly, there’s the problem of the rightwing media’s motives. Recall the reasons for Trump’s second impeachment. He too briefly withheld aid to Ukraine, and he did so just months before the Biden laptop story broke. He did this in order to demand that President Zelenskyy investigate Joe Biden and Hunter Biden as well as the rightwing (and Russian propagated) theory that Ukraine, not Russia, had tried to change the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election through (for example) the Steele Dossier.
So Trump offered an illegal quid pro quo in order to change the narrative about the 2016 election; rightwing media quickly came up with a narrative to connect Joe Biden (even loosely) to a Ukraine scandal and tried to make it bigger than the Trump Ukraine scandal right before the 2020 election. Keep in mind that the Trump scandal is proved. There’s no mystery here whatsoever. The Biden scandal is still hazy, which is why rightwing reportage lurches further and further from the actual points at issue, the New York Post going so far as to publish awkward pictures from Hunter Biden’s laptop of him shirtless and smoking.
Why would I trust such a narrative? Is it possible that Joe Biden did something wrong or even illegal back when he was V.P. to advance his son’s career? Perhaps. But for people like me, here’s the question. Given the bigger picture, is it more likely that Joe Biden did something wrong here or is it more likely that the rightwing media is just doing what the rightwing media always does: advance rightwing causes whether true, truthy, or “spiritually true?” I’m gonna have to go with the latter.
Does the mainstream narrative skew left at times? For sure. I’ve heard stories on NPR that sound more like ads than anything else. That’s called propaganda, and I can recognize it even when I agree with the point being made. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to spend the limited amount of time I have scouring rightwing media for scandals about the left that may have some basis or, frankly, may not. Because their job and their raison d’état isn’t to provide me with the truth.
It's to own the libs.
You sure did own the rightwing media! Oh...uuhhhhh...errr.... (@_@)