US Media’s “Chinese Spy Balloon” Meltdown Shows Intellectual Vacuity of “National Security” Coverage
US Media’s “Chinese Spy Balloon” Meltdown Shows Intellectual Vacuity of “National Security” Coverage
Was it a “spy balloon” at all? To US media outlets it didn’t matter, what matters is something Bad And Dire and Sinister has happened and we must all freak out.
The past few days of U.S. news have been consumed with Balloon-Gate, an alleged national security crisis where a Chinese “spy balloon” was “caught” “incurring” into U.S. territory. The situation unfolded over three days, climaxing with an F-22 blowing the balloon out of the sky in a fiery display primed for cable TV news. The breathless 24/7 coverage during the “crisis” shows how eager U.S. media is to accept government premises and then quickly proceed to meta-discussions of how the U.S. should “respond” to an alleged transgression.
Serious National Security personalities grilled Biden officials about the U.S. being under attack by the balloon.
Cable news excitedly covered its every move.
CNN ran an entirely speculative segment allowing “experts” to pontificate about what could be the spying capacity of said balloon.
As soon as Balloon-Gate took off, as it were, came the predictable partisan meta-coverage, with officials and media surrogates from both parties trying to turn the event into a forum for who could be Most Tough on China. Republican pundits and GOP Senators accused Biden of being too slow to respond. The Biden White House and their media allies chest beat how decisively they blew the menacing object out of the sky. Like any media narrative that's bipartisan in nature, once “both sides” accept the premises—in this case, a threatening weather balloon (attempting to take photos or something?) was overhead—then it becomes accepted fact, and our media simply moves on to the scripted, jingoistic, dick-measuring portion of the story.
One reason the White House possibly didn’t panic right away and blow the balloon out of the sky is because it’s happened many times before, and they possibly just assumed it was a normal weather balloon (as many experts have noted, China has much more effective ways of spying already). But then, once it took hold in our media—namely, right-wing media, which used it as an excuse to call “China Joe” weak on the commies—the Biden administration probably just figured it made sense to nip the controversy in the bud and blow the thing out of the sky. After all, what’s the harm in doing so?
Or, maybe, U.S. security officials, belatedly, actually thought it was a “spy balloon” and wanted to wait until it was over water. Nobody knows. All we know is what the White House’s claims, that they think the balloon possibly had an espionage purpose. And this claim—heretofore supported by no publicly available evidence—was enough for our media to skip past the scare quotes or “alleged” or “suspected” and just call it a “spy balloon.” As Current Affairs’ editor Nathan Robinson notes, they just ran with this label without an ounce of skepticism:
New York Times: Furor Over Chinese Spy Balloon Leads to a Diplomatic Crisis
CNBC: Chinese spy balloon fallout roils Washington and Beijing
ABC News: Chinese spy balloon timeline: Where it was spotted before being shot down
Whether or not the balloon was a routine weather balloon or part of a sinister spying operation matters a lot: to lawmakers tasked with responding to this “crisis,” to a frightened public, to right-wing media looking to ding the president. But few in the media seemed concerned with establishing this basic fact first—they just took the U.S. government at its word and ran with the narrative that it was a balloon used for “spying.” All because our government said so.
But there’s reason to be skeptical. One analysis by James Andrew Lewis, director of Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a hawkish think tank that basically doubles as a lobbying front for the weapons industry and routinely inflates threats, threw water on the the case for it being a spy balloon, writing “China has not used balloons for spying before…the most likely explanation is that this is an errant weather balloon that went astray.” Lewis is no peacenick—indeed, his primary worry is the balloon story will distract from other, real-world threats of Chinese spying.
It’s also possible the balloon had a kind of hybrid function—genuinely used to collect weather data that could, incidentally, be used to detect national security information. The U.S. spends millions developing similar balloon systems (but these don’t, at all, look like weather balloons.) It’s anyone’s guess, but very few people seemed concerned with establishing the true nature of the balloon—it was decided it was a “spy balloon,” and it was time to move on to the “national security implications” of this fact.
Weapons-contractor-funded think tanks like Center for a New American Security (CNAS) took the opportunity to try and turn the incursion into a mini-Pearl Harbor, with CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine insisting in a giddy Twitter thread that the occasion “could be America’s awakening.” He went on: “the visible is the political. So to shift America's mindset, imagine you could put in the air a tangible manifestation of Beijing's menace. One that could get 24/7 coverage and front page treatment.” CNAS’s biggest donors include the U.S. Defense Department, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and Boeing. Fontaine barely seems interested in whether or not the basic facts are true. He’s openly discussing Balloon-Gate in P.R. terms: It’s good for padding Defense budgets (and, thus, the bottom line of CNAS’s donors) and conditioning the public to be sufficiently scared of China. Whether or not this fear is based on facts, or is proportionate—or can lead to bloating a defense budget in a manner that fuels mutual antagonism between both countries—is irrelevant to him. The point is to use Spy Vibes to push a broader narrative of a U.S. under siege by the threat of Chinese expansionism.
Again, it’s possible it is a “spy balloon.” No one can be sure either way. But shouldn’t our media make an attempt to see some evidence first? Or attempt to find experts like CSIS’s James Andrew Lewis to come on their show and provide another credentialed perspective?
But this is the function of spectacles like Balloon-Gate. No one gains from tempering the narrative, or asking for evidence, so everyone jockeys to try and out-hawk the other guy lest they seem suspect or “pro-China.” It was an opportunity for those in the business of selling war and bloated DOD budgets to push a pre-existenting agenda, for hawks in both parties to show how Tough and Serious they are, and a media, unconcerned with whether the basic premises of a “spy balloon” were true, to egg them all on.