These Are Not the Facts You Are Looking For...
How "Media Mind Tricks" Distract Us From More Troubling Stories
One of the biggest mysteries in all of news media is how the major corporate outlets determine what’s newsworthy on any given day. I wrote a bit about this in my AP & Reuters post, but what I want to write about today is something that reminds me an awful lot of a “Media Mind Trick.” It’s the way corporate news outlets band together to promote irrelevant stories which, in turn, distract us from much more troubling stories. Like the “Jedi Mind Trick” in Star Wars (which is kind of like hypnosis combined with sleight-of-hand), “Media Mind Tricks” often happen so subtly and quickly, they’re tough to see. Sure enough, though, this is a very real distraction technique that has been heavily utilized so far in the 2021 news cycle.
I can only speculate as to how this physically happens – my best guess is it’s a combination of all the larger outlets taking their cues from a single source (like the AP or Reuters, or the NY Times or Washington Post) mixed with the fact that the people who work at corporate news outlets are all so like-minded they tend to see the world in a very monolithic sort of way (see my blog post, the Startling Likeness of Newsrooms, about that topic here). I’ve even read articles about how journalists use political party talking points to steer the news cycle (another topic for another day…).
But what I CAN do is show you three very recent examples of this tactic in action, so you can begin to identify it yourselves and see through it.
*As always, I’m taking a moment to issue my customary disclaimer: the purpose of this blog is not to get in arguments about political beliefs or opinions; I respect all viewpoints, no matter what. The purpose of this particular entry is to get you to look beyond the emotional substance of these stories and into the journalistic facts. As I noted in my very first post back in August, if you find yourself getting angry at what I’m about to discuss – don’t worry! That’s natural! The media has conditioned you and so many other Americans to respond to different points of view with anger and hostility. If you find yourself feeling that way, push through it. You may still disagree with me at the end, but at least you will have considered all sides of the argument in a non-emotional way.
The first big example I noticed recently was when NY Governor Andrew Cuomo began being accused of sexual harassment a few weeks ago. First one woman was accusing him, and then a whole flood of women came out as well (in fact, another accusation just appeared in the news cycle this week). Either way, all of the major news outlets in the nation began covering the story like it was one of the most important things in the world.
I have no idea if the accusations have merit or not – I don’t follow NY politics. But what I did find interesting is the timing of these accusations. They came out shortly after the New York attorney general gave notice that she would be investigating Cuomo for his role in allegedly covering up thousands of COVID-related nursing home deaths (for reference, see this story – “New York attorney general accuses Gov. Cuomo of undercounting nursing home deaths by as much as 50%”).
Sexual harassment is a real, serious and valid concern. But if you can look away from the “Mind Trick” at work here, you can hopefully see that, in a very strange way, the media’s hyper-focus on the sexual harassment charges against Cuomo are shielding him from the larger, more serious allegations about nursing home deaths. I won’t pretend to fully understand WHY “journalists” are trying to distract Americans from what Cuomo did at the nursing homes. But sure enough, they are.
The second time I noticed this deceptive technique in action this year was after a bunch of stories came out in corporate media outlets regarding Tucker Carlson. More specifically, the stories were about some things he’d said during his opening monologues, which alleged that the U.S. military’s hyper-focus on inclusion will ultimately harm our nation. *It doesn’t matter if you agree with Carlson politically or not, or if you care at all what he has to say. Remember, take the politics out of it and just pay attention to the way the media used the story (here’s a link to one of the monologues).
I didn’t see the monologues when they happened, but, like so many others, I did notice when story after story started appearing in outlets like HuffPost, MSN, CBS and Yahoo!, describing how people in the military have reacted to Carlson’s words with “revulsion” and how others have condemned him as both sexist and misogynistic. (Also interesting? Several of the articles were about how the U.S. military itself got in on the game, and started confronting Carlson on Twitter in response to what he said).
So what was the media (and government) “Mind Trick” trying to hide in this particular case? Again, because I didn’t see the monologues in question, I didn’t know until a few days later. That’s when I came across several articles showing that several recently simulated war games, staged by military experts, showed the U.S. was highly likely to lose if it ever entered into a war against China. (Here’s a pretty detailed Business Insider piece about that, which came out just days before Carlson’s first monologue)
This particular instance of the “Media Mind Trick” begs some really serious questions, mainly: What do you care about more? That Tucker Carlson said something a lot of people disliked? Or that China, which has shown increasing hostility toward the U.S. in recent years and which has amassed a massive army and an arsenal of deadly weapons, can and likely would beat us if we ended up at war with them?
Now ask yourself three more questions:
Which of these stories do YOU think the media should have been covering?
Why would “journalists” want to distract you from knowing that our U.S. military is in such a weak condition?
Why would they prefer you focus on Tucker Carlson instead?
Maybe the most egregious recent example of this distraction technique in action, though, is also – in my opinion – the most dangerous and offensive use of it, because it’s not just trying to distract you from seeing the rest of a very serious story, it’s also oversimplifying a very complex problem AND manipulating news consumers’ emotions in the process. It’s the story about the Atlanta massage parlor shootings.
This tragic story involves one man killing eight people via shooting rampages at two Atlanta massage parlors. The media’s immediate response was to label it as an anti-Asian Hate Crime. The implication was that this was indicative of a massive new trend. There was also a lot of insinuation early on in media coverage that this trend is being fueled by racist white men (the shooter in this case was a white man).
I know many readers have had a strong emotional response to this story, and I hear you – even one hate crime is one hate crime too many in my book. Mass shootings are horrible things that happen way too often in our society. But as a journalist, I feel obligated to look past the emotions right here. In fact, I’ll even go so far as to say that we as a nation will never move past this very divided moment in time if we keep letting the media lead us by emotion rather than facts. So let’s be brave together and take a look at those facts in this case to see if the media narrative is, in fact, an accurate depiction of what’s going on.
*It’s crucial to remember here that people might try to label you as a “racist” or “bigot” for questioning media narratives. They’ll try to paint you as questioning the existence of Asian hate crimes instead. This is a trap. If you are respectful and open-minded, you are never wrong to ask for more facts about news stories of any kind. You may find the media is right. You may find the media is wrong. You’ll likely find a mix of both. Either way, remember that name-calling is simply an Alinskian technique to try to divide people, and to get them to back down and be quiet.*
1. Was this definitively a hate crime specifically directed at Asians?
Here’s what we know:
Eight people were shot and killed during the rampages. Six of them were, in fact, Asian, but two of them were not Asian – one was a white man and the other was a white woman. An additional man was injured in the attacks; he is Hispanic. (this Insider.com article does an excellent job of providing backstory info on all nine people)
The shooter told the Cherokee County Sherriff’s office that the crime was not racially motivated; he apparently said he attacked people working at the massage parlors because “he blames the massage parlors for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex,” per this ABC News story.
The shooter had in fact attended a rehab program for sex addiction, and his past roommates “bolster his claim that sex addiction was the motivation for his attack,” per this USA Today article.
After an investigation, the FBI director confirmed that the shooting “Does not appear racially motivated,” as noted in this Forbes article.
2. Are hate crimes against Asians a massive new trend?
Again, here’s what we know:
A group called Stop AAPI Hate recently released a report stating “Asian Americans were subjected to nearly 3800 hate incidents over the last year,” per this CBS News story. The breakdown of crimes? “verbal harassment and shunning accounted for 68% of the incidents, the report said. Physical violence accounted for 11%, with over 503 reports of violence in 2021 alone.” Again, even one hate crime is one too many. But let’s put these numbers in perspective. In this nation of over 330 million people, 20 million of them are of Asian heritage, per this Pew Research article. 503 of them - roughly .00252% of the total U.S. Asian population - experienced violence because they were Asian.
Per this Crisis Magazine story, I learned that California State University’s Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism released a fact sheet in March 2020 with the subtitle: “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Surge 149%.” That is a disturbing number, and likely accurate. But let’s break it down a bit to get some more perspective: Their numbers show 122 total hate crimes reported against Asians in 2019-2020 across the entire United States. That’s .00061% of the U.S. Asian population. For even more perspective, the cities with the lowest number of reported hate crimes against Asians were San Diego and Cincinnati, with one anti-Asian hate crime apiece from 2019-2020. The city with the highest number of anti-Asian hate crimes in 2019-2020 was New York, with 28 hate crimes committed out of roughly 1.4 million Asian people (.002% of that city’s Asian population). Granted, in 2018-19 there were only 3 anti-Asian hate crimes in New York, so 28 really is a big and disturbing spike. But is it as prevalent or widespread as the media is making it out to be?
After reading all the facts and removing the emotion from this story (something real journalists should be doing every single day), it’s tough to reach the same conclusions corporate media outlets want us to reach. Asian hate crimes are awful and wrong, and they are definitely increasing (especially nonviolent, verbal harassment incidents), but by the numbers, violence against Asians does not appear to be widespread or rampant at the moment (*if it eventually does, the question that will always be in the back of my mind is this: did the misleading media coverage of this particular story predict that surge… or cause it?). And this particular crime, horrendous as it was, just does not seem a strong example of anti-Asian hate crime; correlation in this case, as my sons like to say, does not necessarily imply causation. Last, there is no indication that white men are the predominant attackers of Asians; in fact, neither of the data sheets I linked to above have any information about the race of the people who attack Asian Americans at all.
((*want three solid, recent examples of verified anti-Asian hate crimes that show how different each attacker / crime can be? “Beauty Store Owner Left Beaten and Needing Surgery After Attack in Texas” (Yahoo!News); “Suspect in Attack on Asian American Woman in NYC Is Arrested” (Newsmax); “CNN describes Horrific Murder of UberEats Driver As An ‘Accident’” (Federalist) ))
So what’s the “Media Mind Trick” happening with the massage parlor murder story? Actually, there are THREE MAJOR stories the media seems to be avoiding discussing here:
The way many – not all, but many - massage parlors these days are just fronts for prostitution rings. This 2019 NY Times story, “Behind Illicit Massage Parlors Lie a Vast Crime Network and Modern Indentured Servitude,” pretty much says it all. But I know even here in my own city, two massage parlors in a very nice suburb called Blue Ash were busted last year for being fronts for prostitution rings.
The way so many Asian and other immigrants in this nation actually live, which often involves menial or degrading labor and / or a life of isolation and near-poverty. Again, see the NY Times story I referenced above. But also read this WSJ piece, For Atlanta Shooting Victims U.S. Life Was Lonely Struggle, that discusses, in-depth, what life was like for all six of the Asian murder victims (ALL six of them were immigrants, by the way – four from Korea and two from China). In my mind this raises HUGE questions about what happens to immigrants when they enter our country if they have no plan, support or stable connections to help lift them up. Why do so many of them seem to end up working in places like these? In fact, with so many immigrants in general crossing our borders right now - many of them CHILDREN (!) - shouldn’t we be exploring this topic???
“The role of sex, and sexual pathology, in our hyper-sexualized culture,” per this Federalist piece by John Daniel Davidson. The alleged killer, his former roommates and the FBI all say he had a serious problem with sex / porn addiction. Think it’s crazy to say this is a small example of a much larger issue? Consider that “Pornography is booming during the covid-19 lockdowns,” per this Economist article. Or spend a few minutes listening to the “music” your kids listen to every day, or watching a replay of the Cardi B performance at the Grammys. Maybe check out their social media feeds. I really don’t think it’s possible to dispute that we, as a culture, have a problem with being hyper-sexualized. “After all,” the Davidson piece continues, “if Long was addicted to pornography, and addicted to paying for sex at massage parlors, the story takes on a different narrative shape. Instead of being about an angry white man taking out his racist hatred on Asian women—and thus fitting neatly into a larger media narrative about racism in America—it becomes a story about a deeply disturbed young man dangerously addicted to pornography and sex in a society that treats both as harmless.”
There are probably dozens of other stories coming out of this I’m not even considering, too. My point is, while the media is busy using “Mind Tricks” to label this particular story as a clear-cut case of an Asian hate crime and a solid example of a massive new trend (which actually isn’t massive at all), they are distracting us all from other, more pressing problems that affect thousands, if not millions, of Asian Americans, immigrants especially, every day (FYI - 14.1 million Americans are Asian immigrants per this 2021 Migration Policy Institute article).
In the case of this story, I’d even go so far as to say the media is causing additional harm to the Asian American immigrant community – above and beyond the harm already caused by the shootings - because they are in essence ignoring those other problems. In their efforts to intervene, “raise awareness” and be “helpful” to minority communities, “journalists” often actually make things much worse for them by not discussing or even acknowledging the existence of some very serious issues affecting those communities.
Next time you see corporate news outlets all quickly banding together to promote or oppose some very large, general cause - especially when it pits racial groups against one another and very much plays on our emotions - look closely for the supporting facts and abundant, hard evidence to back up their claims. If you can’t find much of either one, chances are, you’re witnessing this “Media Mind Trick” technique in action. *And no… noticing this does not make you a racist. It makes you a complex, compassionate and thinking human being who is, in fact, questioning the work of the news media.