This is going to be another of my tedious media literacy posts.

But if you’d like something lighter, please feel free to peruse the Reddit forum r/LeopardsAteMyFace, a community where examples are posted of people expressing shock when a group they support does something that hurts them personally. There are a lot of GOP-voters in posts these days: farmers who didn’t realize that mass deportations would hurt their businesses, migrants who thought the government wouldn’t come after well-behaved undocumented people; Republicans who are just now realizing what tariffs are, and what veteran and medical benefits are at risk.

We’re going to talk a bit about this forum in the piece below, but as I was drafting it, I got the feeling that some might think I was trying to police how others are reacting to these horrible times—and I’m not, truly. I don’t go in for lecturing people about their coping strategies, so if you’d like to indulge in schadenfreude while seeing people who voted in a way that will hurt others come to realize that they’re going to suffer, too—go for it! I hope that it’s healing, and that it restores you for the work ahead.

The only reason I’m writing at length about a related topic is because legacy media isn’t going to stop trying to leverage despair and other intense emotions for clickbait. Sites like the aforementioned can be affirming to some, but the incidents posted there also speak to a media ecosystem more interested in getting a rise out of us than empowering us to live better in community and democracy.

And yes, it’s easy to shake one’s head at people who refused to remember the track record for this next US president, 47 (both in office, and after losing in 2020); or to do even a modicum of research on policy proposals this election cycle; or to give a hoot about what happens to other people, so long as they can “stick it to the Dems!”

But there’s a danger in forgetting that these people weren’t forged on another planet. Just as many Republican voters were able to overlook how media campaigns manipulated them into voting against their own best interests, so too can we all make mistakes with how we interpret what we’re seeing in legacy and social media.

This piece isn’t meant to rap knuckles, then, so much as offer more tools to help us identify when news cycles might be gaming us all.

A dangerous assumption about news media
The biggest challenge, when visiting a news site, switching on the radio, reading a newspaper, or watching TV, is remembering to ask ourselves: Who is this for?

On weekends, for instance, I read El Colombiano. I know—quaint, right? A real newspaper, with a crossword that has taught me the name of most every pope, and plenty of Roman emperors, and the occasional antiquated Spanish military term. (Also, it has a great Colombian food column every Saturday!)

El Colombiano is an economically right-of-centre paper, so I can expect stories that prioritize a middle-class or middle-class-aspirational readership. This means that it discusses national issues with a bias toward congressional debate; the state of pension, healthcare, and infrastructure reforms; and the overall protection of property and stock market value from political corruption and petty crime—even if the paper sometimes covers topics of relevance to poverty and hunger, too.

But why would the editorial team do otherwise? After all, people truly suffering here aren’t the type to be reading or buying newspapers with stories about their plight. Where’s the profit margin in gearing more content expressly toward them?

Every country’s political spectrum is a little different, though, so just because a paper in Colombia is economically right-of-centre doesn’t mean it won’t carefully consider the peace-seeking work being done by this country’s left-wing president. If anything, there’s significant interest paid in El Colombiano to the potential use of economic solutions to paramilitary problems (in equal part, because a country with as storied a history of struggle with armed militias knows full well that simply blowing things up doesn’t usually bring about meaningful transitions to peace).

In contrast, there’s also Q’Hubo, which is Colombia’s version of various Sun, Post, or Daily Mail incarnations in Canada, the US, and Britain. This is the paper for the everyday working-class reader—the taxi driver, trucker, or street vendor who wants a little entertainment that will also inform them of pressing neighbourhood news. This paper has a sensationally conservative message in its foregrounding of every murder, kidnapping, rape, violent assault, and home robbery it can find, along with a healthy share of Catholic-infused fears of Satanic cults in the region. It’s relentlessly telling its readership: “Stay sharp! Don’t let anyone take advantage of you!” Because that sells.

But sometimes we think about the question of “audience” too narrowly.

I was certainly trained up, as a whippersnapper, to think of media audiences solely in this light: one paper “for” X demographic; another “for” Y.

There are, however, other layers of “audience” to consider when we read the news—especially when the news is about political actions. When a government decides to announce a given policy, and when news media simply reports on that PR statement, this credulous relationship turns the Fourth Estate into another tool in government negotiation processes: either domestically, or in relation to foreign policy affairs.

In this relationship, readers are no longer just “the audience”; we become actors, too.

Our hope, at hearing leaders declare a new policy platform, can be used to leverage concessions from a political partner reluctant to accept that same policy.

Our fear, at hearing leaders raise the alarm over a threat they’ve just declared, can be used to whip up consent for state policies we wouldn’t have accepted otherwise.

And on one level, we all know how this works. We’re just not comfortable talking about a form of media manipulation that leads to some of us going off the deep end.

Jeez, ML, don’t we have enough conspiracy theorists as it is?

But this, too, is a reflection of diminished media literacy, because the more media literate do not believe that everything they read is impartial—nor do they ever expect impartiality in full. Rather, they go into every source with a grounded understanding of the subject-positions commonly advanced by the outlet. And they read widely, listen widely, and watch widely, to try to fill in any gaps that coverage from solely one subject-position will invariably create.

Keeping that in mind, then, let’s consider an analogy for how we tend to serve as actors, not primary audiences, when it comes to government statements in the news.

Foreign policy, the media, and the breakfast table
Imagine a traditional family: two parents, a few young kids. One of the parents has been reluctant about adopting a dog, but the other announces at the breakfast table that both parents have decided they’ll let the kids have the dog if they clean the garage, get good grades this next report card, and set up a chore chart for themselves.

The kids are ecstatic! For weeks, they’ve been upset with their hold-out parent, but now it seems that reasonable parameters are finally being set for them to get their dog.

Meanwhile, the hold-out parent is frustrated, because they did not agree to this deal, but now they’re in a bind. If they disagree openly, they won’t just be telling the kids that the deal is off; they’ll also be telling their kids that the other parent is a liar, and that there’s something wrong with the parental relationship—sowing uncertainty and pain among the youngsters. And, sure, maybe later Partner #2 can try to get Partner #1 to retract the offer… but that’s later. This is now! The breakfast table! And their kids are looking up at them with such eager anticipation in their eyes.

Conversely, Partner #1 has been clever, by establishing parameters that offer a bit of grace to Partner #2, while still forcing them into a position they did not want to be in. They’ve given Partner #2 a chance to move from initial, vague reluctance at the mere thought of a dog, into an active deal for future pet-ownership that lets them retain their children’s respect, and even reinforce the children’s desire to follow parental guidelines. Now that Partner #1 has declared this deal for them both on such “generous” terms, Partner #2 gets to be the hero simply by going along with it.

We’ll go into some real-life examples of how this has played out in foreign policy—and how this tactic is showing up in media cycles now—but first, let’s round out the analogy by really drilling into the role for the kids here.

In this scenario, the kids think that the most important communication happening at the breakfast table is the one between their parents and them. Parent #1 just announced something on behalf of both Parents, so now the kids assume the only consent required is their own: Do they agree with the terms of this deal? Will they promise to get good grades, and clean the garage, and draw up that chore chart?

But maybe the eldest child is a little more aware of fractures in their parents’ relationship. Maybe they noticed that only Parent #1 described this deal to them, even if Parent #1 said that the deal came from both adults in the room. Maybe this eldest child remembers other times when Parent #1 declared things a certain way, only for Parent #2 to reveal that this declaration wasn’t unanimous.

Either way, the younger siblings don’t realize this yet. They’re just excited about the possibility of a dog—at last! Within reach!

And yet, the eldest child knows there’s a deeper game being played—a risky one, at that. Even if the gambit works this time, the interaction will still have expended precious relationship capital that could lead to a blow-out between both parents later on. Every time Parent #1 makes a grand, unilateral declaration, and every time the kids follow along, Parent #2 comes close to snapping instead of conceding.

It’s never a simple conversation between parents and children, in other words—even if it sometimes looks that way, until you’re a little more “in the know”.

Sabre-rattling and foreign policy
This is the way a lot of government declarations play out: through announcements expressly given to legacy media with the expectation that signal-boosting their assertions will reach an audience of “kids” (us) who can then do the rest of the work of putting pressure on the “reluctant parent” (a partner in negotiations) to concede.

We saw this tactic attempted many times by US President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in their efforts this past year to get Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to take a cease-fire more seriously. Biden and Blinken would announce to global media that they were very confident in the possibility of a deal by X date, or with Y inclusion—even when a deal was absurdly far from being enacted, because Netanyahu flat-out did not agree with US terms, let alone with Hamas leaders.

In part, these US announcements were done to offset the horrors in Gaza that were also reaching major media, along with routine breaches of so-called “red lines” in US military aid policy that were shattering local faith in the integrity of their government. The implicit argument in these grand promises of a cease-fire was “Yes, yes, we’ve given Israel a lot of laxity despite its repeated contraventions of US law and general humanitarian policy… but for a reason! to secure a ceasefire! you’ll see how this all pays off soon enough!”

There was also a more direct, two-fold benefit for US negotiators, in giving the world the impression that Netanyahu had already agreed to their terms.

For one, the appearance of a united front put pressure on Hamas and its negotiators. If the world believed that Israeli and US negotiators were already in harmony, there would be added pressure for Hamas not to be seen as “spoiling” the deal, and to accept whatever terms were given if it wanted to improve its reputation where it could.

For another, these grand and preemptive declarations of a near-ready peace deal offered Netanyahu an on-ramp to appearing more reasonable on the world stage. By insisting that the US and Israeli teams were this close to securing a Gaza deal—or on occasion, by having the US declare that the Israeli team had agreed to a cease-fire even when Israeli government was telling domestic sources that it most certainly had not—Biden and Blinken were trying to get Netanyahu to fall into line indirectly. They were using the pressure-point of global witnesses to reward him in advance for going along with something he did not and still does not want on any terms but his own.

Now, obviously, this power-play through public pressure didn’t work at the time.

(And we can talk some other time about the freshly carved out, post-election 60-day cease-fire with Lebanon, but it still feels very tied into US presidential politics to me, with Netanyahu talking primarily in terms of replenishing military might and redirecting his war focus on Iran and Hamas for the next two months, so I’m going to wait and see what foreign policy analysis emerges in the coming days.)

But that hasn’t stopped the US—among many other global powers—from using this media tactic often in international affairs.

Russia has used it with great frequency, for instance: not least of all, by hinting at the possibility of nuclear war if the US or other NATO powers further interfere with its invasion of Ukraine. Russia doesn’t want a nuclear winter any more than other major nation-states, but if it can whip up fear of such a thing in Western news, it can shift popular opinion away from escalated investment in Ukraine.

(It’s a bit like a tactic used in abusive households, to extend my earlier family analogy: even though the abuser could simply stop abusing their kids and partner at any time, with the right conditioning, victims can fall into a rhythm of blaming each other for their abuser’s outbursts. In this case, it’s hints from the Kremlin, credulously repeated in Western media, that can lead to citizens pleading with their more “reasonable” governments to stop making the aggressor-nation angrier.)

Likewise, we’ve talked plenty about how Israeli intelligence and government plays a strong media game, too. Last week, I explored Netanyahu’s extensive attacks on domestic media; since then, the Israeli government pulled all funding, ads, and permission for state officials to talk to journalists from Haaretz, the oldest paper in the country, as a supposed threat to the state. A healthy democracy, that one is not—but as I wrote in May, these kinds of crackdowns are also predictable during wars.