Gaming the Center
I want to return to the theme of my previous post "plain
unbalanced" to clear out all the scattered notes and links I collected,
adding some new. Jack Shafer writing for Slate Lewis Lapham Phones It In conducted a peculiar hatchet job on the Lewis Lapham's article Tentacles of Rage: The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history in
the recent Harper's. His primary assertion is that it is old hat and
derived from a DNC consultant's powerpoint show. This much is true;
although, I personally found it informative and interesting, tying
together things I knew were not separate but did not know exactly how
they fit. Shafer moves from this assertion - which presumes that if I
did not already know these facts, I didn't need to - and unloads on
Lapham, trying to show Liberal Philanthropy far outweighs the right's
philanthropists. A contentious assertion at best. In doing so he
continually labels "public" radio and television "liberal" against
which, along with most of what is generally known as establishment
media (ie for-profit and corporate owned), the visions of right wing
can be presented as moderate and centrist. Public radio and television
were born out of "good government" principles and informed and engaged
civic spiritedness, and I can certainly see why some conservatives
would view this as what they like to call the "hard left", but this
serves only to map most clearly the land where their own feet are
planted. Then there is the apparition of Christopher Hitchens in Slate Flirting with Disaster: The vile spectacle of Democrats. Where to start (yeah I miss Molly Hatchet too, but what can you do?). He
starts with a offhand quote by Theresa Heinz: "I wouldn't be
surprised if he appeared in the next month." Then spins dizzily into a
sentence his thesaurus wrote for him -quote: "...words ending in
"-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable..."
Gathering limited cohesion he continues:
The plain implication is that the Bush administration
is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in
reserve, for an "October surprise. This innuendo would appear, on the
face of it, to go
a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It
argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man
who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim
civilians in other countries. Her statement at least as he has
quoted it says nothing of the sort. It
doesn't equate to the first clause of his plain implication at
all, it comes near the second - if one changes the antecedent from the
Bush Administration to the Pakistani regime of General Musharraf, under
all possible pressure of the United States and with all possible
resources. And frankly there it is unremarkable, the Administration
would love for the Pakistanis to produce Bin Laden within a fortnight
of the election. the Pakistanis would love to do it for them. No one
save for Hitchens, possibly, doubts this, and many are saying it.
Hitchen's second assertion with which he energetically damns her, can't
be honestly derived from Theresa Heinz's statement. It is pure
deliberate misrepresentation. It is a magician's
mis-direction. A device of deceitful hateful rhetoric produced by
hitchens out of his own deranged and deeply ugly mind.
Why did he choose to do this? Take a look at this block from
Google news headed "Surge protector",  leading to a story in the Weekly
Standard. I never know what part of Google's displays is a strict turn
around of a headline or link name, and when it may be more
algorithmically complicated. But if you wanted to kill the impact of
media coverage of Kerry moving upward in the polls, what could be
better than to plant stories now that it either means nothing or is
proof of media bias. If one wanted to play down down skepticism of the
Pakistani's current frantic efforts to turn up Bin Laden what
better way than to shake the shame finger at the skeptical now. Call
this viral: call it political gorilla marketing.
There was an interesting article in Online Journalism Review (OJR) last week, Balancing Act: How News Portals Serve Up Political Stories
noting a tendency for searches of various politically freighted terms
in Google News to return large numbers numbers of conservative
dedicatedly 'on-message' web logs. Anecdotely, I've noticed this
myself most recently when I did a search to try to re-find the article
I had read which identified the web logger, Buckhead, to be an activist
republican lawyer from Atlanta. Mostly I came up with web logs on that
search and they ran right wing by a 10 to 1 margin. The one
Democratic leaning web log citation was Buckhead Revealed. By one Chris Hardcore. Note especially at
the end of this post the section he calls Here's what
probably happened . My brother-in-law, Al, indicated that most
democratic political people in Washington believe this was a set-up
along the lines that Mr. Chris lays out. I have reservations, but
something about that whole affair reminded me of this toy car I had as
a kid - held together with springs and rubberbands it was designed to
fly apart when you rolled it against something. This story, too, seemed
designed to fly apart and the MacDougalds seem to have been engaged in
some variety of astro-turf enterprise.
At the end of work today (cataloging dept. of an
university library), one of the last books I handled seemed to be on
this general topic Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age. There was a phrase the author, Tiziana Terranova, used that caught my
attention political subjectivities the context
suggested that a massive subjectivity permeates all aspects of
networked political culture. In sports, I think back to High School
here - to teams and people I knew first hand, when a team got the wrong
idea about its notions and abilities there would be a game. At the end
of that game by the rules sports lives by there would be a score, and
objectivity was reset. Objectivity is not being reset here. The
question to ask is whether online communities and tailored
narrow-casting and web logged amplification of 'news' sources can move
one beyond the point of seeing the score at the end of the game.
11:17:18 PM  ;;
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