Judith Miller, and the slavish hackery for which Judith Miller serves as a convenient notation, is a fixed quantity in the journalistic universe. Judith Miller thus cannot be created or destroyed, but merely changes form.
Reader Interactions
51Comments
Comments are closed.
Bill E Pilgrim
Once again, the corporate media uses intensely interrogated language to avoid stating the obvious.
Cat Lady
I will never stop wondering why journamilists allowed their balls to be cut off and stuffed in their mouths by scum like Bush, Cheney and Fleischer, the most venal lying snakes extant. And I apologize to snakes everywhere. What the holy fucking fuck happened to the 4th estate? Pitiful.
John Hamilton Farr
I’m with Cat Lady. What the holy fucking fuck happened to the 4th estate, indeed. There IS no “free press” in Amurrica today, and the weirdest thing is, they put themselves in jail. Bah. Go read my story about the front-end loader and the executed cow instead of trying to save these bastards.
The Grand Panjandrum
Good on Marcy Wheeler. I read that NYT piece and actually linked to it in another thread w.r.t. Whelan’s childish outing of publius (he worked at OLC during much of the period outlined in the article) but it did strike me as odd that Comey would be in this strange brew. Comey always struck me as a pretty solid lawyer and not one prone to put the fix in for his “betters”, as it were. He’s the guy who wouldn’t sign off on illegal wiretapping program, forcing Cheney’s henchmen to make a late night visit to John Ashcroft’s hospital room, so why would he approve an also illegal torture regime? It’s to convenient to blame everyone affiliated with the Bush DOJ for all the ill cause by that bunch of war criminals. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy journalism.
gex
The demise of media consolidation rules has led precisely to this issue. All of our complaints about the lack of independent journalism can be traced back to this. Once you had to be a big boy to have an outlet (Disney, Fox, GE) the ability to get independent reporting from any side of the political spectrum disappeared.
MikeJ
Darn that liberal media!
Roger Moore
@Cat Lady:
They sold their souls for access. Now they care more about preserving their access and privilege than they do about informing the public. It’s roughly analogous to regulatory capture; the people in charge of looking after the public interest have become more interested in protecting the interests of the people they’re supposed to be overseeing.
El Cid
This is systematic. Major news producers do not always favor the hawkish foreign policy establishment and the upper-class driven economic establishment by accident nor have they descended down from some previously purer peak.
A century ago, it was understood that different newspapers were sold to different communities and that who ran the papers indicated the communities with whose perspective they identified — the business leaders’ papers, the labor union papers, the soc ialist papers, the ethnic community papers.
Now, all that’s left is the papers of the bosses, and for the last 60-odd years a variety of ‘alternative’ media have sprung up to tell the truth of important stories which the major news producers refused to print / run or against active propaganda campaigns.
Nobody was printing the My Lai story until a tiny, peace-oriented lefty news service printed it, and then it took almost a year to make the major papers.
Cat Lady
@Roger Moore:
I understand that, but what I don’t understand is why they seem to be either willfully ignorant of it, or proud of it, and their cravenness is there every day for the world to see. They know better, or should. It’s so obvious for everyone to see what hacks they are, and their job ostensibly is to not be a hack. I don’t get it, and probably never will.
kommrade reproductive vigor
(Journalistic) Ethics = Media Cojones^2^
Tim F. thou art truly awesome. Miller makes me and my co-workers cringe because we actually had a moment of silence for her while she was banged up in jail. Now everyone from the CEO on down would gladly throw her back in and swallow the fucking key.
Brachiator
@gex:
This doesn’t really explain the cowardice of NPR, or even of the NY Times and other newspapers.
And it doesn’t explain, for example, why so many NPR listeners — supposedly good liberals — would sit back and passively allow torture to be explained to clinically.
I wonder whether many people really want to believe that torture worked or was necessary, or just don’t want to believe ill of their country, and so the reporting reflects the public dilemma.
Either way, the Greenwald piece is a depressing, but necessary read.
Roger Moore
@Cat Lady:
Because they’re living in their own narrowly defined inside the beltway world. They spend all their time talking to the same group of insiders, other journalists who are in the same boat as they are, lobbyists, and similar types. And I think that the truly don’t care what ordinary people think about them. They see themselves as part of the informed elite; if the rest of us hold them in contempt, they see it as a sign of our ignorance rather than their own failure to escape the inside-the-beltway circuit.
Will
0th Law: You must play the game
1st Law: You can’t win
2nd Law: You can’t break even
3rd Law: You can’t get out of the game
gex
@Brachiator: The NYT has to make money. NPR has tacked right as GOP controlled Congresses have threatened funds.
Brachiator
@gex:
The NYT ain’t making money. The GOP does not control Congress anymore.
Yeah. Sadly, I think that this explains much of the problem.
kommrade reproductive vigor
@gex: If someone decided that becoming a fRightWing noise machine was the only way to keep the profit margin fatter than Jonah Goldberg’s head they’ve had more than enough time to notice it is not working.
Cat Lady
@Roger Moore:
Yeah. I went back and re-read this Jay Rosen piece on the Overton Window:
http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2009/01/12/atomization.html
This update caught my attention:
“So far no comment, reaction, link or other gesture from journalists in the national press. This after I told Chris Cillizza, who does The Fix blog for the Washington Post, “I wrote this for you, especially you. When you have a moment, give it a gander.”
So you’re right – that’s how they roll. “I can’t hear you, la la la la la”
The Grand Panjandrum
@Brachiator:
But Bush appointments sit on the board of CPB and NPR. They came on board with a political agenda and have been successful at getting NPR to report “all” sides of a story, whether that story had more than one legitimate side or not. But that still does not excuse NPR listener for not raising a bigger ruckus over much of the so-called balanced reporting done the past few years.
Thomas Levenson
@kommrade reproductive vigor: Without going into details (not my story to tell) let me just say that I do know from direct conversations that at least some of Miller’s previous co-workers were eager to lose the key to her cell at that time. To say that her career has been one long “failed sand box” grade on her nursery school report would understate the loathing in which (some of) those who know her best hold her.
The real mystery about the Times et al. is that the people who hire and enable her know this too, and there are plenty of other untouchably always-wrong folks there and elsewhere in the macromedia. I find it a mystery that the Times seems to think that Miller or others make the paper big by their presence. It’s the other way around: Miller, or a never-accomplished hack like their new hire, Douthat, become big by virtue of the institutional platform. If you can take some 20 something whose claim to fame is aimiable right wing politics and a terror of female sexuality (Douthat again) and turn him into a Deep Thinker, then you can do the same for the next glib knight of the keyboard.
Brilliance in reporters/writers is vastly overstated, usually by the writers themselves (and I should know, being one). The Times does not lose by paying attention to whether or not their “stars” are actually any good. Why don’t they? I genuinely don’t get it.
Robertdsc-iphone
Miller’s book Germs was a very interesting read.
As for the state of media today, Josh Marshall had it right a while back when he said that Washington was wired for Republican rule. I certainly include the media in that.
El Cid
Miller had the sort of expertise that establishment news production looks for: the ability to get powerful people to say the very things that the publishers want to have published.
An old Noam Chomsky joke from his speeches goes (more or less), “In the news business, there’s a saying: ‘You don’t print your own opinion.’ And they’re right about that. Instead, you find someone who has your opinion, and you just print what they say.”
bago
In Seattle, The Stranger is a mag I would pay for, but it is free. The PI is going out of business, and expects money for their “access”.
There was an incident a few years ago that showed the reporting chops of each entity. The major media with the pre-established narrative can suck my balls. Let more of the “establishment” ball-lickers go belly up.
Zifnab25
It’s all about the money. You cab draw a straight financial line between the military contractors and the cable news media, giving us lots of war porn. You’ve got newspapers kowtowing to big advertisers who all have their own political agendas.
I think people have always had an exaggerated expectation of the media. Go back to the 1950s and the Red Scare or the 40s and the pro-war propaganda or the Civil War and the various abolitionist / secessionist media campaigns or – hell -go back to the American Revolution and read the Federalist Papers or the coverage of the Boston Massacre. Everybody has had an agenda, always.
Eric U.
the problem is that rich people own the presses. Who cares what the advertisers or readers think? The disinfo must be spread.
Jim-Bob
Are you claiming that Miller matters? is there such thing as anti-Miller?
Uloborus
Kind of related note. I’m working temporarily in news for the first time right now. It’s been strange and eye-opening. I’ve learned how very, very hard it is to figure out what’s the truth, because contradictory information is the norm. I’ve learned that FOX can be very useful for news coverage (they’re extremely good at getting a story first), but you never know when they’ll flat-out lie to you. I’ve learned that news is absolutely part of the entertainment industry. They tell you what they think you want to hear. If they have standards, they’ll tell you the truth even if it’s not the message they were looking for… unless that truth makes it just not exciting anymore. Then they’ll drop the story.
I wouldn’t know about access to big names, though. It’s a tiny little office of a foreign station. We barely have our own reporters.
Tonal Crow
@Brachiator:
The NYT thinks it is losing less money by avoiding offending its advertisers too badly. The GOP controlled Congress for a long time. The Queen Mary of NPR fear and toadying cannot be turned in only a few months. Has Obama even gotten around to routing out the burrowed-in Bushadis from the CPB? I doubt it; he’s been pretty busy with other issues.
Wile E. Quixote
@gex
Sorry, but NPR is part of the problem and it has nothing to do with GOP threats to their funding. NPR shit themselves blind with indignation back in the 1990s when the FCC proposed licensing a new class of radio station, the low powered FM or LPFM station. NPR offered up a huge number of justifications, all of which were total fucking bullshit, about how LPFM stations would cause interference with their stations, blah, blah, fucking blah. For a supposedly “public” radio entity they sure were quick to hop into bed with the corporate National Association of Broadcasters which basically made the same claims.
You can read about NPR’s work to kill off community based LPFM stations here and here. But the fact is that when threatened with potential competition NPR behaved, and continues to behave just like Clear Channel. NPR has a monopoly on what they do, they like it that way and they’ll do whatever they have to, including lying just like a regular corporation, to keep that monopoly. Anyone who thinks that NPR isn’t just corporate radio lite is fooling themselves.
Delia
One weekday I was driving and listening to the BBC program “World Have Your Say” on one of the local NPR stations. The topic, if I remember, was something to do with Afghanistan, and as usual, people from all over the world were calling. But then this woman, Judith from New York City, called, and she was very articulate and acted like she knew what she was talking about, and the host of the program deferred to her, and started letting her run the show. He never gave her last name, but identified her as working for some think tank in New York, and it was pretty clear that it was our favorite ace reporter, Judy Miller.
I turned off the radio.
Brachiator
@Wile E. Quixote:
This is a reasonable additional wrinkle on the issue. Also, I recall reading about KCRW, a fairly famous public radio station that was originally affiliated with Santa Monica City College, and which was supposed to train students in the radio business. But somehow the station managed to wriggle out of this responsibility because they wanted to be a big time alternative music station (in addition to its public radio news programs).
Ironically, the rise of the InterTubes has rendered some of the battles over low power FM irrelevant. And the ability to stream public radio stations over the Web is beginning to make some of the services and programs duplicative. Add the economic slump to this, and you may see some additional jockeying for power in these markets.
IndieTarheel
@Brachiator:
NPR = Nice Polite Republicans.
Clears up much.
Roger Moore
@Cat Lady:
It’s not really “I can’t hear you, la la la la”. It’s more that they’ve descended into group think. They believe that being close to the center of power makes them the best informed group in the world. That lets them dismiss contrary viewpoints as the result of ignorance. It’s like the information opposite of a black hole; their layers of opinion have become so dense that no information from the outside can enter.
Brick Oven Bill
Television has been very bad for attempts at making democracy work. As much as I enjoy viewing attractive women looking at me and talking, it is always ends up being kind of a disappointment upon reflection, knowing that they are really looking at a teleprompter, and not at me.
It is crap like this that dumbs the country down to the point where the last election was about ‘Country First’ vs. ‘Change’, when the policy positions of the two parties are nearly identical on the items that matter.
To witness how far political discourse has deteriorated in 150 years, you can read the Lincoln-Douglas Debates. Many argue that society is best served by making voting eligibility nearly universal.
I see this as a parallel of giving an obese child a big box of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from Sam’s Club. I’d argue that voting rights should be limited to workers earning the average trucker wage or higher. This would extend opportunity to all, but limit political power to those actively engaged in the operation of the State, making it more effective.
This would benefit everybody in the end. If the dollar disintegrates through inflation-indexed social benefits, the ones to be hurt the most will be those who the do-gooders were looking to help. There are some very bad scenarios.
The best show on TV is Glenn Beck. The second best is Red-Eye with Greg Gutfeld.
Laura W
@Brick Oven Bill:
See this is one of the many reasons I like you, Bill. You’re a deep thinker, like me.
TenguPhule
Corallary to Rule 1: This does not apply if you are a Republican.
asiangrrlMN
It’s why we call them the Villagers, no? Anything to reinforce the position of their world. I can’t think of any major newspaper or television news station that I would trust to write an objective story.
I much prefer MPR to NPR. The latter often irritates me with its sense of entitlement (such as the story of the East Coast people who had to give up their European vacation this year because of the recession). I like certain programs from NPR, but not the entity on the whole.
TenguPhule
I favor a basic test for voting rights.
It involves questions on torture, basic math, common law and common sense.
This would of course automatically disqualify BOB.
This is a feature, not a bug.
TenguPhule
We must destroy the village to save it.
TenguPhule
If by best you mean, an example to us all as to how far people will degrade themselves for a contract.
SGEW
@Brick Oven Bill: Yessir. Universal suffrage is surely the root of our problems. A poll tax would be an excellent way to return to our founding values, and women’s suffrage should be repealed too, as I believe you have occasionally advocated.
I didn’t think it was possible, B.O.B., but you’re giving Glenn Beck a bad name by promoting him. As to Fox’s “comedy” show, oh, how sad.
WereBear
These are all good points. But there’s another; once upon a time, reporters were more likely to root for the underdog, because that’s what they were.
Hardscrabble, blue collar, and self-taught men and women were the backbone of reporting. Anyone with some guts and a turn of phrase could, and did, do it well.
The whole point was that they didn’t have access. They had to find leads and convince people to talk.
Now, with the reporters on the very same level as the people they report on, they don’t see themselves as outsiders. They are now insiders, and that’s what skewed their views.
I’m not against journalism degrees or anything; perhaps we need them now, more than ever. But until journalism gets back to journalism, and stops trying to be a reality show or Entertainment Tonight, we will have this problem no matter who owns the outlets.
Brick Oven Bill
Vigorous debate amplified by the Press before the eyes of engaged Citizens is what keeps the flames of democracy alive. For instance:
George Bush: Water boarded 3 people and then stopped in like 2004. Barack Obama: Did not re-start water boarding.
George Bush: Says there is an upcoming fiscal crisis and then raises entitlement spending. Barack Obama: Says there is an upcoming fiscal crisis and then raises entitlement spending.
George Bush: Deploys American forces to Middle East permanently. Barack Obama: Deploys more American forces to the Middle East permanently.
George Bush: Import illegal Mexican laborers and their families to ‘help economy’. Barack Obama: Import more illegal Mexican laborers and their families when there are no jobs.
George Bush: Give the printing presses to outgoing Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson. Obama: Give the printing presses to Tim Geithner, under the supervision of his appointed Chief of Staff, a lobbyist from Goldman Sachs.
Bill H
As we speak Bernard Goldberg is giving a speech on Cspan2, Book TV, about the “Liberal Media” and decrying the “tragic minority” of conservatives in the media today. He is begging for an “affirmative action” program to require the media to hire conservative journalists.
TenguPhule
No matter how much George Bush deserves to hang, this is one thing he is not guilty of.
We don’t import illegal immigrants, they wouldn’t be illegal then now would they?
Brachiator
@asiangrrlMN:
What’s the difference?
Maybe I don’t pay attention to program ID tags, or there are no MPR programs broadcast on Southern California stations.
Ed Drone
One thing I will never forgive the conservlicans for is their assault on and cruel murder of the concept of irony.
Ed
Tonal Crow
@Bill H:
Conservatives cannot compete on any playing field that isn’t tilted at least 45 degrees in their favor. Score another one for the upcoming event horizon.
Jim-Bob
I guess that’s true for those who have trouble keeping up with Blue’s Clues (and are troubled by all the furriners in Dora the Explorer).
Maybe it’s because I’m really, really, really immature, but I cannot help but call Gutfield’s show, “Brown-eye with Greg Gutfield.”
Urbandictionary.com will tell you why, B.O.B.
Original Lee
And in addition to the hacktacular Miller in the NYT, we also have this sample of deep thought, brought to you by the Washington Post:
Hey, Obama’s black and the Saudis like gaudy trinkets
gbear
@Brachiator:
MPR is Minnesota Public Radio. About 1/3 (guessing) of what MPR broadcasts is NPR programming, but MPRs local news programming is often really good. Probably too local for you, but the occasional lecture series out of Macalester Church in Mpls is outstanding. MPR is best between 7:00-11:00 pacific time.
gbear
@gbear: Correction: Westminster Presbyterian Church, not Macalester.