The Outstater
‘Counterfeit’ Journalism
THE LEGACY MEDIA, exemplified by our own Indianapolis Star, is having a problem exerting authority — it has none.
Nonetheless, its editors and columnists still affect the tone of earlier days when their titles were depended upon to sort out the morning’s news. Columnists Michael Hicks, James Briggs and Abdul-Haikin Shabazz have assumed the concocted morality of fact-checkers, peppering their copy with modal verbs telling us that we “should” do this or “must” do that.
We mustn’t, shouldn’t and don’t, of course, because we suspect they are fools. Their business model is a miserable failure and that reflects on their judgment generally.
James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal has called their ilk a “counterfeit authority.” Their columns imitate a judicial ruling resolving a dispute but without factual discovery or the authority of public respect.
“Whereas a court’s opinion carries the authority of law, a journalist’s opinion binds nobody,” Taranto says. “A political fact-checker is a journalist pretending to be a judge — a counterfeit authority. What we now call the ‘legacy media’ and used to call ‘mainstream’ adopted this form in reaction to the weakening of the real, if informal, authority it enjoyed in the decades after World War II.”
The presumption is plainly stated in the current issue of the AP stylebook, once a journalistic guide to spelling and grammar now turned political canon. The stylebook, incorporated or adopted by the copy desks of our state’s largest newspapers, commands that reference to black Americans be capitalized but reference to white Americans not. The rationale, according to the socially attuned algorithms at ChatGPT, is this:
The capitalization is meant to show respect and recognition of these distinct social and political aspects of Black identity. On the other hand, ‘white’ is not capitalized because it is seen as a more generalized racial category. Historically, ‘white’ in the U.S. has been the default racial identity, often associated with a group that has held power, privilege and dominance.
So, this is punishment meted by our journalist masters for perceived violations of some unwritten and shifting law of social justice. What arrogance.
Theodore Dalrymple, writing for the Indianapolis Liberty Fund, wonders why a stylebook doesn’t similarly order “Fat” and “thin” or “tall” and “Short.” The stupid are not to be made clever by means of a capital letter, he extrapolates.
“The supposition that by capitalizing the word ‘black,’ but not the word ‘white,’ some benefit is being conferred on black people is both condescending and demeaning to the supposed beneficiaries,” he continues. “Among other things, it supposes that they are defined purely or largely by how others refer to them in newspapers or other publications. It suggests that they can, and indeed need to, be rescued or saved by the merest gesture of those higher in the social scale than they.”
I worked for a newspaper that as a matter of style purposely inserted a period in Harry S Truman’s name only because Truman insisted there should be none. The same newspaper prohibited for years the word “snake” because of one editor’s ophidiophobia. Another routinely spelled it “potatoe” out of respect for native son Dan Quayle.
Those quirks of style make more sense than assuming blacks are so vulnerable they need prophylactic spelling. — tcl
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