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In comments to the Bush/Cheney shrubbery video, commenter Swan brought to my attention this article from Carpetbagger about media disinterest in the US Attorney scandal:
[…]
One should be cautious about throwing around phrases like “journalistic malpractice” casually, but for the nation’s leading news-weekly to entirely ignore the nation’s biggest political controversy, just as it’s reaching crisis mode for the White House and the Justice Department, at a minimum raises questions about the magazine’s editorial judgment.
To be fair, Time altered its publishing schedule recently, and the new issue was released today, making it practically impossible to offer any kind of meaningful coverage of yesterday’s Sampson hearings. Also, Time did report on a new poll, which at least mentions the story in passing.
But given the circumstances, it’s hard to fathom why the controversy has been given short shrift.
Indeed, there were plenty of key developments in this story earlier in the week, any and all of which would have made good copy. A senior Justice Department official has taken the 5th, Gonzales gave an unpersuasive interview on national television, Republican lawmakers are increasingly unwilling to defend the DoJ’s decision making, the White House is getting antsy, new questions have arisen every day this week about exactly what happened and why.
But Time magazine, to borrow its editor’s word, finds all of this so “uninteresting” that there’s no need to even mention it to readers.
[…]
Swan asked whether I thought it possible that there could be coercion involved.
Oh dear, you had to ask… and by the time I’d finished blathering at length about my views on US domestic spying and its purpose I realised I’d written a whole post, not a comment. So here it is, tidied up and with links added.
It’s been conclusively proven that the Bush administration has been spying internally within the US since well before 9/11. The fact that Bushco hired the former heads of the Stasi and the KGB to advise Homeland Security is also well known, and they didn’t do that out of the goodness of their hearts.
The politicisation of the organs of state control, the NSA, CIA, FBI and the Justice Department, has been going on since the beginning, as has the development of TIA, the total informational awareness programme, which was officially quashed but continues under other names and other budgets. This is no scatttergun approach, it’s being done for a purpose; it looks in certain lights like a deliberate, targeted programme of corruption and blackmail. It’s all about the practical application of power to individuals to to coerce them to circumvent pesky, inconvenient rules.
Do I think key figures in politics, the media and the civil service are being blackmailed? Duh.
Corruption and blackmail are the classic tools of non-violent repression. It’s simple – the one blackmailed is powerless and cannot report the crime for the fear of their own crime or or that of someone close to them being revealed (the latter technique, as in torture, is often the most effective) and is thus ripe for manipulation. The secret doesn’t have to be much: you just have to know which levers to pull and that’s where the spying comes in. One iill-advised phone call from a monitored phone and bingo… it doesn’t need to be blackmail either. Solve a little problem for someone and they’re beholden to you, too.
There’s also a whole swamp of corruption and favour-peddling, of which the high-profile corruption trials we’ve seen so far are just the stinking methane bubbles on top. There’s a whole lot more of the likes of Dusty Foggo’s ‘booze, broads and cigars’ parties (a classic spook honeytrap) to come out yet, for example. Such is the venality and of Republicans that most involved walked right into what was a was a classic cold war blackmail ploy – get a bunch of notables in compromising positions and record it for later use. FFS sake, they all knew Foggo was CIA… but they did it anyway. Have willy, will follow.
That happened in Washington and caught some big fish but think of all the minnows at all the other private wingnut ‘fundraising’ dinners in state capitals around the country… I expect thee’s a fair few county commissioners, state senators and school board presidents with some dirty little secrets they don’t want to come out.
Tax cheating, affairs, drug use, porn, sexual pecadillos, abortions, incest, domestic violence – just think what some of these allegedly Christian people have to hide and what they’d do to avoid being publicly denounced by their co-religionists. Cut off from wingnut welfare and the largesse of the religious right, a lot of these people would struggle to survive and they know it. That’s a massive incentive to keep in line and that’s one of the reasons why the government has been stacked with fundies, because there’s so many guilt levers you can pull and sexual buttons to press.
This sounds like a description of the US or UK media to me:
The press in **** is heavily biased in favor of the ruling party, *****. Most private newspapers also are biased in favor of the ruling party, since they in fact are not entirely “private.” Government supporters very often provide some of the financing for the “private” press, making news tipped in favor of the president and the key government positions and views. The opposition press is likewise political, in that the newspapers associated with opposition party candidates present their party perspectives and criticize the president and his party.
But no, it’s from a critical US-authored report on… Kazakhstan.
Since the days of Reagan networks and major publishers owned by right wing money have steadily promoted young conservatives through their ranks, and this cadre of journalists has always had an incestuous relationship with their counterparts in the GOP lobby firms and thinktanks, and latterly in the government itself – so much so that at times they’re hard to tell apart. They went to school together, they party and socialise together, their children go to the same schools and they belong to the same same churches. There’s a lot of leverage there.
The questions that the media, and that includes blogs, are failing to ask about US domestic spying are the simple ones – who, what, where, when and why. Yes, we know they spy, but we don’t know the specifics, other than when it’s liberals who’ve been spied on and they’ve sued.
A major figure in the mainstream media would have to be very brave to speak out and say they’ve been coerced into taking a certain line on something. To be honest don’t think there’d be any media figure who has the guts.
Oh, wouldn’t it be fantastic if it was like, all Hollywood and someone big spoke out against injustice and Bush was defeated, yay, and it all came right in the end with liberty and justice and popcorn for all?
Not gonna happen. This is a mess that can’t be tidied away, not with peak oil and a foreclosure crisis and an ecologically-driven depression looming. Even if a Democrat wins the presidency they’re going to want all the tools for repressing a rebellious populace that they can get, when faced with the aftermath of yet more Hurricane Katrinas, for example, or when the ‘lone wolves’ nurtured by the far-Right Turner Diaries and Left-Behind readers go on the rampage when they realise they have a black or a female president ..
If the Democrats win the election then a new Administration, faced with the rabid winger IEDs that the Right has placed all over local, state and national government, will want a political purge – and when they realise just what a powerful tool they’ve got on their hands in a politicised domestic spying programme they’ll be just as bad, if somewhat less incompetent, as Bushco.
This is the way it is now.
