On Richard Hanania's “Why the Media is Honest and Good"

An idea worth drawing for.

This visual essay is a tribute to

Richard Hanania

. It’s part of an ongoing series called Ideas Worth Drawing For, in which I make hand-drawn images to honor the excellence of essayists I admire.

Fake news can help start a war. When the USS Maine accidentally exploded off the coast of Cuba in 1898, Joseph Pulitzer's New York World published an illustration of the blast propelling a dead sailor into inky waters along with the unfounded accusation that Spain torpedoed the ship. Public outrage over the 266 deaths was inflamed by this journalistic indiscretion, contributing to President William McKinley's decision to blockade Spanish ships attempting to reach their rebelling colony in Cuba. Thus began the Spanish-American War. As the U.S. Navy explains, “The destruction of Maine did not cause the U.S. to declare war on Spain, but it served as a catalyst, accelerating the approach to a diplomatic impasse.”

Pulitzer was a warmonger for the sake of outcompeting his rival William Randolph Hearst and his paper the New York Journal. In Pulitzer: A Life in Politics, Print, and Power, biographer James McGrath Morris writes that the explosion of the Maine “became incendiary kindling in the hands of battling newspaper editors in New York”:

Fighting down to the last possible reader, each seeking to outdo the other in its eagerness to lead the nation into war, the two journalistic behemoths fueled an outburst of jingoistic fever. And when the war came, they continued their cutthroat competition by marshaling armies of reporters, illustrators, and photographers to cover every detail of its promised glory.

The no-holds-barred attitude of the World and Journal put the newspapers into a spiraling descent of sensationalism, outright fabrications, and profligate spending. If left unchecked, it threatened to bankrupt both their credibility and their businesses. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty, they fought it out at the edge of a precipice that could mean death to both combatants.

In the end, the two survived this short but intense circulation war. But their rivalry became almost as famous as the Spanish-American War itself. Pulitzer was indissolubly linked with Hearst as a purveyor of vile Yellow Journalism. In fact, some critics suspected that Pulitzer's current plans to endow a journalism school at Columbia University and create a national prize for journalists were thinly veiled attempts to cleanse his legacy before his approaching death.

Did it work, for either Pulitzer or the profession he helped define? Many critics of “mainstream media” would argue that journalism is as yellow today as ever — and to hell with Pulitzer’s legacy at the Columbia Journalism School, which is part of a university that the American right holds in particular contempt. And it is the right who hate the mainstream media most today, despite how leftists like Noam Chomsky have also long fomented distrust.

“Spend any time among conservatives, and you’ll before long realize that few things get them as riled up as a chance to attack the media,” writes Richard Hanania in “Why the Media is Honest and Good.” Moreover, this is no mere gripe. It is an organizing principle:

I like the idea of understanding people’s true motivations not just by what they say, but what they seem to have the strongest emotional reaction to. No matter what liberals tells you, opposing various forms of “bigotry” is the center of their moral universe.¹ For conservatives, the equivalent is clearly hatred of the left. Tim Miller, a Bulwark writer who became disillusioned with the party during the Trump era, wrote in his book Why We Did It that there’s a lot of cynicism in Republican politics, but to the extent that many operatives have one genuine belief, it’s wanting to spite and harm liberals. And by liberals, they often mean what we refer to as the “mainstream media,” as represented by institutions like the Washington Post, the big three TV networks, CNN, Reuters, the Atlantic, and, most of all, the New York Times.

Ann Coulter was reflecting the spirit of the movement when she said that Timothy McVeigh could’ve done a lot of good for the country if he had blown up the New York Times Building. In 2018, about half of Republicans said that they agreed with Trump’s statement that the press is the “enemy of the people.” Clearly, he rose to the presidency in part because he tapped into real grievances.

This is not to say that the left has moved on from Chomsky and fallen in love with the mainstream media. As Hanania points out, “it’s hard to think of groups that actually like the American press, other than the press itself… At most, those on the center left will choose to focus on the flaws of media critics, without offering much in the way of a defense of journalistic institutions themselves.” Across the political spectrum, the journalist is often perceived as the used-cars salesman of intellectual life, slyly peddling misinformation as insidious as an old beater that falls apart once you drive it off the lot.

Against this time-honored disdain for our modern scribes, Hanania makes a spirited defense “that while the American media has serious flaws, it is one of the most honest, decent, and fair institutions designed for producing and spreading truth in human history” and that “You should be glad it exists, admire those who work in the industry, and hope for its continued influence and success.” Along these lines, we should remember that the same Joseph Pulitzer who stoked a dubious war also exposed government fraud and won court victories to defend the free press. Hanania argues that the kind of journalism that wins Pulitzer Prizes — which is to say, “mainstream” — truly is superior to alternatives when we ask, “Compared to what?”:

People who complain about the media tend to implicitly judge it by the standard of perfection, while either offering no alternative or arguing that people instead listen to sources that are even worse. …

To have a fair and accurate understanding of the NYT, or any other media outlet, one must start with expectations that are reasonable. Instead of comparing the MSM to some idealized standard of reporting, I prefer to judge it relative to other institutions. Conservatives have tried to build alternatives to the NYT and other major papers. This has been a failed experiment. The right-wing press is more biased, less honest, and simply less competent than those they wish to replace. We know this in part because, among smart people, even conservatives take reporting in the NYT more seriously than what’s said on right-wing news sites.

Exceptions to this rule, like The Dispatch, are far smaller institutions than the New York Times that lack the same resources for expensive global reporting. And as Hanania complains, “Even the few conservative institutions that people take seriously like The Wall Street Journal have to rely to a large extent on left-wing staff. There is no shortage of right-wing grifters though” and the most bitter critics of the mainstream media tend to become hacks:

Try to imagine a book about all the lies and distortions of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show or Breitbart. No one would read it because we don’t even expect these outlets to even try to be fair or inform their audience beyond feeding them a few talking points and telling them who they’re supposed to hate. And the American right-wing press is probably good by historical standards! Something like Russia Today is probably closer to the norm.

The problem with taking a nihilistic posture towards the MSM is that there’s nothing to replace it with… simply trying to discredit the media when it’s in many ways the only means we have to acquire accurate information about the world should be understood as advocating for making society dumber.

Humanity can feel demoralized by how hard it is to come by the truth. This challenge preoccupied one of our bleakest postmodern thinkers, Jean Baudrillard, who believed that contemporary reality had been replaced by simulacra, or self-referential imagery that “bears no relation to reality.” The Gulf War would become his key example, because it was the first conflict in history to receive 24-hour live television coverage; he believed people experienced it more like a staged and sanitized movie about a war, while having no real comprehension of the events in Baghdad or Kuwait.

Whether cynicism about the pursuit of truth is expressed by postmodern academics or right-wing podcasters, it is a defeatist attitude in the face of a banal observation. Of course it is hard to find the truth — how could something so valuable come easy? It is no wonder that someone like Hanania, who is working on a book that valorizes elite human capital, is annoyed at all the people spending more time whining about the media than sifting through the facts themselves.

The truth is so valuable that even when you only learn part of it, you make progress. Newton’s flawed law of gravitation was quite useful, though Einstein’s was more useful still, and we value both physicists while knowing that another will someday bring us even closer to understanding reality. And though it is in many ways harder to know the truth about messy human affairs than the fabric of spacetime — there are more reasons to lie and obfuscate about things like war, and humanity adds innumerable layers of complexity atop the mystery of physics — there are obviously more or less honest versions of events.

Someone like Tucker Carlson may call you a sucker for listening to the mainstream media. But Hanania makes a realistic — if not grim — case that even if the choice was all or nothing, “between ‘blindly trust the media’ and ‘blindly hate the media,’ it’s clear that the former is preferable” and “Intelligent people can think critically about what the media reports and account for its biases.” If you’re worried that humanity is built from crooked timber, then you’re better off reading the mainstream media:

But I don’t have high standards for humanity. “Be intelligent, don’t explicitly lie to me, don’t see yourself as on a team trying to ‘own’ the other side, and have some kind of professional standards where you at least care a little bit about truth” is about the best that I think we have the right to expect. And institutions like the NYT, the Washington Post, and the Atlantic generally meet that standard, at least to a much greater extent than most of their critics. I would argue that much of academia is broken in the way that a lot of media critics think the press is. In many fields, reading the scholarly literature will either be worthless or actually make you dumber. The press largely works though, and I’m afraid that if we dismiss the Atlantic as crude propaganda that is destroying society we won’t have any words left to describe Queer Studies or much of bioethics.

The MSM is at its worst when it comes to issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation because the left has lost its mind on these issues. One should be able to disaggregate various areas of coverage. If the media was as bad on every topic as it is on identity, I would probably join conservatives in suggesting we burn the whole thing to the ground, which is the posture I’m in favor of taking towards much of the academy.² The press is committed to a narrative in which disparities are caused by discrimination and whites and men are constantly oppressing women and people of color. Even here, they’re usually not explicitly lying. For example, they’ll lower their standards in order to publish an unconfirmed report about an alleged hate crime against a minority, and often treat what should be at most local stories into matters of national significance. Recently, three black UVA football players were killed, and the Washington Post made it into a story about white racism, not informing the reader that the shooter himself was black until paragraph 8. This article may not technically contain a “lie,” but it is clearly giving a false impression regarding what happened.

Asking “Compared to what?” puts annoying journalism in perspective, but crucially, it also reminds readers of their own responsibility. Recognizing that even the most rigorous pursuit of truth has significant flaws and limitations puts the onus on readers to learn cautiously. No one else is responsible for your credulity — or your entitlement if you gripe that the truth should be easier to come by.

Perhaps an underlying problem with misinformation is that the solution is so boring. Hanania recommends that people be mindful of bias when they read the media and take time to listen to opposing views — bland stuff — whereas Baudrillard got to feel the thrill of penning the phrase, “The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none,” and then falsely attributed it to the book of Ecclesiastes, because he wanted to make a little mischief that might prove his point by example. Likewise, talk radio or twitter bombast can feel gladiatorial, and I bet that Hanania has more fun when he’s acting the troll (or satirist?) than when he’s patiently explaining the obvious.

Even as technology evolves, the same staid advice applies to the pursuit of truth. Whether the media is duking it out over newspaper subscriptions in 1898, or vying to dominate the 24-hour news cycle in 1991, or scheming to addict you to social media algorithms in 2016, savvy readers are mindful of bias and take time to listen to opposing views. Photographic or video evidence may become meaningless in the age of artificial intelligence, but only because thoughtful people refuse to accept simulacra as their reality when they care about what’s real. We have yet to enter a period of history when someone genuinely determined to find the truth can’t make some progress toward that goal, however much the accumulation of knowledge in any given domain may ebb and flow. The conventional advice to be mindful of bias and listen to opposing views is so reliable as to become monotonous.

It’s elementary, my dear Watson.

1. In the article “Why Do I Hate Pronouns More Than Genocide?”, Hanania wrote: “Having come out of academia, I’ve known many liberals, and I’m also an observer of our political culture. Following Kahneman and Tversky, we can say that there is a “System 1” (instinctive) and “System 2” (analytic) morality. I’m sure if you asked most liberals “which is worse, genocide or racial slurs?”, they would invoke System 2 and say genocide is worse. If forced to articulate their morality, they will admit murderers and rapists should go to jail longer than racists. Yet I’ve been in the room with liberals where the topic of conversation has been genocide, and they are always less emotional than when the topic is homophobia, sexual harassment, or cops pulling over a disproportionate number of black men.”

2. Check out this piece from

Ruxandra Teslo

for a reasoned analysis of the kind of problems that make Hanania want to torch the academy.