Media

Reasoned argument considered harmful

liberalism, Media, US politics, Wingnuts
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John Emerson says:

People used to say that the media weren’t really right wing, but were just sucking up to Bush because they worship power and success. But if that were true, we should be seeing them sucking up to Obama and the Democrats now. They aren’t. Instead, what we’re seeing on TV these days is more of the same: President McCain, and President Boehner, and President Lindsey Graham, and President Snowe, and President Gingrich, and a couple of dozen other Republican Presidents. The slant has scarcely changed at all.

One of the reasons I gave up on America is the feebleness of the Democratic and liberal response to the increasingly conservative slant of the media. We’re long past the time when it made sense to be surprised by anything they do, and we should understand by now that they know what they’re doing and are going to keep on doing it. Squeals of rage about their egregious dishonesty, incompetence, and nastiness just make them laugh.

Coincidently, over at SEK’s place, Rich Puchalsky says something similar about engaging winguts:

What really tires me out about these posts is how strenuously you argue against whatever nonsense you’re writing about. Look, you say, I will painstakingly trace back through the process and show that it is constitutional at every stage! It’s like a rigorous, logical proof, following from simple first principles, that a shit-throwing monkey should not in fact throw shit at people.

John says liberals should stop being surprised at the media being rightwing, Rich says they should stop being surprised about lying wingnuts. Both have a point. The liberal blogosphere has long had a problem with realising that rightwing bias and wingnut lying are not abberations that can be corrected through reasoned debate, that they continue to occur because they’re profitable. Wingnut makes for good copy, while rightwing commentary is rewarded by advertisers where leftwing commentary is not. This is not a new development and those who object to Chomsky teaching them this, should take a look at A. J. Liebling, showing the same influences at work twenty years earlier. Hell, the same dynamics were already at work in the original yellow press.

Both socialists and anarchists have long known that you cannot ask for change, you need to force change on your opponents one way or another. Liberals, unlike rightwingers have failed to internalise this message because they’ve been in charge for so long and had had teh real left to fight their battles for them. Now that they find themselves cast out as well, it’s high time they learned it.

How newspapers die

Blogs, Media
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I don’t like blogging triumphalism or gloating about the death of the “print dinosaurs”, but it is true that a large part of the difficulties many newspapers find themselves in is due to their own actions. Or, in other words, who would want to pay to read George Will when you can have your intelligence insulted for free online:

And most bizarrely, no one has forced folks to create a star system of punditry, despite the fact that the only unique advantage major media possesses over the digital wild west is a knowledge of journalistic craft and the institutional infrastructure that supports sustained inquiry and local and or investigative reporting.

But that’s a disastrous miscalculation. Training up an institution to do real reporting well is hard — and would provide one distinctive competitive advantage over independent knights of the keyboard. Opinion writing does not. Anyone, even yours truly, can take a whack at it; over time big, fixed cost dinosaurs can compete on neither quality nor quantity (or, as we say in my house — both Rock and Roll.)

Coming To A Cinema Near You

Life under Capitalism, Media, War on Terror
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Here’s the pitch – it’s BlackHawk Down, minus the helicopters – and the hero has a sexy French accent! Because there’s bound to be an eventual movie of this story:

French hostage escapes after killing captors

MOGADISHU – One of two French security advisers kidnapped by insurgents in Somalia last month escaped yesterday after killing three of his captors and fleeing to the presidential palace in Mogadishu, police said.

Muscles and an accent….I’m seeing Jean-Claude Van Damme or maybe Vin Diesel in the lead role, though both are knocking on a bit now. Unfortunately there isn’t a corset big enough to fit Gerard Depardieu. Suggestions?

Nothing new under the sun

Media, War on Iraq
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Over at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Robert Farley reviews Mark Thompson’s White War, about Italy’s entry into the First World War and how wrong its campaign to conquer the socalled Italian parts of the Austrian-Hungarian empire went. Quoting a bit from the start of Robert’s review, let’s see if you can spot the similarities between how Italy got roped into that war and how a more recent war was started against the will of the majority of the population of the participating countries:

The control by the war-party of the Italian intellectual class, and accordingly its control over the media, meant that it was possible for the Italian government to wage an aggressive war with the genuinely unenthusiastic support of the bulk of the country. World War I was unpopular in Italy, but control of the media was able to substantially obscure this fact.

Thompson and Farley both draw parallels with the American neocons and their lock on the serious media during the runup to the War on Iraq, but I’m more reminded of the British media, possibly because I was more aware of it myself. Sections of the media — The Independent, The Mirror — were against the war, but on the whole both the newspapers and tv newsshows were, if not pro-war, tending towards taking the arguments for war much more seriously than the millions of ordinary people opposing it. Opponents had much less access to the media than the government and other supporters of the war, were often typecast as loons or naifs, while even the most ludicrious arguments the government put forward (the 45 minutes claim e.g.) were treated with undue respect.

Iranian voters fail to behave as they should

Manufacturing consent, Media, War on Iran
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Like Jamie I don’t share the Foreign Policy magazine’s experts certainty that the Iranian elections were rigged. Iran has a reasonable reputation for holding honest elections, even if they are, as Jamie puts it “engineered to produce the right results from the outset through candidate selection and so on”. Western experts and expat Iranians may have been convinced that Ahmadinejad was to be wiped from the pages of time and see the failure of this as evidence of voting fraud, but that doesn’t mean reality has to conform to their wishes.

The reason expert opinion has gotten it so wrong it seems to me is not fraud, but the myopia with which western news media and experts approach Iran: through the prism of US foreign policy. Iran is only in the news whenever its supposed nuclear weapons programme is brought to our attention again, or it’s accused of meddling in Iraq or Afghanistan. In the same way Ahmadinejad is only quoted when he says something stupid about the Holocaust or is supposed to threaten Israel with extinction again. We only get to see Iran as a menace and Ahmadinejad as a clown, with nobody really covering the reality of Iran’s internal politics.

So we get an incredible distorted view of Iran and Ahmadinejad and because we don’t like him we automatically assume this is the default view in Iran as well. But as Splinty points out, in the country itself he has a quite different reputation; he may not be liked by the western-orientated middle class, but he’s a friend of the poor and the peasants and they vote too.

And of course, expecting Iranians to vote according to our views of their foreign policy is as absurd as to have expected the last Dutch elections to have been decided on the withdrawal of Dutch troops from Iraq.

(Crossposted from Wis[s]e Words.)