Media – Page 23 – Prog Gold

Comment of The Day: French Framing

Published on April 23, 20072 Comments

Democracy, though sickly and a bit nauseous from repeated blows to civil liberties, is not yet dead in Europe: 85% of the electorate, a tribute to banlieues activism, came out in France yesterday and made a statement – no more wishy washy middle. France seems to want a clear choice between neoliberalism or socialism; ether more of the Blair and Bush-led globalisation agenda, or a President that thinks that ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’ applies to more than just middle-aged white men with a comfy bank balance.

No prizes for guessing which candidate I prefer; although my preference is irrelevant given that I can’t vote there, nevertheless I think it would be a triumph for all European women should the French elect a female socialist president at the heart of the ‘old’ EU.

But now the election will move into a whole new phase. The stakes get much higher. In comments to Peter Preston’s Guardian article on the election this morning, a French commenter points out the election has wider implications – that it’s not just a left-right battle, but a question of the basic legitimacy of public leftwing ideas:

Being french, I found this article quit interesting, but even more the reactions some people have posted here. Indeed, france does have some things it can be proud of (good health care, excellent rail network, free education – from primary school to university – , and state subventions to sport, art, environmental groups, …), and of course some bad things that go with it (people abusing the health system creating a great debt, a very heavy bureaucracy, many taxs that few people understand). But it is true that this “France in a state of decline” narrative is indeed the corporate media’s ploy to break what was left of, not the socialist party, but the credibility of left wing policies. We hear all the time that Mrs Royal has no program, but that is not true. She has solid a program, many ideas,not all brilliant, but dominantly a pragmatic left wing.

But medias today spend their time telling us that we can be left wing untill we are 30 year’s old, but then, “please, be serious, a globalized society doesn’t have room for such nonsense. Get back to work and stop being childish”. Because problems in our welfare system do exist, we are made to believe that any welfare system is doomed to faliure. Indeed corporations big and small, and individuals do abuse of this system, but it does not mean that this system is a bad one, that it couldn’t be repaired. When your car has a flat wheel (or even two flat wheels), do you just scrap the car ? By ridiculizing the system, corporation and media are just slowly killing the idea that people can be left wing, by promoting a new idealic society of which their corporations would be at the center making the money and dictating their policies. This election isn’t just an election between RIGHT and LEFT, it is an election where the existence and legitimacy of LEFT ideas are at stake.”

Framing affects everything we see in the media. There is little reported in any media that is not intermediated by another person in some way even if it’s only uploading a clip. Someone still chose that clip. They framed the picture you see.

You cannot ever completely exclude the editorial voice, no matter how hard you try. Because worldwide media as currently constituted is corporate and profit making in structure, its larger editorial voice is also corporatist and the information put out is framed to support the making of those profits. To do otherwise would be fiscally irresponsible and negligent towards the shareholders: sensation sells more than fluffy bunnies and hope so that’s the course the media follows.

Thus the narrative of permanent decline that suffuses everything we read and hear – we’re under attack, an amorphous ‘they’ is trying.to take our stuff, we’re being swamped, invaded… unimporant threats are hyped into planetwide scourges while imporant yet dull, worthy, complicated yet important issues are trivialised or go unreported.

The commenter has spotted the biggest frame of all in modern western democratic politics in action. It’s been the ur-narrative of all western politics since the industrial revolution and the concomitant rise of the newspaper barons, advertising and then the PR industry. The philosophy is so all pervasive that it was built in to EU institutions too.

Capitalism is not only the best way, it’s the only way. The Free Market is a pure and ineluctable product of nature, like sunlight or a mother’s love, or butterflies’ wings. Capitalism’s been ordained by God to make all for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Anyone who says otherwise is a dangerous lunatic and one of the amorphous ‘they’ trying to take our stuff.

So, put very crudely, goes the story and so goes the editorial direction of the US and European corporate media-at-large.

Now, at least in France, the mainstream media will have to engage publicly with actual socialist politics again. That certainly seems to be what the public want – not just, as in the UK, a non-choice between one bunch of incompetent neoliberals and another but a proper public debate and a real choice between ideological directions for the country.

But the socialists had better be on the ball media-wise and not give their usual ‘our ideas will shine through because they’re right’, naive tv and radio performance. In Spain and the Netherlands socialist parties have shown that it’s perfectly possible to handle the media on your terms and be elected on principled positions. I hope the French socialists are ready for this coming campaign – because it’s not just Sarko v Sego now, it’s Sarkozy and the whole media and cultural establishment’s framing v Segolene.

Making Racism Normal

Published on April 17, 2007

I missed this on Sunday so thanks to No More Mr Nice Blog for pointing to this post by Phil Nugent which neatly puts the whole Imus kerfuffle, that on the face of it seems so insular and trivial (who listened anyway?), into the necessary historical context as an integral stage of the process of the absorption of barely-disguised racist right wing rhetoric into the common daily culture, a process that’s been aided and abetted by some of the most well-known names in US politics and media.

[…]

When someone shows himself to be a “real” racist, he’s stripped of his epaulets and driven from the fort. Unfortunately, in public life, you have to practically be filmed burning a cross in front of a black church and waving to the camera to be tagged as a “real” racist. If you protested the Vietnam War, you’re going to be explaining and even apologizing for it to your dying day, but there are plenty of people who voted against civil rights legislation in the 1960s–an act that you might think would pretty clearly and unambiguously stamp you as maybe not being, as Don Imus says, “a good person”– who have been allowed to go on to long, respectable political careers. People like Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond were held by the Beltway not to be racists because, well, because they just couldn’t be–they were duly elected politicians, so the thought was too morbid to be seriously considered. If necessary, apologies for anything they’d done that might give one pause would be fabricated on their behalf. After Trent Lott became Minority Leader last year, returning to prominence after the fall from grace that resulted from his kissing Strom Thurmond’s warty ass on the occasion of the old shitkicker’s unearned centennial, many in the media insisted that Lott had, of course, apologized for those remarks, though as far as I can determine, all he’d done was repeatedly say that he was sorry that so many mean people had misrepresented his sweet remarks to a nice old orange-haired man on his birthday. Lott, as his recent memoir demonstrates, is typical of the kind of Southerner who doesn’t think he’s a racist and would have apoplexy if anyone suggested that he is, but who still disapproves of the government’s role in implementing desegregation; if you ask him, in the right setting in front of the right tobacco-juice-stained crowd, he’ll be happy to explain that, while he’s happy as a clam that whites and blacks can share the same drinking fountain in Mississippi now, it was a dastardly act for the gummint to force all those good Mississippians to do what they’d never done before but would have been delighted to do, of their own free will, at some point. It’s just a shame that the mean ol’ gummint made them do it, thus muddying the issue. As a child in Mississippi in the 1970s, I grew up hearing this line of manure from the local grown-ups, who would apply it to everything from the minimum wage to the Clean Water Act to the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. By forcing them to do the obvious right thing, gummint was leaning on the common people, and it wasn’t fair. Heck, the worst thing about it was the suggestion that they had to be forced, by law, to do the obvious decent thing. It was true they’d never done it before, but they had been planning to get around to it, and probably would have done it five minutes after the law had been passed, if gummint hadn’t gone and gotten its panties in a bunch. Now all they could do was bitch till the end of their days about the injustice of being forced to not lynch nigras when there was nothing good on TV and not pay their employees in shiny beads. Not that they’d have ever done those things anyway, but oh, the injustice of being told that they couldn’t do it!

It would be a very pleasant thing to be able to say that this line of self-pitying imbecility died out in the provinces and never spread to the shoe-wearing regions of the country, but Don Imus and his brothers in the talk radio stratosphere depend as much on it as the Trent Lotts of this world. The fact that he has so much in common with Trent Lott would probably sting Imus more than any realization of the no-brainer fact that he is not, in fact, “a good person,” a realization that would be quick to follow if he could ever get his rodent’s brain around the simple truth that you really have used a word even if you’ve used it in an “off-the-record conversation,” but there you are. The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of “Class Clown” at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone. The self-congratulation comes not from the cleverness of their material–nobody could be that self-deluded–but from the fantasy that they’re speaking truth to power and taking on The Man by being, and here hold tight while we flash back to the thrilling days of 1993, “politically incorrect.” Their natural audience is people who hate their lives and, at least for a few minutes a day, like to imagine that they’re outlaws by listening to some peabrain on the radio make fun of, say, homeless people or the victims of the 2004 tsunami.

[…]

Like they say, read the whole thing.

Asked And Answered

Published on April 13, 2007

More about supermanlover Wolfie: one of the things I’ve been wondering is, if this situation’s been known about for so long, why the fuss now? Avedon has a clue, in reference to other scandals taking up airtime:

But Karl Rove must be loving it, because it’s taking people’s attention off of the things that are making him squirm.

Yup. That about sums it up.

Drop Him Like He’s Hot

Published on April 13, 20071 Comment

Anyone who’s claiming the the firing of beltway insiders’ favourite radio bigot Don Imus as a victory against mysogyny is deluded. He may have been canned, but all those beltway journos and sycophantic pols calling themselves liberals who’ joined in with his on-air racist and sexist bollocks are still in their jobs exercising that same ingrained bigotry in everything they do and say, even if not as explicitly as they were given licence to by Imus. Imus was the the yellow tip of a large, suppurating pustule of moral corruption.

No, this is a victory only for the forces of a corporation not wanting to be sued for libel and the desire not to have to pay out millions of bucks.

All the sudden soul-searching abouit appearing on the show by the likes of former shock-blogger ~~Wonkette~~ Ana Marie Cox of Time is just ass-covering from someone seeing which way the political wind is blowing and positioning herself for the new market. That doesn’t mean Imus isn’t scum and should’ve been dropped – let’s face it, when even Snoop Dogg, a self-described pimp who’s no slouch in the misogyny department himself,says in effect that you’re sexist and racist scum, I think that probably clinches it that you’re sexist and racist scum:

Snoop Dogg: Rappers’ Hos Are Different

12th April 2007 11:01:01

Snoop Dogg: Rappers’ Hos Are Different…. Rapper Snoop Dogg has dismissed comparisons between sexist hip hop lyrics and the recent racist remarks made by American radio Dj Don Imus.

Imus was suspended by Cbs Radio and Msnbc on Monday (09Apr07) after he referred to the Rutgers University women’s basketball team as ‘nappy-headed hoes’ – a racially charged sexist term.

Snoop frequently refers to women as “b**ches” and “hos” in his music, but insists Imus’ use of the term was unacceptable and the 66-year-old DJ should be taken off the air.

The Doggystyle star says, “It’s a completely different scenario, “(Rappers) are not talking about no collegiate basketball girls who have made it to the next level in education and sports.

“We’re talking about hoes that’s in the ‘hood that ain’t doing s**t, that’s trying to get a n**ga for his money. These are two separate things.

“First of all, we ain’t no old-ass white men that sit up on Msnbc going hard on black girls.

“We are rappers that have these songs coming from our minds and our souls that are relevant to what we feel. I will not let them muthaf**kas say we are in the same league as him.

“Kick him off the air forever.”

Clever bit of spin there – not only does he manage get his licks in at Imus, but excuses his owm misogyny at the same time. Genius, of a sort, to absolve your own self while condemning someone else for the same fault. But as Joan Walsh of Salon(via Digby) puts it:

I hate the misogyny of some rap music — it’s not all misogynistic — but rappers didn’t invent sick notions of black women as sexual objects in America; those ideas have an old, old history here, going back to the days when the chains black men wore weren’t bling. As I said to Scarborough and Ridley, when we have “Snoop Dogg Country” on MSNBC, and Young Jeezy’s doing the morning drive-time show instead of Imus, then let’s talk about how rappers deserve the outrage Imus brought on himself. In my opinion, hundreds of years of the racist misogyny of white men like Imus and McGuirk are far more responsible for misogynistic rap music than the reverse. And as I type this I’m thinking, is that even up for debate? Fellas, please.

History isn’t an excuise for misogyny in rap but it does add context and meaning.

The only context of the casual hatred expressed by shock-jocks like Imus and Michael Savage, and to a lesser extent even the supposedly squeaky-clean BBC’s very own Chris Moyles, is the arrogant expression of supposed white male privilege and power.

The cult of Imus amongst beltway insiders was always, in my opinion, just so much whistling in the dark by a bunch of timid little white boys scared of a world that’s moving on without them (I hate to make yet another attack on boomers but it seems to me all these people are of a certain age…).

That advertisers dropped MSNBC of their own volition and that there was a revolt by MSNBC employees of all races against Imus’ comments supports the contention: these DJs are preaching to a smaller and smaller demographic as their target audience ages and generations coming up aren’t interested in these dinosaurs of radio and their outdated attitudes any more. They get their political news and jollies online.

Now, about Instapundit and Malkin…

Comment Of The Day

Published on April 12, 20073 Comments

This may attract flak but I’d be much obliged if anyone could point out where this comment, ffollowing Justin ‘Koolaid’ Webb of the BBC’ on Anti-Americanism in this morning’s Guardian, is factually wrong:

DaveCanuk

April 12, 2007 4:29 AM

I like to think of myself as a proud anti-american, who’s hatred of the role of the U.S. government and business in the world is underpinned by my disgust with the culture that underpins it.

As a Canadian, I get plenty of exposure, not just ot US government policies, but to everyday Americans and the popular culture they love. And it is bad beyond most folks imaginings. Sure there are some decent american citizens. But precious few, even of these, are not bigoted, ignorant, and generally rather frightening.

1) They have a fascination with guns and/or uniforms unequalled in any democracy anywhere, anytime. These folks have some serious issues that need to be addressed in therapy.

2) They worship size and volume beyond all reason. Bigger is always better. Louder is always more correct. I assume the men have some easily understood insecurities in the bedroom, but the bloody women are almost as bad! In addition to all the problems with pollution and invasions that this flaw encourages, it just plain makes them bad neighbours.

3) These folks have a serious god complex. They really believe they have a direct line! And they can’t wait to bore you with the details of their relationship with the BIG GUY. Now we have our religious nuts in Canada too, but only in the US are they the dominant cultural force. It is way beyond satire that they are in bloody battle with ‘Muslim extremists’.

4) The level of ignorance about the world or history is appalling, but even worse is their pride in it. You can have a more informed discussion on world events with a Mexican cab driver than an American high school teacher. George II is really just a more or less polite version of what you can hear in any truck stop, bar or Wal-Mart. This and the most powerful armed forces in the world – if that isn’t a combination to make sleep difficult, I don’t know what is.

5) They are insufferably self-righteous about their greatness -great literature, military prowess, athletic abilities, biggest businesses, finest art, music – the list goes on and on. When discussing any other culture, which few ever do, they will invariably either attack or patronize it.

6) They are steeped in an incredibly mean spirited public discourse. Being stuck in a car for a few hours in the US is a nightmare for a news junky. With a few faint PBS exceptions, the airwaves are a non stop shouting match where slimy insinuations about opponents are quickly drowned out by loud threats and insults. And when what passes for a ‘left’ down there gets a radio station – they do the same thing, except that sometimes I agree with them.

7) The culture is permeated by a racism that is miles beyond what I am used to – and I grew up in a country who’s treatment of aboriginals was criminal and reflected in a racist popular culture.

I could go on all day. But as distant descendent of a Bootle sailer and a highland crofter, I will add that the only culture that I think could compare with the U.S. in recent centuries was the British Empire at its peak. There is just something about being the biggest bully in the school yard that makes people downright dislikable

Take care, eh?

Ah yes, Britain, this emerald jewel in an azure sea, this blighted pox-ridden isle; as always we’re bringing up the rear, trailing past imperialist glories.

But although we’re now much diminished as a nation, we’re still managing to keep up in the ‘planet’s most obnoxious people’ stakes. For example, the first news story I read today was that yesterday in Glasgow an Algerian woman asylum seeker was stoned by a gang of white men, had her hijab ripped off and both herself and her one year old child sexually assaulted – then, on the morning news I heard Tony Blair openly blaming the rise in gun crime entirely on some mythical monolithic black community. We just had our very own Iran hostage media circus too. We may be a busted flush internationally, but hey, no problem. We can just ask to join the USA.

We’ll fit perfectly as the 51st state – we’ve got the undemocratic government, the broken army and government, trigger-happy police, overflowing jails, drugs, corruption and an autocratic vainglorious leader already: now all we need is the OK. Hmm. Whatever would we call it, though?