Beware the Blob

How does the media shape public perceptions of U.S. military involvement abroad? Robert Wright on the enduring influence of an “establishment consensus” in the American press. “What are the main ways to get Americans to pay attention to foreign policy? One is to scare the hell out of them.” News of the World How does the media shape public perceptions of U.S. military involvement abroad? Robert Wright on the enduring influence of an “establishment consensus” in the American press. The chaos of the United States’ withdrawal from Afghanistan has resulted in some of the most negative news coverage of Joe Biden’s seven-month-old presidency. Chuck Todd, the moderator of NBC’s Meet the Press, [said]( the Taliban’s return to power is “likely to haunt Mr. Biden’s legacy.” The Washington journalist and insider Mike Allen called the situation an “[embarrassment]( for Biden. As Eric Levitz [noted]( in New York magazine, the withdrawal “has been a ‘disastrous’ and ‘humiliating’ ‘fiasco,’ in the words of the mainstream media’s ostensibly objective foreign-policy journalists.” Now those assessments are triggering public arguments among U.S. journalists, pundits, and political figures about the media itself—and specifically the way it covered the American interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq over the past two decades. “The one-sided coverage of the military withdrawal from Afghanistan mirrors the mistakes made in the run-up to the Iraq War,” the progressive analyst Judd Legum wrote in a piece on the “[media’s systemic failure]( But what is the problem, exactly, and what role has it played in the way Americans have understood U.S. engagement around the globe? Robert Wright is an American journalist, the author of the [Nonzero Newsletter]( and a longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy. As Wright sees it, there tends to be “a kind of informal filtering process” among prominent U.S. analysts of global affairs. These experts as generally supportive of an establishment foreign-policy consensus favoring U.S. intervention in other countries, despite the patterns of repeated failure in American interventions abroad since World War II. Wright notes that the media frequently draws on the expertise of think tanks, some of which receive funding from weapons manufacturers and other interested parties hoping to shape discussion and debate. In addition, he says, there’s a constant temptation for the press to inflate threats to the U.S. as a means of attracting viewers and readers, especially since “there’s not inherently a big audience [in America] for foreign-policy discourse.” Even legitimate coverage of human suffering can, in Wright’s view, serve to promote intervention if it lacks analysis of potentially harmful consequences. Wright believes that there’s a potential for change in the media, as Americans reflect on the experience of Afghanistan, but he cautions that the establishment consensus—the worldview of what he and other critics call “the Blob”—has proved resilient for decades. ——— Graham Vyse: What has the coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan revealed to you—or reminded you—about how the media conditions Americans’ understanding of their country’s foreign policy? Robert Wright: One factor that’s kind of peculiar to this case is that a lot of journalists and commentators have spent time in Afghanistan over the last 20 years and knew people there. Some of them employed people there. They naturally had a strong reaction to the prospect that friends and former colleagues would be stranded in Afghanistan and forced to live under a brutal regime. That colored the coverage of the chaotic evacuation. But the question of whether the withdrawal will turn Afghanistan into a platform for anti-American terrorism naturally leads the media to turn to terrorism experts, who aren’t in the business of saying terrorism isn’t a problem. They’d be out of business if they said that. I’m not attributing consciously cynical motivations to them—we all want to convince ourselves that what we’re doing is important—but we wind up being advised about terrorism by people who tend to err on the side of over-dramatization. There’s also the problem of “the Blob”—the foreign-policy establishment. More from Robert Wright at The Signal: “Where do think tanks get their money? They get money from arms manufacturers. They get it from groups that plainly have an interest in foreign policy and aren’t simply giving to support dispassionate scholarship. Some of it comes from foreign countries, increasingly from places like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which has helped shape what’s said about the Middle East. Some of it comes from domestic lobbies—there’s kind of a Cuba lobby, kind of an Israel lobby, kind of a Venezuela lobby, and maybe a couple of kinds of China lobbies. A lot of money is pouring into these think tanks, which ultimately shapes what comes out of them.” “You’d think that the people who’ve been getting things wrong—like advocating disastrous interventions such as the Iraq War—wouldn’t be welcome at the highest echelons of the foreign-policy establishment going forward. One theory as to why there’s no accountability is that getting these things wrong was so widespread within the establishment that nobody wants to see accountability. It would be like a mass suicide. They’d all have to find new careers.” “Mainstream media outlets want big audiences. If their audiences wanted day-to-day reports from Afghanistan for 20 years, they’d be there. But you also have to remember that the people sent to Afghanistan by these media outlets have gone through a filter. They’re members of the establishment. There’s some diversity of viewpoints among them. Some have had their viewpoints reshaped by their experiences. Still, even in this age of media decentralization, you can name a few newspapers, television networks, and websites that collectively have a huge influence—and it’s not as if the people those outlets send over to tell us what’s going on are a random sampling of Americans.” ——— Stress Position How is social media affecting mental health? Tom Chivers on the psychology of life online. (Originally published 2021 | 07.08) It’s now a truism that it’s psychologically unhealthy to spend too much time on social media. The American writer Caitlin Flanagan recently [likened]( her relationship with Twitter to drug addiction: “The simplest definition of an addiction is a habit that you can’t quit, even though it poses obvious danger. … It’s madness.” Is it, clinically? Very intense social-media use can be [associated]( with mental illness, although cause and effect here aren’t straightforward. Simply spending time online doesn’t indicate anything troubling, and can even be beneficial. Yet often, the more outrageous or [extremist]( a post is on social media, the more engagement it gets—and the more attention social-media algorithms bring to it. So, what’s the relationship between social-media use and mental illness? Tom Chivers is the London-based science editor for [UnHerd]( and the co-author of [How to Read Numbers]( on the use of statistics in news coverage. According to Chivers, there’s little evidence that social-media use itself is harming mental health. Rather, online dynamics tend to reward extreme, angry, and hyper-emotional behavior, in a way that offline life discourages. This pattern, associated especially with political or activist Twitter, shows up even in online forums on topics like knitting or popular literature. Not infrequently, Chivers finds, the people on social media driving “purity spirals”—a dynamic in which they level extreme accusations of bigotry at anyone they disagree with—openly suffer from conditions as acute as Borderline Personality Disorder. The point, he says, is not that everyone behaving badly online is mentally ill, or that everyone suffering from mental illness uses the internet in a harmful way. It’s that social efforts to raise awareness of mental-health issues have ignored “less-sympathetic” kinds of mental illness. And this has real-life consequences, for both the troubled and those they post about. ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a new, independent digital publication exploring vital questions in democratic life and the human world—and sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: We recently resolved a broken-link issue with our opt-out function. If you’ve received this in error, our apologies—you can immediately unsubscribe below. Thank you. © 2021 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. One, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by newsletters@thesgnl.email