I started reading blogs about ten years ago. Prior to that, I read newspapers, watched tv, and listened to NPR (my parents force fed me that stuff, like good academic parents do). I now believe that I spent the first 30 years of my life living in a propaganda state not all that different from North Korea, other than our much higher standard of living.
Perhaps that’s not entirely fair. There is some attempt to be accurate about basic statistics in establishment media. In North Korea, we wouldn’t get reasonably reliable job reports, CPI estimates, and so on. But a lot of the time, things work like this at the national level: the establishment picks up some story of no real importance or validity and won’t shut up about it, while ignoring some set of other more valid and important stories. Bill Clinton’s consensual relationship with Monica Lewinsky is one of the most extreme examples, but truly, such stories are the rule, not the exception. All the bullshit about Romentum (Anne-Laurie touched on this earlier) fits neatly in to the category of things for which there is little evidence but the media likes to discuss anyway. Alec MacGillis:
Above all, we love a good story. Which, after all, is a very deeply ingrained yearning of the human race, isn’t it? Anthropologists will tell you it is what sets us apart from the beasts—after all, when’s the last time you saw a cat or a dog telling an anecdote at a cocktail party or reading a bedtime story to their offspring? Yeah, didn’t think so. We crave narrative. And let’s face it, the narrative of the 2012 campaign was a real dud. Incumbent president faces tough reelection environment but manages to hold onto slim, steady lead thanks to a just-enough recovery and a singularly uninspiring challenger. I remember being in a Dayton hotel the morning after Mitt Romney’s 47 percent remarks broke and watching the head-shaking reaction of Morning Joe and his crew: it left them with nothing to say. Which is a problem, because, well, they had many more weeks of needing something to say.
But then: our mile-high salvation! Denver, O Denver. As the dynamic of the first debate began to register just a few minutes in—the crisp and hopped-up Romney against the wordy and listless president—we sang our relief across the Twitterverse. The true partisans among us, the Maddows and Sullivans, rent their garments, but most of us were barely able to suppress our glee: we had ourselves a story. Never mind that the debate had produced no great knockdowns, or that, as some noted in the days following, Obama had actually made a decent substantive case in some areas, if not others. No, we had our story. It went up at Buzzfeed before the debate was even half over, before the snap polls even provided the nominal metric to back up the conclusion of a Romney rout. Politico followed soon afterward with an “Obama stumbles” headline that led the site for most of the rest of the night and following morning. Meanwhile, of course, Chris Matthews et al at MSNBC were in full meltdown. If one put one’s ear to the ground, one could all but hear the herd thundering back across the eastern Colorado plains to deliver its new narrative.
Yes, people like horse races, but Steve M points out there is another, equally compelling, but also accurate and important story here:
But the press had a story. It’s a great, multi-threaded story, really, even though nobody in the press thinks it is. It’s a story the press could have been telling us for years, but never wanted to bother: the story of a major American political party going absolutely stark raving mad, while having the power and persuasive ability to potentially take the country with it. It’s a party that flirted with nominating barking lunatics such as Donald Trump, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum before settling on a guy who was able to mollify supporters of those lunatics by faking (or imbibing) madness himself, by being a pathological liar, and by spending millions of dollars — because this party is crazy about the rich, and has persuaded much of the country to want to coddle the rich even after the rich nearly destroyed the world.
They chose close-race, both-sides-do-it, center-right-nation because…well, because they always do.
The same way that in North Korea, the story is always the greatness of Kim Jong-il.
It’s not that different.
some guy
“Pol Pot: At Least He Got Lazy People to Pull Their Weight.”
Tractarian
Don’t look now, but O-MENTUM is arriving with the power of a force-ten gale.
Gallup LV moved 2 points in his direction today (still R+3) and Obama now leads among RV (+1).
Plus O’s job approval (which is sampled over only 3 days) is now a whopping +11. It was +6 yesterday; -7 in August.
You cannot hope to stop O-MENTUM. You can only hope to contain it.
Corner Stone
No idea what this post means.
Elizabelle
After the election, we should have a full discussion of whether it’s in Americans’ benefit to have SIX corporations owning most of the major media.
McClatchy writes that Rupert Murdoch is sniffing around buying the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.
That should not be allowed to happen.
A functioning free press is essential to an informed citizenry our democracy.
A corporate press that pushes out stories that benefits its owners and hoovers up UNLIMITED CORPORATE CAMPAIGN CASH? Not so much.
Was it the 1996 Telecommunications “reform” act that helped bring us to this state of affairs?
Gin & Tonic
I know you’re trolling and I’m falling for it, but get back to me when the press ignores 10% of the US population dying due to famine largely caused by governmental economic mismanagement. Then it’ll be “not that different.”
schrodinger's cat
To keep up the BS narrative, this morning MoDo in her NYT column fantasizes about an electoral vote tie and a Romney Presidency and Andrew Clown Sullivan writes without irony that Obama threw away the election in the first debate. How do we get a better media? I mean why do we overpay these vacuous pundits, they are nothing but the courtiers in the palace of Versailles.
Trinity
I (also, too) was raised on the same propaganda as a child. I don’t think my Mom missed an episode of “All Things Considered”. Even when we were on vacation. Steve M’s point is spot on.
We are fed so much bullshit.
kindness
Right now the MSM is eating up Karl Rove’s meme of pushing (an imaginary) momentum all in hopes of repeating the feat with dubya.
Sorry Karl. We’re paying attention even if the Serious Village Elders are idiots.
@schrodinger’s cat: My physician recommended I stock up on torches, pitchforks & guillotines.
PeakVT
It’s not that different.
Our liars are much, much better than their liars. Propaganda in NK works simply because its the only story available.
parrot
don’t believe the hype, yet the hype is driving the narrative, and by some sort of logical conclusion, an outcome… i don’t get the cogs & wheels of this post? please ‘splain to my rock with lips physiognomy?
Elizabelle
@kindness:
re Rovementun and Romneymentum:
Chris Cilizza of The Washington Post eats that kind of crap up.
And if he doesn’t, The Washington Post’s web headline writers sure do.
Can’t say for certain, because reading Cilizza makes me ill.
beltane
I was also raised in the NPR/PBS/NYT bubble, which is really just a somewhat more high-brow version of Good Morning America/network news/tabloid bubble. What helped me to realize that Americans are subjected to every bit as much propaganda as the Soviet bloc countries was having a close friend in high school who had recently fled one of those countries. I’ll never forget leafing through a magazine with her (it was either Time or Newsweek) as she referred to all the stories save one or two as propaganda. This was back in 1985, when the bullshit didn’t seem quite so blatant to me, but I guess growing up in Ceausescu’s Romania gave my friend a keen eye and ear for lies and distortions used to promote an agenda.
Maude
@Elizabelle:
That act brought about a lot of damage to us. I don’t know if it included the buying of news outlets. I’d have to look it up.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@schrodinger’s cat:
Personally I’d like to line all the MSM ratfuckers up against a wall and shoot them in the head, and then throw their bullet riddled corpses into the street to be eaten by wild dogs. But I’d be willing to settle for the less emotionally satisfying but more practical alternative of turning off the TV and ignoring them at every opportunity. It would be much less violent that way. Also, I don’t want the wild dogs to get heavy metal poisoning. Nobody wants that.
Punchy
I’m firmly convinced that Sullivan believes the hype.
Maude
An example of the media being full of it is the whole big deal about Cronkite going against the Vietnam war. BS.
He was way to late. The war was entrenched and the time for him and the other glorious reporters to yell was in 1964.
It has become a national myth and it is sickening.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
Well, I wonder who or what collective power is truly behind election results… is it Citizens United now? Is it the incompetent yet strangely-powerful media? Is it voter apathy? Is it the 27% who are all fired up and angry as a hive of wasps (the low-information voters)? Is it the candidates themselves? Obviously, it’s a combination of all of these today. It’s also a bit disheartening….
As to NPR, if I had to listen to 90 minutes of news radio, I’d sure pick NPR over anything on the AM band. Believe me, I know NPR is far from perfect; they’ve got waaaaaaay too much he said/she said reporting going on now, but can you name a credible alternative among American options?
Woodrowfan
having actually read the North Korean press for years, as well as Libya’s, I think Fox best fits that model. The rest of the media better fits India’s which cares far less about accuracy that sales.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: We will never get a better media until the day comes when our Galtian overlords go Galt and have no more use for a propaganda apparatus. What we can do is work to discredit the media we have and help to make them as distrusted as the state media is in any petty dictatorship.
? Martin
@Corner Stone: DougJ would like less Jersey Shore and more Mythbusters out of our media.
some guy
I know you’re trolling and I’m falling for it, but get back to me when the press ignores 22% of the US population under 18 living in poverty largely caused by governmental economic mismanagement. Then it’ll be “not that different.”
Dork
I disagree somewhat. It’s hard to make a subjective “momentum bitchez!” call in the face of sooooooo many objective poll numbers. The partisans and Fox Noobs will always cherry-pick, but most of the MSM is beholden to polls, and most of them are showing Obama with a small but clear and steady lead.
Of course, they can just report WTFTW in the end.
Ben Cisco
The minute they see me, fear me
I’m the epitome – a public enemy
Used, abused without clues
I refused to blow a fuse
They even had it on the news
Don’t believe the hype…
Reklam
@Gin & Tonic: The press ignores quite a few things of some import. It it too depressing to come up with a historic list of military, finance, and health issues that do kill thousands and thousands of Americans (and non-Americans too!)
It is quantitatively different but not qualitatively.
Though yes, Ronaldus Magnus is not on lovely Mount Rushmore yet.
beltane
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Thank you. You said it much more eloquently than I did. Unfortunately, the “entertainment” sector of the media is just as guilty of promoting the values of the plutocracy as the news portion is. I rarely watch TV anymore but when I do I am always amazed at the sheer offensiveness of the ideology being shoved into the viewers’ brains.
Ash Can
Meh. I’ll take a contrarian position and say I’m all for a horse-race narrative if it gets people up off their asses and into the voting booths. And up off their asses and volunteering with the campaign to help make sure that happens. That’s vastly preferable to a prevailing narrative of “Obama has this in the bag” and people figuring that it’s not all that urgent that they vote as a result.
Rita R.
The fact that the media have allowed Romney to get away with his postmodern, fungible truth campaign, in which he just says whatever he has to in order to win at the time, even if it means suddenly and totally reversing what his positions were throughout the campaign, will have real consequences for elections in this country going forward. Win or lose come November 6th, it was successful enough that a precedent has been set.
gene108
To: Noumenon
“Physics lessons (Newton’s Second Law of Motion: F=ma)…”
Off topic but in High School Physics I answered ‘F=ma’ on a quiz and it was marked incorrect. The teacher later argued thatit should have been Sigma F=ma, that is, the SUM of the forces equals mass times acceleration. So, FWIW…
That (obviously) dogs me to this day. I think she was a closet feminazi.
Slow day chopping wood at work, so I went to Free Republic (not going to link) and found this reply interesting. When I learned physics in high school, we were drilled that Fnet=M*A.
That is the net sum of the forces acting on an object is the Force you will observe. If an object is resting on an incline (say your car in the driveway) there’s a force that wants to push it down to the Earth’s center and another one that wants it to roll on the horizontal surface. The net of these two force vectors is the F in F=M*A.
Just surprised he’s calling his teacher out, who is correct, instead of accepting his own mistake.
(If you care, the thread is about how Democrats/Liberals/Blacks/Latinos will riot, if Obama isn’t re-elected and/or some are taking to Twitter to threaten Romney. No links to Twitter feeds were provided to substantiate claims.)
(Also, too apparently one ammo website says sales have doubled in the past two weeks…who-coulda-knowed…)
Enhanced Mooching Techniques
Missing the obvious seems to be deeply ingrained into American press culture. Like I’ve said, I’ve seen them pull this crap on stuff were there corporate masters could careless. I think the observation that press thinks they are something special because they report about special things is the core of it.
Spaghetti Lee
I’m glad we’re all able to come clean about this. You see, my story is not that different from yours. My childhood seemed normal at the time-what else could a child with no knowledge of the outside world think-but looking back…looking back, the horrific truth almost makes me weep. George Stephanopolous on the TV, Time Magazine on the bookshelf, the New York Times on the kitchen table! I felt like I was living in a gulag, a concentration camp, and a Supermax prison all at once. Until one day, when my heroic soul welled up within me and said ‘no more! No more of this half-life, this diseased existence!’ Barely escaping the watchful eyes of the guards, I hopped the fence and entered the liberal blogosphere. Ah, the liberal blogosphere! How empty my life had been before I knew this place! This was a kingdom of free men and women, I could tell: no one here ever shouted down others for having unacceptable opinions, no one ever said that perception was as important as reality, and most importantly, no one ever held long-simmering grudges for stupid and petty reasons. Heaven on earth, I tell you! Heaven on earth.
Joel
@Punchy: Agreed with you there. The guy is manic. At least hypomanic.
The rest is bullshit, just blowing in the breeze. Keep in mind that a sizable number of these reporters, managing editors, and certainly the owners, are dyed-in-the-wool republicans. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it organized DPRK propaganda because that’s an effin’ ridiculous comparison. But it’s bullshit to the extreme and these guys need to be fitted for the clownshoes that they so obviously desire.
schrodinger's cat
@gene108: Yes it is the sum of all the forces that is mass* acceleration.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@beltane:
It struck me during the GWB administration that the programming on Fox which was most effective at mainstreaming rightwing agitprop directly into the brains of their viewing audience wasn’t their news division output, it was the dramatic show “24”. Old-fashioned jackbooted fascism is for people who suck at marketing and have shitty production values.
Scribe9
I have long believed that the failing of the “mainstream” media in this political season is to take Mitt Romney seriously as a candidate. He very evidently has no core beliefs and virtually his entire campaign is based on documentable falsehoods and distortions. That is not a serious political candidate. That is a publicity machine. That the media has treated Romney as they would any other candidate for high office is their greatest failure.
MBunge
“Bill Clinton’s consensual relationship with Monica Lewinsky”
I’m just going to do the short version. In every major American corporation, an allegation that the married CEO was screwing an intern would be investigated to some extent. Just the sex alone would be enough to get some of those CEOs fired. Every CEO who responded to the investigation by lying and obstructing it like Clinton did would be fired.
Mike
kd bart
Now, the MSM has the latest twist in their narrative, Obama’s Rebound. Even though, nothing has ever really changed. Obama’s has always had a narrow but electoral college clinching lead where it mattered.
MCA1
@Ash Can: Yes, but what Romney/Rove are going for is having the Mittmentum bullshit demoralize those people on our side of the fence who aren’t 100% sure they’re going to bother to vote, and get them to stay home because they think it won’t matter and Romney’s got it in the bag. It’s the “inevitability” effect they’re shooting for. They wouldn’t be taking this tack if they thought there was a reasonable chance it would fire up more Obama voters than it would demoralize.
Joel
@Spaghetti Lee: Well done. A shot for you, sir.
Kerry Reid
@schrodinger’s cat: I believe that is Andrew “Bell Curve” Sullivan. He is first and foremost a racist conservative twatwaffle, no matter how much he pretends to have adopted Obama as his Own Special Minority Exception to his overall worldview.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@MBunge:
You don’t get out much, do you?
Warren Terra
It’s also the sheer laziness of loving the new administration. If Romney wins (FSM forbid), there will be a transition, and a hundred biographical articles to be written about possible nominees, largely cribbed from Wikipedia. There’s the First Family to reintroduce, and the drama of them moving to DC. If the incumbent wins, there are a couple of cabinet slots that will need refilling as people step down, probably to be filled with people who’ve been toiling away as undersecretaries and are just much less vivid than are the folks who’ve been impotently itching for a taste of power for the last four years. Any political reporter has a good four months of easy stories to write if the challenger wins, maybe more; if the incumbent wins, that only gives them easy material for a week or two.
Culture of Truth
North Korean Army Minister ‘Executed With Mortar Round’
Oct. 24 (Telegraph) – A North Korean army minister was executed with a mortar round for reportedly drinking and carousing during the official mourning period after Kim Jong-il’s death.
On the orders of Kim Jong-un to leave “no trace of him
behind, down to his hair,” according to South Korean media, Kim Chol was forced to stand on a spot that had been zeroed in for a mortar round and “obliterated.”
Scamp Dog
@West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.): NPR being the best news organization in the US is kind of like being the tallest Pygmy in the villiage; true but not impressive.
schrodinger's cat
@Kerry Reid: He is quite the misogynist too. If he weren’t gay himself, he would probably be homophobic to boot.
Reklam
@MBunge: Sorry, not true. Not true at all. First IANYL & TINLA, but not even close to being an accurate assessment of corporate law or contemporary business practice. Consensual sex, up/down/same rung of ladder, is A-OK. And the whole married part making a difference? Nope – irrelevant fact (well to the validity of your claim, not your motivations.)
At best you are not trolling if this was the weird liminal stage of early 1990s with the intern thing or the married thing in 1910s.
one two seven
Slightly OT, but speaking of “close-race, both-sides-do-it, center-right-nation”…
If you could ask Ray Suarez one question, what would it be?
Joey Giraud
@schrodinger’s cat:
Wrong! It’s the sum of the forces equals the sum of the masses times acceleration.
Every mass ( excepting black holes, of course ) is ultimately composed of a collection of smaller masses.
It’s very important to be precise at all times because, well just because.
If the question involved multiple forces, then the teacher may have had a good reason to mark the answer wrong. But more likely the teacher was just being a martinet.
Reklam
@Higgs Boson’s Mate: I wonder if he thinks Alan Turing was a true danger to the Crown too.
Redshift
@gene108:
I took physics in both high school and college, and I can honestly say that I have never seen Newton’s Second Law written this way (and insisting on a sigma is even more bizarre.) The way it is generally expressed is F=ma, and then it is explained that F is the sum of forces. Physical laws are intended to reduce effects to simple descriptions, and the important fact expressed by the Second Law is the relationship of force, mass, and acceleration, not the fact that there may be lots of forces acting on an object at once.
If the Second Law was taught that way in class, then I suppose the teacher can justify marking it wrong for failure to regurgitate his/her quirk, but if I were a bright student who was already interested in this stuff before taking the class, damn right I would call it out if I wrote the Second Law the same way nearly everyone in the world does and had it marked wrong.
Maude
@MBunge:
Was it HP where the CEO was fired? He had an affair and had to go. He landed at another company.
gene108
@schrodinger’s cat:
I found the comment interesting because to me, it says a lot about right-wing cognitive dissonance and the willingness to disbelieve facts, because they contradict a person’s world view and/or view of their own superiority.
Also, too insulting someone else for your failure as part of right-wing victimhood and paranoia that permeates those folks.
Why the media experiment is failing is because the media realizes at least 27% of their audience self-centered, smug, assholes and they need to provide content that appeals to them, in order to stay in business.
MikeJ
@MBunge: You’re funny.
mdblanche
@one two seven: Who are you and why should I care?
schrodinger's cat
@Joey Giraud: I assumed that we are talking about a point object. Otherwise we have to take into account torques as well as forces. For many problems, earth can be considered a pt object.
Joey Giraud
@one two seven:
If you could ask Ray Suarez one question, what would it be
In my kind-of-totebagger era, I always thought Suarez was the very acme of a principled journalist. But I don’t watch PBS anymore.
Has Rey gone to the dark side? Say it ain’t so.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Reklam:
Doffs white hat.
McJulie
I was a journalism major for a while, spent year on the college newspaper, so I’ve seen the root causes from the other side, and I’m pretty sure we will not see better mainstream national journalism until there’s a financial incentive.
Which probably means “never.”
Although, personally, I think the 24-hour cable news channels are probably the worst thing to happen to journalism in the history of the human race, and might be single-handedly responsible for destroying our country. So if there was a way to just make them disappear, that would help a lot.
Steeplejack
One of the things that kills me is how over the course of my adult political life Noam Chomsky has somehow morphed from crazy far-left “hates America” loon to reasonable and accurate critic of American power and the media. Somehow I don’t think it’s Chomsky that has changed so much.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988, written with Edward S. Herman) is still relevant today.
one two seven
@Joey Giraud:
Not saying he’s on the dark side at all, in fact I quite like him. Just curious because I’m seeing him speak tonight and I may have a chance to ask a question which I’d like to be on the current state of the media.
one two seven
@mdblanche:
I’m a vociferous reader of this blog and its comments section and rare, but occasional poster. As for why, see above.
Joey Giraud
@schrodinger’s cat:
I see, the infamous “point being.”
Whereas my point was mere pedantic snark.
schrodinger's cat
@Joey Giraud: You can snark but it works, ask Newton!
Elizabelle
@McJulie:
It would seem that President Obama despises them with a vengeance too, and with good reason.
However, it’s never wise to turn your back on a large predator, and you can’t ignore that too many people absorb the infotainment purveyed, even while they might scoff at it, too.
Weirdly enough, I listened in on a Mitt Romney teleconference with average Joe voters (allegedly), and one of Mitt’s comments was that Obama should have talked to the nation more in a time of war.
I still think Obama has not used “old” broadcast media well enough.
Cable news jackals and infotainment fill the vacuum.
Joey Giraud
@one two seven:
I have a feeling that Rey understands much more then he can ever show on screen. On “Talk of The Nation,” which was a great show before Juan Williams trashed it, it often seemed that Rey had some perceptive and relevant question in mind but had to pose the question in milquetoast terms to give the target some room to escape.
So the real question is; what to ask Rey that he can actually answer?
Needless to say, he won’t be able to tell the truth in response to “is the mainstream media trustworthy?”
PeakVT
@one two seven: something like these might be fun:
Why does the media feel the need to be fair to both sides instead of feeling the need to give the facts to its audience? What happens if both “sides” are wrong?
Does a mainstream media organization like PBS understand that the criticism from the two sides of the political spectrum is different? ie one thinks you are too liberal, and the other thinks you get the facts wrong and confine reporting to established narratives
aimai
@MBunge:
That is obviously false. David Vitter–still in Congress. Newt Gingerich? Three time sex scandal and would still be in congress for all of that. Mr. Wide Stance? Didn’t leave congress. And if you think that major CEO’s get fired for consensual sex with a) prostitutes and b) underlings you’ve got another think coming. Maybe one or two of them get caught in a power play in which some indiscretion is used to force them out but you’d have to have been born under a cabbage leaf to believe that the majority of them aren’t still in place and still philandering. What are you, three? Sex: powerful people can buy it and steal it and pretty much never get caught or forced out. That’s why they are powerful people. Viz: England’s current pedophilia and necrophilia scandal which apparently was an “open secret” for years.
aimai
Matt McIrvin
@Joey Giraud: Actually, it’s the sum of the forces equals the rate of change of momentum, which is not necessarily easily expressed as a mass times an acceleration. For relativistic massive particles, it’s gamma * mv, where gamma is the time-dilation factor and depends on speed, so the rate of change isn’t necessarily pointing in the same direction as the acceleration. For massless particles, it’s energy/c, and you also have to take fields into account.
And in general relativity, the best way to say it is really that the net non-gravitational force causes a deviation from free-fall geodesics (among other problems, the energy/momentum density stored in gravitational fields themselves becomes very hard to define, and not independent of coordinate system; this got Albert Einstein terribly confused for about a year before he decided he had to live with it).
That’s before even really putting quantum mechanics into the picture…
Being pedantic is all very well and good, but I get a little annoyed when teachers are pedantic about something without realizing how deep the pedantry can go.
MikeJ
@McJulie:
I think in the early days of CNN they never expected people to just leave it on all day. It was just a way to get a newscast any time. Then the other newsrooms started leaving it on (I know we did where I worked.) And you just see the same stories all day, blah, blah, blah. Nothing worse than reporters saying you’re boring, so things got sexed up so you could watch for eight hours at a stretch. Once the sexed up stories were on CNN, every newsroom that left CNN on so they wouldn’t miss anything important picked up the same crap.
I think OJ was probably the breaking point. After that is was nothing but garbage all day, and they defined what was “news” for everyone else.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@PeakVT:
Already covered; “See? Both sides do it.”
Joey Giraud
@one two seven:
Hey, you could ask him if he thinks that careerism or perverse financial incentives have influenced coverage.
He might say some damning things, properly encoded as trivial observations of course.
Elizabelle
@PeakVT:
You’re kind of giving him an out with the wording of this question, because, in our political discourse, it’s predominantly one side that is way wrong. And frequently lies fulsomely.
I am thinking your “both sides are wrong” question would reassure the Glenn Kessler types of the world. The ones where “pants on fire” and “mostly true” are equal. Where “mostly true” means: most other people would go with “true”, but I gotta be a contrarian. ‘Cause that’s how I roll.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@PeakVT:
Here’s how I would phrase the question:
1) For the producers, reporters, etc. in our current mass media news industry, where do their loyalties lie?
2) If the answer to #1 is NOT “with their audience” then why should we believe anything they have to say? If the answer to #1 is “with their audience”, then where are the tools for us in the audience to influence them in the direction of creating a better and more satisfying product?
3) If the answer to #2 is “there are no such tools”, then go back to question #1 and answer it again, because you got it wrong the first time.
Lex
@Elizabelle: Yes, the ’96 act (supported by Clinton) did help bring us to this state of affairs, but that didn’t affect newspapers, by and large.
As for all the corporate cash, the real culprit is the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case (2010).
Corner Stone
@MBunge:
It’s good to see that whatever remote monastery you’re commenting from now has internet access.
SFAW
@one two seven:
Hmm, tough choice. It would be either:
1) Will DougJ ever stop trolling himself and the other FPers?
or
2) Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?
ETA: And, no, I was never high when I listened to them. (For you old farts who get the reference.)
Joey Giraud
@Matt McIrvin:
You’re right, and obviously can go even further, you relativistic moralizer!
Let’s not even get into possible minute adjustments to relativity that dark energy may require. ( I mean, let’s not. Beyond my education grade. )
But I do know that every good teacher knows it’s better to give simple if not completely accurate theories first, details and corrections can come later.
gene108
@Redshift:
I took AP physics in high school and thankfully got out of having to take it in college.
My physics teacher was fanatic about stressing the multiple forces on an object is why it’s Fnet and she said it up front F=MA would be dinged. It had to be Fnet=M*A.
I guess from my education in the subject, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people, who are just satisfied with thinking F=MA is good enough to describe Newton’s Second Law of Motion.
I just find his sense of righteous victimhood symbolic of the right’s sense of entitlement to their own set of facts.
max
@Spaghetti Lee:
{applause}
no one ever held long-simmering grudges for stupid and petty reasons.
That said, I like my long-simmering grudges.
Doug has a point though: there has long been a tendency to a universal point of view that it is not so much objective as simply the NY-DC view. And there’s the nasty tendency for technocrats to be corrupted.
So I can concur with the wingnuts that the wingnut point of view (along with many many other points of view) is not so frequently well represented in aeverage newsrooms, while also agreeing that said wingnut point of view tends to be full of shit.
max
[‘Fox would be totally at home in North Korea though.’]
Higgs Boson's Mate
@SFAW:
I was always high when I listened to them.
mdblanche
@one two seven: I’m sorry; that was my question for Suarez.
Lit3Bolt
Jesus fucking Christ.
DougJ, do you expect journalists to be a race of angels with the sacred duty to save you and your friends from thinking a single misinformed thought?
Is journalism some ancient secret monastic order of warrior-priests sworn to exorcise negative emotions and thoughts and feelings wherever they are found in our great nation?
Do you believe that in journalism school there’s some secret initiation room in the back where journalism professors reveal that they are in reality a race of octopus faced sea-dwellers come to destroy mankind via fatuous media narratives?
You seem to think journalism is a higher calling, like a free press is something that just swoops in and saves us like Superman. And maybe if our free press didn’t have to worry about payroll and production time and wood pulp costs, that would be possible (for example, Bill Moyers has been all over the shit you and Steve M just described. Where’s a little Bill Moyers love?)
But journalism in this country isn’t like that. It’s more like the record industry in the really bad old days. Just think of the New York Times as Madonna (some decent hits, mostly turds), the Washington Post as Phil Collins (inexplicably popular), and Time and Newsweek as Creed and Nickleback. This isn’t journalism, just like the aforementioned “artists” don’t really make music, at least not without a lot of help of nameless backup musicians and production artists. It’s a Lowest-Common Denominator-Conventional-Wisdom Shit-Stream. And it sells.
Journalists tried to tell the truth. Some people listened. Most did not. People knew the truth about Reagan from the get-go. Expose after expose was written in the newspapers. The truth was there in plain sight, but the public saw Reagan on TV, and he was their genial grandfather, god damn it, and that visual image was fixed, no matter the word jello salad that dribbled from his mouth. So after his reelection, he’s the Teflon President. Iran-Contra? Still Teflon! That’s the story. That’s the framing.
So why is the media beside themselves with Denver? It’s because Obama did the same thing that the Clintons did, which enraged the DC Press. They didn’t feed the Beast enough, or tried to control the flow of information in a way that offended delicate egos. There wasn’t enough BBQ invitationals or chances to play a friendly game of touch football with the President. In other words, “they trashed the place, and it isn’t their place.”
Romney will be nicer. They just know it. He’ll start a war for them and give them lots of dreamy access with officials and soldiers, as well as insider scoops on the entire Romney-Brood-Hive-Mind, which numbers at 127 at the last count. And all 127 must be interviewed and giggled with about stock portfolios and there must be solemn nods exchanged about how crushing the White Man’s Burden is to bear.
It’s not that journalists hate Democrats per se, although some do. It’s just that the Clintons, and now the Obamas, have tried to change the rules about access and information and is not treating the DC press like the demigods that they think themselves to be. The Republicans, with their own dedicated media apparatus and narratives that are quickly formulated and supplied, keep the journalists busy and giddy with the tidbits they receive. “Oh boy! Bush at War!! It’s so exciting I can hardly wait to write the hagiography!” squealed Bob Woodword, rushing home to his Macbook Pro.
Denver was at last a crack in Obama’s media self. He appeared confused and timid for the first time in a long time, before a wide audience, and the press has gleefully, and gratefully, savaged him for it and elevated his opponent, regardless of the merits or the political impact.
So you think America is as bad as North Korea? At least in North Korea they suppress the truth. In America, the truth is told, and nobody cares or listens, because they’re all too busy listening to the media equivalent of Nickleback and Korn.
PeakVT
Okay, the second half of the first question is worded poorly. My intention was to point out that there’s often a third voice that does get an issue right but is never really represented. But it brings in a second issue regardless of how it’s worded, so I shouldn’t have included it to begin with.
Lurking Canadian
@Steeplejack: It became clear to me many years ago that Chomsky’s opinions about American foreign policy are indistinguishable from those of Charles Krauthammer.
The only real difference between them is that Chomsky thinks the way America acts in the world is bad.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@McJulie: I’d go with AM talk radio as being the most destructive media force. How anyone can still buy the “left-wing media” horseshit is beyond me.
pseudonymous in nc
OTish: the Texas AG just published an bullshitty dick-waggling open letter threatening to arrest OSCE election observers if they get within 100 feet of the polls, which shows a remarkable lack of self-awareness with regard to the role of election observers in noting cases of governmental intimidation.
DFH no.6
@McJulie:
Nah, that would be hate radio.
Much larger audience, much greater influence, than cable news.
Few of us listen to it, but it’s big — in all it’s many and nefarious manifestations — with the fascists.
Hate radio is far more important than even Fox “News” to the countless local fascists with whom I am surrounded at work and home here in Joe Arpaio County, AZ.
Oh, and speaking of fascists, that’s some grade A bullshit by MBunge up there.
Joey Giraud
@Steeplejack:
Where do you see this? I haven’t seen Noam Chomsky being mainstream legitimized. The MSM still mocks him, when they mention him at all.
Lit3Bolt
Let me rephrase my analogy a bit, to show you how bad the 24 news cycle is for us and our country and people as human beings.
Imagine Nickleback.
Now imagine Nickleback trying to come up with a new song EVERY HOUR of EVERY DAY, ENDLESSLY. AND THAT SHIT SELLS.
That’s our current media environment.
DFH no.6
And I see West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.) got there just before me.
Great minds and all that…
ranchandsyrup
Public Enemy stuck in my head now due to post title.
Yes
Was the start of my last jam
So here it is again, another def jam
But since I gave you all a little something
That we knew you lacked
They still consider me a new jack
All the critics you can hang’em
I’ll hold the rope
But they hope to the pope
And pray it ain’t dope
Lurking Canadian
@pseudonymous in nc: Would they be committing some kind of crime to get within 100 feet of a polling place, or is he just going to arrest them on the grounds that he has the biggest swinging dick and no damn furriner is going to tell him how to run an election?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Lurking Canadian:
Well that, and that Chomsky can never look forward to the day when he leaps out of his wheelchair crying “Mein Fuehrer! I can walk!”.
catclub
@Joey Giraud: Steeplejack was describing the evolution of his thoughts.
Noam Chomsky and Ward Churchill are still uber-scary to the general media. In spite of the completely uncontroversially true things they say.
DFH no.6
@SFAW:
We are, no doubt, all bozos on this bus.
And I wasn’t always high when I listened to Firesign.
YoohooCthulhu
In related news, does anyone know who this Jean Cochran woman is? Admittedly I’m normally listening to Morning Edition half-awake, but I normally get a couple instances of it, and I notice she’s been flogging the “Romney Surge” story particularly hard lately.
catclub
@Lit3Bolt: “give them lots of dreamy access with officials and soldiers”
I would disagree with this. They liked GWBush because he insulted them. Romney would be even more so. The first 8/10ths of his campaign he gave NO media access, and they only started to hate him. But if he were in charge, they would love him for it.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@DFH no.6: True dat… Right-wing hate talk is on 24-7 it seems. And even the non-political AM talk stuff leans far to the right (Dr. Laura — is she is still on — has a very conservative perspective; Coast-to-Coast AM has become bible-thumpin’-fear-science radio). How many rightwingers have radio programs now? Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, Savage, just to name a few. They’ve got A.M. to P.M. coverage.
Dennis G.
And a Romney rally is very much like a North Korea rally as both have dupes in color coded costumes making images.
Hal
@Tractarian:
I was just reading yesterday on Kos a commenters saying they expected Gallup to start adjusting there polls to match starting this weekend. That by Monday, Obama would be in the lead just in time for the election and Gallup to save face.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Hal:
So the future looks like Rasmussen pulling last-minute credibility out of their hat, forever?
Democrat Partisan Asshole
Right there with you, although my main source of concern is that, unlike a propaganda state, where everyone generally knows that their media is full of shit, our media are actively and successfully reprogramming people’s minds – and yet we believe that we’re free actors untainted by external influences. Take a few weeks off from watching the tube, reading the papers, reading recent books, listening to music, reading the internet, and then come back to it. Doesn’t take long and I’m not urging a “Burn Your TV” kind of thing. Just a few weeks of downtime for the brain. What you see – as opposed to what you didn’t see before – will floor you.
I did this and discovered that I’m being sold a society and a way of looking at life that I do not want, that I find morally bankrupt, that is mortgaging our futures at the expense of in-the-moment gratification, and perhaps most significant – something I wouldn’t let my hypothetical nonexistent children imbibe under any circumstances whatsoever. Psychic poison is what our media is peddling. They and their vile system should be put to the torch.
@beltane: This.
Steeplejack
@Joey Giraud:
I don’t think Chomsky has been legitimized by the mainstream media. But I do think there are a lot of people (like myself) who, as they have awakened from the slumber, have realized that Chomsky is not the crackpot he was painted to be.
SFAW
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Well, that explains it, then. (No, I have no idea what I mean by that.)
tamied
@pseudonymous in nc: If I were an observer, I know where I’d want to be posted.
pseudonymous in nc
@Lurking Canadian:
There are anti-loitering and electioneering laws, and observers are mindful of them, even though their treaty accreditation means they ain’t loitering, and that trumps Texas state jurisdiction. So it’s basically the kind of dick-swinging for public consumption that, if done in Foreign, would be written up as “Observers faced threats of arrest from state authorities and were restricted in their ability to observe the voting process.”
SFAW
@DFH no.6:
Yeah, I’m goin’ back to the shadows again, I am.
Soonergrunt
@Corner Stone: He’s saying that the press frequently settles on narratives that have little to do with objective reality, and that these narratives sometimes actually drive the facts to conform with the story instead of the other way around.
In the instant case, he’s discussing how a lot of the press is reporting that Romney has momentum going into the last 10 days of the election, even though an objective viewing of the electorate reveals that this is not in fact the case.
Paul
Not necessarily. They guy who started the brokerage firm “Interactive Brokers” is from Hungary. He is convinced Obama is a socialist.
And during the tea bagger rallies in 2009, I remember one of the baggers was from Russia. He claimed he knew socialism since he was from Russia and that Obama was a socialist.
Joey Giraud
@Steeplejack:
I wish my old friends were as alert as you.
My only beef with Chomsky is his almost absolute bias in favor of institutional or structural explanations. It’s a useful viewpoint and not very common, but there are individuals who have an outsized impact on things and Chomsky virtually always dismisses these factors with prejudice.
But it’s a small beef really, given the value of his work.
Joey Giraud
@Soonergrunt:
Wait a second, first we were talking force and acceleration, but now you go on about momentum?
Which form of Newton? pick one and stick with it!
ranchandsyrup
@Paul: When your your cultural history is enmeshed with any sort of ism, you see that ism everywhere. See, Rand, Ayn. Oh how I wish we weren’t held captive by her feverish dreams of teh communists hurting her family.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@Joey Giraud:
Fig!
kay
TIME has Obama plus 5 in Ohio, which is a very good number. Better than I expected.
I think they have to report that, because, TIME
Where’s political observer? I want to jeer at him :)
grandpa john
@McJulie:
absolutely this. that is why I don’t watch them. same talking heads with no exceptional ability or knowledge, regurgitating the same talking points night after night. Hell I get more from watching the Weather Channel than from these bloviating lying scum.
ranchandsyrup
@kay: i think halperin and Jokeline’s heads exploded at that number.
Ruckus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
You could do like Italians did at towards the end of WWII and hang them from lightposts. Then the dogs won’t get sick and we can spit on them or throw rocks. The smell isn’t too great after a while but it would probably be worth it. The only problem is of course who gets to choose. And do you choose the owners/publishers or the bylinners or both or…
kay
@ranchandsyrup:
I’m thinking about commenting in all caps. That may create momentum, as I understand the theory.
I voted yesterday and tried to project a lot of “enthusiasm”, too.
We can play this media game! We just didn’t know the rules!
ranchandsyrup
@kay: Holy crap kay, that made me guffaw!
Also, too, if President Obama woke up every day, went to the west wing balcony and yelled “Terrorist Acts” and “Acts of Terrorism”, terrorism would end. QED.
grandpa john
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Where as presently they are still pushing the narrative and bringing down the net averages by flooding the poll averaging sites with a daily flood of polls all with their 4 point repub bias.
West of the Rockies (formerly Frank W.)
@kay: Allow me to present a reasonable facsimile to our old pal P.O.
TIME HAS OBAMA UP BY ONLY 5 IN OHIO.
Looks like Romney is going to be our next president!
cckids
@gene108:
AGAIN?? Jesus, we should have all invested in the ammo/gun stocks during the last election. Retirement plan!!
These people should be praying that President Obama is reelected.
Cris (without an H)
Funny you should say that in the context of NPR, because I had the very same feeling during the ’90s when I was a big Public Radio junkie (listened to it at work all day, every day).
We would listen to the BBC World Service at noon, and NPR News at the top of each hour. The contrast between which stories each news service thought required coverage was stark. And then comparing either to the weekly dose of anti-globalist, anti-corporate radicalism we got from Alternative Radio, and the news directors really seemed to be living in a weird little parallel universe, unconnected to what was affecting people.
As you say, the Lewinsky scandal was the epitome, though not the only example.
fuckwit
What fucked it up for us was Reagan-era dumping of the Fairness Doctrine.
These are PUBLIC airwaves, which should be a PUBLIC resource, used for the PUBLIC good!
When I was a kid, that’s how it was. The news was boring, dull, and actually informative. Edwin R Murrow was already gone, but we had Walter Cronkite.
But then everything fell to shit in the 80s.
With the end of the fairness doctrine, suddenly the thinking became that the media are a PRIVATE resource used to enrich corporations. It was about profit, and that meant it was about entertainment, not news.
Here me now. NEWS IS NOT ENTERTAINMENT, and should not be!
Drama, conflict, and grand sweeping narrative arcs are what CREATIVE WRITERS do, not reporters. We don’t have reporters nowadays, we have entertainers, drama writers.
It’s always been propaganda, in its own way, but it used to be American propaganda– i.e. the red-baiting during the early days of the Cold War. Nowadays it’s corporate propaganda, all about selling some kind of exciting narrative.
Combine that with the 24/7 need in the post-CNN days to have assholes on the TV and radio nattering endlessly and saying nothing, and it gets surreal.
“Network” wasn’t a satire, it was prophesy. I remember when that movie came out, and we all went “ha ha”. Ain’t laughing now.
This is why our “news” media is a total lump of steaming shit. All of it.
This is why the only actual news we can hope to get, is from cartoonists like Michael Moore and comedians like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.
Cris (without an H)
He’s a Magyar Ayn Rand
cckids
@MBunge:
The problem with your argument, in Clinton’s case, is that his “employers”–the citizens of the USA–had the chance to fire him. And reelected him in a landslide.
Origuy
@Maude:
Mark Hurd was let go at HP after getting involved with a contractor, not a direct hire. Whether they actually had sex or not has never been clear. The reason he was fired was irregularities in his expense reports.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/08/06/hp-ceo-mark-hurd-resigns-_n_673858.html
cckids
@ranchandsyrup:
FTFY
Patricia Kayden
The Electoral College still looks great for President Obama, but the national polls are tight or show Romney in the lead, which is depressingly scary.
Ohio still looks good. Just saw a Time poll showing President Obama up 5% in Ohio.
I never gave a penny to the Obama campaign in 2008 because I just didn’t believe Americans were crazy enough to elect a ticket with Palin on it. But this time around, I’ve given something everytime I get paid.
Hopefully Mourdock’s comments will be another stinker for Romney’s effort to get votes from women.
PJ
@Lit3Bolt: Amen, Brother.
T. Bombadil
A college professor typed this?
We are doomed.
MM
Radio news was a source of corporate pride starting during World War II. CBS and NBC hired many real experts to report. Competition after the war kept them working hard on a real news service. Bill Paley at CBS and David Sarnoff at NBC were willing to spend a lot of money against not so much profit for the news divisions because it gave their networks prestige.
Once network television was able to expand out of the northeast, they poured resources into news gathering. Murrow’s Boys, especially at CBS reported into the 70s. All three network news broadcasts had labelled news commentary every night. The networks produced special reports on issues of the day. The correspondents could ad-lib a knowledgable broadcast with breaking news.
The networks had foreign correspondents in Europe, Tokyo, Vietnam, Cairo, Israel who actually did reporting on the evening news on a regular basis.
Once the networks were sold to outside corporations the new owners looked to the news business as a profit center rather than prestige center and started cutting back.
The scrapping of the Fairness Doctrine and the new consolidation of media outlets has made it possible to crowd out voices that don’t help the bottom line. This allowed hate radio to prosper. The corporate owners probably agree with a lot of what is said there.
The average national reporter is very rich now and identifies with rich people rather than working class as they used to do when they too were working class.
I watched Cronkite every weeknight from about 1964 until his retirement. I’ve always listened to BBC World Service, first on shortwave and now on satellite radio. I also heard a lot of Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, Radio RSA The Voice of South Africa, Deutche Welle, etc.
A college professor recommended that I subscribe to the Economist airmailed from England in its old newsprint paper form. There was never a lot of foreign news in the USA, but it is much less now.
CNN when Ted Turner owned it had a lot of live on the spot coverage. Now it’s pretty tabloid from what I hear (I don’t have cable). I hear that CNN International is pretty good.
Every once in a while you would see a blog post showing the covers of the European, Asian and US editions of Time and/or Newsweek and the foreign editions would have a real story and the US edition would have something about ghosts.
I started reading blogs in 1998 or 1999 because the TV news was driving me crazy. I read a lot of them, not knowing anything about their points of view. I’ve figured out which ones know what they’re talking about and check in on them daily. Balloon Juice is one of them.
I used to tape a lot of news broadcasts and also bought a lot of old time radio news broadcasts (I was a history and political science major). The contrast in listening to an old Meet the Press from 1973 and now is amazing. It was a half an hour of good questions from mostly real reporters asked of one newsmaker guest. It wasn’t gotcha or fluff.
I wish we could go back and take a different path.
Haydnseek
@T. Bombadil: Exactly. Not that different? You obviously don’t know a single fucking thing about North Korea. Oh shit! I just got sucked into my first DougJ troll! Rest assured, it won’t happen again
Steeplejack
@MM:
Good post.
Haydnseek
@Trinity: Of course we’re fed bullshit, but we also have the antidote. In North Korea, not so much.
Haydnseek
@SFAW: You didn’t have to be high to listen to Firesign, but sometimes it added an extra dimension……..
Ohio Mom
@fuckwit: Yes, Yes, The Fairness Doctrine.
There wouldn’t be a such thing as Rush Limbaugh if we still had the Fairness Doctrine, which, as described in Ezra Klein’s “Everything you need to Know about the Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” included that:
“…programs on politics were required to include opposing opinions on the topic under discussion. Broadcasters had an active duty to determine the spectrum of views on a given issue and include those people best suited to representing those views in their programming.
Additionally, the rule mandated that broadcasters alert anyone subject to a personal attack in their programming and give them a chance to respond, and required any broadcasters who endorse political candidates to invite other candidates to respond…”
It all sounds so quaint now.
SFAW
@Haydnseek:
I understand, not really judging anyone. I just thought it was unusual that I never did. Might explain why I remember it, after 40 years. Or not.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@Ohio Mom: But the Fairness Doctrine applies to the public broadcast spectrum. Once cable took over and the signal went on on privately-owned wires instead of public airwaves, the Doctrine was doomed. Maybe not even legal.
Terry Chay
@Maude: he was fired for using company money for the affai and to possibly cover up the affair. The fact that he had it didn’t register a blip… Else Larry Ellison would have been fired every day of his married life.
Terry Chay
@Maude: he was fired for using company money for the affai and to possibly cover up the affair. The fact that he had it didn’t register a blip… Else Larry Ellison would have been fired every day of his married life.