If you’ve been following how the media has covered the confrontation between the indigenous elder and the MAGA-hatted teens, you’ve got to be discouraged.
Conservatives have realized they can construct a parallel reality and have it accepted
Footage show students wearing pro-Trump Maga hats taunting the Omaha tribe elder. The relentlessly repeated talking point — that there was a collective “rush to judgment” on the boys because they were Trump supporters – was used by conservative anchors Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham to attack mainstream media and left leaning social media users.
On Wednesday morning, Sandmann got almost nine minutes of airtime on a national breakfast program to make his case, after his family hired a Republican-linked PR firm.
In making this happen, conservative media have normalized the boys’ aggressive form of political expression, and tried to further discredit both fact-oriented media and high-profile liberals. Media outlets have been effectively gaslighted, and many climbed down from coverage which was based on the most clear and obvious interpretation of the boys chanting, making gestures and making tomahawk chops.
So how did they do it? They followed a few well-worn steps:
1. Reframe the debate as soon as possible
There are multiple versions of anything that happens now, captured on social media. What conservatives have realized is that they can pick and choose among the versions available to construct whatever narrative best suits their purposes. It's not a matter of truth, or "what really happened" — it's just another tool in the arsenal of bad-faith conservative tactics to get to the ends they want, by whatever means they can, valid or not.
2. Pick your narratives
They choose the side in a confrontation that is judged best to work for them, and then push a chosen narrative about it relentlessly, uplifting their chosen heroes endlessly and smearing their chosen villains, with more and more conservative voices echoing and reinforcing that same narrative. It's designed to overwhelm the babble of differing perspectives of liberals offering their own varied versions as they earnestly pursue the "truth" — and the avalanche of one unified message, even if it’s a pack of lies, over a non-unified message, even if it’s the truth, works.
3. Focus on the extremes of the other side
Conservatives pick the worst or most unappealing versions from the opposing side and hammer on them in a unified way to present that as the other side's view. It keeps them from having to deal with the actual arguments and evidence which are frequently better and more accurate than their own. But focusing their audience on the most inflammatory aspects of the supposed "liberal" side, like doxxing or calls for violence, lets them keep their base riled up and insulated from the actual truth of the situation.
And the result?
As of Wednesday, as a result of these well-work tactics, liberal media has almost completely backed away from their initial, justified take on the story.
And it's the same with so many other stories, not just the CovCath MAGA teen. You can see the same dynamic happening over and over again in all kinds of news stories.
So what's the solution?
I don't think anyone wants liberals and progressives to stop being rational and honest seekers of the truth of situations and speaking in good faith about them. Turning the left into a howling, integrity-free mob like the right-wing blabbo-sphere wouldn't be a good thing.
So then how to counter the success of the right with their unscrupulous but effective unified approach?
Sticking to the principle of seeking the truth has to be part of it. Perhaps punishing those media outlets that let themselves be bullied away from sticking courageously to the pursuit of truth needs to be the rest of it.