When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Every morning, we run The Narrative Machine on the past 24 hours worth of financial media to find the most on-narrative (i.e. interconnected and central) stories in financial media. It’s not a list of best articles or articles we think are most interesting … often far from it.

But for whatever reason these are articles that are representative of some sort of chord that has been struck in Narrative-world.

De Blasio’s ‘pay parity’ hypocrisy  [NY Post]

Back on planet Earth, there’s a gender pay gap at the top of his own administration. As Julia Marsh reported in Sunday’s Post, four of the five highest-paid members of his administration are men.

Overall in de Blasio’s top ranks, women earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by the men. And both Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza and new NYCHA chief Gregory Russ have salaries over $400,000, much more than their female predecessors.

Bill de Blasio is an apparatchik.

Give him a bowler hat and an umbrella, and he’s a dead ringer for John Cleese’s classic character, the Minister of Silly Walks.

My personal opinion of Bill de Blasio’s political career and ideology is a sense of relief that he’s too inept to be truly dangerous.

But is Bill de Blasio a hypocrite? No.

Bill de Blasio is an authentic good leftie soldier, and it’s that authenticity that makes him a successful politician today.

Even if it also makes me throw up in my mouth a little bit.

Sure, Bill de Blasio is pandering in a particularly cringe-worthy way when he says that he’ll force equal pay for women’s national sports teams “if elected president”. But at least it’s authentic pandering. There is no bone in Bill de Blasio’s body that does not believe this is the right public policy position, no matter what ridiculous lengths he might take it.

And that’s what makes this series of “articles” and editorials from the NY Post – claiming that there is some massive inequity and hypocrisy in de Blasio’s treatment of women in his own administration – so popular and central to this morning’s media Zeitgeist.

But as it turns out, everything about this “reporting” on the pay-parity hypocrisy of the de Blasio administration is complete horseshit.

For example, when the NY Post says that “four out of the five top-paying jobs in the de Blasio administration belong to men”, they neglect to tell you that one of those four men is de Blasio himself. How dare de Blasio – who does not set his own salary, of course – include himself in his own administration! So out of the five top-paying jobs of people Bill de Blasio hired, three are men and two are women. The sexist pig! If de Blasio had hired a woman for any one of those three jobs now filled by a man – something I’m sure he now wishes he had done – the entire pay-parity “scandal”, where “women earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by the men”, disappears.

This article is not a lie. There is no “fact” here that is not checkable and true. This article is not Fake News.

It’s worse.

This article is Fiat News, the presentation of opinion as fact, in pure and despicable form.

This article was specifically designed to manipulate someone like me … someone who is VERY predisposed to believe the worst about Bill de Blasio because I dislike his politics SO MUCH.

It’s a particularly virulent and destructive form of Fiat News we call a rage engagement.

Once you start looking for rage engagements – and their twin, the mirror engagement – you’ll see them everywhere in today’s media. Why? Because they WORK. Because we are hardwired to respond to manipulative “evidence” like this. Because this is how others win The Game of You.