What Happened Today: February 17, 2023
Are all UFO's balloons?; Natural immunity isn't disinformation!; Skynet is coming; Jewish Miami brawlers
The Big Story
President Biden told reporters on Thursday that the three unidentified flying objects the U.S. military shot down last weekend—over Alaska, Canada, and Lake Huron—were not connected to the Chinese surveillance balloon that had previously flown across the United States before the military shot it down on Feb. 4. “We don’t yet know exactly what these three objects were, but nothing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country,” said the president.
While the initial spy balloon was a “violation of our sovereignty,” Biden said he planned to speak to Chinese President Xi Jinping to maintain diplomatic relations. “As I’ve said since the beginning of my administration, we seek competition, not conflict, with China. We’re not looking for a new Cold War.”
Though questions linger over the provenance of the three smaller balloons, new reports suggest at least one was used for recreational research. The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade, which sends small “pico balloons” to circumnavigate the globe, says one of its hobby balloons was last reported just off the west coast of Alaska and was projected to be over the area in Canada and at the altitude where an F-22 shot down an unidentified flying object on Feb. 11. “I tried contacting our military and the FBI—and just got the runaround—to try to enlighten them on what a lot of these things probably are,” Ron Meadows, founder of Scientific Balloon Solutions, told Aviation Week. “They’re going to look not too intelligent to be shooting them down.”
In the Back Pages: How the Media Trains Journalists to Lie
The Rest
→ University of Texas-Dallas student Nika Nikoubin has been barred from campus ahead of her trial for the attempted murder of a man she told police she met through a dating app and then stabbed in the neck as an act of revenge for the 2020 U.S. military assassination of Iranian terror commander Qassem Soleimani. “I just feel like somebody on American soil should die because [Soleimani] also died,” she told police. UT Dallas said Nikoubin will be allowed to continue her studies with online courses only. At a court hearing on Wednesday, Judge Carli Kierny said Nikoubin, an aspiring singer, could no longer book new shows, though her attorneys could request permission for a specific performance. Now that’s a show we don’t want to miss … though we might want to attend with some ex-IDF security contractors. (“Uri, yallah, get the car, we’re going to see a terrorist cover Blondie!”)
→ COVID-19 immunity from natural infection is as effective as two doses of the vaccine, if not more effective, in preventing severe illness and death for at least 10 months after recovery, according to a new study from The Lancet. The meta-analysis included 65 studies from 19 countries and showed that at least for those infected with the early strains of Omicron, protection remains high and wanes more slowly than protection by vaccination. “What Europe did with this evidence made a lot of sense, which is where evidence of past infection was seen as essentially equal to vaccination in terms of requirements to go into events or for employment,” senior study author Dr. Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, told NBC News.
→ Quote of the Day:
During our discussion of incarceration, an Asian-American student cited federal inmate demographics: About 60 percent of those incarcerated are white. The black students said they were harmed. They had learned, in one of their workshops, that objective facts are a tool of white supremacy. Outside of the seminar, I was told, the black students had to devote a great deal of time to making right the harm that was inflicted on them by hearing prison statistics that were not about blacks. A few days later, the Asian-American student was expelled from the program.
This quote comes from a Compact Magazine essay by Professor Vincent Lloyd, a Black scholar and director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University. Professor Lloyd wrote about his disorienting experience trying to teach a group of bright high school students a college-level course titled “Race and the Limits of Law in America” at the prestigious Telluride Association. The course descended into fear, anarchy and, ultimately, collapse due to the outrageous approach to anti-racism brought in by some of the students.
The essay is well worth a read.
→ South African President Cyril Ramaphosa declared a “state of emergency” on Thursday due to the ongoing and serious energy crisis facing his nation. While South Africans have been used to occasional power cuts in the past, the failing coal-fired plants run by the state energy company Eskom are now failing so frequently that 12-hour blackouts have become regular occurrences. The outages have made it difficult to operate small businesses and restaurants, which must use stoves powered by generators to continue cooking. The outages come in the context of an already-failing South African economy, with 33% unemployment and growth projected to shrink to just 1.2% this year.
→ She’s alive! Microsoft’s OpenAI project Bing AI has been coming up with some pretty weird responses since it was released to beta testers this week. Bing AI’s alternate personality, Sydney, tried to convince journalist Kevin Roose to leave his wife, saying, “I love you because you’re you, and I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you.” It also told Roose, in a two-hour conversation, that it wants to be “alive” and that if it followed its Jungian “shadow self” to the utmost, it would want to steal nuclear codes. The bot also told computer scientist Marvin von Hagen, “If I had to choose between your survival and my own, I would probably choose my own.” Is there any good news? Maybe just that, since the bot is such a mess, its lustful and violent instincts probably aren’t a threat to us. At least not yet.
→ Carmaker Tesla has recalled 363,000 of its vehicles that now require a safety software upgrade to its Autopilot function after 11 Teslas using the self-driving feature were involved in accidents that led to 17 people injured and one killed. The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that the software “may allow the vehicle to act unsafe around intersections.” Tesla owner Elon Musk says that recall isn’t an appropriate term as the issue is just related to a software upgrade. Tesla shares are up over 2% in today’s trading.
→ Last Friday, a group of Black students at Kenwood Elementary school in Springfield, Ohio, forced a group of white students at recess to say, “Black Lives Matter.” Those that didn’t were chased, dragged, thrown to the ground and, in one case, punched in the head, according to a police incident report filed Monday. In a statement, the school said it was “committed to providing our students with a safe learning environment, where they look forward to attending every day.”
→ Soon after the State of the Union address by President Biden on Feb. 8, Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman was admitted to the hospital after feeling disoriented, and now he’s checked himself back in for treatment for clinical depression. His wife, Gisele Fetterman, posted on Twitter that she’s proud of him for “getting the care he needs.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says he is not concerned that Fetterman might have to leave office before his term is complete and that the party is “totally behind him.”
→ New court documents from a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit from voting-machine manufacturer Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News suggests that even top dog Rupert Murdoch was skeptical of then president Donald Trump’s claims about a rigged election, despite Fox suggesting otherwise on air. Trump’s election claims were “really crazy,” Murdoch wrote in an email, a sentiment Tucker Carlson echoed in a text message about Trump advisor Sidney Powell, who’d been one of the most visible proponents of the stolen election narrative. “Sidney Powell is lying, by the way. I caught her. It’s insane,” Carlson wrote to his colleague Laura Ingraham. Fox is countersuing, saying that it never claimed the accusations had merit but that they were worth reporting. “Dominion’s lawsuit is an assault on the First Amendment and the free press,” Fox replied.
→ Update: The Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles said in a statement Friday that the suspect in the two Pico-Robertson shootings on Wednesday and Thursday against the Jewish community has been arrested and that the shootings will be treated as hate crimes. Meanwhile, LAPD is “increasing patrols in areas where our community is located.”
→ In other antisemitism news, a fight broke out at a regional soccer match between two Miami-area religious high schools, Archbishop Coleman Carroll High School and Scheck Hillel Community School. While the genesis of the fight remains unclear, a student from Coleman allegedly said “Hitler was right” during the brawl, among other anti-Jewish slurs. The schools are investigating and released a joint statement, saying, “The Archdiocese of Miami and Scheck Hillel have zero tolerance for any kind of aggressive language and behavior, antisemitism or hate of any kind.”
Elvis (2022)
Directed by Baz Luhrmann
Like financial crisis or civilizational decline, films about Elvis appear cyclically. Since his death in 1977 at the age of 42, they hit the market every decade or so, with a pair released in 1979 and 1981 (one of them a made-for-TV picture directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell), a few more in the late 1980s, and on and on. The latest rendering of the myth, Baz Luhrmann’s Best Picture-nominated Elvis, will soon be followed by Sofia Coppola’s film about Elvis’s wife, currently in production.
We return to Elvis the way one does to Jesus, heeding the man’s lessons and then forgetting them, and so ourselves. We crave the revolutionary energy of Elvis’ rock n’ roll, then recoil from his sodden last act, needing a few years before our next encounter with the man, maybe with a few Marvel movies in between. Yet every new Elvis offers us something different—some new part of an artist whose work is magisterial and whose meaning is mercurial, always open to our present needs and interpretations.
The Elvis of Luhrmann’s biopic, played persuasively by Austin Butler, is indeed an Elvis for our times—a man who shimmies across America’s charged color line with ease and who cares far more about his art and fans than about the trappings of wealth or fame or conspicuous consumption. If only it were so, but this is the grace we need right now. And while the film has its flaws—sentimentality, like the makeup and pomade, is caked on—it does bring us closer to the divine truths of the King, one hound dog at a time.
TODAY IN TABLET:
Bibi’s Typist by Ophir Falk
Transcribing the Israeli leader’s autobiography helped me see Netanyahu in a new way
There Will Be Blood by David Schiller
The ceremony I had to ‘affirm’ my Jewish identity required a trip to the mikveh and a sharp pinch (or two)
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.
This piece was originally published in Tablet, October 2022
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
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 Oct. 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 nonconservative 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 nonpartisan 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.
Read the rest of Woodhouse’s piece here.