I'm glad that the American center-left media has recalibrated somewhat since peak wokeness. But the fact that no one was willing to break this story in the first place except Cofnas tells us things are not as copacetic as Hanania would have us believe.
I agree with the thrust of your point but it's too generous to parts of the establishment, non-fringe media imo. Take the BBC's coverage, to choose one example, which has been staggeringly awful and ideologically slanted. As it generally is on a range of different subjects ranging from wokeness to Israel to Brexit etc. A recent Spectator (better than the BBC) piece sums this up:
'The BBC spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programmes (totalling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles, and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims.
When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defence of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on 6 August, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack, and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.
This was nothing short of a six-year propaganda campaign by the BBC on Jason Arday’s behalf
In that time journalists across the world published revelations detailing Arday’s long history of lies and exaggerations, from publications as diverse as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the Guardian and the New York Times. For weeks, the BBC ignored them all.
Following Arday’s death, the corporation has returned to its less-than-impartial reporting of the matter. Throughout the saga, the BBC has spent more resources smearing Arday’s exposer, the former Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas, and participated in a genuine witch hunt against him. Even in articles detailing accusations of plagiarism against Arday, it is clear that the real enemy of the story was the infamous ‘race realist’ Cofnas.'
I would like to hear Hanania address this, maybe he should do a "top comments on Jason Arday media coverage" post. In the case of the BBC it seems like they basically kept propping him up and defending him until the point where it was going to be a serious loss of credibility for them and he was beyond saving. The fact that they fawned over him for years without investigating his background is journalistic malpractice.
Thank you for the dose of sanity. Like many, I've been stirred up by the Arday scandal, and it's tempting to want to metaphorically burn it all down — the press, the left, academia. That would be a mistake. Reformers must be very careful to safeguard — and indeed make common cause with — those segments of the left, media, and academia that value truth, facts, and evidence. There are many, and a similar divide exists on the right as well. I think of those on either side who remain committed to these principles as the "Sanity Coalition."
A more cynical interpretation of what happened is that there are no segments of the left, the media or academia which value truth. However they do highly value the perception that academia is filled with intelligent and rigorous people.
All these lies were not really worse than the lies academics get away with every day, but they were extremely stupid and obviously so, which made Cambridge look stupid, which made academia look stupid, which meant that at some point they had to cut him loose.
This was clearly not done out of any actual reverence for truth. Instead it looks purely tactical.
I'm proud to be an American living in a country where we believe in free speech and the mainstream would never entertain the level of censorship some other supposedly-free countries do... "at least not since 2022"
Unfortunately that isn't really true and Americans should absolutely not get complacent about this. The American left has spent the last 10 years aggressively censoring the internet, social media, the news and many other forms of mainstream communication; they just didn't do it through the government.
The first amendment is simply irrelevant if the people doing the censoring don't work for the government, which is the case in the USA.
In other words the relatively free discussion found in the USA is primarily not an artifact of culture at all but a purely legalistic convention.
"Trump and Arday are uniquely pernicious figures – both perfectly representative of the pathologies of their respective movements – so much so that you can tell a lot about a person’s discernment and ability to engage in good faith discourse by the degree to which they show any inclination to defend either man,"
This is rich coming from someone who voted for Trump in 2024.
The mainstream media gets it wrong on Israel all the time. The NYT is so antiZionist it is disgraceful. They don't deserve the pass you give them, even if they got one story right on Arady.
Right but this is part of Hanania's general principle that they get it right except when it comes to issues that directly concern wokeness and human inequality. So on a conflict between a first-world country and a third-world quasi-country, they are biased just as they are biased on American race relations and HBD. They refuse to see Palestinian society for what it is and ascribe pro-Hamas sentiment to "oppression" even though the war reduced pro-Hamas sentiment in Gaza, the same way they refuse to be honest about crime and gangs in African-American communities in the US and always say that the "black crime" problem in the US as well as black underachievement are a legacy of historic racism and oppression.
Well, these are two major questions confronting modern society and they get it wrong almost all the time on them, as they do on modern society itself, which is problem-driven, complex, highly differentiated, ethically challenging, and which offers those lucky enough to live in it all kinds of pleasures.
The mainstream media is generally reliable on empirical questions that don’t touch on sensitive points about human inequality. So they are right about vaccines and so on, and even admitted the truth about the Platner tattoo through their teeth.
That the MAGA right and extreme UK woke left have similar political instincts of authoritarianism is just another example of the horseshoe theory. Wingnuts on either extreme are more similar than they are different.
I think Jason Arday is a very uninteresting person who obviously did not deserve to be at Cambridge. But I think that academics mad about it are also for the most part mediocrities who also are not contributing much to humanity. I don't really care if a 125 IQ hard-working person was not able to get the Cambridge spot because of Arday, and complaints from this archetype of person are not very sympathetic to me in general. I find most of the voices involved in this discourse to be contemptuous.
>I don't care that stupid people steal jobs from smart people because of race.
This is a stupid thing to think. Why on Earth would you think this?
Not to mention the offense here is that Cambridge wastes their money funding courses on a subject as idiotic as "the sociology of education", which shouldn't exist at any school, least of all what's supposed to be an élite university. They'd be more respectable spending their money on a campus cockfighting ring, as at least that would involve biology and animal husbandry, which have the dignity of being real subjects.
I think that the gap between a titan in their field and a regular hard-working smart member dwarfs the gap between a regular hard-working smart member and an Arday type in impact. Arday is contributing literally nothing but the person whose 'job he took' is almost certainly contributing barely a miniscule fraction over nothing. I think a lot of academics are in denial over how mediocre and untalented they are relative to pioneers and leaders in their fields and so they find Arday to be a good punching bag for these frustrations. It is a minor loss when an Arday type gets the job over one of these people but the self-importance and self-righteousness coming from people who are not very smart and do not matter much is what is annoying to me.
I agree that sociology being a fake field adds to this. If Arday was a senior member of the Physics department, there would be lower odds that the person whose job he was taking would be mediocre.
> Arday is contributing literally nothing but the person whose 'job he took' is almost certainly contributing barely a minuscule fraction over nothing.
The person whose job was taken was anybody who would have worked at a real department for the same amount of money. The offense is twofold: That Arday was unqualified for any position, and that resources that would've been better spend on any sort of real professor of a real field—whether we're talking art history or theoretical physics—were spent on both a worthless position and an even more worthless thinker.
Particularly since Arday was not an exception. He was exceptionally bad, but there are still many people who are more like Jason Arday than they are even a crappy real scholar, in universities throughout the world, and every one of them should be expelled from academe and see their fake positions eradicated.
My argument is that most thinkers are fairly worthless. Obviously Arday is much more of a worthless thinker than them, but I think the bulk of progress and insight in most fields get developed by a small number of geniuses.
If you are right and we have a large amount of Ardays, this could be boxing out a genius or two. I am not opposed to your stated policy aim here as much as I find a lot of academics who think of Arday getting opportunities while they did not (as they had a competent and mediocre thesis and not a horrible one and write regular mediocre academic articles and not horrible ones) as a moral affront to be aesthetically and socially annoying.
The bulk of insights, yes. But progress comes from the much larger class of thinkers who adopt these innovations into their own thinking and habits. Darwin would not have mattered had he not been able to convince those in his field he was right. Neither would Einstein nor Newton nor Euclid nor any of the other great innovators.
By filling cognituve institutions with blatantly unqualified morons and fabulists, or even merely selecting the intellectually mediocre over qualified but derivative functionaries, progress becomes impossible. Indeed, regression becomes the new normal. Hence why socialism has massively increased in popularity as we've lowered the quality of our thinkers, with the legacy of socialist failure still comfortably in living memory.
This is a good point. Your position was probably the more accurate one in our back-and-forth than mine. I retain a mild distaste towards the self-importance of the functionaries, but you are right when it comes to everything else.
Personally I think the centre right. The centre and the centre left need to team up and start providing sound evidence based facts to discredit the far right and far left, both have a parisitical, symbiotic relationship with each other and would struggle to exist without the other. Strangely we as classic liberals are seen as enemies to both that's why one side calls us woke or cucks and the other calls us facists or racists
Obviously, I object to your characterization of the mainstream media as "honest and good." They are neither. A "liar" is not someone who lies in every utterance, but only very occasionally and strategically. For example, saying Israel is only weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon is clearly a lie propagated by people on the right, which the mainstream media does criticize occasionally (though less often than they should). But remember covid when the media constantly told us about "safe and effective" or to "social distance", stay "six feet away", wear masks, "pangolins", "wet market", etc. All of these things were false, and were proven false by April of 2020 for the disease and June 2021 for the shot.
The reason is that newspapers and TV validate their information against "reliable sources," most of which are government officials, professors, or activists. It's the Wikipedia (or now ChatGPT) version of current events: the "consensus." Which is wrong a substantial fraction of the time. It's like the weather reports: they always tell you what they think the weather is going to be for the next week, they never go back and analyze their predictions from the last week. If they did, you'd find out that they were wrong much more often than people think, especially the detailed aspects.
I first learned about journalistic epistemology in 1991 during the Oakland Hills fire. I lived near there at the time, and so was glued to the live coverage of the fire, mostly from helicopters circling. The live video that I saw, which the anchor saw as well, showed literally hundreds of homes burning. Yet the anchor kept coming back to the point that "government officials have only confirmed that 54 homes have burned." In other words, the epistemic value of some government official carried much more weight to the TV newsman than HIS OWN EYES. Once you realize that little tidbit about journalism, you understand that there really is no epistemic value in any mainstream media. Not that all of it is false--much of it is true. Just that the method of accumulating knowledge is fundamentally flawed, can be gamed by evil officials or experts (think Fauci), and can lead an entire country into a mass psychosis under certain conditions.
The British press had good reasons to publicize the Arday story in a way the American press would never do (Kendi is just as much a fraud as Arday, yet he is continually praised). As you mention, embarrassment still exists in British academic circles, whereas it no longer does in the USA. But secondly, such obvious, preposterous frauds as Arday can be used by "right-wing extremists" to color all black professors as frauds, and the danger of that is much greater in Britain than in the US. So Arday had to be sacrificed to protect the Kendis of the world.
A long winded way to say unfiltered unsueable "facts," are better then self regulating media I can post online unicorns exist or aliens bummed the pope you can't disprove me it must be true
No, I was saying journalism no longer values the truth but rather the conventional narrative, though that doesn’t mean they don't occasionally tell the truth when circumstances force them to. I mentioned COVID, but I could mention a hundred other stories (Covington Catholic kids, VA Tech lacrosse team, BLM "fiery but mostly peaceful" riots, etc., etc.), but I'll spare you. Richard is delusional on this point. It's not like we have the choice between CNN and Alex Jones. Plenty of reliable sources on various topics of expertise are right here on Substack.
The main example you gave of the media being unreliable was the Oakland Hills fire. I’m sure you could give more examples. I, too, have my favorite examples of the MSM using dishonest/biased framing, etc. But in what sense could Substack be a replacement (as opposed to corrective) for basic news coverage? Hanania’s point is not that the MSM is free from bias or error but that it gets most stuff right. Unfortunately, too many people assume that if the MSM doesn’t report their favored narrative, that means they are lying, etc. But we must always ask: “Compared to what?” Why haven’t more reliable, honest, competitive, alternatives arisen? The answer appears to be that they aren’t sustainable because the interest isn’t there.
Yes I agree with you on that point but saying it's MSM and ignoring that there's a ton of mke believe slop posted on the online world is like a half truth the type of person who looks for truth is actually quite rare most people look for echo chambers that agree with there existing views at least with MSM it can only go so far with narrative the online world in general is almost a wild west of woke or far right naritives a lot of people are either to ignorant or stupid to go searching for truth so if I had to pick from two choices I'd rather go for the slightly dishonest but within a reasonable closeness to reality framework ove the completely dishonest everything I say is fact anytime truth is both are pretty bad were now in a situation of picking the least wrong
My litmus test these days is who told the truth on Covid and the shots? Anyone who lied or pushed the government/Pharma narrative has lost all credibility forever on any topic. Those that were correct deserve to be treated with respect. Not unquestioning belief, just respect and support.
That is a very limiting litmus test. It means you have no source of news other than people who comment on the news because there is no real alternative to the MSM.
Today, primary sources are people with iPhones and eyewitness accounts who post videos and statements on X or TikTok. Of course, not every video is real, and not everyone is telling the truth or making a mistake. That’s where trusted secondary analysis comes in. Take the flood in Nepal, for instance. There are obvious political implications to the flood, in that it happened right on the China-Nepal border region. A border crossing point was annihilated by the flood. What actually happened in the flood? First impressions and report, even reports in mainstream newspapers are almost always wrong. That's because, as I mentioned above, they almost always simply repeat what goverment spokepersons tell them, and those government spokespeoepl aren't any better informed than the man on the street. But by piecing together evidence from commerical satellite companies, eyewitness accounts, all the videos that were released, aerial photography, and reports from disinterested professors who study these types of things, one can fairly quickly (within a few days) figure out what actually happened, both from viewing the first-hand evidence oneself as well as critically evaluating the analyses, which tend to be quite more in depth than in a TGV news report or even a NYT article. So, yeah, use your own best judgement, knowledge (I read A LOT), and experience to cultivate a series of trusted outlets, or at least know any given outlet's biases.
I'm glad that the American center-left media has recalibrated somewhat since peak wokeness. But the fact that no one was willing to break this story in the first place except Cofnas tells us things are not as copacetic as Hanania would have us believe.
I agree with the thrust of your point but it's too generous to parts of the establishment, non-fringe media imo. Take the BBC's coverage, to choose one example, which has been staggeringly awful and ideologically slanted. As it generally is on a range of different subjects ranging from wokeness to Israel to Brexit etc. A recent Spectator (better than the BBC) piece sums this up:
'The BBC spent years uncritically promoting the myth of Arday. Prior to July 2026, the broadcaster produced at least 11 radio programmes (totalling nearly six hours of Arday content), four news articles, and two TV interviews championing the academic and repeating his false claims.
When the initial story broke about his plagiarism and lies, the BBC doubled down on its defence of the academic. The first article which I would say features real criticism of the former professor was published on 6 August, a day after he resigned, more than two weeks after the original Arday exposé was published on Substack, and six years after the BBC’s first hagiographic piece about the late academic.
This was nothing short of a six-year propaganda campaign by the BBC on Jason Arday’s behalf
In that time journalists across the world published revelations detailing Arday’s long history of lies and exaggerations, from publications as diverse as the Telegraph and the Daily Mail to the Guardian and the New York Times. For weeks, the BBC ignored them all.
Following Arday’s death, the corporation has returned to its less-than-impartial reporting of the matter. Throughout the saga, the BBC has spent more resources smearing Arday’s exposer, the former Cambridge academic Nathan Cofnas, and participated in a genuine witch hunt against him. Even in articles detailing accusations of plagiarism against Arday, it is clear that the real enemy of the story was the infamous ‘race realist’ Cofnas.'
And the fact that British taxpayers are obliged to support that sort of ideological jihad pretending to be journalism is utterly disgraceful.
Indeed, the BBC immediately framed his death without much argument as basically "death by media and racism".
I would like to hear Hanania address this, maybe he should do a "top comments on Jason Arday media coverage" post. In the case of the BBC it seems like they basically kept propping him up and defending him until the point where it was going to be a serious loss of credibility for them and he was beyond saving. The fact that they fawned over him for years without investigating his background is journalistic malpractice.
Thank you for the dose of sanity. Like many, I've been stirred up by the Arday scandal, and it's tempting to want to metaphorically burn it all down — the press, the left, academia. That would be a mistake. Reformers must be very careful to safeguard — and indeed make common cause with — those segments of the left, media, and academia that value truth, facts, and evidence. There are many, and a similar divide exists on the right as well. I think of those on either side who remain committed to these principles as the "Sanity Coalition."
A more cynical interpretation of what happened is that there are no segments of the left, the media or academia which value truth. However they do highly value the perception that academia is filled with intelligent and rigorous people.
All these lies were not really worse than the lies academics get away with every day, but they were extremely stupid and obviously so, which made Cambridge look stupid, which made academia look stupid, which meant that at some point they had to cut him loose.
This was clearly not done out of any actual reverence for truth. Instead it looks purely tactical.
I'm proud to be an American living in a country where we believe in free speech and the mainstream would never entertain the level of censorship some other supposedly-free countries do... "at least not since 2022"
Unfortunately that isn't really true and Americans should absolutely not get complacent about this. The American left has spent the last 10 years aggressively censoring the internet, social media, the news and many other forms of mainstream communication; they just didn't do it through the government.
The first amendment is simply irrelevant if the people doing the censoring don't work for the government, which is the case in the USA.
In other words the relatively free discussion found in the USA is primarily not an artifact of culture at all but a purely legalistic convention.
True but let us not forget the rights attempts to censor press through lawsuits the FCC. Those radical elements on both sides are a threat to freedom
"Trump and Arday are uniquely pernicious figures – both perfectly representative of the pathologies of their respective movements – so much so that you can tell a lot about a person’s discernment and ability to engage in good faith discourse by the degree to which they show any inclination to defend either man,"
This is rich coming from someone who voted for Trump in 2024.
Not exactly a “gotcha” given that he has completely repudiated Trump.
The mainstream media gets it wrong on Israel all the time. The NYT is so antiZionist it is disgraceful. They don't deserve the pass you give them, even if they got one story right on Arady.
Right but this is part of Hanania's general principle that they get it right except when it comes to issues that directly concern wokeness and human inequality. So on a conflict between a first-world country and a third-world quasi-country, they are biased just as they are biased on American race relations and HBD. They refuse to see Palestinian society for what it is and ascribe pro-Hamas sentiment to "oppression" even though the war reduced pro-Hamas sentiment in Gaza, the same way they refuse to be honest about crime and gangs in African-American communities in the US and always say that the "black crime" problem in the US as well as black underachievement are a legacy of historic racism and oppression.
Well, these are two major questions confronting modern society and they get it wrong almost all the time on them, as they do on modern society itself, which is problem-driven, complex, highly differentiated, ethically challenging, and which offers those lucky enough to live in it all kinds of pleasures.
The mainstream media is generally reliable on empirical questions that don’t touch on sensitive points about human inequality. So they are right about vaccines and so on, and even admitted the truth about the Platner tattoo through their teeth.
'one that you need to find a way to destroy.'
I read you for the vibes only
Like you are the only respectable person who has these chud lowly instincts and isn't afraid to admit the.
That the MAGA right and extreme UK woke left have similar political instincts of authoritarianism is just another example of the horseshoe theory. Wingnuts on either extreme are more similar than they are different.
I think Jason Arday is a very uninteresting person who obviously did not deserve to be at Cambridge. But I think that academics mad about it are also for the most part mediocrities who also are not contributing much to humanity. I don't really care if a 125 IQ hard-working person was not able to get the Cambridge spot because of Arday, and complaints from this archetype of person are not very sympathetic to me in general. I find most of the voices involved in this discourse to be contemptuous.
>I don't care that stupid people steal jobs from smart people because of race.
This is a stupid thing to think. Why on Earth would you think this?
Not to mention the offense here is that Cambridge wastes their money funding courses on a subject as idiotic as "the sociology of education", which shouldn't exist at any school, least of all what's supposed to be an élite university. They'd be more respectable spending their money on a campus cockfighting ring, as at least that would involve biology and animal husbandry, which have the dignity of being real subjects.
I think that the gap between a titan in their field and a regular hard-working smart member dwarfs the gap between a regular hard-working smart member and an Arday type in impact. Arday is contributing literally nothing but the person whose 'job he took' is almost certainly contributing barely a miniscule fraction over nothing. I think a lot of academics are in denial over how mediocre and untalented they are relative to pioneers and leaders in their fields and so they find Arday to be a good punching bag for these frustrations. It is a minor loss when an Arday type gets the job over one of these people but the self-importance and self-righteousness coming from people who are not very smart and do not matter much is what is annoying to me.
I agree that sociology being a fake field adds to this. If Arday was a senior member of the Physics department, there would be lower odds that the person whose job he was taking would be mediocre.
> Arday is contributing literally nothing but the person whose 'job he took' is almost certainly contributing barely a minuscule fraction over nothing.
The person whose job was taken was anybody who would have worked at a real department for the same amount of money. The offense is twofold: That Arday was unqualified for any position, and that resources that would've been better spend on any sort of real professor of a real field—whether we're talking art history or theoretical physics—were spent on both a worthless position and an even more worthless thinker.
Particularly since Arday was not an exception. He was exceptionally bad, but there are still many people who are more like Jason Arday than they are even a crappy real scholar, in universities throughout the world, and every one of them should be expelled from academe and see their fake positions eradicated.
My argument is that most thinkers are fairly worthless. Obviously Arday is much more of a worthless thinker than them, but I think the bulk of progress and insight in most fields get developed by a small number of geniuses.
If you are right and we have a large amount of Ardays, this could be boxing out a genius or two. I am not opposed to your stated policy aim here as much as I find a lot of academics who think of Arday getting opportunities while they did not (as they had a competent and mediocre thesis and not a horrible one and write regular mediocre academic articles and not horrible ones) as a moral affront to be aesthetically and socially annoying.
The bulk of insights, yes. But progress comes from the much larger class of thinkers who adopt these innovations into their own thinking and habits. Darwin would not have mattered had he not been able to convince those in his field he was right. Neither would Einstein nor Newton nor Euclid nor any of the other great innovators.
By filling cognituve institutions with blatantly unqualified morons and fabulists, or even merely selecting the intellectually mediocre over qualified but derivative functionaries, progress becomes impossible. Indeed, regression becomes the new normal. Hence why socialism has massively increased in popularity as we've lowered the quality of our thinkers, with the legacy of socialist failure still comfortably in living memory.
This is a good point. Your position was probably the more accurate one in our back-and-forth than mine. I retain a mild distaste towards the self-importance of the functionaries, but you are right when it comes to everything else.
Personally I think the centre right. The centre and the centre left need to team up and start providing sound evidence based facts to discredit the far right and far left, both have a parisitical, symbiotic relationship with each other and would struggle to exist without the other. Strangely we as classic liberals are seen as enemies to both that's why one side calls us woke or cucks and the other calls us facists or racists
Obviously, I object to your characterization of the mainstream media as "honest and good." They are neither. A "liar" is not someone who lies in every utterance, but only very occasionally and strategically. For example, saying Israel is only weeks away from getting a nuclear weapon is clearly a lie propagated by people on the right, which the mainstream media does criticize occasionally (though less often than they should). But remember covid when the media constantly told us about "safe and effective" or to "social distance", stay "six feet away", wear masks, "pangolins", "wet market", etc. All of these things were false, and were proven false by April of 2020 for the disease and June 2021 for the shot.
The reason is that newspapers and TV validate their information against "reliable sources," most of which are government officials, professors, or activists. It's the Wikipedia (or now ChatGPT) version of current events: the "consensus." Which is wrong a substantial fraction of the time. It's like the weather reports: they always tell you what they think the weather is going to be for the next week, they never go back and analyze their predictions from the last week. If they did, you'd find out that they were wrong much more often than people think, especially the detailed aspects.
I first learned about journalistic epistemology in 1991 during the Oakland Hills fire. I lived near there at the time, and so was glued to the live coverage of the fire, mostly from helicopters circling. The live video that I saw, which the anchor saw as well, showed literally hundreds of homes burning. Yet the anchor kept coming back to the point that "government officials have only confirmed that 54 homes have burned." In other words, the epistemic value of some government official carried much more weight to the TV newsman than HIS OWN EYES. Once you realize that little tidbit about journalism, you understand that there really is no epistemic value in any mainstream media. Not that all of it is false--much of it is true. Just that the method of accumulating knowledge is fundamentally flawed, can be gamed by evil officials or experts (think Fauci), and can lead an entire country into a mass psychosis under certain conditions.
The British press had good reasons to publicize the Arday story in a way the American press would never do (Kendi is just as much a fraud as Arday, yet he is continually praised). As you mention, embarrassment still exists in British academic circles, whereas it no longer does in the USA. But secondly, such obvious, preposterous frauds as Arday can be used by "right-wing extremists" to color all black professors as frauds, and the danger of that is much greater in Britain than in the US. So Arday had to be sacrificed to protect the Kendis of the world.
A long winded way to say unfiltered unsueable "facts," are better then self regulating media I can post online unicorns exist or aliens bummed the pope you can't disprove me it must be true
No, I was saying journalism no longer values the truth but rather the conventional narrative, though that doesn’t mean they don't occasionally tell the truth when circumstances force them to. I mentioned COVID, but I could mention a hundred other stories (Covington Catholic kids, VA Tech lacrosse team, BLM "fiery but mostly peaceful" riots, etc., etc.), but I'll spare you. Richard is delusional on this point. It's not like we have the choice between CNN and Alex Jones. Plenty of reliable sources on various topics of expertise are right here on Substack.
The main example you gave of the media being unreliable was the Oakland Hills fire. I’m sure you could give more examples. I, too, have my favorite examples of the MSM using dishonest/biased framing, etc. But in what sense could Substack be a replacement (as opposed to corrective) for basic news coverage? Hanania’s point is not that the MSM is free from bias or error but that it gets most stuff right. Unfortunately, too many people assume that if the MSM doesn’t report their favored narrative, that means they are lying, etc. But we must always ask: “Compared to what?” Why haven’t more reliable, honest, competitive, alternatives arisen? The answer appears to be that they aren’t sustainable because the interest isn’t there.
Yes I agree with you on that point but saying it's MSM and ignoring that there's a ton of mke believe slop posted on the online world is like a half truth the type of person who looks for truth is actually quite rare most people look for echo chambers that agree with there existing views at least with MSM it can only go so far with narrative the online world in general is almost a wild west of woke or far right naritives a lot of people are either to ignorant or stupid to go searching for truth so if I had to pick from two choices I'd rather go for the slightly dishonest but within a reasonable closeness to reality framework ove the completely dishonest everything I say is fact anytime truth is both are pretty bad were now in a situation of picking the least wrong
My litmus test these days is who told the truth on Covid and the shots? Anyone who lied or pushed the government/Pharma narrative has lost all credibility forever on any topic. Those that were correct deserve to be treated with respect. Not unquestioning belief, just respect and support.
That is a very limiting litmus test. It means you have no source of news other than people who comment on the news because there is no real alternative to the MSM.
Today, primary sources are people with iPhones and eyewitness accounts who post videos and statements on X or TikTok. Of course, not every video is real, and not everyone is telling the truth or making a mistake. That’s where trusted secondary analysis comes in. Take the flood in Nepal, for instance. There are obvious political implications to the flood, in that it happened right on the China-Nepal border region. A border crossing point was annihilated by the flood. What actually happened in the flood? First impressions and report, even reports in mainstream newspapers are almost always wrong. That's because, as I mentioned above, they almost always simply repeat what goverment spokepersons tell them, and those government spokespeoepl aren't any better informed than the man on the street. But by piecing together evidence from commerical satellite companies, eyewitness accounts, all the videos that were released, aerial photography, and reports from disinterested professors who study these types of things, one can fairly quickly (within a few days) figure out what actually happened, both from viewing the first-hand evidence oneself as well as critically evaluating the analyses, which tend to be quite more in depth than in a TGV news report or even a NYT article. So, yeah, use your own best judgement, knowledge (I read A LOT), and experience to cultivate a series of trusted outlets, or at least know any given outlet's biases.
Nice to see a really good take from RH again.