A brilliant and clear essay on how to spin a story! I don't really have anything to add to that as you've nailed it again. Your students were very lucky Celia to have you teach them how to recognize and utilize the mechanisms of media influence and we are also fortunate to be able to reap the rewards of your expertise!
This is great, Celia. After reading this , I immediately thought of the analogous process that goes on in our minds: where we ultimately decide whether to be happy or sad; whether to enjoy ourselves or be miserable from one moment, to one day, to long stretches of our lives, and through our entire lifetime.
When I was 20, I took the “Student Success Course” which was required at the West Point Preparatory School on (now closed) Fort Monmouth, NJ. The instructor, the late Dr. Matthew Ignoffo, had two simple hand puppets: a green smiling face and a red frowning face, which he respectively named the Inner Genius and the Inner Critic.
It was an extremely simple lesson that many people probably never had to learn, but it was the most valuable thing I learned in my life. For whatever reason, I had given my Inner Critic primacy and I usually saw the downside of things. Realizing I could see the positive spin on events and people allowed me to see the good in more people and circumstances, and to find the self-confidence to take risks like calling up and asking out this pretty, quiet young lady I’d barely known in high school six years prior (now my wife of 22+ years).
I am still quite cynical, but I work hard not to be about things that matter most: love and friendship. Dr. Ignoffo and his Inner Critic and Inner Genius hand puppets eventually made me give myself permission to be happy.
You shared a very valuable skill, enlightening your students to the power of words to influence feelings. Thank you for sharing it and triggering my memory of another great teacher.
I had a guy tell me that one of my problems among many, was that I'd rather be right than happy. I said bullshit. He laughed and said see. That was when I was around six months into recovery. That sentence changed my whole perspective and made me realize that I was my biggest problem. My reactions and attitude shifted once I started to integrate and practice what these strangers were teaching me. They are gone, but the lessons they taught live on.
I’m glad that helped you! It’s great that you were able to separate the message from the messenger, too. Dr Ignoffo could be arrogant and condescending, and most of us made fun of him, but he was sure wise about how to have an positive attitude. I will remember to seek truth wherever I find it even if I don’t personally like the source.
Celia, this is probably the most useful article I’ve read in many, many years. My undergrad minor was Literature and I don’t recall ever having the power of persuasive writing spelled out so clearly. (To be fair to my professors, I don’t recall what I had for dinner last night, either.)
Two thoughts come to mind:
First, I’d love to find a way to make your article widely available. It is important and necessary information. I don’t use social media and I’m not a sure how Substack’s “restack” thing works, but I’ll give it a shot. I hope we can get this article out there!
Second, as I mentioned in a comment on another article (without knowing anything of your background), you are a natural educator. Some people are, some people aren’t. My friend Bill has the gift you do, I do not. Thank you for sharing it.
It was actually your comment that inspired me to dig into my old teaching materials for today's article! It occurred to me that there might be valuable material there.
Or you could have gone first to the Free Press (I didn't, I came here first) and read a truly disturbing account of the lunacy and depravity of our "friends" in the elite suburbs of New York City.
It’s an awful story, but Francesca Block DOES, I believe, at least TRY to tell the story fairly. However, she maybe didn’t temper her story as carefully or clearly as you were teaching your students to do. ANYWAY, I wish I’d read YOUR article before I read that one!! (Actually, I wish I’d read ONLY your article!)
I’ve been reading that article . The agree Press introduced it as the longest article they’ve ever published. The author spent 8 months working the story. The “ editors think it is so important because it shows how Tik Tom influencers can push their oft wrong , uninvestigated take on a story and destroy recitations and lies with their invasive and odious intrusions into people who they have never met , and know nothing g about.
Once again it is conscious bias for salacious and money making reasons.
And the "Editorial staff" at TFP described the article as a "juicy read". How disgusting to take a tragedy and describe it as such. Editorial standards have gone out the window at TFP.
Please, they lived in NY. How many Rs were rampaging BLMers? CHAZ? Pro-Hamas lunatics? The Democratic Party has been infected with a cancer that requires an extremely deep surgical intervention.
The woman in the article was at her core a nasty, self-loathing woman hell bent on ruining everyone and everything. Of course, an interesting reflection of what we see from so many people these days who have the exact same bottomless emptiness.
Yep. I decided long ago that real life has enough horror, sadness and bloodshed so I’m not going to spend my leisure time and money seeking it out. I’ll take the comics page over Dear Abby any day and every day.
Thanks for telling me, Litr8r. More than anything— with the possible exceptions of pizza and breakfast hamburgers — I love to laugh. If I can share humor with someone else, well, then it’s a very good day.
I cannot even believe the garage article about Biden's interview with Stephanopolis and some of the ignorant commentary completely devoid of logic and critical thinking. Even the most simple minded know when they're being played for a fool.
I haven't been there yet too, Bruce! Now I'm scared! Luckily my immediate neighbors are generally balanced, but I am surrounded by those off the deep end!!
Wise, insightful and trenchant, as usual, Celia. Propagandists have always known this. Think Duranty's swooning depiction of 1930s Soviet Communism in the comical New York Times. Or the garbage lauding the Nazis produced by Goebbels and Riefenstahl. The problem with our media today is that almost all the writers and overlords are committed, leftist Democrats. One would expect a population writing such descriptions to be split 50-50, with half swooning over a delightful, warm summer's day and the other half complaining about heat and humidity. Today, however, with our partisan media, we expect only alarmism and hysterical cant about rising temperatures and the wickedness of humankind. In fact two recent episodes stand out as examples of carefully disguised lies. The first was the deliberate lie by "geneticists" that the Wuhan Virus could not have been engineered in a lab. Of course, "gain of function" was carefully avoided to serve the interests of their Chinese masters. The second was the carefully constructed lie by 51 spooks that Hunter's laptop, "appeared" to have all the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. So they later could claim that they never "said" it was, only that it appeared so. Knowing full well that the dolts in the DNC media would run with the lie - and thus ensure the "election" of the Senile Imbecile.
I can remember when CNN was truly straight down the middle. They were so valuable in the days after 9-11. It’s a shame they made a formal decision to be one more anti-Trump outlet, we lost a valuable resource when that happened.
I remember when Robin McNeil and Jim Lehrer were the PBS newsanchors. I never knew their politics. There is a difference between unconscious bias, which Celia brilliantly taught her students about and the current state of MSM
What he have now is something else entirely, Deliberate conscious bias to push an agenda.
Yeah, media token conservatives are a joke. Ross Douthat, George Will, Brooks, Bill Kristol, and the rest. It took just one brash orange New Yorker to make them all abandon their “deeply held conservatism.”
I suspect so. The irony is that Trump is not really a conservative as such. He came on the scene as an iconoclast, at a moment when many ordinary Americans had become sick to death of the attitude and policy of Elites (particularly as personified in Pres. Obama). And since they viewed him as the only candidate who could lose to Hillary, the Media promoted him daily, ensuring that he would become the nominee.
I completely understand the aversion to Trump. I had grown up watching his wealthy playboy antics, and I simply couldn't vote for him in 2016. (I voted for Johnson, because I couldn't vote for Hillary either.)
But I think Trump's nomination as the Republican candidate revealed a lot about who was actually a conservative and who was using their nominal association with the Republican Party to promote personal agendas. Because the vast majority of them didn't say, "What the heck, Trump is not a conservative," but instead said, "Trump represents conservativism, so I can no longer be a conservative."
"CNN straight down the middle?" Was that a reconstructed memory, lol? I remember calling them the Clinton News Network. And Ted Turner was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda. Who, to the best of my memory, was never punished for her treachery.
Hanoi Jane has never been punished for what amounted to actual, literal treason. The Elites have always been subject to different rules from the rest of us.
But I always felt that CNN tried to be objective, back in the day. They were the go-to news station for a clear picture of unfolding events. The station that TVs in public places were often tuned to. (It's ironic that, at least around here, those TVs are now most likely to be tuned to Fox News.)
It’s been a long time, I watched a lot of CNN until early 2002. I thought they handled the 2000 election pretty fairly, as well. They used to have interesting and fair minded presenters like Greta van Susteren. That was a different time.
The media doesn't need to make things up in order to tell its tendentious story. It just needs to pick out from the vast minestrone soup of events - endlessly unfolding hour after hour - which bits it 'likes' and which bits it suits the Narrative to leave untouched.....which murders matter and which ones don't etc etc. (Some murders warrant months of agonising and outrage whilst other murders (sometimes actually on the same day) don't even get a mention.)
It frustrates me how little of the discussions on media bias actually get this crucial editorial-selectivity aspect. What it means, in effect, is that "The News" cannot help but be biased....the whole concept is a fraud and always has been (the idea that you can know what's important all around the world just from a dip into "The News" for a bit).
Exactly. The media creates its own desired narrative simply by choosing what stories to cover and which to ignore.
It's arguable that the refusal to cover Hunter's laptop altered the outcome of the 2020 election. Which is exactly what they intended. And they have made no secret about having done their best to influence the election--which is unethical, if not actually illegal. Clearly they think that no one will ever hold them to account for it.
Wow - away above and beyond, Celia. I feel like this when I click back and forth between Fox and CNN at night - are they really talking about the same people?
Thank you Celia for opening up those young minds to what is quite simply a magician's trick - spinning an illusion of "all the facts" when it's not. I taught my two children the same caution- I told them whenever they read a headline or an article that gets their blood pressure going, see if just changing a few words (it's amazing, as you pointed out) also changes the story being conveyed. The police "quickly approached" versus "charged" the suspect - two different mental images, subtlety altering the mindset for what follows.
My students were often shocked to realize that a few words could make such a difference in the picture portrayed. Seeing the light go on for them was one of the most rewarding parts of teaching that class.
Well done, Celia. As an old school reporter, I assure you everyone in the business once knew their biases and strove to keep them in check because doing so burnished their credibility. If we didn’t, an editor usually was there to do it for us. I once reported on a Klan rally, and my lede included the phrase “spewing their hate.” The managing editor, a liberal, pulled it. Let the facts tell the story, he said. Another time, after a truly embarrassing campaign by one black candidate, an editor assigned me a story about whether any black candidate could ever run for governor in our state of South Carolina. I, a conservative, asked the editor if he would be assigning the story if the losing candidate had been white. Story dropped. Advocacy journalism, an oxymoron, took root in the ‘80s. I saw the seeds being sewn in the newsroom of the University of Missouri J-school in 1983, when our professors/editors announced we’d never question the environmental movement. AJ has consumed the industry. Facts. Schmacts. Tell a compelling story that will engage the reader and inspire action. The problem is we’re all fatter, dumber, and happier than we once were. Reports don’t dig. Readers don’t think.
To that end, how is it that a political machine that can throw elections, hide and suppress evidence of the grossest malfeasance, and spin a fantastic lie for six years can’t shuffle a demented, doddering old fool off the stage?
They can shuffle the old fool off the stage. I suspect they are playing for time and just the right incident to do that. They may be setting everyone up for the big switch. It goes back to how to make a speech: First you tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them.
What a wonderful essay! As Mark D. pointed out, we also make a choice in how we decide to perceive events and our own circumstances. People tend to view pessimists as "smarter" than optimists (not true, actually), and social media obviously capitalizes on the human tendency to engage most when angry.
This post was not only a terrific primer on how to think critically, but also a good reminder to cultivate an "attitude of gratitude."
It also doesn’t hurt to add Trump lies but we all know that to an article about Biden to ease the sting cough Eli Lake cough.
I had a TA in freshman English. White woman who would now be one of those wearing a pussy hat. Anyway I turned in a paper that said King Lear became sentient right before the end. She gave me a C. When I confronted her it was obvious I didn’t vomit the narrative she laid out in class and when I told her that (most likely not in those words) she started crying. Yikes.
Then there was the Pakistani TA for calculus that no one could understand.
One of the problems involved with the move by colleges to have most lower-level courses taught by adjuncts is that they often end up scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The reality is that you cannot make a living as an adjunct unless you teach for several different colleges. Adjuncts are carefully not given full-time hours, so they don't have to be given benefits. And adjuncts work on contract, so they have no guarantee of a job the next semester.
As a result, colleges have to hire whoever is available. When we first moved to this area and I enquired about a teaching position at the community college, the dean hired me basically sight unseen, because he was so desperate to get a teacher for the upcoming summer course. He lucked out with me, but one semester the other English adjunct wasn't available and he ended up hiring an immigrant whose spoken English was difficult to understand, particularly to rural Midwestern students who had likely had little contact with foreign English speakers. Students complained in droves.
I have no idea who was hired to replace me when I quit, and at that point, I didn't care. Chances are I could go back to teaching there if I wanted to, but I'd hit my limit of disrespect from the college administration (not my dean, he was awesome; he also wanted out, but no college wanted to hire him to teach music--his own subject matter--after he'd been an administrator).
Well, I was in college pre adjunct but we had the TAs.
What colleges are doing to people is vile. Charge an arm and a leg but provide no real education. Encourage PhDs but they have few real job prospects. Then create the adjunct system which as you so well said, leaves people in penury and with no stability. And tenure provides the worst of all worlds. It freezes the employment base and those with tenure act nuts half the time. Plus full professors rarely teach anymore beyond one or two classes.
Celia-- I also worked as an adjunct for quite a few years. I was working at one at one particular school (where my boss loved me and I had great reviews from the students) when one semester I was accidentally given 3 classes which put me over the PT limit. i was all excited and thought I made it to the big time and I'd get benefits. Not so much! the minute admin found out they took away one of my classes. I immediately applied (and got partial unemployment, and then found a better (but still adjunct) job for the CUNY system (which being union paid benefits!)
I got to teach an extra course (a *real* English lit course) one semester because the retiring professor's wife had a stroke and he left a semester earlier than planned. But the administration had to give special permission, and it was with the understanding that I was still a contract worker with no benefits.
I had literally a week to prepare to teach that class. When the administration didn't even give me a courtesy interview (as was standard practice for current employees) for the retiree's position, after I saved their asses that way (on top of many other examples of disrespect) I was simply done.
It was plain TERRIBLE! I literally had my boss call me up 1 day before and ask me to teach a class in typography (a course I had never actually even taken!!) I jumped on it to keep me numbers up, but of course he was playing w/ positioning his faculty. He knew he had 1/2 a dozen people he could pop into a painting slot (which was my preference) but only a few who could do graphics. I later spotted on my page in his notes on faculty "can teach anything"! It was a blessing AND a curse! Of course when I asked him to help me get a promotion (He was the chair of dept. AND the union rep! Conflict of interest anyone??) he did literally ZILCH!!
Gosh Unwoke you made me remember my own bad experience in college freshman English. the prof was a prune faced fossil who claimed my first essay was plagiarized! (I had compared iambic pentameter with physics formulas) I was really reaching and it was pretty out there, but it certainly wasn't plagiarized! Anyway I was lucky in that my physics prof went to bat for me. He was more upset about it than I was actually. the English prof finally backed down but I was certainly on his shit list the rest of the semester and I just never took any more English classes after that. Sure wish Celia had been my teacher!
LOL. My dissertation advisor told me I couldn't apply economic theories to F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories. Thankfully an econ prof had just come out with a book adjacent to that, so I showed him the book and said "watch me"! I won.
Sometimes I think profs just simply hate it when a whippersnapper comes up with something genius they don't understand (and can't steal for their own stab at a journal article). Hee hee.
I think you are right Litr8r. Had a memory jog last nite about that incident, it was over 45 years ago, so took me awhile to pull the pieces together. I vaguely remember the English prof saying there was no way I could have come up with that far out idea on my own so ergo I must have plagiarized the piece! And I think my physics prof got so mad because the implication was that one of 'his' physics students wasn't smart enough to think of something like that. Anyway I also suspect there might have already issues between them. I was young and dumb so pretty oblivious to academic politics back then.
You are doing so much here. I can't imagine how much time and energy this is taking.
To me, America's community colleges are the crown jewels of our higher education system. For all the crap they get, a typical local two year school has more resources and provides a higher quality education than most of the world's universities. I encourage everyone who asks me to attend a two year school as the first (and maybe only) part of their higher education.
As you have shown, anyone with a GED or better and a couple of hundred bucks can get a world-class education in spin doctoring in this country. And yet, though they are overloaded with graduates from Ivy League institutions, most of the mainstream media just doesn't bother any more. If something doesn't fit the narrative they want to preserve, they just don't cover it. Kids getting mutilated by the medical-industrial complex? Say nothing. Our government is engaged in two proxy wars with a nuclear power? Remain silent. The President keeps the same hours as a pre-schooler because it's all he's physically and mentally capable of? Mums the word.
They know that if they fill their pages with stories about Kardashians and shit they pull off Reddit threads the people will be satisfied with that. I don't know if it's because we're all idiots or we just feel helpless. Either way, the system has successfully made most of us feel like self-governance is no longer something we can or should do.
Agree! I think it makes a big difference when students are working full-time or part-time and paying for their education themselves! They take their classes much more seriously and don't want to fail because then they have to pay to repeat the class.
Oh yes! Non-trad students were always my hardest workers. Kids who had come straight from high school had a tendency to view school as secondary to their social and emotional life.
I completely understood, because I had been there myself. I ended up flunking out of college in my 4th year the first time around. I hadn't taken the gap year I desperately needed (because no one had heard of gap years back then), and I was suffering from depression complicated with anxiety and OCD (thanks for your rotten genes, bat-shit-crazy birthmother's family!).
When I went back to college in my 30s I was back on top of my game (as I had been in high school). I viewed studying as a privilege, not just more school. I understood to my bones what life without a degree was like.
But even though I felt for my struggling young students, I had to grade them based on what they actually did.
100%!!! I also taught in a few suburban CC's where the students were living at home and you know their indulgent parents made them sign up or move out. They couldn't give a rat's ass whether they were learning anything or not!
Well, in Atlanta I had an 18-year-old mother of two whose social worker thought a college class would be good for her self esteem, a middle-aged ex-convict, …etc. Never dull no matter who’s was on my class list!
LOL!!! Well you know we New Yorkers are competitive- I had one class where my only white student (I had very few) was a 6'5" pale blonde guy who identified as a VAMPIRE! He wanted to do his final presentation in Art History on Vlad the Impaler! I managed to convince him that Vlad was not considered an artist and if he wanted a decent grade he should pick someone else! (he did, prob. Van Gogh!)
Took a business ethics class towards the end of my undergrad. We covered however many topics with an eye towards presenting differing opinions. Our final exam was an essay.
Towards the end of the course, the instructor gave a couple more pointers on how to better articulate a position, show your sources etc and opened the class up to a Q&A. One of the students asked the following …
If I pick <Subject A> for my essay, what’s the correct answer?
You could feel a collective head-tilt in the room. I want to assume this was because the student came from a country that forbids independent thought (China), but the number of us silently asking how did this student get this far was just …
The more I think about this point, the more I’ve come to think of it as a blessing in disguise. After all, there are few life lessons more important than adversity.
I was in community college for the first two years of my education and I learned more in that setting than I did in graduate school. I have fond memories of my speech class, where I learned a valuable lesson. We were required to pick a controversial topic and make a convincing presentation of the argument that went against our personal opinion on the matter. Then, we had to make the argument for the opposite side. The goal was to make it impossible to tell where we personally stood on the matter. We were all permanently cured of "straw-manning." Such a valuable lesson! I am 70 years old and this class was in the early 1980s. I wonder if junior college is still as great as it was back then. It opened up the whole world for me.
Since community college classes are often taught part time by adjuncts who have full time professional jobs in the subjects they teach, the students get more current, relevant, and useful information than they do from full time faculty who may have no relevant experience other than going to school and directly going into teaching.
Yes. That is what was so awesome about community college. My anthropology professor was an actual anthropologist, my psychology professor was a practicing psychologist, and so on. This gave us a real feel for what it was like to work in that profession.
Another thought provoking and insightful piece. An educator with your sensibilities and thoughtful approach should have risen to the heights of academia. Instead we all see how advancing in an educational setting is now more of political exercise than anything else, with a free pass on plagiarism thrown in.
Reading some of your examples just hit me over the head with how the Boston Globe operates. Descriptions of certain people always play into the narrative of the earnest, hardworking victim of the oppressive racist culture.
I read a report by a LIFE Magazine reporter several decades ago. He explained that as a photo-journalist, he felt that he had a story to tell through his photos beyond straight reporting, and so he arranged, scheduled, and organized his photos accordingly. Even then, this photo-journalist had a grievance with Israel, and "the occupation". He scheduled photos of Israeli soldiers in the harsh, burning glare of a noonday sun. He photographed the aggrieved Palestinians in the soft cool light of the approaching evening. A picture is worth a thousand words. But words or pictures, they can and are both manipulated to support a bias.
Today, this is more the rule than something exceptional. The MSM, print and electronic, carefully select what is put out to the public, especially where Israel is concerned. At the time, years ago, what you described in the piece today seemed mind-blowing. Today it just the way it is.
A brilliant and clear essay on how to spin a story! I don't really have anything to add to that as you've nailed it again. Your students were very lucky Celia to have you teach them how to recognize and utilize the mechanisms of media influence and we are also fortunate to be able to reap the rewards of your expertise!
and Rainbow you nailed it too! Ditto from me on this!!
This is great, Celia. After reading this , I immediately thought of the analogous process that goes on in our minds: where we ultimately decide whether to be happy or sad; whether to enjoy ourselves or be miserable from one moment, to one day, to long stretches of our lives, and through our entire lifetime.
When I was 20, I took the “Student Success Course” which was required at the West Point Preparatory School on (now closed) Fort Monmouth, NJ. The instructor, the late Dr. Matthew Ignoffo, had two simple hand puppets: a green smiling face and a red frowning face, which he respectively named the Inner Genius and the Inner Critic.
It was an extremely simple lesson that many people probably never had to learn, but it was the most valuable thing I learned in my life. For whatever reason, I had given my Inner Critic primacy and I usually saw the downside of things. Realizing I could see the positive spin on events and people allowed me to see the good in more people and circumstances, and to find the self-confidence to take risks like calling up and asking out this pretty, quiet young lady I’d barely known in high school six years prior (now my wife of 22+ years).
I am still quite cynical, but I work hard not to be about things that matter most: love and friendship. Dr. Ignoffo and his Inner Critic and Inner Genius hand puppets eventually made me give myself permission to be happy.
You shared a very valuable skill, enlightening your students to the power of words to influence feelings. Thank you for sharing it and triggering my memory of another great teacher.
This is very true! I'm glad you had a teacher who enlightened you to the power of one's attitude. (I bet your wife is glad, too!!)
I had a guy tell me that one of my problems among many, was that I'd rather be right than happy. I said bullshit. He laughed and said see. That was when I was around six months into recovery. That sentence changed my whole perspective and made me realize that I was my biggest problem. My reactions and attitude shifted once I started to integrate and practice what these strangers were teaching me. They are gone, but the lessons they taught live on.
I’m glad that helped you! It’s great that you were able to separate the message from the messenger, too. Dr Ignoffo could be arrogant and condescending, and most of us made fun of him, but he was sure wise about how to have an positive attitude. I will remember to seek truth wherever I find it even if I don’t personally like the source.
Amen!!
Mark- wonderful story!! Thanks for sharing!!
Celia, this is probably the most useful article I’ve read in many, many years. My undergrad minor was Literature and I don’t recall ever having the power of persuasive writing spelled out so clearly. (To be fair to my professors, I don’t recall what I had for dinner last night, either.)
Two thoughts come to mind:
First, I’d love to find a way to make your article widely available. It is important and necessary information. I don’t use social media and I’m not a sure how Substack’s “restack” thing works, but I’ll give it a shot. I hope we can get this article out there!
Second, as I mentioned in a comment on another article (without knowing anything of your background), you are a natural educator. Some people are, some people aren’t. My friend Bill has the gift you do, I do not. Thank you for sharing it.
It was actually your comment that inspired me to dig into my old teaching materials for today's article! It occurred to me that there might be valuable material there.
Gosh, Celia, I’m happy that you read my comment, much less felt some inspiration from it. Thank you for letting me know!
Or you could have gone first to the Free Press (I didn't, I came here first) and read a truly disturbing account of the lunacy and depravity of our "friends" in the elite suburbs of New York City.
I haven't been there yet...bated breath. :O
Save yourself the misery. That people such as this exist, and are lionized, in New York's "elites" shows the lunacy with which we are dealing.
It’s an awful story, but Francesca Block DOES, I believe, at least TRY to tell the story fairly. However, she maybe didn’t temper her story as carefully or clearly as you were teaching your students to do. ANYWAY, I wish I’d read YOUR article before I read that one!! (Actually, I wish I’d read ONLY your article!)
Was that the one about the divorced couple where one committed suicide? I saw it but didn’t read it — I have no interest in other people’s tragedies.
I’ve been calling the Free Press “The Progressive Cosmopolitan Ladies’ Home Digest” for some time now, and they’re living up to it.
I’ve been reading that article . The agree Press introduced it as the longest article they’ve ever published. The author spent 8 months working the story. The “ editors think it is so important because it shows how Tik Tom influencers can push their oft wrong , uninvestigated take on a story and destroy recitations and lies with their invasive and odious intrusions into people who they have never met , and know nothing g about.
Once again it is conscious bias for salacious and money making reasons.
The whole was thing was predatory and gross.
And the "Editorial staff" at TFP described the article as a "juicy read". How disgusting to take a tragedy and describe it as such. Editorial standards have gone out the window at TFP.
But still.......has anyone looked up their political contributions? Anyone want to take bets on whether those loons were Democrats?
Please, they lived in NY. How many Rs were rampaging BLMers? CHAZ? Pro-Hamas lunatics? The Democratic Party has been infected with a cancer that requires an extremely deep surgical intervention.
Destroy reputations
Yes. Oh that's brilliant. Bari and her posse are hilariously incapable of seeing what caricatures they've become.
The woman in the article was at her core a nasty, self-loathing woman hell bent on ruining everyone and everything. Of course, an interesting reflection of what we see from so many people these days who have the exact same bottomless emptiness.
I asked on the Free Press if they were Democrats. Just to see what that would ignite. So far, none of the usual gang of idiots has taken the bait.
Oh it’s been a while since I’ve seen that phrase “usual gang of idiots”! MAD magazine, right?
Yes. A staple of my youth.
wow- this sounds like a horrible article! It might be a train wreck I can't look away from!!
You were wise to take a pass. An ugly story, with nothing to be gained from reading it.
Yep. I decided long ago that real life has enough horror, sadness and bloodshed so I’m not going to spend my leisure time and money seeking it out. I’ll take the comics page over Dear Abby any day and every day.
TFP claimed we would learn about the horrors of social media. I think most of us are already quite aware of the downside.
Great moniker for TFP!
That is a hilarious and spot on description, James Nick! Thanks for the chuckle!
Thanks for telling me, Litr8r. More than anything— with the possible exceptions of pizza and breakfast hamburgers — I love to laugh. If I can share humor with someone else, well, then it’s a very good day.
I cannot even believe the garage article about Biden's interview with Stephanopolis and some of the ignorant commentary completely devoid of logic and critical thinking. Even the most simple minded know when they're being played for a fool.
Yes but so many will still say nothing, ie the emporer's non-existent new clothes!
Yes, so many people that say absolutely nothing! Edit: Sumgly and proudly say absolutely nothing.
No, because they still believe Bad Orange Man will actually destroy democracy. So they'll still vote (knowingly) for the shadow government.
I haven't been there yet too, Bruce! Now I'm scared! Luckily my immediate neighbors are generally balanced, but I am surrounded by those off the deep end!!
Wise, insightful and trenchant, as usual, Celia. Propagandists have always known this. Think Duranty's swooning depiction of 1930s Soviet Communism in the comical New York Times. Or the garbage lauding the Nazis produced by Goebbels and Riefenstahl. The problem with our media today is that almost all the writers and overlords are committed, leftist Democrats. One would expect a population writing such descriptions to be split 50-50, with half swooning over a delightful, warm summer's day and the other half complaining about heat and humidity. Today, however, with our partisan media, we expect only alarmism and hysterical cant about rising temperatures and the wickedness of humankind. In fact two recent episodes stand out as examples of carefully disguised lies. The first was the deliberate lie by "geneticists" that the Wuhan Virus could not have been engineered in a lab. Of course, "gain of function" was carefully avoided to serve the interests of their Chinese masters. The second was the carefully constructed lie by 51 spooks that Hunter's laptop, "appeared" to have all the hallmarks of a Russian false flag operation. So they later could claim that they never "said" it was, only that it appeared so. Knowing full well that the dolts in the DNC media would run with the lie - and thus ensure the "election" of the Senile Imbecile.
I can remember when CNN was truly straight down the middle. They were so valuable in the days after 9-11. It’s a shame they made a formal decision to be one more anti-Trump outlet, we lost a valuable resource when that happened.
I remember when Robin McNeil and Jim Lehrer were the PBS newsanchors. I never knew their politics. There is a difference between unconscious bias, which Celia brilliantly taught her students about and the current state of MSM
What he have now is something else entirely, Deliberate conscious bias to push an agenda.
Every imponderable in a while, just for old times sake, I will watch a clip on YouTube, of Brooks and Capehart from the Friday evening PBS Newshour.
What the hell happened to David Brooks? I think he is meant to be the ‘ conservative “ voice? Capehart is a carcicature of the left mouthpiece.
They agree on most everything, on accession Brooks will have an insignificantly different assessment of some minor point.
It’s egregious and the zenith of the “ elite” media
Horrifying
Yeah, media token conservatives are a joke. Ross Douthat, George Will, Brooks, Bill Kristol, and the rest. It took just one brash orange New Yorker to make them all abandon their “deeply held conservatism.”
Do you think it’s their aversion to Trump that caused them to abandon all conservative principles?
I suspect so. The irony is that Trump is not really a conservative as such. He came on the scene as an iconoclast, at a moment when many ordinary Americans had become sick to death of the attitude and policy of Elites (particularly as personified in Pres. Obama). And since they viewed him as the only candidate who could lose to Hillary, the Media promoted him daily, ensuring that he would become the nominee.
I completely understand the aversion to Trump. I had grown up watching his wealthy playboy antics, and I simply couldn't vote for him in 2016. (I voted for Johnson, because I couldn't vote for Hillary either.)
But I think Trump's nomination as the Republican candidate revealed a lot about who was actually a conservative and who was using their nominal association with the Republican Party to promote personal agendas. Because the vast majority of them didn't say, "What the heck, Trump is not a conservative," but instead said, "Trump represents conservativism, so I can no longer be a conservative."
That or a combination of craven cowardice and filthy lucre.
Indeed. Whatever happened to "just the facts, m'am?"
"CNN straight down the middle?" Was that a reconstructed memory, lol? I remember calling them the Clinton News Network. And Ted Turner was married to Hanoi Jane Fonda. Who, to the best of my memory, was never punished for her treachery.
Hanoi Jane has never been punished for what amounted to actual, literal treason. The Elites have always been subject to different rules from the rest of us.
But I always felt that CNN tried to be objective, back in the day. They were the go-to news station for a clear picture of unfolding events. The station that TVs in public places were often tuned to. (It's ironic that, at least around here, those TVs are now most likely to be tuned to Fox News.)
It’s been a long time, I watched a lot of CNN until early 2002. I thought they handled the 2000 election pretty fairly, as well. They used to have interesting and fair minded presenters like Greta van Susteren. That was a different time.
The media doesn't need to make things up in order to tell its tendentious story. It just needs to pick out from the vast minestrone soup of events - endlessly unfolding hour after hour - which bits it 'likes' and which bits it suits the Narrative to leave untouched.....which murders matter and which ones don't etc etc. (Some murders warrant months of agonising and outrage whilst other murders (sometimes actually on the same day) don't even get a mention.)
It frustrates me how little of the discussions on media bias actually get this crucial editorial-selectivity aspect. What it means, in effect, is that "The News" cannot help but be biased....the whole concept is a fraud and always has been (the idea that you can know what's important all around the world just from a dip into "The News" for a bit).
Exactly. The media creates its own desired narrative simply by choosing what stories to cover and which to ignore.
It's arguable that the refusal to cover Hunter's laptop altered the outcome of the 2020 election. Which is exactly what they intended. And they have made no secret about having done their best to influence the election--which is unethical, if not actually illegal. Clearly they think that no one will ever hold them to account for it.
I am reminded of Kipling's poem, "The Press" (hear it sung here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGUa8ftiMc4 )
The Soldier may forget his Sword,
The Sailorman the Sea,
The Mason may forget the Word
And the Priest his Litany:
The Maid may forget both jewel and gem,
And the Bride her wedding-dress--
But the Jew shall forget Jerusalem
Ere we forget the Press!
Who once hath stood through the loaded hour
Ere, roaring like the gale,
The Harrild and the Hoe devour
Their league-long paper-bale,
And has lit his pipe in the morning calm
That follows the midnight stress--
He hath sold his heart to the old Black Art
We call the daily Press.
Who once hath dealt in the widest game
That all of a man can play,
No later love, no larger fame
Will lure him long away.
As the war-horse snuffeth the battle afar,
The entered Soul, no less,
He saith: "Ha! Ha!" where the trumpets are
And the thunders of the Press!
Canst thou number the days that we fulfill,
Or the Times that we bring forth?
Canst thou send the lightnings to do thy will,
And cause them reign on earth?
Hast thou given a peacock goodly wings,
To please his foolishness?
Sit down at the heart of men and things,
Companion of the Press!
The Pope may launch his Interdict,
The Union its decree,
But the bubble is blown and the bubble is pricked
By Us and such as We.
Remember the battle and stand aside
While Thrones and Powers confess
That King over all the children of pride
Is the Press--the Press--the Press!
The perfect companion piece to his "The Gods of the Copybook Headings":
https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_copybook.htm
Overton Window Dressing poured over Word Salad!
TBC: the Media not you Mr. C…
Yes, that’s a Happy Days reference💫
Wow - away above and beyond, Celia. I feel like this when I click back and forth between Fox and CNN at night - are they really talking about the same people?
Thank you Celia for opening up those young minds to what is quite simply a magician's trick - spinning an illusion of "all the facts" when it's not. I taught my two children the same caution- I told them whenever they read a headline or an article that gets their blood pressure going, see if just changing a few words (it's amazing, as you pointed out) also changes the story being conveyed. The police "quickly approached" versus "charged" the suspect - two different mental images, subtlety altering the mindset for what follows.
My students were often shocked to realize that a few words could make such a difference in the picture portrayed. Seeing the light go on for them was one of the most rewarding parts of teaching that class.
I think it would have been interesting to also ask them to do a press release on the same topic, just to see what it's like to present just the facts.
Well done, Celia. As an old school reporter, I assure you everyone in the business once knew their biases and strove to keep them in check because doing so burnished their credibility. If we didn’t, an editor usually was there to do it for us. I once reported on a Klan rally, and my lede included the phrase “spewing their hate.” The managing editor, a liberal, pulled it. Let the facts tell the story, he said. Another time, after a truly embarrassing campaign by one black candidate, an editor assigned me a story about whether any black candidate could ever run for governor in our state of South Carolina. I, a conservative, asked the editor if he would be assigning the story if the losing candidate had been white. Story dropped. Advocacy journalism, an oxymoron, took root in the ‘80s. I saw the seeds being sewn in the newsroom of the University of Missouri J-school in 1983, when our professors/editors announced we’d never question the environmental movement. AJ has consumed the industry. Facts. Schmacts. Tell a compelling story that will engage the reader and inspire action. The problem is we’re all fatter, dumber, and happier than we once were. Reports don’t dig. Readers don’t think.
To that end, how is it that a political machine that can throw elections, hide and suppress evidence of the grossest malfeasance, and spin a fantastic lie for six years can’t shuffle a demented, doddering old fool off the stage?
They can shuffle the old fool off the stage. I suspect they are playing for time and just the right incident to do that. They may be setting everyone up for the big switch. It goes back to how to make a speech: First you tell them what you are going to tell them, then you tell them, then you tell them what you told them.
What a wonderful essay! As Mark D. pointed out, we also make a choice in how we decide to perceive events and our own circumstances. People tend to view pessimists as "smarter" than optimists (not true, actually), and social media obviously capitalizes on the human tendency to engage most when angry.
This post was not only a terrific primer on how to think critically, but also a good reminder to cultivate an "attitude of gratitude."
"attitude of gratitude" has been replaced with "I'm owed because I am a victim, usually because of my own choices".
AKA “I deserve respect without effort. The World owes me!”
Good point!
Absolutely. Resentment will eat your soul. Gratitude will save you.
As Hamlet said, "There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." For modern readers, change "thinking" to "spin."
Excellent comment! Extra points for quoting the Bard.
It also doesn’t hurt to add Trump lies but we all know that to an article about Biden to ease the sting cough Eli Lake cough.
I had a TA in freshman English. White woman who would now be one of those wearing a pussy hat. Anyway I turned in a paper that said King Lear became sentient right before the end. She gave me a C. When I confronted her it was obvious I didn’t vomit the narrative she laid out in class and when I told her that (most likely not in those words) she started crying. Yikes.
Then there was the Pakistani TA for calculus that no one could understand.
One of the problems involved with the move by colleges to have most lower-level courses taught by adjuncts is that they often end up scraping the bottom of the barrel.
The reality is that you cannot make a living as an adjunct unless you teach for several different colleges. Adjuncts are carefully not given full-time hours, so they don't have to be given benefits. And adjuncts work on contract, so they have no guarantee of a job the next semester.
As a result, colleges have to hire whoever is available. When we first moved to this area and I enquired about a teaching position at the community college, the dean hired me basically sight unseen, because he was so desperate to get a teacher for the upcoming summer course. He lucked out with me, but one semester the other English adjunct wasn't available and he ended up hiring an immigrant whose spoken English was difficult to understand, particularly to rural Midwestern students who had likely had little contact with foreign English speakers. Students complained in droves.
I have no idea who was hired to replace me when I quit, and at that point, I didn't care. Chances are I could go back to teaching there if I wanted to, but I'd hit my limit of disrespect from the college administration (not my dean, he was awesome; he also wanted out, but no college wanted to hire him to teach music--his own subject matter--after he'd been an administrator).
Well, I was in college pre adjunct but we had the TAs.
What colleges are doing to people is vile. Charge an arm and a leg but provide no real education. Encourage PhDs but they have few real job prospects. Then create the adjunct system which as you so well said, leaves people in penury and with no stability. And tenure provides the worst of all worlds. It freezes the employment base and those with tenure act nuts half the time. Plus full professors rarely teach anymore beyond one or two classes.
Adjunct work pays dick. Hence my move to tech writing.
Good move! I went into decorative painting.
Celia-- I also worked as an adjunct for quite a few years. I was working at one at one particular school (where my boss loved me and I had great reviews from the students) when one semester I was accidentally given 3 classes which put me over the PT limit. i was all excited and thought I made it to the big time and I'd get benefits. Not so much! the minute admin found out they took away one of my classes. I immediately applied (and got partial unemployment, and then found a better (but still adjunct) job for the CUNY system (which being union paid benefits!)
I got to teach an extra course (a *real* English lit course) one semester because the retiring professor's wife had a stroke and he left a semester earlier than planned. But the administration had to give special permission, and it was with the understanding that I was still a contract worker with no benefits.
I had literally a week to prepare to teach that class. When the administration didn't even give me a courtesy interview (as was standard practice for current employees) for the retiree's position, after I saved their asses that way (on top of many other examples of disrespect) I was simply done.
It was plain TERRIBLE! I literally had my boss call me up 1 day before and ask me to teach a class in typography (a course I had never actually even taken!!) I jumped on it to keep me numbers up, but of course he was playing w/ positioning his faculty. He knew he had 1/2 a dozen people he could pop into a painting slot (which was my preference) but only a few who could do graphics. I later spotted on my page in his notes on faculty "can teach anything"! It was a blessing AND a curse! Of course when I asked him to help me get a promotion (He was the chair of dept. AND the union rep! Conflict of interest anyone??) he did literally ZILCH!!
Higher Ed-it's a brutal money making machine!
Gosh Unwoke you made me remember my own bad experience in college freshman English. the prof was a prune faced fossil who claimed my first essay was plagiarized! (I had compared iambic pentameter with physics formulas) I was really reaching and it was pretty out there, but it certainly wasn't plagiarized! Anyway I was lucky in that my physics prof went to bat for me. He was more upset about it than I was actually. the English prof finally backed down but I was certainly on his shit list the rest of the semester and I just never took any more English classes after that. Sure wish Celia had been my teacher!
What on earth!? Where did he think you would find an essay to plagiarize with such an esoteric thesis??
I have absolutely no clue. Might be fun to go back in time and ask him!
LOL. My dissertation advisor told me I couldn't apply economic theories to F. Scott Fitzgerald's short stories. Thankfully an econ prof had just come out with a book adjacent to that, so I showed him the book and said "watch me"! I won.
Sometimes I think profs just simply hate it when a whippersnapper comes up with something genius they don't understand (and can't steal for their own stab at a journal article). Hee hee.
I think you are right Litr8r. Had a memory jog last nite about that incident, it was over 45 years ago, so took me awhile to pull the pieces together. I vaguely remember the English prof saying there was no way I could have come up with that far out idea on my own so ergo I must have plagiarized the piece! And I think my physics prof got so mad because the implication was that one of 'his' physics students wasn't smart enough to think of something like that. Anyway I also suspect there might have already issues between them. I was young and dumb so pretty oblivious to academic politics back then.
You are doing so much here. I can't imagine how much time and energy this is taking.
To me, America's community colleges are the crown jewels of our higher education system. For all the crap they get, a typical local two year school has more resources and provides a higher quality education than most of the world's universities. I encourage everyone who asks me to attend a two year school as the first (and maybe only) part of their higher education.
As you have shown, anyone with a GED or better and a couple of hundred bucks can get a world-class education in spin doctoring in this country. And yet, though they are overloaded with graduates from Ivy League institutions, most of the mainstream media just doesn't bother any more. If something doesn't fit the narrative they want to preserve, they just don't cover it. Kids getting mutilated by the medical-industrial complex? Say nothing. Our government is engaged in two proxy wars with a nuclear power? Remain silent. The President keeps the same hours as a pre-schooler because it's all he's physically and mentally capable of? Mums the word.
They know that if they fill their pages with stories about Kardashians and shit they pull off Reddit threads the people will be satisfied with that. I don't know if it's because we're all idiots or we just feel helpless. Either way, the system has successfully made most of us feel like self-governance is no longer something we can or should do.
It really feels a lot like "bread and circuses" at this point.
Totally!! My fav. teaching was at Borough of Manhattan CC! i knew I was really making a difference and my students valued learning!
Agree! I think it makes a big difference when students are working full-time or part-time and paying for their education themselves! They take their classes much more seriously and don't want to fail because then they have to pay to repeat the class.
Oh yes! Non-trad students were always my hardest workers. Kids who had come straight from high school had a tendency to view school as secondary to their social and emotional life.
I completely understood, because I had been there myself. I ended up flunking out of college in my 4th year the first time around. I hadn't taken the gap year I desperately needed (because no one had heard of gap years back then), and I was suffering from depression complicated with anxiety and OCD (thanks for your rotten genes, bat-shit-crazy birthmother's family!).
When I went back to college in my 30s I was back on top of my game (as I had been in high school). I viewed studying as a privilege, not just more school. I understood to my bones what life without a degree was like.
But even though I felt for my struggling young students, I had to grade them based on what they actually did.
100%!!! I also taught in a few suburban CC's where the students were living at home and you know their indulgent parents made them sign up or move out. They couldn't give a rat's ass whether they were learning anything or not!
Well, in Atlanta I had an 18-year-old mother of two whose social worker thought a college class would be good for her self esteem, a middle-aged ex-convict, …etc. Never dull no matter who’s was on my class list!
LOL!!! Well you know we New Yorkers are competitive- I had one class where my only white student (I had very few) was a 6'5" pale blonde guy who identified as a VAMPIRE! He wanted to do his final presentation in Art History on Vlad the Impaler! I managed to convince him that Vlad was not considered an artist and if he wanted a decent grade he should pick someone else! (he did, prob. Van Gogh!)
I'm glad rural Midwesterners are not that exciting!
The Ivy League colleges are pipelines to employment in DC. It’s the only thing required on the resumé
Took a business ethics class towards the end of my undergrad. We covered however many topics with an eye towards presenting differing opinions. Our final exam was an essay.
Towards the end of the course, the instructor gave a couple more pointers on how to better articulate a position, show your sources etc and opened the class up to a Q&A. One of the students asked the following …
If I pick <Subject A> for my essay, what’s the correct answer?
You could feel a collective head-tilt in the room. I want to assume this was because the student came from a country that forbids independent thought (China), but the number of us silently asking how did this student get this far was just …
My students complained constantly about other professors who graded on the basis of their political views.
The more I think about this point, the more I’ve come to think of it as a blessing in disguise. After all, there are few life lessons more important than adversity.
I was in community college for the first two years of my education and I learned more in that setting than I did in graduate school. I have fond memories of my speech class, where I learned a valuable lesson. We were required to pick a controversial topic and make a convincing presentation of the argument that went against our personal opinion on the matter. Then, we had to make the argument for the opposite side. The goal was to make it impossible to tell where we personally stood on the matter. We were all permanently cured of "straw-manning." Such a valuable lesson! I am 70 years old and this class was in the early 1980s. I wonder if junior college is still as great as it was back then. It opened up the whole world for me.
Since community college classes are often taught part time by adjuncts who have full time professional jobs in the subjects they teach, the students get more current, relevant, and useful information than they do from full time faculty who may have no relevant experience other than going to school and directly going into teaching.
Yes. That is what was so awesome about community college. My anthropology professor was an actual anthropologist, my psychology professor was a practicing psychologist, and so on. This gave us a real feel for what it was like to work in that profession.
Love it!!
Another thought provoking and insightful piece. An educator with your sensibilities and thoughtful approach should have risen to the heights of academia. Instead we all see how advancing in an educational setting is now more of political exercise than anything else, with a free pass on plagiarism thrown in.
Reading some of your examples just hit me over the head with how the Boston Globe operates. Descriptions of certain people always play into the narrative of the earnest, hardworking victim of the oppressive racist culture.
I read a report by a LIFE Magazine reporter several decades ago. He explained that as a photo-journalist, he felt that he had a story to tell through his photos beyond straight reporting, and so he arranged, scheduled, and organized his photos accordingly. Even then, this photo-journalist had a grievance with Israel, and "the occupation". He scheduled photos of Israeli soldiers in the harsh, burning glare of a noonday sun. He photographed the aggrieved Palestinians in the soft cool light of the approaching evening. A picture is worth a thousand words. But words or pictures, they can and are both manipulated to support a bias.
That's horrible. :~(
Today, this is more the rule than something exceptional. The MSM, print and electronic, carefully select what is put out to the public, especially where Israel is concerned. At the time, years ago, what you described in the piece today seemed mind-blowing. Today it just the way it is.