What Happened Today: October 31, 2022
Bolsonaro’s silence shadows Lula’s victory in Brazil; echoes of past tragedies in South Korea after Halloween stampede; How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie
The Big Story
In Brazil’s closest presidential election in more than 30 years, the left-wing candidate Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who goes by Lula, edged out his far-right rival, Jair Bolsonaro, by 2.1 million votes, a margin of less than 2%, as more than 118 million Brazilians voted. As of Monday afternoon, Bolonsaro had yet to concede the election, raising concerns that he might contest the results and spark widespread unrest among his supporters. The charismatic Da Silva, a former metalworker, served as Brazil’s president from 2003 to 2010 before being convicted on corruption charges and spending nearly 600 days in prison. The convictions were later annulled after a Brazilian court found that the case was tried in the wrong jurisdiction.
For months leading up to the election, Bolsonaro warned that leftist operatives had rigged the nation’s electronic voting system to end his reign after one presidential term. As of Monday morning, neither Bolsonaro or his three sons, all of whom are prominent social media users, had made any comments about the election. Truckers, who are some of Bolsonaro’s most hard-line backers, have set up roadblocks in at least 12 Brazilian states and could potentially block key trucking routes for grain exports if they are kept in place. Meanwhile, Arthur Lira, the lower house leader, and a prominent Bolsonaro supporter, upheld the election result in a statement released Sunday night that read, in part, “the will of the majority, expressed at the polls, should never be challenged.”
Credited by many with lifting millions of Brazilians out of poverty, Da Silva departed office in 2011 with an 80% approval rating. He is also a vocal supporter of Iran, once declining to denounce the Iranian government’s planned execution of a woman accused of adultery, and has opposed sanctioning Iran for its nuclear program. The close ties to Tehran could strain Brazil’s trade relationships while Da Silva seeks to shore up a weak national currency and moribund economy made more severe as China, historically the largest buyer of Brazilian exports, weathers its own economic slowdown.
In the Back Pages: How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie
The Rest
→ The already fragile global food supply became more vulnerable after Russia pulled out of a deal brokered over the summer that allowed for the safe export of much-needed grain out of Ukraine. The humanitarian corridor, created in the Black Sea, had allowed Russia and Ukrainian inspectors and their counterparts from Turkey and the United Nations to check vessels carrying grain, food stuffs, and fertilizer to destinations like the Middle East, where governments have warned that some 100 million people face starvation. Moscow said it would no longer honor the agreement after claiming, without confirmed evidence, that drone attacks had been launched from one of the vessels passing through the humanitarian corridor.
→ Graph of the Day:
Where did all the funny go? It’s not clear, exactly, why films have gotten so much less funny, but as Misha Saul points out in this Substack post “Why Did Comedy Die,” less than a quarter of today’s movies are comedies, in stark contrast to the 1990s, when at least 1 in every 2 new movies was a comedy. Saul has some theories, including the cultural trend of politics eating everything, the rise of sanctimonious creativity, and a general feeling of being overwhelmed by all the bad news of the day. But then again, isn’t that exactly what comedies are for?
Read More:
→ Video of the Day:
Amy Gallagher is a nurse who had been training to become a clinical psychotherapist at Tavistock Centre in London, a gender clinic shuttered after a damning independent review raised several concerns about the safe treatment of teenage patients. In this interview with GB News broadcaster Andrew Doyle, Gallagher explains how she was pushed out of her training program after she told clinic management that components of a training session called “Whiteness: A problem for our time” espoused several blatantly racist ideas. Gallagher notes that when she suggested medical professionals would do well to treat all people equally regardless of race, color, or creed, she was told those ideas “were contrary to the trust’s anti-racist thinking … and [that] it was a discredited and outdated view.”
→ The Saturday evening stampede in Seoul that claimed the lives of at least 150 young people celebrating Halloween prompted local and national officials to promise an investigation and safety reforms that some in South Korea say rings hollow given similarly tragic events in the recent past.
In 1994, the partial collapse of the Seongsu Bridge claimed 32 lives.
In 1995, the collapse of Sampoong Department Store resulted in 502 deaths.
In 2014, 304 were killed, most of them teenagers, when the Sewol ferry sank during a field trip to Jeju island.
“Whenever such accidents took place, the authorities vowed to take all possible measures to prevent further tragedies,” The Korea Times wrote in an editorial on Sunday. “The [Halloween] tragedy is a clear reminder that the nation is ill-prepared to prevent such deadly incidents.”
→ Tweet of the Day:
Iran will bring criminal charges against some 1,000 protestors for their involvement in the ongoing protests that have enveloped the nation since the September death of a woman who was in police custody for not wearing a hijab. The crackdown comes after an estimated 283 protestors have died, including 44 minors, according to Hrana, an activist news agency, and just as newly leaked images of Rostam Qasemi, a military leader and high-ranking government minister, show him on a vacation in 2011 with his girlfriend, enjoying the sights of Malaysia like a middle-class tourist from a non-theocratic country, sans head covering.
→ At least 100 people were killed and 300 injured on Saturday after car bombs were detonated at a busy market near a state education building in Mogadishu, Somalia, but the death toll is expected to continued rising, according to Somali officials. The Islamist group al-Shabaab, which maintains ties to al-Qaeda, claimed responsibility for the terrorist bombing; it said it targeted Somalia’s education ministry because the government was engaged in a “war on minds” by using a Christian-based syllabus in the school system. Emergency personnel were responding to the wounded from the first car bomb when the second car bomb exploded. “We failed to stop her,” Mohamed Moalim said of his wife, Fardwasa, a mother of six who rushed from a restaurant near the site of the first explosion to lend aid. “She was killed by the second blast.”
→ It’s time for Americans to “declare a pandemic amnesty,” Emily Oster argues in an article published in The Atlantic Monday. While acknowledging how much of the early COVID-19 pandemic guidance, from cloth masking to school shutdowns, was not only wrong but harmful, Oster feels that most of the errors were made by people operating in good faith under difficult conditions. “Obviously some people intended to mislead and made wildly irresponsible claims,” Oster writes, but for the most part, and in the interest of allowing the country to move on, we’ve got to drop our grudges. That puts Oster at the opposite end of the spectrum from Tablet’s Liel Leibovitz, who wrote an essay in March entitled “If You Were Wrong You Need to Apologize.”
Read it here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/if-you-were-wrong-you-need-to-apologize
→ Thread of the Day:
While skeptics point out that Elon Musk’s new plan to charge Twitter users between $5 and $20 a month for full platform features might not exactly pay down the billions of debt he loaded onto the company’s books to finance the takeover, it seems that Musk at least will have something to distract him from the pressures of making Twitter profitable: As tech reporters and their remoras point out in the thread here, Musk has also acquired all the internal Slack chats and attorney-client communications between Twitter executives and their lawyers during Musk’s bitter legal battle to not buy, and then buy, the company. Which should make for some interesting reading.
→ Icy relations between enemy states Israel and Saudi Arabia continue to thaw, at least in the soft diplomacy of the world of sports, as Shachar Sagiv became the first Israeli to compete in Saudi Arabia during a triathlon hosted in the Saudi Kingdom over the weekend. Though Sagiv has had a rough time on the course (eliminated after falling from his bike), the diplomatic implications marked a “significant breakthrough,” according to Yael Arad, head of the Israeli Olympic committee. “This is a growing trend and the true force in normalization between nations, and especially people.”
→ As more corporations have taken on the decorative embrace of ESG (or environmental, social, and governance policies), there’s been a not-so-subtle creep of anti-Israel BDS advocacy from corporations espousing the ESG creed, with Ben & Jerry’s removing its ice cream from Israeli territory as just one notable example. Now, Morningstar, the Chicago investment firm, will partner with several leading Jewish organizations—including The Jewish Federations of North America, Anti-Defamation League, and American Jewish Committee—to keep anti-Israeli bias out of the analytics and investment guidance it provides to companies as they build out their ESG portfolios. “We appreciate Morningstar's engagement with our communities, as well as its leadership’s strong rejection of the Boycott, Divest, and Sanctions campaign to discredit Israel,” said Eric Fingerhut, president and CEO of The Jewish Federations of North America.
→ The houseplant, once the causality of negligent caretakers the world over, has now been reinvented by Neoplant, a French startup selling bioengineered Pothos plants for $179 a pop. The pricey vines go by the name of Neo P1s and come with a promise to absorb several toxins as it purifies the air. To what extent this “superplant” possesses what the company calls its “superpowers” depends, however, on the habits of its owners, who will have to keep feeding the plant its regular supply of microbiome plant food.
TODAY IN TABLET:
The Great Swamp Monster Confluence of 1971 by Andrew Fox
Tracing the tangled, Jewish origins of three iconic comic book characters
The Old Halloween Story by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee
As the days get darker and Russian bombs continue falling, revisiting the holiday’s ancient wisdom
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Dear Scroll readers,
Starting today, the Back Pages section of The Scroll will feature exclusive previews—available only to Scroll subscribers—of stories that will appear in the next day’s edition of Tablet. To get us started, we have a sharp piece from Tablet contributor Leighton Woodhouse that examines how the media covered Senate candidate John Fetterman’s post-stroke health impairments by attacking the few reporters who acknowledged the truth.
How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie
By ‘ratioing’ NBC’s Dasha Burns for questioning John Fetterman’s health, her fellow journalists hid the truth from the public but exposed how they manufacture consent
By Leighton Woodhouse
On the debate stage last week, Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman performed like one might expect from someone who survived a stroke only five months ago. In the aftermath of the debate, Democratic strategists have been asking—anonymously, of course—how anybody thought it was a good idea to foist Fetterman onto such a public stage. The simplest answer is that they thought they could get away with it because they believed their own hype.
A swarm of liberal political pundits and journalists had spent the previous weeks denouncing any questions about Fetterman’s health as illegitimate, while attacking the few reporters who dared raise such questions as heartless bigots and right-wing shills. In the process, they unintentionally revealed something essential about how the elite media distorts the public’s understanding of key issues by bullying journalists into repeating obvious lies.
Case in point: NBC News’ Dasha Burns. On October 7, Burns conducted an on-camera interview with Fetterman. Because Fetterman has “auditory processing issues” as a result of the stroke, according to his campaign, he had to use a closed-captioning system to understand Burns’ questions. After the interview aired, Burns told NBC’s Lester Holt on air that Fetterman didn’t appear to understand her pre-interview banter. Burns was just doing her job by reporting on the fitness of a public official, but her assessment also seemed to lend credibility to the line of attack coming from Fetterman’s Republican opponent, Mehmet Oz, who has claimed that Fetterman is suffering from cognitive decline and covering it up. Simply for stating the facts as she had observed them, Burns was seen to be supporting the “wrong” candidate.
The media felt a great disturbance in the Force. On Twitter, blue-check journalists jumped in to defend Fetterman and throw shade at Burns. Soon, Burns’ tweets were inundated by thousands of haters calling her "disgraceful," "trash," and, again and again, "ableist." The Associated Press published a syndicated story amplifying the criticism and suggesting that Burns’ remarks had given ammunition to the Republicans. The New York Times published an op-ed deploring her remarks. Savannah Guthrie confronted Burns about it on air. On The View, Sunny Hostin implied Burns had acted unethically. BuzzFeed published an article essentially accusing Burns of putting disabled people at risk of violence. Recaps of the criticisms surrounding Burns’ interview appeared in The Washington Post, LA Times and other publications where they served to legitimate the idea of a controversy that the media itself had created.
That’s how it remained for two weeks: with Burns scolded and swarmed, and other journalists left to internalize the message about what would happen to them if they too stepped out of line.
Then, Fetterman’s abysmal debate performance vindicated her. Most of us know better than to expect the media establishment to pause for even a fleeting moment of introspection but, still, it’s incredible to see how many pundits and blue-check experts chose to double down on the “ableist” defense. The few non-conservative commentators who had the gall to note the reality about the debate were promptly disciplined. “There is no amount of empathy for and understanding about Fetterman’s health and recovery that changes the fact that this is absolutely painful to watch,” tweeted New York Magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi. In response, Nuzzi was instantly accused of "ableism," racism, acting out of hatred, and lacking a conscience. The experts had spoken! But for the rest of us, it’s an excellent time to take stock of what Burns’ colossal ratio and the subsequent swarm on Nuzzi were meant to accomplish.
When I was in college, like any budding leftist, I read a lot of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky’s most famous book is Manufacturing Consent, in which he argues that the big corporations that pay for the advertising that keeps the media industry afloat exercise a soft power over journalists. It’s not that they tell publishers and broadcasters what they can and cannot print. They don’t need to. Their looming presence as the industry’s paymasters is enough for editors and reporters to figure out quickly where the lines are that they cannot cross. Simply by observing what kind of reporting is incentivized in the business and which kinds of stories will help them get ahead in their own careers, individual journalists self-censor. What emerges is a pliant, self-policing, corporate-friendly media.
Chomsky’s theory, if it was ever true, seemed to become obsolete with the invention of the internet. Before the internet, the mass media was the only way for advertisers to reach millions of people at a time. Today, not only has social media broken that monopoly, but digital ads can be targeted in a way they never could on TV or in newspapers and magazines. No longer do corporations have to pay a surcharge on their ad spending to cover the salaries of journalists and editors and typesetters. They get a much better service for way cheaper on Google and Facebook.
In his book Postjournalism and the Death of Newspapers, Andrey Mir describes what happened next. Starved of ad revenues, print media outlets changed their business models. They had already been drifting toward partisanship, but now they saw there was money in it. Instead of seeing their readers as consumers of the ads they sold, they started looking at them as potential donors. They began appealing to their political consciences, asking readers to subsidize their noble journalistic missions, NPR-pledge-drive-style. ‘Support our brave truth-telling work,’ went the pitch, ‘for Democracy Dies In Darkness!’
This shift went full throttle during the Trump years, as the President attacked reporters as “the enemy of the people,” instantly transforming them into heroes in the eyes of Democrats. The only way to defeat Trump and his lies, liberals came to believe, was by forking over their money to The New York Times. Only The New York Times (and The Washington Post, and The Guardian, and The New Republic, and The Intercept, etc.) had the reporting chops, the prestige, and the national audience to counter Trump’s propaganda with The Truth. By subscribing to the Times, you weren’t just paying to access a consumer product; you were donating to a cause. You were doing your part to make sure The Truth got pushed out into the discourse, that it reached millions of Americans who, without it, might be left brainwashed by the MAGA hate machine and its “disinformation.”
In other words, you were paying to build your own propaganda apparatus to counter Trump’s.
Under Trump, the media brands behind the news Americans consumed became badges of political affiliation, even more than they were before. If you despised the administration, you would never dream of watching Fox News. Instead, you would watch CNN or MSNBC voraciously, and share stories from The New York Times or The Washington Post on your Facebook feed. During the Trump administration this became the media’s new value proposition to its consumers, and for a select few outlets, it was a godsend. The New York Times’ subscriber rolls ballooned, as did its newsroom, becoming the largest in the paper’s history.
As news organizations became more partisan than ever before, their loyal readers and viewers came to demand a standard of ideological fealty from their coverage.
Before the internet, a politically unpopular story might trigger a flood of nasty letters to the editor, but as long as it didn’t upset any major advertisers, the haters could be safely ignored. Now that it was the readers paying the rent, things were different. A revolt by your readers, if you were a newspaper publisher post-2016, was a direct threat to your bottom line.
But there was a threat even more perilous than that: a revolt by all the young reporters you hired to cater to the millions of outraged new subscribers you had enlisted in the fight against MAGA authoritarianism. Those young reporters were true believers. They’d never known the old, aspirationally non-partisan mode of journalism. They had joined your outlet to fight for social justice, wielding their pens as swords. So had all the app coders you had enticed away from their overpaid-but-unfulfilling Facebook jobs with the promise that here, you might take a pay cut but you could also change the world.
Today, a politically unpopular article or personality can leave a publisher besieged from the outside while facing a revolt from within. We’ve seen this play out again and again, especially at The New York Times. There was The Nazi Next Door scandal, the Donald McNeil fiasco, the Tom Cotton op-ed outrage, the Andy Mills brouhaha, the Alison Roman inanity and everything that Bari Weiss ever wrote or tweeted. Some of these tempests may have started with readers, others with journalists, but mostly it was hard to say, because they emerged from the swamp where the media industry’s most indignant consumers and its loudest employees coalesce: Twitter.
As these changes took place across the digital media industry, Twitter became a disciplinary tool for the journalistic profession. It became the means by which the partisan and ideological vanguardists huddled inside the media’s fortress walls could find their ragtag armies on the outside and wage war together against disfavored colleagues like Weiss and McNeil.
That’s what happened to Dasha Burns. I don’t know Burns and she didn’t return my request for comment. But I do know that she’s a human being. As such, I suspect that, if not for being so publicly vindicated by Fetterman’s debate performance, she may have begun to think twice before again giving voice to an obvious but unpopular truth that could draw the collective wrath of her colleagues. She may have learned, in other words, how to lie.
Instead, though, the script was changed: The real world punched through the narrative, revealing the flimsiness of the media establishment’s partisan indignation. As Fetterman stammered through response after response, the obvious became even more so: Dasha Burns was right, and all her haters were disingenuous hacks.
So maybe this story will have a different outcome. Maybe the media will experience, just for a moment, an unfamiliar feeling—humility. But I doubt it.
Re: "teaching newspapers to lie", you did not mention that 90% of the media in the United States is controlled by just six corporations: AT&T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, Newscorp and Viacom, as of May 9, 2022. Are you saying that this is the group that calls for CRT?
As long as the legacy media views itsself as crusaders for the progressive world and the woke view on issues such as race, gender and climate, it is not worth reading.