The scourge of ‘lame news’
Journalists as narrative curators
My daughter, like teenagers across the country, has recently been learning at school about the importance of media literacy, taught how to spot ‘fake news’, ‘misinformation’ and other evils.
And did they teach you about Steve Sailer’s concept of ‘lame news’, I asked her, whereby the facts of a story are deliberately made as opaque as possible to prevent readers from drawing the correct conclusions about who’s doing what? Remarkably, and to my surprise and disappointment, her north London school wasn’t using unz.com as a resource to teach its pupils media literacy, and indeed most people will have never heard of the concept - but it’s arguably more useful.
Recent events serve as an example. The United States has suffered four Islamist-inspired attacks already this month, although the death toll has been limited by displays of heroism on the ground. Security guards outside a Michigan synagogue prevented mass slaughter and students in Virginia subdued and killed the attacker. In another incident, a bomb launched in New York luckily failed to detonate and no one was hurt, apart from the reputation of the country’s media, who excelled themselves in the art of lame news.
The incident occurred after a right-wing provocateur called Jake Lang organised a protest outside Gracie Mansion, the official residence of New York’s mayor, which was countered by a peaceful counterprotest. Just as a comedian/political activist called Walter Masterson was speaking through a megaphone about how immigrants are welcome in the city, two young men jumped up from behind him to hurl home-made explosives, filled with bolts and screws, at the anti-Islam protesters.
Many remarked on the symbolism of the image, of a liberal in New York City ‘yelling about how everyone is welcome’ when a man shouting ‘Allahu Akbar!’ uses him as a ‘literal springboard to throw a homemade bomb’, the threat of Islamic terrorism literally going right over his head. As another observed, ‘using a progressive white guy as a shield to commit Islamic Terrorism would get you laughed out of a writers room for being a bit too cliché.’
