During most of 2020 and 2021, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US election were the two big stories in the US press. But in 2017 and 2018 in some places in the media it was like there was a different story that had been crowned as the Big Story: the Mueller Investigation. We can look back now at the coverage of that investigation, and realize that much of the coverage was a bad example of junk journalism.
Triggered by the firing of FBI director James Comey by Donald Trump (then president of the United States), the Mueller Investigation was launched in May 2017 to investigate claims of Russian interference into the 2016 United States election. Before it completed in March of 2019, the investigation was a secret government inquiry. But this did not stop television networks such as MSNBC from reporting on it almost every day for two years. The stories about the investigation that we got on MSNBC shows such as the Rachel Maddow show were in general a case of junk journalism.
For almost two years on her primetime show, Rachel Maddow had a steady stream of talking heads speculating about what the Mueller Investigation was doing and what its end result would be. It was a very long stream of guesswork and kind of wishful longing in which people seemed to fondly imagine how the Mueller Investigation would end up spelling Trump's doom. Guest after guest on Maddow's show would leave hints suggesting that once the investigation was finished, it would spell political doom for the US president at that time, Donald Trump. During this period between May 2017 and March 2019, there was little in the way of substantive facts to back up such speculation, because the Mueller Investigation had not yet released its report. For almost two years MSNBC led us to believe that the Mueller Investigation was pretty much the most important story of its time. A Guardian article says this:
"The Mueller investigation was covered more on MSBNC than any other television network, and was mentioned virtually every day in 2018. No twist was too minuscule or outlandish for Maddow; every night, seemingly, brought another nail in the coffin of the soon-to-be-dead Trump presidency...In more sober times, this brand of analysis would barely cut it on a far-right podcast. In the Trump era, it was ratings gold."
The Mueller Investigation resulted in the indictment of 34 individuals, eight of whom were convicted or pleaded guilty. None of the charges were charges of colluding with Russians to alter the 2016 election. Donald Trump was not indicted. Finally in May 2019 the Mueller Investigation released its report. The results were anticlimactic. The report said that substantial Russian interference in the 2016 US election had occurred, but such a thing was already known before the Mueller Investigation began in 2017.
A BBC article summarized the rather dull and muted findings of the Mueller Investigation:
"Mr Mueller's 448-page report said it had not established that the Trump campaign criminally conspired with Russia to influence the [2016] election. However, it did detail 10 instances where Mr Trump had possibly attempted to impede the investigation and stated the report did not exonerate Mr Trump. Mr Mueller reiterated that in a rare statement following the end of the inquiry and said legal guidelines prevent the indictment of a sitting president. He said if his team had had confidence that Mr Trump 'clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.' "
The Mueller Investigation seemed to have no great effect on the opinions of US voters, and there was little change in the polls. By April 2020 people began focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic, and the Mueller Investigation was almost forgotten by the public. After losing the 2020 US presidential election Donald Trump now finds himself indicted on other charges and in serious legal trouble for various other reasons; but the idea that the Mueller Investigation would be his downfall was not at all correct.
There is a strong resemblance between two years of MSNBC's "Mueller mania" junk journalism and the junk journalism that continues to pervade the reporting of science news. Some of the similarities are as follows:
(1) Just as MSNBC gave us two years of softball-question interviews with speculating authorities who did not really know what they were talking about when they droned on about the Mueller Investigation (because the investigation was secret), science journalists give us year after year of softball-question interviews with speculating scientists who do not know what they are talking about when they speculate on topics such as dark energy and dark matter (which have never been observed), human memory (which is not credibly explained by anything known about the brain), and macroevolution (which has never been observed by humans, unlike small-scale microevolution that has been observed).
(2) Just as MSNBC hosts such as Rachel Maddow for two years tried to give us the impression that they had some deep insight into some matter they did not understand (the secret Mueller Investigation), science journalists year after year write articles trying to give us the impression that have some great insight into baffling mysteries of nature that are vastly beyond their understanding (such as the mystery of how an enormously organized human body is able to form from a speck-sized zygote, the mystery of how any human is able to think, imagine or remember, or the mystery of how the human species originated).
(3) Just as the great majority of the Mueller Investigation talk we got for two years (2017 and 2018) on MSNBC shows such as the Rachel Maddow Show was pretty worthless hype and speculation, a large fraction of the content of today's science news is almost-worthless hype and speculation, including lots of poor and uncritical hype-heavy discussion of badly designed science research guilty of Questionable Research Practices, in which weak and unimportant papers are hailed as giant breakthroughs.
(4) Just as the endless Mueller Investigation talk we got for two years (2017 and 2018) on MSNBC was ideology-heavy content designed to influence worldviews and voting behavior, a great deal of the content in our science news feeds and science web sites is ideology-heavy content designed to influence worldviews, and make you think a particular way about yourself and the universe you live in: that your species is an accident of nature that arose in an accidental universe.
(5) Just as the endless Mueller Investigation talk we got for two years (2017 and 2018) on MSNBC distracted us from things we should have been paying attention to (such as the risk of a global pandemic like the one starting in 2020, the danger of hazardous gene-splicing in biomedical labs with insufficient safeguards, and the danger of inflation which rather suddenly got so bad around 2021), the speculation and clickbait journalism that litters science news sites have been a very bad distraction reducing the amount of time people spend on pondering the really important developments related to science and nature. Such developments include the gradual discovery that we live in a very precisely fine-tuned universe that had to be just right in dozens of ways for us to exist; the accelerating discovery of stratospheric levels of organization. coordinated complexity and purposeful fine-tuning in the human body and in the bodies of all mammals; the worsening failure of explanations such as Darwinism and genetics to account for such wonders of nature; the failure of neuroscientists to provide robust evidence backing up their claims of a neural basis of mind and memory; increasing evidence suggesting brains have many physical shortfalls ruling out claims that they explain mind and memory; a replication crisis shaking the public's confidence in various types of experimental science such as neuroscience; and the growing evidence for psychic phenomena such as out-of-body experiences that are inconsistent with the claims about minds and brains typically made by today's scientists.
While your comparison of the Mueller report to shoddy science-reporting is apt, there is a bigger picture in both cases. The Mueller investigation was only one instance in a much wider campaign to prevent, and then to undermine, the Trump presidency--and now to prevent another. The campaign by physicalists to explain physics by physics alone, also has wider implications. The modern complex society cannot survive its present descent into moral depravity. Most especially, the redefinition of family is aimed toward its disestablishment, and replacement with central commissars. Human rights come to us, not from bureaucrats nor from science-reporters, but from the Creator. Nature cannot have come about by natural means, since until nature existed, there were no natural means. Life, consciousness and sovereign volition (free will) can never be explained by materialist physics. The larger context is that science is no longer scientific; it is ideological.
ReplyDeleteMy post did not compare the Mueller investigation to shoddy journalism. My post was a complaint not about the Mueller investigation itself but about the shoddy speculative coverage of that investigation that went on for two years, in which we had two years of speculation about a secret inquiry. But thanks for your thoughts.
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