This week in the Huffington Post, my good friend Marty Kaplan has been documenting the scrambly responses of CNN to the charge that they protected the GOP candidates from difficult questions at the You Tube/CNN debate in a way they clearly did not protect Democratic candidates during their similar debate earlier this year. CNN has dealt with the charges by trotting out various spokestoads to deny them, to confirm them and then to justify them. (If you haven't read his piece, check the 12/7/2007 Huffington Post for the full story with a full complement of updates.)
When one escapes the oxygen-free hilarity of the CNN response, one reflects that a phenomenon of the past seven to twenty-seven years has been infiltration of CNN, PBS, CPB, and other news organizations with bush- or reagan-party flacks who don't think critically or analytically but only decide moment by moment what sounds least incriminating. (I try to distinguish between the Constitution-respecting Republican party and the Constitution-defiling bush- and reagan-partisans.)
Their behavior is reminiscent of the irresponsible elementary school student who arrives at school ill prepared. He asserts that the dog ate his homework until it's discovered that he didn't even write down what the assignment was, at which point it becomes the teacher's fault for not reminding him that there was homework. And besides, they don't even own a dog, so there's no way they'd use that as an excuse--that would be ridiculous and an obvious lie. What? Are you accusing them of LYING??? etc.
And a hundred echo machines go forth to sing "dog ate it, teacher didn't assign it, schools failed the student--the student didn't fail, and besides the dog ate it." Or as Al Franken liked to say, "He didn't lend me his platter, I returned the platter in perfect condition, and besides the platter was broken when he loaned it to me."
The reason these folks are such poor and obvious liars is that they have achieved their positions after a lifetime of toadying instead of a lifetime of professionalism. For those of us who have worked and struggled and learned the hard way to get the story straight, to tell the truth the first time, and to take our fucking lumps if it comes to that, these little gems by bushites and reaganites sound like the excuses of children--cute almost to the point of being amusing--until one realizes that these children aren't going to grow out of this phase. They are already in positions of authority and have enough fellow toadies around them to keep them in power no matter how they abuse it. It would be no challenge for them to start spreading the most vicious lies about any of us, and they would not stop until we were unable to work, unable to pay a mortgage, homeless, hopeless, or dead. The recent past is scattered with examples of people murdered or at least destroyed as human beings by the news.
This infrastructure lies crumbling under the hideous, fallen-circus-tent kudzuscape of the news like a dead forest awaiting patiently a carelessly tossed cigarette butt. Just knowing this drains my soul of hope for the future. (If you've never traveled in the southeast, there are regions where you can drive for miles and rarely see a living, healthy tree because year after year the kudzu has climbed everything that protrudes from the ground and covered it with netting under whose weight buildings, fenceposts, telephone poles, and trees lean and rot, rust and crumble, and eventually collapse. It always makes me think of the Soviet ambassador's words in Dr. Strangelove: "...a doomsday shroud...")
Tonight on NBC Nightly News, Lisa Myers anchored a minifeature about Giuliani's business ethics, never once mentioning his involvement with the folks in Qatar who are suspected of having funded and helped to plan 9/11, (to the extent of having hosted Osama bin Laden) who escaped the FBI because someone (underscore "someone" as if I had a pretty good idea of who it was) let them know the FBI was on their trail, and who, most disturbingly, appear to remain clients of Giuliani Associates long after 9/11. No mention, Lisa? I remember Lisa covering the Bush campaign as if it was the return of Camelot. I really don't think she should have been the one to report on Giuliani, Bush's hand-picked successor. I am not saying Lisa Myers is a toad. Perhaps she is simply incompetent. Or there might be other equally valid excuses for her failure to pursue the story where it leads.
Recently I joined the mailing list of Media Matters. Ever since, I've been receiving three to seven postings a day of irresponsible journalism--and not just by Fox "journalists" but also by supposedly trained and seasoned newspeople at NBC News, the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and other so-called legitimate and mainstream media. They get the facts wrong. Or they allow their target to use an easily recognized technique like knocking down a straw man without following up or confronting the target. Sometimes they allow a pundit to egregiously misstate a set of facts without correcting them or even checking whether the facts are fictitious.
We need to become obnoxious about these practices, in my opinion. We need to start confronting the news organizations with their incompetence, their willingness to allow lies to stand as truth, and their unwillingness to track down the truth of a matter but rather simply state opposing positions as of they were commensurate (even when one is patently true and the other just a patently untrue). It's at least as important as our generally successful efforts to confront Congress with its failures.
http://gabbyhayesplace.blogspot.com
Adherent to the cowboy way, eschewer of four-letter words and dental care, founder of the hippie movement, and failed prospector, Gabby Hayes can be counted upon to point and say, "They went thataway," and to develop plans to cut them off at the pass.
[Ever since, I've been receiving three to seven postings a day of irresponsible journalism--and not just by Fox "journalists" but also by supposedly trained and seasoned newspeople at NBC News, the New York Times, Washington Post, LA Times, and other so-called legitimate and mainstream media. They get the facts wrong.]
But why? The answer is really simple. They're all owned by the same sociopaths, as shown on the GreatRedDragon.com of who controls what. I call them sociopaths for what they are, that is "intraspecie predators with no empathy nor conscience."
I understand people have to work to survive, and journalism is honest work. However, when sociopaths, via FCC permission, are allowed to own major media across our land, this is what results. Once you understand who controls whom, you'll figure out your own way of fighting back.
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Edward Ulysses Cate (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 217 comments)
on Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 10:26:29 AM
Thank you for the advice not to continue tolerating the lack of professionalism in the MSM but I personally stopped tolerating it about four years ago and haven't watched TV since or read an MSM "news"paper. All of my news comes from the Net and I don't mean the MSM websites. I surf for several hours every day reading and re-reading the various important daily articles relating the news of the day. This way I can check the stories against each other on various websites to come to the truth. I always believed that Faux News was really entertainment (admittedly of an egregious kind) not news. The interesting thing is since I don't trust their rendition of the news, I don't watch them and that means I don't support their entertainment either so they have lost me as a viewer because they are untrustworthy.
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Archie (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 966 comments)
on Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 11:42:39 AM
The corporatists who own the MSM also are a major part of the military-industrial set who benefit from the propaganda they spew.
Only the sponsors can have an impact, clearly the 'viewers' are discounted. It's time to begin some targeted boycotts. (I don't buy their junk anyway, but how will they know if we don't tell them?)
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Laudyms (0 articles, 759 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 377 comments)
on Sunday, December 9, 2007 at 12:30:07 PM
Rob Kall's Op Ed News has the best informed readers in the world. Thanks for your replies. Unlike Randi Rhodes and Thom Hartmann, I do think boycotts (or at least threats of boycotts) work. Since Randi and Thom depend on advertising revenue to survive and since boycotts could easily be turned upon them as well, I can understand why they would hesitate to promote them. But I think they're well worth the time--if only to remind people that WE on OUR SIDE are the great mass of the public, the 70% who supported Clinton during the darkest days of the impeachment and the 70% who oppose the war and oppose G. W. Bush. Who would like to lose 70% of their business? When Rush decided that soldiers who opposed the war were phony soldiers, I wrote to each of the stations in my state that carried rush and reminded them that we have millions of vets in this state and we were not going to put up with a cowardly draft dodger like Rush deciding who was a real soldier and who was phony. It can't hurt.
But I wouldn't like to see people turning their back on the mainstream media news for the very reason that we can have an effect on how accurate and truthful they are. Twice Andrea Mitchell used footage of Hillary saying she had experience in dealing with evil men to illustrate that Hillary had no problem in dealing with Bill. Hillary's comment was directed at the Scaifes and the Starrs of the world, not Bill Clinton, so I wrote to Mitchell both times pointing out the error and illustrating how out of touch and ignorant it made her appear to be. I suggested that her producer or whoever inserted the video may be trying to get out of television altogether and by making Mitchell look foolish, he or she was trying to get fired. I knew that Mitchell probably wouldn't read my letters, but I suspected that her producer probably would.
It's a twisted, weird world in big time journalism. Even if it's run by sociopaths only interested in fomenting war and selling cold war weapons to a 9/11 world, they have to listen to their consumers. I believe that by watching and catching idiot errors we can shame them into being better journalists. And viewers vote with their remote controls. I still hold out a kind of nostalgic hope for CBS, the Tiffany network. It has a history of providing the best journalism and we can use that as a lever. What would Dan Rather, Walter Cronkhite, or Ed Murrow say about CBS ignoring war news in favor of the latest about Britney? How can we ignore the bombings and terrorism that continue to threaten our young people in uniform and turn instead to hear about the crime of the century du jour--the latest 20 year old blonde to go missing or the guilt or innocence of a retired cop with a history of violence? We have juries to make these distinctions. Until the jury reaches a verdict, everything else is simple gossip and not worthy of time on the evening news.
Tell the truth and shame the devil. We need to be very smart about what the mainstream media is saying and doing so that we can pound it over the heads of the producers and editors who put together our national news. Please at least get together with Media Matters and subscribe to their several-times-a-day media alerts. Get in the habit of following up on these alerts and complaining to newspeople, producers, journalists, and editors. I wish someone would develop a companion site where the letters could be pre-written, needing only a return address and the click of a button to register displeasure and dissent. Anybody listening out there?
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gabby hayes (9 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 17 comments)
on Thursday, December 13, 2007 at 1:19:37 PM
