Jul 17 2008

The Media’s Disease

(12 pm – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Courtesy of BarbinMD we get a spiffy glimpse into the stupidity of our Traditional Media. Here’s the relevant passed from an LA Times article from this past Sunday:

To determine just how polarized blog readers are, we constructed a measure of political ideology by drawing on blog readers’ attitudes toward stem cell research, abortion, the Iraq war, the minimum wage and capital gains tax cuts. Using this measure, we then arrayed respondents from left to right. Here’s what we found.

Readers of liberal blogs were clustered at the far left, and readers of conservative blogs were bunched at the far right

This is simply another step in the horrifying disease gripping our media and our Ruling Class: Partisanophobia Conservatitis. This scary condition causes presumably intelligent people (emphasis on “presumably”) to become irrationally scared of partisan behavior unless it’s coming from conservatives. This disease is more commonly identified by its slang term, “hypocritical bullshit.”

As BarbinMD posted, liberal blogs a far more mainstream than their conservatives evil twins. We routinely hold mainstream opinions on stem cell research, the economy, the administration, the war in Iraq, and just about every important aspect of American life you can imagine.

Unfortunately, the media has been beaten and battered so badly that it can no longer discern the truth from the lies put forth from their conservatives spouses.

I remember the 90’s. I was younger (I’m 27 now) obviously, but I still remember when “liberal” started becoming an insult. As a young male, I was routinely stricken and attacked by my peers with accusations of homosexuality (you see, I read books and shit; you know, queer stuff like that). I recall the word “liberal” evoking similar feelings of insult.

I also remember when idiot pundits called the media “The Liberal Media.” This was never really fact, but it was still a brilliant strategy. The Right correctly discerned the general stupidity of the general American and realized that by pushing the talking point of “Liberal Media,” they accomplished a couple of things:

  • If anyone on the Right was portrayed in a negative light, then people would discount its veracity because of a supposed “liberal bias”;

and

  • If anyone on the Right was portrayed in a POSITIVE light, then people would trust that since, if the LIBERAL MEDIA is being positive towards a conservative, it MUST be true.

The reverse of each of the above is also true.

So, that’s how The Right began to control how the media reported and how Americans viewed those reports.

As I said, it was brilliant. People STILL say there’s a liberal bias to the media, to this day despite the mountains of evidence to the contrary.

A side effect of the above is that the media actually began to believe the crap it was peddling, whether via osmosisified corruption or just simply some bizarre form of Helsinki Syndrome, the media became not only complicit, but actively engaged in these lies and biased reporting.

As such, the most successful media figures were conservatives. And these conservatives decided that their popularity was because Real Americans believed the same way they did, held the same opinions about policy and social issues.

Which brings us to the LA Freakin’ Times.

Despite the easily verifiable fact that we on the Liberal Left have mainstream views, we’re still pushed towards the fringe, to the outskirts.

So, that’s the bad news. Or the annoying news, depending on how you look at it.

The good news, however, is that the very fact that such facts are being ignored; the reason that the Village Media and the Ruling Class continue to feverishly push these tired and debunked claims, is that they see us growing upset.

They see us organizing, mobilizing, and fighting back.

And they also know that one indisputable fact remains:

All empires crumble.

The Village’s Media Empire isn’t quite as vast and as strong as it once was. The people aren’t quite content to be spoon-ed bullshit.

That’s making them nervous.

So, while we have to put up with the nonsense like we saw in the LA Times op-ed, we can at least be comforted by the fact that what we’re doing is working.

So let’s keep up the pressure.

5 comments

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    • theblaz on July 17, 2008 at 20:46
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    • #

    but in the big picture, articles like the one discussed above bring me some level of satisfaction.

  2. I see the media, as well as so many of our other crumbling infrastructures of empire, as very dangerous right now, precisely because they see the emerging power of teh blogs.

    I don’t see them going down without a dirty fight, and our internet access is bound to be a battle in that fight, imo.

    Phone companies, cable providers, media, all intertwined in the same power structure of empire.

    Gonna be a bumpy ride ahead.  

    • RUKind on July 20, 2008 at 07:09
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    True conservatives would be in the streets right now protesting two things: the demolition of the balance of power at the federal level and the demolition of the balance of power between the federal and state levels. These used to be important issues to conservatives back in the 60s. Those two and the size of the federal government.

    Republicans from Nixon onward have trashed the federal balance. Nixon took the first real run at the imperial presidency. Reagan had the charisma to move it forward. Bush I was just an apparatchik caretaker. Clinton did nothing to slow it down. (I think this is why HRC voted Yes on the AUTF on Iraq; she liked the idea of having that power.) And the current sock puppet just loves the perks. He just flies around and hangs out at his leisure and lets Cheney run the show.

    Dick got his chops going right from the beginning of this whole slide into imperialism at home and abroad. Nixon brushed back the media in the early 70s. Only four newspapers published the Pentagon Papers. We lucked out at the time because the network news guys were actual journalists before they became talking heads. Today the real TV journalists have been discredited and banished – Dan rather and Phil Donahue come to mind. Tell the truth and get disappeared.

    Which brings up my point: left and right are bullshit adjectives. The words are just bumper sticker thinking to frame the debate in a way that the ruling class can control it. Exampla gratia, is a pro-FISA immunity Obama still a liberal? What exactly is a liberal?

    What was middle-of-the-road in 1960 is now ultra-liberal. The country you’re inheriting is a fascist joke.

    • Edger on July 20, 2008 at 07:28
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    By John Pilger, August 8, 2007

    The truth about most modern journalism: You first become a career media worker, you start climbing the ladder, and then you prostitute yourself. It’s as common as it’s straightforward.

    The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Pilger at Socialism 2007 Conference in Chicago this past June:

    The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.

    For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism.

    …

    One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”

    What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 [2006] the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn’t say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That’s the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of them-they’ve spoken to me about it-few of them will say it in public.

    Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”

    …

    We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.

    read the whole thing here…

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