Plain Unbalanced
This years election campaign has often made me think of the early work
of Brian Eno. The early work of Brian Eno doesn't make me think of
anything at all, but I've made a note to take Tiger Mountain, by
strategy if neccesary. A while back, June, the Pew Charitable Trust did an opinion
survey looking into peoples political affiliations and convictions,
cross referenced into questions on where they they obtained their news
and opinions. The Pew Charitable Trusts: Informing the Public: The practice of journalism. The Newshour (pbs) who are associated with the Pew Trust did a segment on it
Online NewsHour: News Consumers Follow Political Lines -- August 3, 2004 and Alternet anted up with a piece named
Fox Leans Right, White, and Male
AlterNet: MediaCulture. The over all message from this survey had two
main parts. That the news consumption by Americans hasn't changed much
in the past few years. (they note increasing reliance on online news
sources and emerging technologies like RSS, among some population
segments). The other more dramatic finding was the degree of
polarization in news consumption and evaluation: The
public's evaluations of media credibility also are more divided along
ideological and partisan lines. Republicans have become more
distrustful of virtually all major media outlets over the past four
years, while Democratic evaluations of news organizations' credibility
have remained mostly stable. As a result, only about half as many
Republicans as Democrats rate a variety of well-known news outlets as
credible. pdf I read through a good share of the full report and kept it in mind as
the conventions swam by and the post labor day campaign kicked off.
During this period there was a noxious series of newspaper ads that
traded on
this and on the entire red state/blue state nonsense (which in the
effort of creating a big picture has rendered half the electorate
inconsequential to the election). Further since no state in the union
is a monolithic entity: all urban, or all rural. it encourages a
daft over-simplification of our socio-geography. As David Brooks has
said
politics is more identification than reason. Retro-Metro (which turned
out to be for a "high-concept" drugstore novel) can become a reality if
enough folk feel thats as much thinking as they want to do. There are
tribes within the democratic party, metroscalors and sundry which while
comprising non-majoritan portions of the electorate would assume sole
proprietorship of the Democratic party. And that's after Ralph Nader
has
taken his crowd and gone home. If the democratic party is to continue
to win national elections it needs to be the party of the working class
and pay attention to how working people come by their wages and
opinions.
Let's stop and look at a set piece of modern media-proxy political
dialog : Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, truth by which they proffer a mangy
grab-bag of second-hand lies half truths, and nebulously stated
unsupportable falsehoods. Show of hands: how many Vietnam veterans out
there would like their own tour of duty, purple hearts, friends and
accomplices to be examined with the same doubt and cynicism that Mr.
Kerry's has. Too late to change your mind now, As even E.J. Dionne
Points out And, please, none of this nonsense about how Kerry
"opened the door" to the assault on his Vietnam years by highlighting
his service at the Democratic National Convention. Nothing any
candidate does should ever be seen as "opening the door" to lies about
his past.
What Is Bush Hiding? (washingtonpost.com).
But I've come neither to praise or bury these folk per se. I just
wanted to point out Benjamin Ginsburg's oped in the Washington Post
"Swift Boats and Double Standards" (Wed. 01 Sep 2004, A19). Mr.
Ginsburg wrote out
600 words to the effect that the press is unbalanced and biased because
he feels shafted that he's had to leave the Bush Campaign, while he
believes he sees democratic lawyers going back and forth between the
Kerry campaign and left of right non-profits. which he attempts to lay
out in detail. This may be; although, I wouldn't necessarily take it on
his word alone. More particularly it misses essential point: these
'dem" lawyers were not
behind a vicious ad hominen ad campaign that played loose and fast
(swift?) with the truth all, the more because the official presidential
campaign would try to seem unconnected above it all, and made wide loud
claims to that end. Coordination is hard to achieve without
coordinators though, and Mr. Ginsburg was noted with his boxers in both
camps. Lawyers are a special case, you never know when they are
being professionally disingenuous, stupid, or deliberately churlish.
Politically sensitive events are polarized into separate realities,
parallel worlds. Scenarios are posited to reinforce or dilute and
mitigate facts. Hypothetic 'facts' are posited to explain inconvenient
outcomes. Increasing some people are looking for news sources that will
take them through the looking glass. One of the strangest things I've
heard - I've been running across this one for at least four or five
months. An argument that Weapons of Mass Destruction have been found -
in mass quantities as they tell it among themselves, nearly always
falling back to the the story of the artillery shell set as a roadside
bomb that didn't go off, or a supposed warehouse with or more damningly
not with barrels of industrial chemicals. President Bush is sitting on
this overwhelming proof - taking the hit and ridicule - so that we
don't have to leave Iraq (or let the UN in, so the narrative goes) and
can stay and do Freedoms work. WMD and the sacred heart of G W Bush.
Consider the story of George Bush's service in the Texas Air National
Guard Military Service: Portrait of George Bush in '72: Unanchored in Turbulent Time New York Times. That is the story, and it's existed thirty years, but aside from this and an Airforce times article
Bush[base ']s Air Guard stint started well, then faded into mystery
Air Force Times (which contains a URL to a report on George W Bush's
service record by Gerald A. Lechliter Colonel U S Army (Ret.) the NY
times web site provides: pdf,
the story which has taken over the news and come to represent the
primary facet of the Presidents National service are stories about
amateurish and obvious forged memos from his service jacket. The
coincidence that the Weblogger "Buckhead" who led the charge to prove
this is actually a well-known politically active republican lawyer from
Atlanta Atlanta lawyer's blog on Guard memo spurs speculation - 09/18/04, is probably not coincidence but counter-narrative. Your modern republican has done been to school.
In order to work - in order for a manufactured narrative to succeed in
the marketplace of ideas - official statements must be made that lean
in the direction of beliefs sought without provoking a challenge at the
hands of realists. Undersecretary of Defense Doug Feith strayed over
that line the previous Monday in an interview on NPR's Morning edition Pentagon Hawk Feith a Magnet for War Critics. A few days later a highly classified National Intelligence Estimate gets leaked to the New York Times
U.S. Intelligence Shows Pessimism on Iraq's Future
offering near complete contradiction of his characterization of the
war. A report which undoubtedly he had read. President Bush himself offers up
rose colored scenario, shakes off a plea by senate to come to terms
with situation
Yahoo! News - Senators Urge Bush to Rethink Iraq Policy", plunges
on toward policy speeches dealing entirely with so far entirely elusive
benefits of his policy. He must position himself outside of and
skeptical of the "guesses" of the intelligence bureaucracy. If he is
successful he can make the insurgency virtually disappear in the eyes
of his supporters. The situation on the street.
The Incident on 'Death Street'
(AlterNet), is making Iraq so difficult and dangerous to
cover that its true nature slowly being squeezed out of the public view
allowing it room to be transformed into a fable of prevailing victory
and justice. Just check over at Free-Republic.
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