Why Some Groups Get Linguistic Preference from the Media

Sam Bankman-Fried "Bribed" CCP Officials But "Invested" in US Media

The latest lurch in the hulk of former crypto exchange FTX is the recent allegation that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried bribed Chinese officials to the tune of $40 million. According to prosecutors, SBF sent the money, in the form of crypto, to officials in order to unfreeze FTX-related accounts in China.

That seems par for the course, not just in terms of FTX conduct but also in how US companies frequently interact with the CCP. Last year, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fl) introduced legislation to crack down on any US entity that “assists in the denial, obfuscation, or excusal of genocide,” “supports the CCP’s foreign policy goals” or “advocates on behalf of the CCP.” All of these efforts are shockingly frequent, as my own reporting on Harvard Medical School demonstrated.

In the media, the dynamic is elegantly, and disturbingly, simple: China pays media organizations millions and media organizations are shockingly light on covering things like the Uyghur genocide. It’s a correlation but when money is involved, cause is never far off.

I wrote about just how light the New York Times’ Uyghur coverage has been—and if you don’t believe me, ask yourself when was the last time you saw a big (or even small) front page NYT story on the Uyghurs, or any other mainstream publication, for that matter.

Back to the manifold sins of SBF, the alleged crypto conman may have been caught doing what is virtually standard practice in business dealings with China. But there’s a deeper point, which is that he was doing the same thing with American companies—specifically, the media.

I wrote earlier this year about the irrational exuberance the media displayed toward SBF. He was the disheveled wunderkind here to save the world. Ecce nerd! The narrative proffered by the media was the same one that SBF kindled and spread. He effectively mythologized himself in the pages of some of the world’s biggest—and most skeptical—news outlets. “This geek is making as much money as possible, as quickly as possible, in order to help as many people as possible,” that narrative went.

The thing is, many of the outlets that carried this storyline were ones that had taken money from SBF. This came in the form of advertising, donations, and, of course, investment. Basically, any format they were able to take it was how he was willing to give it. The coverage that came out of the other side of these transactions was never—but never—negative, or even critical.

To turn this into a bit of a logic lesson, let’s look at the following:

---

With China, the formula is (according to the prosecution):

X gives money to Y —> Y performs action desirable to X.

That is labeled “bribery.”

With the media, the formula is:

X gives money to Y —> Y performs action desirable to X.

That is labeled “investment.”

---

You might argue that the bribe was to Chinese officials but the investment in media was given to private business owners. And that might be partially true, but not completely. The media considers itself the Fourth Estate of government, not a regular business sector. It demands, and receives, special legal protections in exchange for playing a quasi-governmental role in our society. So baked into the media’s DNA is this idea that the New York Times participated in a 2018 documentary on its (anti-) Trump coverage titled The Fourth Estate.

All this brings up the notion of Russell conjugation, which is the practice of loading identical actions or ideas with different values by using different words to describe them. My kid is “tough” but yours is “vicious.” My politician is “principled” but yours is a “hardliner.” Our language, and particularly our media, is replete with such examples.

In recent years, the idea of Russell conjugation has become much more prevalent. The reason is that we are all paying attention to the ways in which influence is wielded—or I suppose "applied"—by invested parties to exact political, economic, cultural or social outcomes. Fraud is a great bellwether for Russell conjugation because it provides a very discreet before-after timestamp against which we can see change in the language. According to the same people, SBF was an “altruist” on Monday and a “conman” on Tuesday.

Sure, the emergence of new information can explain the shift—except when your job is to unearth such information, as it is with the news media, rather than keep it covered up. The interesting thing is that, in this case, as in many others, Russell conjugation played an outsized role in the coverup.

What is being Russell conjugated today? Everything. This is the driver of so much dissatisfaction and distrust of the media—the sense that facts and ideas are being massaged to fit a narrative that, in turns, pushes an agenda.

As Marshall McLuhan wrote in The Media is the Massage (not a typo):

“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic and psychological, moral, ethical and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage.”

Our news media is, and has always been, the backbone of the broader media. Information exchange is driven by events. The news media is the great decider of what constitutes an event, and what kind of event it really is. We are being massaged, worked over, by what is now a nakedly political force. And this is one thing humans simply cannot stand.