The liberal media’s Orwellian method of non-coverage coverage

An item at Powerline shows the way today’s media operate:

The AP reports that Massachusetts House Speaker Salvatore DiMasi is resigning from his powerful position under an ethical cloud. Winding down to paragraph 17, the careful reader can infer DiMasi’s party:

The resignation of DiMasi has some in the state wondering if there’s something about the power of the office, or the increasingly one-party nature of Massachusetts’ politics, that makes the job of House speaker particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted wounds.

House Minority Leader Bradley Jones, who has seen the number of Republicans in the 160-member House dwindle to just 16, said the lack of political competition “creates a sense of being impervious.”

It’s thoughtful of AP reporter Steve LeBlanc to respect the sensitivities of readers who might be offended by a naked description of DiMasi’s poliitcal affiliation.

Astoundingly, the AP doesn’t mention by name the political party to which the resigning House Speaker belongs, the party that the AP itself says enjoys one party rule in Massachusetts. But it does mention by name the other political party, the party that has zero power in the state legislature.

In other words, not only does the AP refuse to tell readers that which it doesn’t want to tell them, the name of the ruling party of Massachusetts; but, by naming the minority party, it taunts readers with the fact that it’s not giving them the name of the ruling party. The AP revels in its power to transgress normal standards of journalism and in the readers’ powerlessness to do anything about it.

The method just described connects in my mind with the AP’s (and the entire media’s) “non-coverage coverage” of the beheading of 22 year old Chinese graduate student Xin Yang in a Virginia Tech student coffee shop last week, which I’ve written about at length. The AP’s article jumped in Kafkaesque fashion from the witnesses in the coffee shop noting Xin Yang and her killer talking quietly at a table before the murder, to the 9/11 call and the arrival of the police after the murder, with not a single reference to the murder itself and what the witnessses did during the murder:

Haiyang and Xin had been having coffee in a cafe in the Graduate Life Center, where Xin was living. About seven other people who were in the coffee shop told police that the two hadn’t been arguing before the attack.

Police received two 911 calls shortly after 7 p.m. Wednesday, Flinchum said, and were on the scene in a little more than a minute to take Haiyang into custody.

Such news writing is not merely failing to give the central facts of the story. It is blandly, in the manner of a totalitarian bureaucrat, sticking in the reader’s face its refusal to give the central facts of the story. The article’s relationship to the truth is not merely the absence of a presence. It is the presence of an absence. What is absent is the truth. What is present is the article’s s silent, taunting message to the reader that it will not provide the truth. And the reader learns to accept without mental resistance this withholding of the truth, as he learns to accept without protest the entire world of triumphant untruth that liberal society presents to him.

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Sage McLaughlin writes:

You write,

“The AP revels in its power to transgress normal standards of journalism and in the readers’ powerlessness to do anything about it…What is present is the article’s s silent, taunting message to the reader that it will not provide the truth. And the reader learns to accept without mental resistance this withholding of the truth…”

An excellent observation. It reminds me of this passage from an Front Page Magazine interview with Theodore Dalrymple (a fatalist who nonetheless has written many perceptive things about contemporary liberal society and its institutions):

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to. I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries. The scary thing is, I sometimes believe they are right.

Granted he’s talking about sins of commission rather than omission, but I think you are talking about the same phenomenon.

LA replies:

Dalrymple writes:

“I have heard people who have grown up in former Communist countries say that we in the West are at least as brainwashed by Multiculturalism and Political Correctness as they ever were with Communism, perhaps more so. Even in the heyday of the East Bloc, there were active dissident groups in these countries.”

I think this is true. I think liberal PC in the liberal West controls people’s minds more than Communist PC in the former Communist bloc.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2009 04:59 PM | Send