Skip to main content

let the next british invasion be the press

i admit it-- the ease of the alito confirmation was disheartening. i took a little break from politics, downloaded a bunch of justice league unlimited episodes. they're great there's a dark undercurrent of paranoia fostered by illegal actions by a covert govt. agency, just took my mind off of everything.

during my little break i thought about the clinton impeachment. it was over a lie about a blowjob. the lie came out in an investigation that began by looking into alleged financial improprieties during his days as governor and through several odd turns, and acquitals for clinton at every one, it all came down to the fact that monica doesn't swallow. i saw a great post recently comparing the coverage of clinton after the lewinsky revelations and the coverage of the illegal nsa spying revelations. it might not be too surprising that there was much more coverage of clinton and lewinsky. clinton was under such incredible scrutiny, more than any other president in my lifetime, except perhaps nixon, but i was three so he doesn't count. if the media had covered the iran-contra affair the way they did the ballad of the blue dress would reagan still be so beloved, would bush sr. have ever become president? inquiring minds want to know. somehow through it all, through all of the outrage, the calls for his resignation in the media clinton remained popular. no one would leave him alone with a niece or female dog but they were fine with his leadership.

where would we be now if the media covered bush with any credible degree of scrutiny? what if all the people against the moral relativism of letting even a small lie about sex go unpunished were as enflamed by lies about war, protecting our troops, illegal spying, illegal renditions, torture, tax cuts, the economy, social security, our security, medicaid, katrina, education, the budget......every few weeks a new revelation comes out in the media detailing the falsehoods in the lead up to war-- the foreign media. these stories seem to go nowhere in the domestic media. the excuse is that the people are not interested. i think this is false, otherwise bush's poll numbers wouldn't be where they are. think about it: despite the media saturation of the lewinsky affair clinton's numbers remained high, despite the anemic coverage of any one of bush's impeachable offenses, and the media parroting of his talking points bush's numbers remain low. even with the blatant falsehoods being bounced around cable news shows people have gleaned enough to know that bush is basically a failure as a president. if we can't have an actual liberal press can we at least have the foreign press as exchange students for a while?

via digby i found thess great articles from eric alterman here and here on the myth of the liberal media.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

'Anti-racism', All Trap, No Honey: A Discourse About Discourse

One of the things that prevents me from writing more often is the sense that I'm just writing the same thing repeatedly from a slightly different angle. In a nutshell, all I'm saying is that moral idealism substituted for material goals will not lead to justice, but is an argument against materialism. I'm a dumb person's low rent Adolph Reed Jr. translator. I'm a "class reductionist" who understands that when the discourse is reduced to just class there's nothing as important as food, water and shelter that's left out. I often find myself contending with people who insist that there is, unable to name anything. They don't understand that they're making an argument against economic redistribution, or they don't care. There are no concrete manifestations of systemic racism or any oppression that are not dealt with through economic redistribution. When people say that economic redistribution won't end racism, what they mean is that
Post a Comment
Read more

The Hydra Heads of Wokeness

Have you ever tried to explain why a meme is funny or true to someone completely unfamiliar? You first have to explain the image if unknown, then the context of the image and its relationship to the idea meant to be conveyed. Then you explain the wit behind the connection, while pointedly avoiding any other connections that could be made. Despite your explanation the listener, lacking your context, creates his own. In creating his own connections he creates his own meaning for the meme. Obviously, your only recourse was to detail the harm that came from the listener's inability to make sense of the meme as you had. When I say that wokeness works like a meme , this is what I mean. It only functions for people who think they get the underlying idea. It lacks explanatory power for anyone not already versed in the cultural language. More important, it lacks any ability to address critique by those who reject its premises or answer basic questions about the underlying assertions. Asking
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cuckoo Movement

A reed warbler raising a common cuckoo chick it hatched from an egg surreptitiously placed in its nest by the cuckoo's parent “Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”―  George Orwell Parasite to Virus Brood parasites are species that manipulate other organisms to raise their young for them. Among the best known of brood parasites is the cuckoo.  A number of cuckoo species have specialized to lay their eggs among hosts whose eggs theirs mimic closely enough to provide protective camouflage. The eggs hatch sooner than host eggs, the chicks grow faster, and they often eject the eggs or hatchlings of the host from the nest. The cuckoo chicks begin to mimic the cries of the host young to encourage the fostering birds to keep up with their growth to the detriment of their own young. Following one of the first documented cases of computer espionage in the mid 80s, the concept of brood parasitism was applied to malware.
Post a Comment
Read more