It was not a good week for the news media. After moaning and groaning about the flood of misinformation and fake news on social media, our legacy media proved they were more than capable of stepping up to the challenge. The New York Times, the Washington Post, Reuter’s, etc., followed the Hamas line and reported that the Israelis bombed a hospital in Gaza. Except the Israelis didn’t; it was a misfired Islamic Jihad rocket. Except it didn’t hit the hospital; it was the adjacent parking lot. And no one tried to verify the claimed number of deaths. And that photo of the bombing published by The New York Times? It wasn’t.
A simple mistake, you might think, made in the rush to publish news in the internet age. And then you remember the Covington kids. And Russian collusion with the Steele dossier. And the burial of the Hunter Biden laptop story (aka “Russian disinformation”). And the outrage over the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol while turning a blind eye to / celebrating the destruction and riots following the death of George Floyd. And you realize that the news media is no longer in the business of publishing news. Instead, it’s all about narrative, and how something called “moral clarity” trumps objectivity, fairness, and simple common sense.
Nellie Bowles at The Free Press has a depressing summary of the week’s Mideast news coverage: TGIF: Guilty Until Proven Innocent. Terry Mattingly, at the Get Religion blog, raises a bigger question: who can we trust to provide accurate information about what's happening?
News Media
Why editors in legacy newsrooms struggle with calling members of Hamas ‘terrorists’ – Clemente Lisi at Get Religion.
The Israel-Hamas conflict and the failure of the information war – Fred Skulthorp at The Critic Magazine.
The media accuracy crisis around Israel mirrors how it got BLM wrong – Stephen Miller at The Spectator.
The Stories –and Stakes–of the War in Israel – Bari Weiss at The Free Press.
The New York Times Takes Another L – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
Poetry
Reading “Ulysses” in Autumn – Carla Galdo at Dappled Things.
Too Close – Yehonatan Geffen at Alphabet Soup.
Better Angels – Kelly Belmonte at All Nine.
The Battle of Bunker Hill in Epic Poetry – Andrew Benson Brown at Society of Classical Poets.
Inside of the Painting – Seth Lewis.
Louise Glück: The poet who taught me to write books – Meghan O’Rourke at The Yale Review.
Writing and Literature
Remembering Sheldon Vanauken – David Hartman at The Imaginative Conservative.
The Old Curiosity Bookshop – Joseph Epstein at Commentary.
A Murder or Poets: Or, the Inescapable Connection Between Crime Fiction and Poetry – Paul Munier at CrimeReads.
Life and Culture
Map-Burning – Joseph Orso at Front Porch Republic.
The Awful Humanity of Russell Kirk – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.
Faith
Imperfections That Grow Character – Lara d’Entremont.
The Arts as Sources of Epiphany – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.
The Mission Field We Don’t Think About – Michael Niebauer at The Gospel Coalition.
Old Nick’s Offer: Temptation in the wilderness of everyday – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.
The Grace of My Bipolarity – Anonymous at Church Life Journal.
American Stuff
The Wheeling Horse Hospital – Christy Perry Tuohey at Emerging Civil Wat.
The Sound of Silence – Gregorian
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