the acceleration of misrepresentation

Jesse Singal posted the other day about an academic named Peter Coviello who denounced David Brooks for saying something silly when in fact Brooks was outlining a position that he disagrees with. (Follow the link for the details). Singal says,

Either Coviello has a real reading comprehension problem — one that would pose genuine challenges to his ability to write about anything — or he’s a transparently disingenuous writer and thinker. I’m not sure which is worse.

I think what’s going on here is something more specific. My guess is that Coviello thought (a) David Brooks is a conservative and (b) this dumb dismissal of Foucault is just what a conservative would say. I think that also helps to account for the gleefully mocking tone of Coviello’s essay: though he claims to have “all but committed to memory” Brooks’s column, it seems more likely that as soon as he got the one sentence that fit his pre-existing caricature of conservative thinking he effectively stopped reading and certainly stopped thinking.

This is a very common phenomenon.

Recently the Telegraph of London did a kind of exposé of the BBC’s political biases, focusing on (among other things) a documentary that aired just before last November’s Presidential election. In it, Donald Trump’s words on January 6, 2021 were carefully edited and spliced to connect phrases that were not connected in his speech and to alter the timing of those words. When confronted with these facts,

Deborah Turness, the chief executive of BBC News, even tried to justify the doctoring of the Trump speech, telling a meeting of the broadcaster’s standards committee that it was fine because it broadly reflected the truth about Trump’s actions.

After all, it’s the kind of thing he would say.

Similarly, in 2024, when it was pointed out to J. D. Vance that there had actually been no reports of Haitian immigrants in Springfield killing and eating people’s pets, he replied,

If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do…. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants coming into Springfield thanks to Kamala Harris’ policies. Her policies did that. But yes, we created the actual focus that allowed the American media to talk about this story and the suffering caused by Kamala Harris’ policies.

Maybe the Haitian immigrants didn’t kill and eat pets, but it’s the kind of thing they would do, or might do, and it calls attention to real problems. In short, “it broadly reflected the truth” about Haitian immigrants in America.

To be sure, the BBC’s reports came much closer to reflecting the truth about Trump than Vance’s lie-spreading did to teaching Americans about Haitian immigrants; but all the parties mentioned above are on a down escalator to the sub-basement, and once you step onto that device it’s extremely difficult to get off.

If you report that someone said X, not because she said X, but rather because X seems broadly consistent with what you take her views to be, then X becomes your new baseline for interpreting her. Then if someone tells you she said something much more extreme, say 2X, well, that’s plausible, isn’t it? After all, she said X, you remember that. And now 2X is the new baseline, so when you hear that she said 3X…. And before too long the escalator dumps you off in the sub-basement, where you’ll say anything at all about those you believe to be your Repugnant Cultural Other, because, after all, you have so much evidence against them.