One week ago today, The New York Times demolished the self-made billionaire myth that helped Donald Trump become president. How come it already feels as if the Times story never happened?
Yes, there's a lot else going on. Yes, a lot of people already assumed (correctly) that Trump, who lies about pretty much everything, probably lied about his origin story, too. But it takes a certain "method" to make sure a story as big as this Times investigation disappears quickly from the public consciousness, argues journalism professor Jay Rosen:
I call it a 'method' because we have a statement explaining it that way. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit," said Steve Bannon to author Michael Lewis. 2/
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 8, 2018
Read Rosen's whole thread here. He's describing what other people have cast as kind of DDoS attack on our democracy's normal circuits of accountability.
"Flooding the system with too much news, much of it misleading or simply false, not only reduces the weight of any individual story; it has the further effect of keeping opponents in a pop-eyed state of outrage, which in turns shows supporters a hateful image of the other side," Rosen writes.
That seems to be the outcome of the New York Times investigation of his financial history, which is proving to be simultaneously devastating and harmless, a news condition previously unknown to presidents facing a check-on-power press. 5/
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 8, 2018
What's happening here is that investigative journalism's power to expose has been superseded by a larger power: not only to flood the zone with shit, but to polarize and exhaust through polarization the patience of the sort of public that this sort of journalism depends upon. END
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) October 8, 2018
In this light, patient focus—including the focus it takes to read an article as long as this one—constitutes a form of resistance.
