'Who Does This Serve?'

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Renaud Camus, thought criminal and heretic

Last night in Budapest, I had dinner with a group that included a French academic. I asked him to tell the others at the table how we first met. It was a couple of years back, he said, at the Sorbonne. We were both supposed to participate in a panel discussion about trans ideology. When we arrived (separately), the panel had been called off because trans activists had attacked the professors already there, slinging pink paint on them. He told me something last night I had not known: that there were liberal anti-woke professors who had agreed to participate, but they pulled out at the last minute when they discovered that well-known Menace to Society™ Rod Dreher was going to participate.

Later, I told the group that last week, I visited Renaud Camus at his home in southwestern France. “Who is Renaud Camus?” asked one of the men at the table.

Said the French academic, “He is a guy who has become totally anathema in France — totally — for saying things that everybody knows are true, because we can see them with our own eyes.”

With that background, let me share with you this article by Matti Friedman, a former Associated Press correspondent in Jerusalem, who recalls what his time working for the AP taught him about how the media work. Excerpts:

The most important thing I saw during my time as a correspondent in the American press, it seemed to me, was happening among my colleagues. The practice of journalism—that is, knowledgeable analysis of messy events on Planet Earth—was being replaced by a kind of aggressive activism that left little room for dissent. The new goal was not to describe reality, but to usher readers to the correct political conclusion, and if this sounds familiar now, it was both new and surprising to the younger version of myself who was lucky to get a job with the AP’s Jerusalem bureau in 2006.

The story I found myself part of proposed, in effect, that the ills of Western civilization—racism, militarism, colonialism, nationalism—were embodied by Israel, which was covered more heavily than any other foreign country. (Israel takes up one one-hundredth of one percent of the surface of the world, and one fifth of one percent of the landmass of the Arab world.)

By selectively emphasizing some facts and not others, by erasing historical and regional context, and by reversing cause and effect, the story portrayed Israel as a country whose motivations could only be malevolent, and one responsible not only for its own actions but also for provoking the actions of its enemies. The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information. All of this had the effect of presenting a mass audience with a supposedly factual story that had a powerful emotional punch and a familiar villain.

More:

Looking back at my essays ten years later, it’s clear that what I saw in Israel wasn’t limited to Israel. Starting out as a journalist, I knew the fundamental question to ask when reporting a story. It was: What is going on?

When I left the AP after nearly six years, I’d learned that the question was different. It was: Who does this serve?

You may think that a news story is meant to serve readers, by conveying reality. I thought so. What I found, however, was that the story was more often meant to serve the ideological allies of the people in the press. If your ideology dictates that Israeli Jews are symbols of racism and colonialism, and Palestinians symbols of third-world innocence, then a story that makes Israelis seem constructive and Palestinians obstructive must be avoided even if it’s true, because it serves the wrong people.

As Friedman points out, this is not at all just about Israel. It is fundamentally how many in the media approach their jobs. One more quote:

Asking “Who does this serve?” instead of “What is going on?” explains why a true story about a laptop belonging to the president’s son was dismissed as false: This story would help the wrong people. It explains the reticence in reporting the real effects of gender medicine, or the origins of Covid—stories that could help the wrong people and hurt the right ones. It explains why much of the staff of The New York Times demanded the ouster of talented editors for publishing an op-ed by the wrong person, a conservative senator. It explains why a story about an opposition candidate colluding with Russia was reported as fact—the story wasn’t true, but it helped the right people. It explains why President Biden’s cognitive decline, a story of obvious importance to people of any political affiliation, was avoided until it became impossible to ignore. And it explains why journalists rarely pay any price for these shortcomings. If the goal is ideological more than analytic, these aren’t shortcomings. They are the point.

This thinking also explains why the growing fear of violence perpetrated by Muslim extremists, a fact of life throughout much of the Middle East, Africa, and increasingly the West, has to be presented whenever possible as a figment of racist imagination—a fictionalization that requires intense mental efforts and serves as one the key forces warping coverage of global reality in 2024. In the strange world of the doctrinaire left, adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Hinduism are the wrong people, while adherents of Islam have a point.

So: last week, Islamic militants massacred a hundred Christians in Nigeria. From the report:

Dozens of people are still missing, and hundreds were injured and without adequate medical care, it added.

“Many families were locked up and burnt inside their bedrooms. So many bodies were burnt beyond recognition,” Amnesty said.

This was reported, but don’t be surprised if you didn’t hear about it. It was just another everyday story that might or might not attract your attention, but certainly doesn’t provoke any kind of broader consideration of what is happening in Nigeria. Christians in northern Nigeria have been routinely massacred by Muslims for years, but people in the West are barely aware of it. Why not?

Because these killings are black people killing black people. And these are Muslims killing Christians. It does not serve the media’s preferred Narrative to focus on this story, even though many thousands of Nigerian Christians have died at the hands of Islamic terrorists, for years.

As you regular readers know, I saw the same thing in my years as a mainstream journalist. In one newspaper I worked at, many in my newsroom hated me because I was writing in my column about Islamic extremism locally. My writing, and the information I uncovered — solid, documented information — served the wrong people. My colleagues didn’t want to see it in print, and the only reason it got into print was because I worked for the editorial section, and my editor there supported me. She said she would stand with me as long as I could prove the stories I was uncovering. I was able to do that, and she bravely stood with me, even though local Muslim Brotherhood activists made her job difficult. I can only imagine the pressure she got from the newsroom.

The first time I saw this was in 1993, a few years into my career. I was sent to cover the huge LGBT march on Washington, on the Mall. There were something like 800,000 marchers there, calling for gay marriage. There were lots of normal, middle-class gays there. But there were also lots of freaks there too. Lots of them. I saw a group of men called the “Radical Faeries” there, dressed like wood nymphs. One of them had a leafy limb shoved up his ass. People like that were not fringe figures in that crowd. Topless lesbians, pierced leathermen — they were all there, among the normies.

But they did not turn up in the media coverage of the event. If you depended on the media to tell you what had happened on the Mall that day, you got a sanitized version. The journalists there were more interested in telling a particular story — not in reporting on what was there, and letting readers and viewers make up their own minds, but in curating the experience.

This happens all the time. Not long ago, I was talking to a liberal American journalist friend about the racial situation in the US. I told him that it frustrates me that in writing about the situation with America’s black community, we never see in-depth discussion of what the collapse of the family and traditional social norms in black society has to do with the chronic problems among them. Journalists aren’t interested. The story can only be one of white racism. It’s not about trying to understand what’s actually happening in the real world, in all its complexity, but in creating and reinforcing a narrative.

As I’ve been saying in this newsletter for the past few years, I meet people all the time who come to Budapest for the first time, and are surprised by how very different this city, and this country, is from what they were told by the media. They were led to believe that this is a quasi-fascist hellhole. In fact, it’s a well-ordered, relaxed, pleasant place — no paradise, surely, but a place that is in palpable ways better than the cities in western Europe where they live. And the reason for that is chiefly the lack of large numbers of Third World migrant men making the streets menacing — a lack that comes directly from the policies of the government demonized by the media.

The thing is, there is truth in the newspapers, on radio, on TV. The difficulty is knowing what is true and what is not. There is the Gell-Mann amnesia effect identified by the late Michael Crichton, who defined it in a 2002 speech:

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.

I’m susceptible to this too, of course. All of us are. I don’t know how to escape it. We can’t know everything. We have to go on trust. But how do you know who to trust, and when you can trust them? There’s no clear answer, but at least we should all approach everything we read, hear, and see in the media with what you might call a “hermeneutic of suspicion”: recognizing as Matti Friedman says, so much of what we see in the media is NOT about “what is going on?” but “who does this serve?”

Back to Renaud Camus: why is it that French society, especially media and academic elites, has anathemized a man who says things that massive numbers of French people believe are true, based on their own experience? Because Camus is pointing out things that radically undermine the official narrative. The French elites would rather believe comforting lies than face painful, difficult truths — and they will punish anybody who challenges those orthodoxies. These people will destroy others for the sake of these lies.

Incidentally, here is a lengthy interview that my European Conservative colleague Harrison Pitt recently did with Renaud Camus. Don’t pay attention to what the mainstream media tell you about Camus’s concept of “the Great Replacement”; listen to the man himself explain what he means. If all you know about it is what the media have said, trust me, you will be quite surprised to learn what is going on from the man himself: