The Reality

The Times’ Ian Urbina wrote this about the pro-insurance company activism that is currently pushing a sort of Chewbacca Offense at Congressmembers’ townhall ‘debates’:

The tenor of some of the debates has become extreme. Ms. Pelosi has accused people at recent protests of carrying signs associating the Democratic plan with Nazi swastikas and SS symbols, and some photographs showing such signs have been posted on the Web.

Pelosi DIDN’T!

Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused this woman:

of carrying a sign that associated Obama’s reform of the insurance industry with Hitler.

or was it this woman?

An accusation… is it true or false?

We’re not to know. Apparently it’s not The Times‘ job to actually assess whether such things are true. Maybe Pelosi is lying. After all, the picture above and the video that GOP officials have posted on the web, or the non-stop Nazi analogies coming from talk radio gasbags and Fox News nutballs, don’t prove anything, right? Nah, “He Said/She Said” is a safer construct.

This journalistic voice is simply not respectable, it does not educate readers, it is not truthful, it is the reason why people don’t trust news organizations.

It’s no longer a surprise when media companies fail to investigate charges and report on the findings, opting instead to set up the issue as a ‘debate’ between partisans, even if one side of the debate is complete ‘lies’ and utterly ‘insane.’

Amazingly, in this instance, The Times does report on it, and they still call it an ‘accusation’. I believe therefore that this is a perfect distillation of what is so ludicrous about our broken media.

They don’t want to get wrapped up in a partisan battle, after all…

The essentially modern American partisan battle, that is, between liars and cowards.

(This, by the way, is also why we can’t have nice things.)

NewsCorp is a force of destruction.
Any actually reputable media outlet that claims any journalistic integrity, but which doesn’t call out FOX News, is partially responsible.

For what?
Dead cops, for one.

Let’s look at the shooting in Pittsburgh, where a activist 22-yr old Republican, wearing a bullet-proof vest, armed with a .22 rife, a handgun and an AK-47, killed three cops because of his “hatred of our Zionist-controlled government,” the impending martial law, and the suspension of the 2nd Amendment.

Whoa, what would make that kid think that any of those things are true? He loved John McCain, so what? McCain didn’t tell him to kill cops…

Oh, that’s right, there’s a 24-hour news channel on free basic cable dedicated to paranoid conspiracy theories, armageddon, eliminationism, and inspiring the heavily-armed hatred of liberals at any cost and in militaristic tones.

Here’s the thing: I don’t recall homicidal frenzy being a normal part of the recessions of 1981-82, 1991-92 or 2001. What’s so different about now?

First, the body count:

• Knoxville UU Church shooter actually wanted to kill “every single liberal and all Democrats in the Senate.”
• 7 residents, 1 nurse, killed in NC nursing home shooting. [AP]
• Man kills wife, five kids, himself, after being fired. [CNN]
• 6 dead and 1 critical after Santa Clara massacre. [Register]
• Ohio family found dead in suspected murder-suicide. [CNN]
• Funeral, for four killed Oakland police. [MSNBC]
• Binghamton, NY, 14 killed in murder-suicide at immigration center.

Murder suicide notes don’t often blame “liberals.”

Could the difference be that not only do we now have a Democrat in the White House during a painful recession, but now there exists a full-time conservative TV apparatus that uses eliminationist, paranoid, violent propaganda to fear-monger and whip-up angry and depressed people (the sole product of recessions) into believing that liberals are to blame for their pain?

FOX is also telling people, that not only is the President a “Radical Left-winger” but that he is a “reverse racist” minority who may not even be an American citizen… plus, he “pals around with terrorists” — as Sarah Palin made clear during the campaign. All of that libelous hate mongering is the cherry on top for these crazies.

Liberals want to take your guns, they want to make your kids gay and they used their racial quotas to give your jobs to undeserving minorities. Produced in two-minute segments. All day, every day.

Hell, Fox made this same case, that Liberals were to blame for everything, even when Conservatives controlled every branch of government. Now FOX just makes the same case louder because they don’t have to spend half their time apologizing for Bush’s failures.

If only cops weren’t getting killed as a result. Maybe FOX News hoped that only Democratic Senators would would be the targets.

Sarah Palin, what happens when you equate your political opponents with your battlefield enemies? People die.

If any reporters out there want to try to tell the story behind the blood bath that has been 2009, watch FOX.

UPDATE: 6-11-2009: After the assassination of an OB/GYN doctor at an abortion clinic in Kansas, and the attack on the National Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. by a white-supremacist and “birther” this video from Media Matters says it all:

This place is too conservative to work.

Headlines are insane. Usually the New York Post or The Daily News vie for the biggest font. Other areas of competition are for infantile nicknames and abbreviations, Hizzoner, Nabe, are some of the most annoying.

Across town at the Old Gray Lady, the funniest headlines are the ones that try the hardest to not be criticized as liberal. The New York Times is apparently scared of being called liberal. How else to explain this headline:

Democrats See Risk and Reward if Party Sweeps

Holy. Slippery. Fuck. What!?

The point of a political parties is to win elections. This year, Democrats are going to win the big elections. To report such is not liberal. It is fact.

To feign an argument that a win for the Democrats is somehow a bad thing is so stupid that when the Philadelphia Phillies win the World Series on wednesday, and when there isn’t a pearl -clutching headline in the Times to the effect that:

Phillies Win, Worry Sinks In

or

Phillies Win, Will Phillies Lose?

or

Phillies Win, Lose

… I’m going to send this link to my friends at the paper and ask that for balance sake they say that the Phillies Kinda Lost.

(They might as well say, Phillies Drink Hemlock. Because if you’re more concerned with Bill O’Reilly’s perception of you than you are concerned with reality, why even bother?)

See the MSNBC story as written about this part of the interview:

Palin calls Obama ‘naive,’ ‘dangerous’
In the first part of the interview, which is airing Wednesday and Thursday on “NBC Nightly News,” Palin also sharply criticized Obama for having said he would be open to direct talks with leaders of Iran and North Korea.
{…}
“It is so naive and so dangerous for a presidential candidate to just proclaim that they would be willing to sit down with a leader like [Iranian President Mahmoud] Ahmadenijad and just talk about the problems, the issues that are facing them,” Palin said.

“You have to have some diplomatic strategy going into a meeting with someone like Ahmadinejad or [North Korean leader] Kim Jong-il, one of these dictators that would seek to destroy America or her allies,” she said, adding that Obama’s position was evidence of “ill-preparedness.”

That is a very generous rearranging of the interview. It really went like this:

Recently, there has been an extraordinary amount of sneering, dismissive media attacks on America’s young people and the utility of the internet in politics. This website, Future Majority, dedicated to beat reporting on millennial politics has tried to correct the condescending, disdainful narratives time and time and time and time and time again but yet the haters persist.

One fine example, The New York Times‘ columnist Thomas Friedman recently put on an album of Captain Beefheart, got sentimental, then in turn, regretful; and so he lashed out at whippersnappers, his infernal computer, and those geeks who like infernal computers.

“But they can’t e-mail it in, and an online petition or a mouse click for carbon neutrality won’t cut it. They have to get organized in a way that will force politicians to pay attention rather than just patronize them. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy didn’t change the world by asking people to join their Facebook crusades or to download their platforms.”

Bobby Kennedy didn’t travel between farms or factories by horse-drawn carriage – and there was no teaching of songs! Would journalists who also covered the AFL’s growth in the 1890s or of California’s Wobblies in the 1930’s have rolled their eyes at RFK’s silly methods? Martin Luther King always made sure to have newfangled mechanized-photo-graphic picture-illustrators present at his heavily stage-managed lunch-counter sit-ins. No planned riots and not a single engraver was invited!

Absurdly, Thomas Friedman’s beef with the do-gooding college children of the millennial generation is that they’re just all too Facebookey. “But Generation Q may be too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good.” Really? Online equals… quiet What then would Rip Van Friedman think about this:

Youths silent rally met with force in Pakistan

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Ahsan Pirzada and his high-school buddies spread the word via Facebook, e-mail and cell phone text messages: Let’s meet at McDonald’s after school on Monday.But not to hang out.

About 100 students pulled out banners, taped their mouths shut in symbolic protest and marched silently toward the office of President Pervez Musharraf. Before they had gone 1,000 yards, truckloads of police, including an anti-terrorist squad, swooped in and dispersed the threat, hauling about 50 teens to a police station.

Using facebook, twitter and cell phones they did a flashmob protest. (That alone is enough politics 2.0 to literally blow Friedman’s head off his shoulders.)

“We know that many people cannot afford to join us,” said Samad Khurram, a Harvard University student who stayed home this semester to work in the pro-democracy movement. “At least 30 percent of Pakistanis are surviving day to day on their wages. They can’t afford to take off a day to protest” or to risk indefinite arrest.

Thomas and the rest of The Village, please note, an undergrad organized a political cause using the internet’s free tools, such as online petitions, emails, webby gizmo for cell phones “twitter” and the dread facebook… the result of this online organizing: offline action for thousands.

“This is how people are really networking, expressing themselves,” said Adnan Rehmat, who heads Internews Pakistan, a Washington-based media watchdog group. “People are sending messages of solidarity, relaying information about protest sites, that sort of thing.”

I’ve marched in protests that large and felt neutered. I find political organizing online more effective and more economical and so does Ahsan Pirzada. Around the world, the old ways of organizing and then effecting political change (marching in the streets, chaining oneself to bulldozers) are no longer effective. Nor do these methods fit the moment. Nicholas Handler suggested much the same thing in his New York Times essay:

Many of us have protested, but we — by and large — felt like we were imitating an earlier generation, playing dress-up in our parents’ old hippie clothes. I marched against the war and my president called it a focus group. The worst part was that I did feel inert while doing it. In the 21st century, a bunch of people marching down the street, complimenting one another on their original slogans and pretty protest signs, feels like self-flagellation, not real and true social change.

Today’s form of activism organizing looks completely different from what the past 40 years has taught us political action should look like. Sorry, Friedman.

Today’s commentariat is looking increasingly like the cantankerous, curmudgeon Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes segments of unedited free-associative complaining about how hard it is to open a bag of potato chips these days, or how confused and angry he is at his coffee machine.

I suspect it might have changed everything, and helped these ignorant writers and news celebrities if the political discussion at the cocktail parties where their thinking is done for them included quips about the Presidential candidates’ innovative use of the internet.

Tragically though, the one guy who could have been a field guide for these folks to the new century’s new style of political organizing, Sen. Obama, is instead running a decidedly last-century campaign. The reason he’s running such a television-heavy campaign and not leading innovation in online politics is simiple: his chief strategist and campaign manager also happens to be a partner with the media firm serving Obama’s TV ads. So when Obama spends 163% of what Hillary Clinton spends, it’s not only because he has a traditional mindset – it’s also because someone is lining his pockets.

So it’s not just corporate media, print and TV pundits who have it wrong. Many political communications consultants don’t believe the internet is worth anything more than a source of free money that magically comes in somehow from emails. Their prejudices will be worn away, gradually. I had hoped it would be this cycle, but it’ll probably be the next.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. — Mark Twain

In The Know: Situation In Nigeria Seems Pretty Complex

Duncan and Digby came to the conclusion that the beltway pundits and Deans – from where comes the Holy CW are actually just not smart people.

My hunch was that they were of average intelligence but they just didn’t care. If you’re speaking of a lack of ‘caring’ as to why we’ve witnessed the failure of our national broadcast media (which everyone agrees now has rolled over and died for the last decade) it is to argue that journalism is a mission. Journalists don’t merely do a job, they serve a function in our government but more importantly, they are on the side of truth and justice in the larger battle of, lets call it like it is: good versus evil. That’s a lot to argue.

Let me unpack that: There is a difference between doing well and doing good. The former is a measure of successful completion of tasks and the latter reflects on the value measure of what is done. Journalists need to do good.

There’s a quotation I love about journalism by Chicago Muckracker Finley Peter Dunn. Dunne was a friend of Mark Twain and was a member of Twain’s “Damned Human Race Luncheon Club”. Dunn said that the job of journalists is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

The comfortable take offense whenever anyone follows this advice. They know better than to claim this treatment is unfair — fairness and justice are not concepts they’re trying to promote — so they end up sniffing that it just seems rude. “Civility” then becomes the last bastion of those who cannot appeal to justice or the truth to make their case.

Now the refs have been worked to hard that they no longer think of their job as to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” for the cause of fairness, but instead, in the name of “FOX-brand Fairness^TM” they give equal time to the afflicted and the afflicter. And that tells the story.

So, if they don’t care – why no? Why don’t they care? Look at this book interview:

CBSNews.com: You point out that voters with under $100,000 in income focus more on issues, and over $100,000 they focus more on character and personality. So do you think the media has a kind of elite bias in terms of what they cover politically?

Mark Penn: I point out in the book that the eggheads are becoming jugheads, and the jugheads are becoming eggheads. Meaning that elites are increasingly separated from the kinds of struggles that working and middle class voters are feeling. And therefore, they are much more impressionable. They seem much more concerned about personality, who people like.

Whereas working and middle class voters are much more educated than ever before. They have greater access to information through the internet. And they are much more concerned about the issues that affect their lives and the lives of their families.

Penn’s point is that the journalists are elites and they’re living in a different country than their audience. What do they care about? Fashion.

Frank Rich and Paul Krugman call this the Theatre Critic as Political Pundit. It’s the same thing. Judging appearances, delivery, style. This is the vapidity that has been percolating throughout pundit class. This is the inevitable byproduct of our Television-based Politics.

During the 2004 campaign I [Krugman]went through two months’ worth of TV news from the major broadcast and cable networks to see what voters had been told about the Bush and Kerry health care plans; what I found, and wrote about, were several stories on how the plans were playing, but not one story about what was actually in the plans.

There are two big problems with this kind of reporting. The important problem is that it fails to inform the public about what matters. In 2004, very few people had any idea about the very real differences between the candidates on domestic policy. It remains to be seen whether 2008 is any better.

The other problem, which has become very apparent lately, is that this sort of coverage often fails even on its own terms, because the way things look to inside-the-Beltway pundits can be very different from the way they look to real people.

They don’t know or care about what “the people” are freaking out about. They waste time quibbling about the show.

Theres a brand new dance but I don’t know its name
That people from bad homes do again and again
Its big and its bland full of tension and fear
They do it over there but we don’t do it here
-David Bowie, “Fashion”