After the Future

And Maher's Two Cents

Elite Media Stupidity: It's Not a Bug . . .

Dougl at Balloon Juice thinks that maybe a big part of the problem lies in that elites in the MSM aren't very smart:

Maybe it’s time to admit that the people at the top of our political/media heap just aren’t very bright. Politics and media are both areas where there isn’t a lot of good accreditation and review of people (the way there is to some extent in law or medicine or academia), nor is there much opportunity for constructive entrepreneurship (you have to be at some large organization to get anywhere) nor is there anyway to get to the top by just beating other people, as there might be in something like sports (I realize there are elections to win, but they are mostly rigged via gerrymandering etc.). Most of it doesn’t pay very well at the beginning, with all these unpaid internships and so on.

I find it amazing that lots of smart people still don't understand that the MSM is closed system whose primary purpose is to serve corporate and shareholder interests. Big media organizations hire and promote careerists who understand that they don't move up the ladder unless they can prove themselves to be a prodigies of the banal and commonplace. The whole media structure exists not to challenge entrenched power but to reinforce it, and no one gets promoted who isn't on board with that.

Maddow and Olbermann have their liberal ratings niche for the time being because the conservative ratings niche is already occupied, and they pose no significant threat to elite power because they cater to a relatively small, toothless group that has no desire or capability to rock the establishment. And they play their role to keep the culture war alive, which keeps most Americans who have common interests otherwise divided and conquered. As long as the American people fight among themselves, they don't fight elite power. The most important thing for entrenched power is to make sure that we're all segregated into our respective tribal silos. 

Stewart v. Maddow

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."  [attributed to Karl Rove]

I don't know that it was so interesting  it required an hour, but Maddow's interview of Jon Stewart did focus on some issues that we've been discussing at ATF in the last several weeks. I'd like specifically to talk about the interview in the light of my posts last week, "Centrist Politics and Rhetorical Virtue" and "The Rhetorical Strategy of the Power Elites."

Maddow had a beef with Stewart insofar as he suggested during his sanity rally that there was an equivalency between what MSNBC does and what FOX does. Stewart defended that position using a weather/climate metaphor. The weather of specific stories might be fine, but the basic MSNBC climate was as partisan liberal as FOX is partisan conservative. As such, MSNBC is a part of the problem as much as FOX is. For Stewart, Left vs. Right, blue vs. red is the wrong argument. The real argument is corruption vs. non-corruption, extremists vs. normal people.

For the Record

. . . about the paper of record

Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said the newspaper has written so much about the issue of water-boarding that "I think this Kennedy School study -- by focusing on whether we have embraced the politically correct term of art in our news stories -- is somewhat misleading and tendentious."

Greenwald's response:

I'm not one who wishes for the death of newspapers, as they still perform valuable functions and employ some good journalists.  But I confess that episodes like this one tempt me towards that sentiment.  This isn't a case where the NYT failed to rebut destructive government propaganda; it's one where they affirmatively amplified and bolstered it, and are now demonizing their critics by invoking the most deranged rationale to justify what they did:  political correctness?  And whatever else is true, there is no doubt the NYT played an active and vital role in enabling the two greatest American crimes of the last decade:  the attack on Iraq and the institutionalizing of a torture regime.  As usual, those who pompously prance around as watchdogs over political elites are their most devoted and useful servants.

Perusal of the New York Times was once one of life's daily little pleasures. It's not something I ever do anymore. It's just another media source among so many others. I've come to feel similarly about NPR's Morning Edition or All Things Considered.  I find myself hitting the NPR button in my car from time to time, but then switching to the local sports talk radio because I just can't stand listening to these NPR types. The very tone of their voices irks me. Better to listen to the jocks. Not as painful. I can't quite put my finger on the feeling I have as I read or listen to the non-jocks. It's as if their reporting assumes an imagination of the world that is now world I would ever want to live in. It's not about agreeing or disagreeing.  There are plenty of people I like with whom I disagree.  It's more a matter of "Are you for real? You can say that and still take yourself so seriously?"

I didn't always feel that way.  And now I'm not sure I feel this way because they've changed or because I have.

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this I found this comment #7 at Balloon Juice on another matter, which nevertheless amplifies what I was trying to say:

The problem is that we have no truly serious people in this country. We have one group of hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths, and another group that is afraid of the hacks, clowns, idiots, and sociopaths. Our country may not yet be comatose, but it is certainly paralyzed. The DNC cannot say this because it is the truth, and the truth has been relegated to those people whom no one listens to.

It's the truly un-serious people in the media who seem to take themselves most seriously in their taking seriously that hacks, clowns, idiots and sociopaths. They seem to think that's what journalistic integrity requires. That's what I think irks me about them so--their blithe acceptance of the insanity as if it were normalcy. Their refusal to take seriously the truth tellers, well, because their not "serious"; they're the ones nobody listens to.

The "Lost" Sensibility

Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it:

Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's googly-eyed provocations? Michael shooting Ana Lucia in the gut? The impenetrable, nostalgia-inducing mysteries of the Dharma Initiative? Thanks to the brilliant character studies of the first season (we ignored the dumb monsters), thanks to the genius twists and turns of the second and third seasons, we're doomed to do our penance as the whole tale unravels in a messy heap. . . .

Back then, like teenagers at a Baptist retreat, we thought the big, bad world would add up to something, that every confusing twist was laden with hidden meaning. Now we know better. Now we get up in the morning and put on our Sunday best and trudge off to church on the off-chance that the Lord Himself will appear and shine His glory on us in person. Now we watch because we were once "Lost" fans, and here it is the final season, and there are only a handful of episodes left. Even though the long-awaited answers we're looking for are offered in such blunt, unimaginative language that we feel like we're reading first drafts: "I'm a smoke monster." "You're going to have to kill the devil." "It's all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything." And if we wanted to waste six years in a Judeo-Christian allegory, we would've just followed a Jehovah's Witness home a long time ago. At least their Armageddon should be a little bit gripping and suspenseful. (5/8)

Neither does Laura Miller at Salon after watching the finale, and there are many others who felt the show was a "long con". But needless to say I disagree, and I think the difference lies in there being two fundamentally different postmodern sensibilities. Havrileski and Miller represent one, and the Lost writers represent the other. The first is one that with its arms folded and foot tapping, suspicious about everything, fears to be hoodwinked. The second is arms open with second naivete ready to embrace everything that has the slightest scent of truth. Count me in with the second group.

Lost was remarkable for its ability to be both complex and multilayered and yet to end with a theme that was simple, clear, resonant, and deeply human. It was a show that was full of ideas but was never just a head trip. In the end it was about the characters and their relationships, and it was about why those relationships matter and with meanings that might be described as having cosmic import.

Greenwald's Response to the "Citizen's United" ruling

Greenwald is making the Libertarian defense of this ruling arguing that money is, in fact, speech, and he's being, IMO, absolutist about the First Amendment. No constitutional right is an absolute, and it's one thing to defend a principle; it's another to go rigidly fundamentalist about it. 

So again, no value, no matter how sacred, is absolute, and when it comes to "liberty" rights, they have to be held in a kind of tension with "equality" rights. It's one thing to say that we're all free to say our piece; it's another to say that people with enormous resources should be allowed to buy a monster megaphone to say theirs. It basically reinforces the idea that some people are more free than others, and that should never be true in the political sphere, where, I would argue, equality should be the dominant principle. (Liberty, the way I think about it, is the dominant principle in the cultural sphere, not the political or economic spheres, but that's argument for another day.)

If money equals speech, the power of the rich to buy a greater amount of speech creates a fundamental inequality problem, and it diminishes the free speech of citizens with modest means. There's an injury there that ordinary citizens should be able to seek a remedy for, but after today's ruling it would seem impossible to do so.

To argue that laws like McCain-Feingold were ineffective is one thing, but to ban forevermore, as a matter of constitutional precedent, any attempt to limit money spent to influence events in the political sphere by the mega-wealthy is horrifyingly undemocratic. It's another hard slap at the equality principle, which lately always seems to lose in its tug-'o-war with the liberty principle. 

Look, I get there are problems, as for instance with media corporations' ability to use their megaphones in a way that other non-media corporations cannot, but the remedy is not to empower other corporations, but rather to get the media out of the hands of profit-driven corporations.  We need to find a way empower, through subsidies, a more diverse, robust, and non-profit press. A subsidized, non-profit free press sector would lead to a healthier exercise of the First Amendment than our current corporate-owned system.  But that, too, is an argument for another day.

Disease in Remission

For the life of me I don't know why anybody serious is obsessing so much about Sarah Palin this week. This piece by Sullivan is simply silly.  As if the future of the nation hinges on exposing what everybody with half a brain already knows.Honestly, who cares and why feed this media frenzy with a seriousness it simply does not deserve?

Palin represents a disease in the body politic, which for now, for all the fatuous attention it's getting, is in remission. It has no real power; it functions as a distraction. We need to monitor it, and we need to be careful about not creating the conditions that might trigger more serious symptoms to present acutely, but for now, there are just more important things to worry about than this airhead from Alaska and the 25% who think she's so wonderful. This is entertainment fodder for the media, not anything worth an erg of energy beyond that.

The FOX Brouhaha

I'm just trying to understand the administration's calculation in using this attack tactic to deal with right-wing media. Clearly right wing media are never going away. Clearly, while they get a big media share of the news pie, they still only reach a relatively small number of people. And the number of people who identify with Republicans and with its obstructionist program promoted through its media megaphone is down around 20%. So why should the administration care? Why not just let these people talk to themselves, and let them continue along this path which leads to marginalization and irrelevancy to every one with an ounce of sanity and common sense?

The answer: it's a containment strategy. The administration is concerned to hear that after the ACORN incident, mainstream news organizations are chastising themselves for not taking more seriously the news that these right-wing media invent, and the last thing the administration wants is for right-wing nonsense to be taken seriously outside the right-wing media ghetto. That's what they want to nip in the bud before we get full throttle into the kind of thing Clinton had to deal with. The problem lies in how right wing nonsense was covered by the networks and other mainstream media to legitimate what was fundamentally illegitimate.  It's understandable that Obama's people would be looking for ways to prevent that from happening.

If the administration can make the case that FOX deserves to be marginalized, not because it criticizes the administration from a conservative point of view, but because it is not really independent insofar as it serves as the talking-points media arm of the Republican party, then they have a legitimate case to be made that FOX is different and deserves to be shut out until it changes its behavior. The equivalency with MSNBC or with the opinion journalism of Maddow and Olbermann is unfounded.  They represent a Liberal/progressive point of view, but their opinions are not Dem talking points, they are often critical of Democrats, and they simply bear no resemblance in their relationship to the Democrats that FOX news personalities bear toward the Republicans. And most important, while they make no effort to hide their biases, they don't make stuff up. There is no equivalency here, and it's fair for the administration to point that out.

The problem is not that nobody at FOX has no serious journalists--there are apparently a few who qualify--nor does the problem lie in that sometimes they criticize the administration from a conservative point of view.It isn't just opinion; it's abetting and colluding with Republican political strategists. The problem lies in how a problem how these strategists make things up, throw mud on the wall to see what sticks, spread disinformation and confusion, and seek to subvert any legitimate debate with fearmongering and jingoism. They fabricate and distort in the hopes of manufacturing controversy that the MSM will cover, no matter how baseless, because people are talking about it. Think Vince Foster, Whitewater, death panels, Obama is a racist, fascist communist, etc., etc.

The challenge for the administration is not to marginalize legitimate criticism but to quaranteen that kind of baseless fabrication. How do you do the one without the other?  It might not be possible, but I don't begrudge them for trying.

P.S.  See also this bit on Mickey Kaus's take. The point isn't that it's unbiased, but that it's not independent.

Greenwald/Todd Post Postscript

(h/t Matt Z.)

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The lesson, of course to be drawn from this, if you are a Beltway media person, is never ever talk to Glenn Greenwald on his radio blog.  You'll only wind up being mocked on Colbert.

Media Neutrality = Media Nihilism (Postscript added)

I like Chuck Todd, and I admire that he has enough integrity to submit to aggressive questioning by Glenn Greenwald about comments he made on "Morning Joe" earlier in the week regarding whether Bush administration war crimes ought to be investigated and prosecuted.  But his answers to GG's questions reveal the underlying nihilism of the inside-the-Beltway media pundit--there's no right or wrong--there are only points of view, "interpretations" all ideologically and politically driven.  He takes at face value that because the Bush OLC lawyers came up with a legal rationale for war crimes, it's a matter of interpretation, and it's not for journalists to say whether the interpretation is completely off the wall, because, "Well, we're journalists, not lawyers, and everything is politically driven, and the politics is all we're paid to report on."  This exchange at the end of the interview is interesting:

GG: And isn't the best thing to do to immunize that question from political considerations is to say to a prosecutor, the way that we do with every other accusation of crime: take a look at the pure legal issues here, ask: "were crimes committed; is this the kind of case that indictments are appropriate for, where people should be put on trial," and then just have this be treated like every other accusation of crime, which is the prosecutor taking a look?

CT: I agree, in a perfect world - Glenn, in a perfect world, yes. And if you could also guarantee me, that this wouldn't become a show trial, and wouldn't be put, and created so that we had nightly debates about it, that is the ideal way to handle this.

GG: Why not?  What's wrong with nightly debate about whether our government committed crimes?

Todd thinks that there is no such thing as a non-ideological investigation, and that since Nixon it's not possible to have one.  The impeachment of Clinton was payback for Nixon, and if Obama were to investigate and prosecute Bush, the GOP would get its payback on Democrats as soon as they had the chance. The people in the Obama administration, obviously, would rather not be subjected to that if a GOP administration succeeds them, so it's understandable for self-protective reasons that they don't want to pursue prosecution of Bush administration felons. In the political calculus, there's more to gain than lose by prosecuting Bush administration crimes.  And since the media sees everything as politically driven, there is no need for the media to point to its view/reading public that  a dime-a-dozen sex scandal with an intern does not have the same constitutional substance as Nixon-, Reagan-, and Bush-era abuses of power.  It's all equal; it's all politics. It's all so fatiguing.

Greenwald asks whether there isn't a larger issue at stake here:

GG: The principal argument of those of us who want investigations and prosecutions, is that our justice system ends up being perverted, and it's a very dangerous thing if we have this idea that presidents can break the law, and then for political reasons, shouldn't be treated like everybody else. That is a very dangerous idea that we've accepted since Ford pardoned Nixon, and since the Iran-Contra criminals were pardoned. That if there's an accusation, a credible accusation that laws were broken, it's vital that the prosecutors and the Justice Department treat it like any other case, and indict if indictments are warranted, because it's so dangerous to create this two-tiered system of justice.

That view wasn't included anywhere in the discussion you had.  And I just think that - I'm not saying you should be an advocate for that view, although I think the Founders thought journalists should be - but even if you don't think so, that that view has to be articulated every time there's a discussion about whether or not prosecutions are warranted.

CT: Glenn, you get to a bigger problem here. I don't disagree with you with this issue, that ever since the Nixon situation, that we have gotten into this situation where investigations in the government of officials have become politicized, in some for or another. Either the investigators are politicized in what they're doing, or it gets politicized from the outside by--

GG: Well, I don't agree with that. That's your point. My point is there have been prosecutions--

CT: And the problem is, there is a department, and you can't, whether this, you can sit here and say, you know what, that's exactly what's wrong with the Beltway. But there has been this fatigue about it because the use of prosecutions has been too politicized, to the point where I think it has made it where it's just unfortunately too easy to dismiss an investigation.

GG: And as a result, powerful politicians know that they can break the law and get away it.

CT: I don't disagree with your conclusion here.

GG: Politicians know that they can break the law and get away it because there is that quote-unquote 'fatigue', that dislike, that contempt for holding political officials accountable in Washington....

CT: Well, look, I think the problem, though, sits not with the media in this respect. And this is what frustrates me a little bit, is that the problem, the people we should be upset with are the folks on the Hill, folks in the White House, folks at the Justice Department. Those are the ones who have the power of the subpoena, and the power to do these things, not the media. And I know we get beaten up about it. But the power does lie in Congress. And the power does lie in the Justice Department.

We are upset with them, Chuck, but we're upset with you and your colleagues, too, because you let them off the hook rather than challenge them to live up to their constitutional and legal responsibilities.

Todd seems to be saying, "Look, I'm not a lawyer.  I have my personal opinion, but I'm not paid to give my opinions; I'm paid to analyze.  This is the Republican point of view and strategy; this is the Democratic point of view and strategy."  But then why can't the non-partisan nature of this controversy get more play? There are plenty of non-Democrats who are concerned about Bush administration crimes.  Why can't these people be given the center stage.  Greenwald points this out:

Some of the people who have called for investigations and prosecutions of Bush-era torture crimes include people like Jesse Ventura, the former independent governor of Minnesota; Philip Zelikow, the former aide to Condoleezza Rice; four-star general Barry McCaffrey, who said, on MSNBC, actually, that numerous detainees were, quote, "murdered" in custody, and that there's no way that we can not have criminal investigations. General Antonio Tabuga, who investigated the Abu Ghraib crimes, said: quote, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes; the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account." Same with Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief-of-staff to Colin Powell; Thomas Pickering and Williams Sessions, former Reagan administration officials, on and on, wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post calling for investigations.

The idea that this is something that, the idea that the rule of law, that holding our high government officials to accountability when they commit crimes, is a "hard left versus a hard right" or a partisan debate - isn't that really just an invention of cable news, for exactly the reason that you said, which is that's how cable news typically understands things, even when that's not really what the debate is?

Todd's response is illuminating:

CT: Well, look - and that is my frustration on this very issue, that I don't think - and this is why, when I said, how should this be handled, and how should this be investigated - if you could guarantee me that we could keep this debate off of television, and keep it off of being an ideological - because, this was an ideological, when you read those OLC memos, I was struck by this fact, and that is that the Bush White House was looking for a legal way to do this. They were trying to legally justify what they were doing, and what their policy was. Which then, if that is the case, then, things are going to have an ideological split, and frankly, you, you and I both know you're going find judges that end up falling on both sides of this issue.

Now, does that mean that there shouldn't be investigations as to how these detainees died in custody?  Of course there should be investigations. That's what makes the American form of justice held to a higher standard.

A TV guy saying the solution is to keep it off television?  Seems to be a clear admission of TV's central role in creating this problem and why we are upset with the media as well as the politicians, why we see them as all part of the same corrupt system.  American form of justice is held to a higher standard??? 

Todd's a smart guy, and I think a decent guy, but I hope he reads the full transcript of his comments, because they are largely incoherent. Maybe he will come away from this discussion having learned something. Greenwald's effort to hold Todd accountable should be a model for him and his colleagues about how to challenge those in the White House or on the Hill to hold them accountable and focused on the real issues:  It's not about left and right, Dem or GOP; it's about the rule of law.

***

Postscript: Here's the nub of the problem.  It's not just a question about what things look like from 30,000 feet up versus what things look like on the ground, as Todd thinks.  It's a question of both being integrated.  Todd's defense of his media role is a  perfect description of what I described last weak as  being lost in a thicket of rationalizations without a moral compass. 

Yes, it's true politics and political motivations are a dominant factor not just in Washington but everywhere in our lives.  People are continuously in conflict, and different parties have good and bad reasons to support their agendas, but Todd and his colleagues seem immune from distinguishing good reasons from silly, frivolous, or reasons that are based on transparent falsehoods because there is in the media view no broadly accepted standard by which such judgments can be made. Self-interest is the only criterion.

But we do have a standard when it comes to torture and war crimes.  It's the law and treaty obligations.  Most Americans know the difference between a show trial about substanceless accusations and issues of real importance. Most Americans did not see the Watergate Hearings as a show trial, but they did see the Clinton impeachment as one.  Americans have common sense and recognize the difference between the serious and the trivial.  It's the people within the Beltway and the courtiers who manage the Beltway media who for some reason seem incapable of it, and the reasons for this lack of capability are not hard to fathom.

"Manufacturing Consent" and Obama's X-Factor (Updates 1 & 2)

Walter Lippmann coined the term  "manufacture of consent" back in the WWI era, and Chomsky wrote a book about it. Lippmann thought that the mass electorate had to be governed by experts or elites who understood the issues in a way that ordinary citizens could not. And he thought that the mass public, because it was incapable of understanding the complexity of the issues, had to be propagandized into consent. American democracy at least since then has been all about the insiders spinning the outsiders--all about elites inside a bubble deciding among themselves what is good for the country and the rest of us being told whatever we were thought to want to hear to justify what we otherwise could not understand.

So that's how things work, and it's been the same with Dems in power as much as with the GOP. Vietnam, for instance, was the brainchild of Kennedy's elites who convinced themselves they were doing the right thing. Among the elites there are factions, and there is an inside game in which these factions maneuver for advantage, and those of us outside the insider bubble hear rumors about these maneuvers, but we are never told straight what is really going on. All we get is the most highly spinned stories filtered through the mainstream media, which are quite willing vehicles for those factions which they perceive to support their interests. 

So public opinion, while not completely irrelevant, is not something elites care about or respect. It's simply a problem to be managed. And management tools for that end are the use of fear, jingoism, greed, financial anxiety, moral-norm confusion. Elites need the support of the general public because of these pesky rituals called elections (which in the last two cycles the GOP elites had no compunction about subverting), but elites among the Dems and the GOP are both in agreement that the general public must understand as little as possible about what's really going on, so they can be left to pursue their interests otherwise undisturbed.

Is there no one in the media who tells a story different than the one approved of by these elite factions?  Sure there are a few, and you can find them on the web or on obscure cable channels. But what percentage of Americans watch Democracy Now! or have even heard of it?  Moyers has been good, but what's his Friday night share? There are guys like Charlie Savage who did the grunt work to expose the whole business of Bush's abuse of signing statements, but such stories are rare and we can be sure that for every one published there are a dozen squelched as the NYTimes squelched the Risen/Lichtblau warrantless wiretap story until it was forced to run it. But even when such stories stories get out, they have a minimum impact in shaping mainstream opinion. They don't usually get on Good Morning America or the Today show, or the major networks' nightly news. If they do, it's only when the story has become to big to ignore. And they'll give plenty of airtime to those who would defend the indefensible.

Quote of the Day: Jon Swift (Updated)

Regarding the now notorious New Yorker cover:

Although liberals are often unfairly accused of being humorless, the truth is that they are so knowledgable about what makes something funny that they rarely find humor that meets their very tough standards. They are like connoisseurs of fine wine who are unable to drink anything that is not the finest vintage. When a liberal says, "That's not funny!" it is a cry from the heart from someone who longs to see something that really is funny. It's too bad the editors of the New Yorker did not consult them first before they made their ill-fated attempt at comedy.

Atrios, for example, whom many consider to be the Benny Hill of the blogosphere, but pithier, points out that for satire to be effective, it must exaggerated beyond all reason so that even a moron will know it is supposed to be funny. Only satire that is way, way over the top has even a chance of making people laugh. Subtlety has no place in satire because it could easily be taken at face value. If someone like Atrios is fooled into believing that something intended to be satire is real doesn't that just defeat the whole purpose? It would be like an episode of MASH without the laugh track, which wouldn't be funny at all because you wouldn't know when to laugh. Many liberals believe that if they don't get a joke, it stands to reason that it would probably go over the heads of most people, who are not as smart as they are. Just to be on the safe side, it would probably be better if humor were avoided altogether.

And:

I don't even understand the point of satire. If the editors of the New Yorker actually believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, Michelle Obama is not a dangerous revolutionary and that they do not actually burn American flags, as Remnick now claims, couldn't they have just said that? Wouldn't it have been simpler and clearer to run the illustration with a big X over it so that we knew what they were trying to say? We are not mind readers. It doesn't make much sense to say the opposite of what you mean and then attack people for being unsophisticated because they thought you were sincere. Do New Yorkers always say the opposite of what they mean and then expect you to understand? Real Americans, I think, prefer straight talkers, like John McCain, who means what he says when he tells us that he doesn't know very much about economics, can't figure out how to use a computer and believes that we will be in Iraq for 100 years.

Satire, I believe, is supposed to be funny, though I don't see how being dishonest is humorous. I think it's just sad. If the New Yorker wanted to run a humorous cover that showed Obama is not a Muslim, they could have accomplished that goal by depicting him slipping on a banana peal on the way to church. That would have made the same point and it would also have had the virtue of being funny. I don't even understand the point of satire. If the editors of the New Yorker actually believe that Barack Obama is not a Muslim, Michelle Obama is not a dangerous revolutionary and that they do not actually burn American flags, as Remnick now claims, couldn't they have just said that? Wouldn't it have been simpler and clearer to run the illustration with a big X over it so that we knew what they were trying to say? We are not mind readers. It doesn't make much sense to say the opposite of what you mean and then attack people for being unsophisticated because they thought you were sincere. Do New Yorkers always say the opposite of what they mean and then expect you to understand? Real Americans, I think, prefer straight talkers, like John McCain, who means what he says when he tells us that he doesn't know very much about economics, can't figure out how to use a computer and believes that we will be in Iraq for 100 years.

Liberals who are so upset about this--get a grip. Sure, racist Dittohead types are everywhere; they are a subset of the one out of three people who wouldn't vote for Obama no matter what. But Liberal angst about this cover grossly underestimates the intelligence and good sense of everyone else.  The best way to deal with fear is to get it out in the open and to see it clearly and name it.  This cover helps to do that and to the degree that it will have any influence one way or the other works in Obama's favor in the long run.

Wed. UPDATE:  Jon Stewart last night:

The cover a such a big deal outside the relatively small circle of people who read The New Yorker only because the media's and blogosphere's negative over reaction to it. But even if the only sane response is to see this cover for the satire it is, the negative reaction to it--even among the Bill O'Reilly types--works in Obama's favor. The message that comes out of all this is that anyone who thinks that the Obamas are furtive  Islamo-terrorists is a moron. The cover did its job--that was the intent of its satire to begin with.

Quote of the Day: Jessica Yellin

About her time at ABC News in 2002/3:

JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.

And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president. . . .

COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?

YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience.

(h/t Greenwald Greenwald talks about similar admissions from Kaite Couric and the Phil Donahue and Ashleigh Banfield stories)

At  least Yellin is self-aware enough to understand this.  I think many big-time reporters think they are free to write about what they want, but are oblivious of why they rose to the positions they hold in the first place: they were recognized by mangement as docile corporate careerists. They were never the intrepid reporters they thought themselves to be in their own imaginations. They were people who did what it took to get ahead, and getting ahead means giving management what it wants.  Greenwald makes the same point:

Brian Williams, Charlie Gibson and company are paid to play the role of TV reporters but, in reality, are mere television emcees -- far more akin to circus ringleaders than journalists. It's just as simple as that. David Halberstam pointed that out some time ago. Unlike Yellin, Donahue and Banfield, nobody needed to pressure the likes of Williams, Gibson and Russert to serve as propaganda handmaidens for the White House. It's what they do quite eagerly on their own, which is precisely why they're in the corporate positions they're in. They are smooth, undisruptive personalities who don't create problems for their executives. Watching them finally describe how they perceive of "their role" leaves no doubt about any of that. . .

Clearly, if these network media stars think they did nothing wrong in the run-up to the war and in their coverage of the Bush administration -- and they don't -- then it's only logical to conclude that they still do the same things and will do the same things in the future. As people like Jessica Yellin, Katie Couric, Phil Donahue and Scott McClellan are making clear, these media outlets are controlled propaganda arms of the Government, of the political establishment generally. For many people, that isn't a new revelation, but the fact that it's becoming clearer by the day -- from unimpeachable sources on the inside -- is nonetheless quite significant.

Corporate control of the media conversation of public affairs is a very serious problem, and the  solution is not a Balkanized internet.  The net provides a counterbalance for those who are serious about finding out what is really going on, and many people, me included, find it very difficult to take seriously anything that the print or electronic MSM takes seriously. But insofar as our democracy and the health of the republic depdends on the attitudes and voting choices of low-information voters, the MSM matters, and they must be held accountable and shamed into more probing and effective coverage of those issues our power elite would prefer we not know about.

Quotes of the Day: Digby, Berube (Updated: & Marshall)

The important thing to realize is that these themes have been completely internalized by the villagers. They really don't even question it anymore, it's completely natural to them. When you see George Stephanopoulos essentially explain that Democratic voters are choosing between an flaccid, unpatriotic "metrosexual" and a lying, delusional succubus, and it's simply his job to help them sort that out, you know that he's completely lost touch with what people actually need politics and government for. Digby.

***

Things would actually be simpler if the American commentariat was composed merely of corporate shills. Instead, it's composed also of pathological, Chris Matthewsian misogynists, rabid foaming Glenn Becks, Tim Russert the Terrible Trivium, and, of course, David "Red Man Tobacco and Pabst Blue Ribbon" Brooks, who loved last night's debate and warns us today, no whining about the media.

Well, Blue Ribbon, ol' boy, this isn't a whine. Think of it instead as a barbaric yawp. When you write, "We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall," we know you're telling the truth, because you'll be around in the fall telling us precisely how important these things are. After all, as you note, we should "remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis."

Hold the phone, Red Man--did you say "expose Michael Dukakis"? As what, pray tell? As the flag-burning, hemp-wearing, Amerikkka-hating card-carrying member of the ACLU he really was? I seem to recall 1988 as the year George H. W. Bush was exposed as a craven slimeball who would use the phrase "card-carrying member of the ACLU" as an epithet. But then, I don't read the newspapers.

The point is that we are not dealing merely with a "corporate" media. That would be bad enough. We are dealing instead with a deeply decadent and deeply entrenched class of courtiers in the late stages of Bloated Beltway Media Empire, one of whose pastimes is chattering on about the folkways of the salt of the earth (bowling, shots-and-beer, guns, God). The level of chattering is directly proportional to the decadence of the commentator, which is why you hear so much about small-town values from people who last caught glimpses of my neighbors when they watched the opening thirty minutes of Deer Hunter in their suite at the Willard Hotel. The appropriate text for our situation is not so much Manufacturing Consent as the film Ridicule. Not a great movie, by any means, but a reasonable approximation of a situation in which we can find lunatics like Glenn Beck and congenital liars like William Kristol among our most powerful courtiers. Berube

***

...it occurred to me that we have now crossed an important threshold where the Republican operative cadre has sufficiently disciplined and trained the press (and more than a few Democrats) that their own role may simply be redundant.

Think about it. Organized campaigns of falsehoods, distortions and smears used to be something most people thought of as a bad thing, if not something that's ever been too far removed from American politics. Now, however, members of the prestige press appear to see it not as a matter of guilty slumming but rather a positive journalistic obligation to engage in their own organized campaign of falsehood, distortion and smear on the reasoning that it anticipates the eventual one to be mounted by Republicans. In other words, we've gotten past the debatable rationale that journalists have no choice but to cover smears and distortions once they're floated into the mainstream debate to thinking that journalists need to seek out and air smears and distortions on the grounds of electability, as though the mid-summer GOP Swiftboating was another de facto part of the election process like primaries, conventions and debates. Marshall

Back to Unreality

McCain used to be a relatively sane conservative capable of discriminating between reality and unreality, but to the degree that he has sought the GOP nomination, to that degree has he lost his grip on reality.  He's living off a reputation based on what he was, not on what he has become. It's hard to understand how any objective observer can take what he is now seriously. Nevertheless he is, especially by a fawning MSM.  Greenwald this morning reminds us why:

The central paradox of our political life is that the right-wing faction that continues to dominate our political institutions and win elections embraces fringe beliefs which have little popular support. That's why their overarching objective is to remove substantive considerations from our political debates -- the more consequential the issue, the less establishment media attention it receives, the less real public debate there is over it. Instead, our elections are determined by the barren, petty personality-based distractions and mindless chatter that define the lowly Drudgian Freak Show, where our political life now almost exclusively resides.

For instance, did the FISA/telecom amnesty issue even come up once during the Dem debates? Did the issue of the unitary executive and the loss of habeas corpus come up? I didn't watch them all, but these issues did not come up in any I watched, and they should have been front and center in the discussion. Why wouldn't it I wonder.

The Right has perfected the art of creating mythical cults of personality around their leaders. They are strong, courageous, honor-bound, protective, morally upstanding salt-of-the earth Everyman-warriors -- contemptuous of elitist prerogatives, and oozing traditional masculine virtues and cultural normalcy. As important, if not more so, is the corresponding character demonization of liberals, Democrats and a growing group of miscellaneous right-wing opponents -- those weak, subversive, conniving, appeasing, gender-confused, elitist freaks, whose men are as effeminate and cowardly as their women are angry, threatening and emasculating.

These election-determinant themes are not merely petty and completely removed from what actually matters. That would be bad enough. Far worse is that they are complete fabrications. Virtually the entire leadership of the right-wing GOP is the complete opposite of these cartoon icons they are held out to be. Their lives are almost completely devoid of the virtues in which they are packaged. After all, their leaders are Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Ann Coulter, Bill Kristol and the whole slew of tough guy pundits from Fox News and National Review, cheering on wars while imputing to themselves the courage and virtue of those they endlessly send off to fight and prancing around as moral guardians and defenders of individual freedom while, in reality, living lives that rapidly destroy those very values.

These are the same tactics that have been used again and again -- from the era when Ronald Reagan was transformed into the wholesome, horse-riding, freedom-defending cowboy to the current incarnation, George W. Bush, dressed up in ranch hats and fighter pilot costumes and transformed into the swaggering, brush-clearing warrior. And one Democrat after the next -- Walter Mondale, Mike Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry -- was swiftly turned into the same, now-familiar loser archetype: the overly earnest, sniveling, dishonest, elitist, subversive weakling, who bore political journalists and provided an easy target for their adolescent derision.

That the right wing has been so successful in this kind of distorting branding has been the mystery for me, and a lot of what I have written here has been by attempt to understand why it works so well on swaths of the electorate that are otherwise sane and decent.  Kerry was a poor candidate in '04, but it nevertheless astonished me that George Bush could be taken seriously by sane, decent Americans after everything we learned about him by 2004.  The only conclusion one can draw from that is that people simply didn't see George Bush for what he is. They weren't paying attention enough to see past the propaganda. 

They bought into the way he was represented by the establishment media that operates within the Beltway bubble because "reality" and "sanity" are something that the people in the media lost touch with long ago. They only report on reality as it appears within the bubble. That's why they think they're honest brokers just doing their job. The unreality they report on is all they are exposed to.  Some like Bill Kristol are conscious propagandists and as such creators of the unreality. Others like Coulter and Limbaugh are consciously over-the-top entertainers who play with these distortions as their schtick. But most in the media are earnest, sincere types who think they are doing a fair job of reporting "reality."  Reality is the world shaped by the interests of those in power.

So for this reason, if you don't live inside the right leaning Beltway/media bubble, and you're active enough to get your information from sources outside of it, it's hard to take almost anything you learn from the people within it seriously.  Their concerns and chatter defy common sense.  And so when some one like Obama comes on the scene who actually talks sense, it's easy to forget about or dismiss the insane reality to which he offers an alternative. I, at least, find myself doing so

Kerry was an empty suit and easy for the right/media to brand along the lines Greenwald describes above , but Obama is not. I am cautiously optimistic that this time it will be different.  The right/media will try to do to Obama what they did to Kerry, but the American electorate has caught on to the fact that the world as represented by Limbaugh, Kristol, and even so-called reasonable types like David Brooks is like a carnival hall of mirrors. There is always some element of objective  truth in their representation of reality, but they distort it to such a degree as to make it hardly recognizable to anyone who sees clearly.

A word about Olbermann.  He can be annoying.  He has an ego the size of Rhode Island.  He often over-reaches.  I think he's frequently wrong or at least off base in some of his perceptions and comments.  But he's the one high-profile person in the MSM who seems capable to sometimes (not always, but more often than not) speak outside the bubble Greenwald describes above. He can be dismissed as partisan, but I would argue that he is a partisan of "reality" as opposed to bubble-enclosed unreality.