Annie Lowrey In The ATLANTIC: Beware of Readers Who Know More of the Facts Than the Journalists Do
08/01/2020
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Annie Lowrey, wife of media mogul Ezra Klein, has had enough of unofficial men and their unofficial facts popping up in comments sections and the like. If there are facts you really need to know, her husband will apprise you of them through the proper channels in Vox. From The Atlantic:

Beware of Facts Man

Facts Man is less about truth than raising questions. Why can’t Facts Man talk about certain issues in exactly the way he wants to?

JULY 31, 2020

Annie Lowrey
Staff writer at The Atlantic

… You have met Facts Man before if you have spent any time online in the past half decade or so. He’s inescapable. He podcasts. He makes YouTube videos. He traffics in Medium posts. He burns up Facebook. And he loves—loves!—Twitter.

What does he serve up there? Truth. Facts. The overlooked and the undercovered. The unvarnished and obvious conclusions that the media do not want you to believe. The conclusions that the social-justice warriors and sheeple professors will not let you reach. The conclusions that mere mortals, including lauded subject-matter experts and the people who have actual lived experience of the topic at hand, have not yet grasped.

He—and he is almost always a he—is a venture capitalist who has analyzed the hospitalizations data! He is a growth hacker with a piercing view of race and measures of intelligence! He is an industry analyst with insight into viral spread! He is a lawyer exploding nuances of gender and sex!

In contrast, Annie’s husband Ezra worries constantly about which facts readers can handle and which facts they should be kept in the dark about. From my review of Klein’s Why We’re Polarized:

The good news, according to Klein, is that “white Christians” are being demographically inundated in what Ezra calls the Browning of America.

The bad news, according to Ezra, is that some whites have started to notice the fate that is being prepared for them, and thus they voted for Trump. Klein says that the media should try harder to mislead white Christians about demographic change so that they don’t see it coming until it’s too late for them to do anything about it:

As we navigate these sensitivities, we can do so with more or less care. [Jennifer] Richeson believes it would be wise for demographers to stop using terms like “majority-minority America”—after all, whites will still be a plurality and what good can come of framing America’s trajectory in a way that leaves the single largest group feeling maximally threatened? It sounds like “a force of nonwhite people who are coming and they are working as a coalition to overturn white people and whiteness,” Richeson says. “That’s a problem.”

Yet of course, as Ezra makes clear throughout his book, that’s not just a problem, that’s also the plan.

Ezra points out that if you simply lie to whites about what you are plotting, many of them will foolishly believe you:

Richeson’s research shows that if you can add reassurances to discussions of demographic change—telling people, for instance, that the shifts are unlikely to upend existing power or economic arrangements—the sense of threat, and the tilt toward racial and political conservatism, vanishes.

But, Klein and Professor Richeson conclude, with regret, you can’t fool all the white Christians all the time:

The problem, she admits, is “we can’t say, ‘Don’t worry, white people, you’ll be okay and you’ll get to run everything forever!’”


[Comment at Unz.com]

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