The Big Lie about the Big Lie

Re: Trump and "the Big Lie". An analogy: mortgages were collateralized and leveraged by slicing all kinds of “good debt” and “bad debt” into financial instruments and sold widely as good and true and holy. Which led to the financial crisis. 

Similarly, we see how the media packages all kinds of truths and lies into one big statement (“the big lie”) that is sold and labeled as “the truth”. Which leads to further collapse of confidence in journalism.

So let’s all break out what is meant by the large leveraged statement of Trump's “big lie”:

Possible Trumpian lies:

1. "I won by a landslide”.  Judgement: Appears to be a lie or at best gross exaggeration. Even the good predictor Trafalagar poll done right before election showed only a narrow Trump electoral win. 

2. "The machines were rigged."Judgement: Could be true since machines can’t be audited except by Dominion and Dominion has shown itself unworthy of trust. Media likewise, so you have no check on them.

3. “The Election was rigged." Judgement: Yes, if by ‘rigged’ you mean takeover of key election counties by Zuckerberg. (This is the Hemingway distinction of “rigged” but not "stolen”.)

Basically by wrapping all 2020 election skeptisms into one “big lie” it effectively allows the media to sell a funhouse mirror version (if not overly successfully).  

One honest journalist (not conservative!), Christoper Leonard, funded by Schmidt Foundation through U of Missouri, had this to say on Brian Lamb’s podcast about the Hunter Biden laptop:

“I think the Hunter Biden story, to be honest, is a real black eye for my business. I’m not one to glibly second-guess print journalism editors who have such a hard job, but at the end of the day we have to own it as a big black eye. I’ll just go a little further, and maybe get myself in trouble here, but there’s a reporter named Peter Schweitzer, who is a conservative guy funded by conservative people. But he’s a heckuva reporter. And I’m looking at his book “Secret Empires” from 2018, which really unspooled in pretty solid detail a lot of Hunter Biden’s deeply problematic business relationships in China and Ukraine. And it was not picked up! The news is the news and the evidence is the evidence and we have to report things that make us uncomfortable or cut against our political preferences.” 

Imagine a dominant media who didn’t leave these topics to the amateurs: election vulnerabilities, the government’s role in Jan 6th vis-a-vis the Whitmer case, Hunter's laptop? (An exaggeration but funny line heard: "a nobody laptop repairman named Jon Paul Issac accomplished more than all journalism and intel community combined”.) 

But that is pie in sky. We’re back to where we were in 1800s with faction newspapers. I think it would be good to know how to navigate in this new environment, i.e. best practices for finding truth in an environment where every journalist is an activist, perhaps a scholarly look at 1800s journalism. (Did faction newspapers help lead to the Civil War?). 

One thing I’m hugely impressed by is the power of the media not so much in its ability to persuade as it is it’s potent ability to set the agenda, to decide what to suppress or talk about. All roads lead to journalism. I learned the hard way not to judge a news outfit by its (prestigious) cover or a college in the same way. Not too many go out of their way to seek out substacks and non-traditional places. In other words, you have to be your own journalist.