This schtick is so old that I’m embarrassed we fall for it again and again. It happened when the media finally looked into George W. Bush’s being AWOL from the National Guard. It was a legitimate story, and it was also refreshing that our timid national media was finally doing some legwork. But Dan Rather got busted for citing a document that turned out to be forged, and the story died. Rather, for being uppity, was fired.
Media people after that refused to look into the AWOL story, and Bush skated.
The Republicans are experts at media management – they use their noise box – they can throw out an incredible amount of flak. The tube today was full of noise about how Palin was somehow vindicated and now untouchable. But for a brief while, it looked like media was doing its job. Now with the screeching, “the speech”, which was an affront to us all and full of lies but supposedly “hit out of the park”, media is again intimidated. They are afraid of being called sexist, and Palin, who seems to have a closet full of skeletons, will skate.
It’s our own fault. We walk into a trap. We have no one to blame but ourselves – the Republicans, who pummeled Kerry with the Swiftboat campaign, are no one to fool with. These are experts at manipulation, and the media, easily intimidated, are no match. Democrats seem to jump bare-assed into this pool every four years, all concerned about being dignified and above the ordinary knife fights. The only saving grace is that they might take a commanding majority in the senate, and that they might use that majority to stop (gulp) ‘President’ McCain. But that depends on election integrity. For so long as our ballots are counted in secret, exit polls will continue to go awry, and there will be surprising and unexpected Republican wins, and doe-eyed media analysts who can’t for the life of them figure out why exit polls can’t get it right.
But allowing Democrats to defend us is like sitting atop a bowl full of Jello. I don’t doubt that Harry and Nancy will be back, and the concessions and cave-ins will continue.
Things aren’t looking so good right now. I fear for the country – we’re rudderless – a minority party in charge, a majority party too weak to do anything about it. We’ll continue our drift into right wing paranoia and madness.
Piece of Mindful 
Cheer up, Trotsky. Maybe something terrible will happen to America, and you’ll be at the top of your game again.
LikeLike
Ah, Check – always there with a kind word. Thanks, man.
LikeLike
What happen to another anti-Palin post? Soros won’t pay unless you do ten.
LikeLike
Global corporations bet on both parties, and won, long before Palin was selected. Both parties kiss the ring without hesitation. Corporate media took out the trouble-makers: Paul, Kucinich, Gravel, and McKinny. More Independents than ever despise the parties, but have nobody to vote for in Montana except Nader and Barr. The fix is in. Electors, not citizen voters ultimately decide. Know who they are?
LikeLike
Ok, let’s assume the Bush medium-size story is true:
What about the huge, earth-defining “This proves ones sides version of events about the unfairness of the media” story about Dan Rather taking an obvious fake, then having media dissemble for him?
Let’s be clear: it was a coverup. This is far worse than Watergate, because these are the watchers. Who watches the watchers? It turns out the basic function of the media as Americans understand it is false, and that the large media organizations (CBS certainly, but also NBC/ABC which studiously covered for their friends) are vastly partisan organizations.
Dan Rather’s pushing of the fake document and then covering for the people who created it (they STILL don’t know who put it out because Rather WON’T TELL) is nothing less than the admitting that the basis of American Monroe journalism (the notion of the arbiter/referee) is utterly false. It’s admitting we don’t have the “fair” media, but have a partisan/party media system like Britain. That’s fine to have the partisan model, but the entire premise of American TV media is that it’s a fair arbiter of life. They teach it in schools. It’s assumed. This proves the basic media lie.
This is the story of a century. It wasn’t people fighting for jobs when they got caught in a lie- they would have fought the battle completely differently had they simply made a mistake. They fought only to destroy a presidency and let their own reputations dice out- knowingly. They could see it coming, they could see it was going to happen. CBS could have stopped the whole thing (and done instant damage control) by simply admitting their mistake after handing it to a specialist (meaning, the first hour the story of the fake documents came up). But they chose to keep on with an obvious lie, just to damage a president. They cut their nose to spite a president. That’s not just partisan, that’s the destruction of the reputation of the American system of media in television. The biggest story of our lifetime. And you’re going on about how unfair it is TO YOU. Fuck me.
That’s the paradigm of everything right there- you claiming it’s all unfair to you while the real unfairness goes completely unmentioned…and in your favor. There are only three options to go on about the Bush story- you’re insane, stupid, or a liar. I know you. You are not a liar.
LikeLike
Good stuff, Chief Wiggum. A little didactic, perhaps, but generally on target. I would very much like to see you apply your thesis on TV media to the momentous collapse of big and small newspapers. Do you think that is a purely an economic phenomenon, or does it have something to do with credibility?
(Hey, Trotsky, congratulations. Every once in a while somebody on your blog tells it like it is, besides me, of course.)
LikeLike
Are you kidding? Clearly it’s NOT economic. It’s clearly a multicausal institution, and I very clearly blamed the aggregation of politicial interests (not class interest, merely the aggregation of similar people in similar jobs) of media personnel.
Don’t think for a second I’m reducing everything down to the cultural agglomeration of the left-libs into media. But I am saying THIS was the culture of the very narrow left-liberal milieu (not even leftist like Mark) working against its own economic and class interests by throwing caution and “objectivity” away on crass partisanship.
People do work against their class interests because -and you’ll forgive me for stating the obvious- classes don’t exist. You can’t touch a class. It’s merely an aggregation of people with similar attributes in a hierarchy (and an intellectual shorthand) given phony “consciousness” by the Left because of Marx’s writings which reified* classes and attributed “interests” to classes: a dreadful and childish reduction that a moment’s reflection could dispel.
I’m saying reporters and editors wanted Bush gone so badly they were willing to do anything to kill him. And they’ve been so used to getting away with the falseness of the “objectivity” they’ve sold the public that they were caught flatfooted in a lie. It was NOT economic, it was the individual decision of many different people with similar outlooks to dissemble and lie for something they all wanted to be true.
You should also note that what happened here is very common: leftist sites like Marks all do the same thing: suddenly they’re very silent when this comes up. This is because they know there’s no argument against this…it all came out too openly. When a person like Steve argues against it, they can’t do it without a pit in their stomach- they know deep down it confirms the worst of what we say, and they psychologically want to avoid it. Hence Mark’s said nothing. Because the only, and I mean ONLY thing he can do is go after the evidence with a “well it COULD have been real” bullshit, which is very disheartening thing to do when you don’t believe it yourself. So they run away from it, just like here. This is one of those subject – like racism for southern partisan conservatives in the 50’s- where they know deep down they’re on the wrong side, but can’t give up the ghost because they’re too wedded to sticking to the narrative. For a leftist to admit the media is as biased as it really is is to give up too many cherished notions.
So they just ignore it. Just like here.
*- Reification means to attribute human motives and points of view to that which is not human, to mistake something in human terms because we can’t concieve of it properly in its own terms.
LikeLike
Actually, I was referring to the financial troubles being experienced by the print media, i.e., the lost readership, falling revenues, layoffs, etc. Of all the excuses the newspapers are giving for their financial troubles, a loss of credibility is not one of them. I was just wondering if you thought the credibility problem that knocked down CBS News has started to affect the print media.
Here is my digression on Marx and classes.
Marx took the feudal class structure and transposed it to the Industrial Revolution. It seems he could not imagine a world without classes, so he invented new classes to replace the old. But the fact remains that his new classes were not embodied in law like the old classes, which were also propped up by the aristocracy, the church, and the widely accepted belief in a Great Chain of Being or Ladder of Perfection, where all individuals were fixed forever in their proper socio-economic place.
Marx’s idea of the Industrial Revolution creating a new class structure based on income, investments, or tangible property is suspect. Not only do his proposed classes appear to be merely a transposition of previously existing classes to some extent, but his entire class structure assumes the existence of legal impediments that would prevent an individual from acquiring income, investments, or tangible property. For without legal barriers to the acquisition of assets, there would be no mechanism to stop movement from one class to another.
Essentially, one must assume that Marx’s class structure is fixed for all time, either by law or by custom or by some invisible force. That is, persons belonging to each class are permanently immobilized. But the Marxian “hopelessness” of ever escaping from the lower class is actually nothing more than a pessimistic assumption predicated on a low opinion of people’s abilities. While it is generally true that people are “born into” a particular socio-economic class, no legal or quasi-legal mechanism exists to keep them in a particular socio-economic class. Moreover, the same dynamic class structure that exists in capitalist societies can operate in reverse: Having been “born into” an upper class, there is no guarantee that an individual cannot fall into a lower class.
Rather than the Industrial Revolution having replaced the feudal class structure with a “new” class structure, as Marx contended, modern capitalism actually created a classless system. And if not a truly classless system in the Marxian sense, then a dynamic class system through which individuals might move one way or the other depending on their ability and good fortune or lack thereof.
LikeLike
I told you I was going to be away. I’m in a Starbucks in Tahoe City, CA, and don’t have time to read this even now – we’re on our way to other places. So I go silent on you …. god what presumptuous bullshit!
Next week I’ll deal with your fine fine mind. And yours too, Checker.
LikeLike
Ah, yes, La La Land and Starbuck’s. Do we need to know any more about Mark Trotsky?
LikeLike