The Bad Journalism of Hypotheticals

It's a Sickness on the Left and the Right...and Now the Middle

I have a hard time watching ESPN’s flagship sports show “SportsCenter” these days. What used to be a show about the previous day’s sports highlights and major news stories in sports has become nothing but a promotional show for the upcoming games and odds/betting reporting for the many legal sportsbooks that now proliferate across the landscape. Nobody cares about what happened, they care about what is going to happen. Aside from the fact this just exacerbates an already problematic gambling addiction in America’s young men (and growing exponentially among college age women), the stories they cover no longer show events or highlights, they dwell far too long on “what ifs” and meeting a standard to “put you in the money.”

There has always been a bit of this; the original “NFL Today” not only had Irv Cross¹ and Phyllis George,² but also had a segment by Jimmy “The Greek” on predictions. Every show has some aspect of this, having people make predictions about the upcoming games. However, until the last few years, it has never been the FOCUSED portion of the programming. Now it has.

You may be asking yourself, why I am talking about sports reporting and gambling and how the journalistic landscape has changed there. The reason why is simple, this level of mentality has been prevalent in actual political journalism far longer and worse yet, is a source of much of the antipathy towards how we receive our news. If you watch news in the mornings, or earlier in the week, all they talk about is what WILL happen, what is coming up of importance. That’s understandable, they’re setting up the upcoming events. But then, quite often, they don’t follow through, the event happens and then they immediately pivot to what else is coming up. Always asking “What if?” and playing up hypotheticals of possibilities to keep you engaged. Nothing is ever resolved, its just the set up for the possibilities of other events happening. Interviewing people throwing hypotheticals at them that have no bearing on whether they matter or not. If the hypothetical doesn’t happen, they act like they never asked it; if it does they crow about how they saw it coming.

The advantages of this style reporting is evident; it gives the appearance of impartiality, intelligence and that there is a 50/50 chance of certain things, when in reality it’s biased, indifferent bullshitting. It’s the nonsensical way people answer absurdity by saying “I’m only asking questions.” It’s how you move millions of people to fear and anger against our government based on “the possibility” of something happening or could have happened. It’s how you get millions to buy into stupid arguments and lazy positions, and get them to misunderstand and misread the current environment. It’s how you get millions to second guess their faith in institutions and point fingers at the other political side saying they’re the cause of everything wrong. Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America because he reported on what occurred, not because he was Kreskin with predictions.

Now, to many, it’s easy to see how both the left and the right do this. Watch Morning Joe or any 10 minutes of Fox News and you’ll be inundated with this level of bullshittery. Count how many times they say the word “if” on that show and turn it into a drinking game. But what many may not understand is that the middle, largely consisting of conservative “Never Trumpers” routinely troll in this area as well. Being a Never Trump journalist is the easiest job on the planet; you just report on what the orange troll says and register your disdain at his mindlessness and the mindlessness of those supporting him. But out there, particularly based on what he did last time, there is a very high level of fear of what he is going to do. So it’s exceptionally easy for Never Trump Journalists to always question “what if…” and push buttons. This isn’t reporting or even opinion journalism—it’s hypothetical bullshit that may or may not happen, and is akin to Chicken Little questioning if the sky is going to fall.

As I said with sports journalism, there has always been some level of it in the format, but it has never been the focused portion; read any Never Trump website today (The Bulwark for instance) and it is ENTIRELY about it. Don’t believe me? Here is someone I agree with regularly, writer Jonathan V. Last³, last week in a title that says it all “Will he or Won’t he?” It’s a mishmash of coulds, maybes, possiblys, and hypotheticals. To his credit, he usually acknowledges he does this and is a bit of a pessimist in that regard, but most of his articles pull this same thing. As does much of the Bulwark these days. This type of bullshit isn’t good or thoughtful, it’s just plain lazy.

In fairness, part of this I suspect is the relative Limbo we are currently in; Biden is still President for a couple more weeks, the new Congress was just sworn in but hasn’t done anything of substance yet, and Trump’s Inauguration is still some time out. We can see the cliff coming, but have no idea what awaits on the other side of it. We’re primed for what’s about to take off but still in the starter’s blocks. In that environment, it’s REALLY EASY to start writing opinion pieces and reporting like this. And there is definitely an audience for that, (I’m not going to lie, I happen to be one). But reporting like this is how we forget what we DID, and where we ARE. It’s how it was so easy to not make the connection that COVID wrecked the economy and sparked inflation before Biden did anything, how COVID was eventually put under control by vaccines(!) and how Biden rallied Europe to confront Putin and turned the American economy into the envy of the world. This lack of focus, always questioning the future(!) is how we lose track of our present. I’ve already seen articles about potential candidates for 2028 and whether Trump will even try to disregard the 22nd Amendment and seek a third term like Nixon in Watchmen. We need to stop this bullshit. We need to keep our eyes open to what is right in front of us. It’s absolutely no good being Chicken Little for four years only to have the sky fall. It’s no good being the “Boy who maybe called wolf and was wrong” when the wolves eventually come.

PurpleAmerica’s Cultural Corner

One of my BIGGEST pet peeves in politics is when someone thinks they are quoting Dante when they say “The [hottest/deepest/darkest/worst] circle of Hell is reserved for those who maintain neutrality in troubled times.”⁴ Here’s an example from last week:

'The Hottest Circle of Hell Is for Those Who Stay Neutral'

Dante didn’t say it. He certainly didn’t write it. Whenever I see someone say this, I think to myself “Show me you’ve never read Dante without saying you’ve never read Dante.”

I could get right to the point of where Dante DID put the neutral and their punishment, but first, I want to tell you what actually IS in the deepest/darkest/hottest/worst circles of Hell. It just makes for a more interesting picture and demonstrates very clearly why that aphorism is completely wrong and inconsistent with Dante altogether.

So the deepest circle of Hell is the ninth circle, Cocytus, which is a lake of ice. This circle is reserved for traitors, and the punished are frozen to various degrees consistent with the type of person they betrayed (e.g., friends, family, God) It’s frozen for two reasons: 1) it is the furthest from God’s light, which also makes it the coldest part of Hell; 2) Satan is trapped frozen to his torso, and his wings flap hard trying to free himself from his frozen prison; the stronger he flaps, the colder the winds, the more the ice freezes and the more he gets stuck.

The hottest/worst circle of Hell (that is if you don’t consider being forever frozen for eternity in ice the worst) is the eighth circle of Hell, a horrible, wretched place called “malebolge” which is a series of ditches and pits with the punished enduring the worst punishments in Hell. Those punished here are frauds; panderers, sorcerers, simoniacs, hypocrites, thieves, extortionists, sowers of discord and others. The punishment for each group differs but gets progressively more vile, proportionate to their crimes.

The reason the lower bastions of Hell are reserved for these groups are because as Dante wrote, “God hates malice above all things.” The 8th and 9th circles of Hell are filled with those sinners that were particularly egregious in that regard, not just because they committed these acts but that they did so with a corruption of the mind and evil, malicious intent. The earlier portions of Hell are filled with the lustful, gluttonous, and greedy because those are seen as more sins of control and a lack of continence. The middle portion of Hell is reserved for the more violent, with the fifth circle to the wrathful, and the seventh committed to those who committed violence to others, themselves or to God.⁵

So where did Dante place the neutral? After all, being neutral is a sin of apathy and indifference, not malice or even ill intent. Well, he didn’t even place these fence-sitters, wafflers and flip-floppers in Hell proper. The politically neutral, along with all the angels who wouldn’t pick a side in Satan’s War against God were placed in what is referred to as “the vestibule” of Hell. After Dante walks in and sees the sign that says “Abandon Hope All Who Enter Here” he sees the sight of the neutral, chasing a blank banner, forever in movement, never to stop or pause. If they do stop, they are stung by wasps to continue moving. They had no cause in life and now are forced to movement following no real cause in the afterlife. Neither Heaven NOR HELL wanted them, so they remain outside of Hell itself. Dante didn’t even put them in Limbo with good people whose only flaw was that they were non-Christian.

So why do people still misquote this? Because they are trying to inspire people to get off the sidelines and into the fight. They’re trying to encourage people to become activists. In that sense, the theme of the neutral being WORSE punished fits right into that call for action. It’s a bit of gaslighting to say Dante said this, adding a level of moral authority to it, even when he demonstrated the actual opposite of it in his Divine Comedy. In fact, since the people who usually say it know better, and say it anyway, they are committing the very sin that puts people in those worst parts of Hell. They are being frauds, sowers of discord, flatterers, hypocrites, falsifiers, and counselors of fraud. Don’t follow them there or you’ll end up in malebolge too.

And THAT is what Dante wrote.

PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day

In the first circle of Hell, Dante has Limbo; the place where virtuous non-Christians exist. What I love about this place is that you are punished by actually enduring what you believe happens to you in the afterlife. So if you believe you just were buried and rotted in the ground, that’s what you get for eternity. If you think its sitting around a fire talking with philosophers to achieve a higher learning, that’s what you get. If you were Hindu, you would endure what Hindus believe in. It really is an encompassing junk drawer of the afterlife; you just weren’t allowed into Christian Heaven because only Christians got into that according to Dante.

Dante’s argument wasn’t that you were a bad person if you were sent here, it’s that you had a lack of imagination that you weren’t aspiring to something better. That “something better” in Dante’s mind was the Christian version of Heaven, because that was what Dante believed in.

Even Dante was biased as a writer.

PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject

Quit asking “What if?” If I wanted that, I’d watch the Disney/Marvel cartoon.

Ask “What now?”

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Footnotes and Fun Stuff

1. Interesting factoid about Irv Cross; he was once my neighbor and was extremely particular about his lawn. When I ran for City Council, he came over and shook hands with family and friends, and was generally a really nice guy. When I told him that one of the reasons I would skip church on Sunday mornings was to watch The NFL Today, he told me I shouldn’t have done that, that God was more important than football. In his later years, he was the Athletic Director of Bethel College in the Twin Cities. R.I.P Irv.

2. Interesting factoid about Ms. George, she married the Governor of Tennessee and her daughter, Pamela Brown, now anchors coverage on CNN.

3. And before I get a lot of people defending Last, just let me say, I read his newsletter daily, actually like him more than most people I read and agree with him more often than not.

4. This quote while occasionally still misattributed to Dante, was actually mentioned by JFK, and that is the source for most of the troubles with it.

5. In case you are wondering, the sixth circle is reserved for Heretics, as a “violent” affront to God.