"I'm not in politics, I'm in ratings. We're winning"
-Roger Ailes, Chairman, Fox Television Stations Group -
It's remarkable and a bit sad that media outlets like MSNBC or NPR or the New York Times are so easily dismissed by the very people their job it is to expose as charlatans, liars, thieves, hypocrites and enemies of Democracy. There are so many possibilities to disembowel the people who are in turn disemboweling our values and our history and our nationhood and the very stability of our country, but bundled into a package like bad loans and labeled as Liberally biased, the non-Fox media simply give in, afraid to do what anyone who knows how to use Youtube can do they ignore the lies and emulate the deceivers or turn to celebrity gossip.
But of course in a different way, it's just as sad to see people like Newt Gingrich and Sean Hannity shown as naked and pathetic as the newly clothed emperor by one of the only news programs with nothing to lose by telling the truth: The Daily Show. I had tears in my eyes Thursday night as the scrolling text of President Obama's Nuclear Position Report was followed by the Foxed up report clothed as a conversation between the very god of hypocrisy and America's own Rasputin. Using someone's own recorded words against him makes it very hard, in theory to drown out the truth with the usual brass band of Obamahate or simply continue to lie and deny with brass balls. why sad? because it doesn't matter, because the people who want to believe won't willingly leave their fantasy faith and view the real, sad world and because there are a lot of them and because they're angry as hell that Democracy overturned their perceived entitlement. As with evolution deniers, no amount of proof is enough even to raise the terrible spectre of doubt. For reasonable people seeing is believing, for Teabaggers, Fox Folk and the vermin who write viral e-mails, it's the other way around.
Yes, indeed, The United States pledges never to make or threaten a nuclear attack against a non-nuclear enemy save for the provision that a chemical or biological attack could exempt an enemy from that pledge, but within seconds we see Gingrich saying that we're endangered because a chemical or biological attack could not provoke a nuclear response. Within seconds we hear Hannity affirm "yes, that's what he said."
It's always quite an experience to see someone look you in the face and lie when you have proof positive that's just what it is. One feels betrayed, embarrassed, angry: one never wants to trust or listen to that person again. But not if you need that lie. Not if your entire life revolves around that lie.
Will MSNBC or CNN or the networks address the Fox crew's responsibility to report the truth? Would they risk running such dramatic proof that their competition is no more honest or reliable than the Legendary Iraqi Defense Minister? What will they say about Fox's assertions that our widely radical president will put us all in danger by reducing our huge stockpile of nukes, some over 40 years old, by a third, or by looking forward to a world without them? Will they, like Jon Stewart simply run clips of Ronald Reagan telling the world that he looks forward to a world without nuclear weapons and that we should reduce the count by one third as a first step? No, they won't. Reagan will remain right and Obama will, by being exactly the same be irrevocably wrong -- and a far left radical liberal trying to weaken our defenses. Truth is irrelevant.
According to Newt Gingrich, President Obama believes that words are a substitute for reality: he's referring to words the President never said, or words that the Hero Reagan also said. His smirking riff, only meant to perfume a pointless smear and to deflect notice that this is precisely what Newt is doing: knowingly lying about the President, creating a false substitute for reality and knowingly trying to enrage people against the elected government. As Roger Ailes said, they're about ratings.
Who in the "Liberal Media" is going to expose him as a seditious insurgent? Who on CNN is going to put together clips of McCain calling himself a Maverick and denying he ever called himself a Maverick? Clips of McCain telling us to avoid extremists like Jerry Falwell and then praising Jerry Falwell? McCain espousing views and then calling Obama an extremist for agreeing? Only an entertainment show, a fake news show. You won't often see such stunning journalism on a real news program or in a real paper or magazine, because it's quick, because it doesn't allow the concocted "balance" of dignifying a baseless lie as "another point of view," because you can't speculate and expatiate and flap your jaws hysterically about it all day and all night. That's not what journalism is any more. Truth isn't even what truth is any more and Journalism isn't journalism, it's entertainment, it's a Roman circus and we're not the lions.
Two in a row Capt. Excellent!!
ReplyDeleteWhen some on MSNBC, like Olbermann and Maddow, expose the Fox lies and outrageous partisan "reporting" it's just us watching and we already know Fox is a fraud. So I don't know what more we can do except to keep blogging about it. We do know conservatives peek in on us, they just can't help themselves! lol
I remember when being a "conservative" used to be a respectable and even practical thing. It's just mean, ignorant hate and self-pity now and as far as I'm concerned the term is no longer useful.
ReplyDeleteIn my lifetime, it's come to be identified with bellicose support of any and all war, particularly an illegal, useless and unwinnable one. The one exception being in the Balkans because it was supported by one of their demons and because the outcome was favorable.
Conservatism isn't really about conserving anything: resources, a natural environment, money. It's about conserving a fictitious utopia and a method of getting there that fails every time.
Too many times it's only about conserving ignorance.
On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow's show is the one I pay attention to.
ReplyDeleteThe others mostly rally supporters and mock the right's latest idiotic blunder or outrageous statement -- they're offering politics-based entertainment. (KO is a partial exception.) Not that I mean to complain harshly or to suggest that they're not smart, skillful people -- and besides, it's nice to see that after all these years of scaredy-cat Republicans falsely conjuring a big bad liberal media, there really IS a liberal media, even if it isn't exactly big and bad.
But Maddow obviously has a fine team working behind her and she does serious journalism -- which, in the wingnut lexicon, makes her a bomb-throwing lefty radical just as surely as we here on this site are "Marxist sociopaths" because, on a good day, we exhibit something approximating common sense and a dollop of sanity.
I would like to see MSNBC find a couple more of them-there Rachels instead of playing the opinion-and-mockery game so much. But I suppose the whole product, taken together, creates a decent push-back against the through-the-lookingglass regime of fairness and balance over at that other place.
By the way, on that treaty Pres. Obama just signed with the Russians, I can't see how he's going to get the requisite 67 votes to ratify it. The Senate Republicans have a "just say no" reputation to keep up -- it will be interesting to watch how the president tries to maneuver his way to success on this one; if he does, it will sure show that he's learning how to deal with a recalcitrant opposition that puts its own interests above the country's. He isn't likely to change any minds, but I will be delighted if he can get them to make their faces look a certain way and issue forth the appropriately concerned, patriotic words (and votes).
ReplyDeleteAbout that concocted balance and other curiosities of our political news reporting.
ReplyDeleteA piece from AP discussing Palin's attacks on Obama caught my attention yesterday, specifically this fragment:
Palin is leaving the door open to a candidacy and has spent the past few months pummelling Obama in speeches, interviews and online. She used her speech in New Orleans to blister the president repeatedly, as did several of her potential rivals who also spoke at the three-day event.
Children, watch your language!
Pummelling, really? Is that what she did? And did she really blister him repeatedly? Any evidence of that?
Apart from the absurdity of covering Palin's criticisms of Obama's nuclear policy (or anything else, for the matter) as if they made any sense, we have the required language of "fairness and balance," which lets us describe semi-coherent and devoid of substance ramblings of a not-too-bright individual as legitimate and damaging political attacks.
I realize that legitimate isn't a requirement for political or damaging, but still, those repeated blisters are a figment of a "fair and balanced" journalistic imagination, which passes for our news (or, more accurately, opinion-making).
Elizabeth,
ReplyDeleteYes, I suppose they've decided Sarah is very marketable. No matter what she says, they can always gussy it up and set it forth as serious political commentary. Silver lining: she (or one of her speechificationalists) has added to our political vocabulary the fine phrase "hopey-changey." Dubya had his moment of lexical glory with "decider," and Sarah deserves at least a brief shout-out for hopey-changey.