The Press Creates Its Own Reality

OBSERVATION CAN BECOME AN INTERVENTION: Andrew Ferguson’s “Press Man” back page column at Commentary is always my first read when the new issue arrives each month. I believe his newest column is currently behind the subscriber paywall, but he makes a great observation in the excerpt below, beginning with a riff on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle:

Heisenberg’s principle can be crudely generalized (it’s the best I can do) as follows: An observer can change the nature of a thing or an event merely through the act of observation. Observation all by itself can become an intervention. Heisenberg was describing how reality works at the level of quantum mechanics, where a wave becomes a particle and vice versa depending on how it’s being measured. But it applies, too, at the level of political journalism, where reality is even stranger. There, facts can become interpretations, interpretations can become facts, and events of no significance can achieve an earthshaking importance simply by virtue of being pawed over by a large number of journalists.

A typical journalist, if he’s any good, insists at least theoretically on the iron divide between observer and participant. At its best the press corps sees itself as a squadron of Red Cross workers, wandering among the combatants in a battle zone and ensuring their own safety with a claim of strict neutrality. The Heisenberg Principle of Journalism puts the lie to all that. You see it at work whenever a news anchor announces that “this story just refuses to go away” or a headline writer insists that “questions continue to be raised” about the conduct of one hapless public figure or another.

The story refuses to go away, of course, because the anchor and his colleagues won’t let it; and the questions that continue to be raised are being raised by the headline writer and his editors. Reporters create more news than anybody, just by pretending they’re watching it unfold.

And the reverse is true as well:

• A presidential candidate calls for bankrupting entire industry? Let’s ignore it in plain sight.
• A presidential candidate call for higher energy prices for all Americans, especially the poor? Capital idea, we agree! But on the whole, let’s ignore it in plain sight.
• A presidential candidate has spent years marinating in a radical chic background? Let’s ignore it in plain sight.
• The Middle East is in tatters as a result of an administration asleep at the wheel? Let’s ignore it in plain sight.
• A border agent killed and guns in the hands of Mexican criminals? Let’s ignore it in plain sight.
• An incendiary racially-charged speech involving the man who is now the president of the United States emerges that 99 percent of the general public hasn’t seen? Old news. Let’s ignore it in plain sight.

For decades, the establishment media has been in the tank for the left — to the point where Bill Clinton was paraphrased by the Washington Post in 2006 as saying, “There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies.”

But both halves of the equation used to be better at going through the motions of pretending about the nation’s welfare.

Or to put it another way, as the Washington Examiner notes tonight in an editorial, “To believe Obama is to forget the last four years.” That’s what both the Obama Administration and their palace guard are hoping.

 

Ed Driscoll @ Instapundit