Saturday, August 22, 2009

Six Degrees of Exasperation

toolz

“The world embarrasses me, and I cannot dream that this watch exists and has no watchmaker.”
-- Voltaire
OK, so my graphic is of a tool set and not a watch. (A very fine set of [no kidding] "King Dick professional quality socket ended Nut Spinners" if you want to get specific about it.) So bite me, because the point is the same: however infuriating the professional liars on Right may be on camera and in print, they are, in the end, just tools in someone else's toolbox.

Now, given these confusing little clues, see if you can spot what is missing from these snips from this otherwise-unimpeachable article about Lanny Davis (The Whore of Babble On and On) by Glenn Greenwald:

Snip 1:

The Lanny Davis disease and America's health care debate


Davis frequently injects himself into political disputes, masquerading as a "political analyst" and Democratic media pundit, yet is unmoored from any discernible political beliefs other than: "I agree with whoever pays me." It's genuinely difficult to recall any instance where he publicly defended someone who hadn't, at some point, hired and shuffled money to him. Yesterday, he published a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico -- solemnly warning that extremists on the Far Left and Far Right are jointly destroying...
Snip 2:
But Davis parades around as -- and is treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well.

He's presented by numerous media outlets as an independent analyst who opines on the news of the day -- yet does so almost exclusively in order to promote the interests of those who are paying him, relationships which are often undisclosed…
Snip 3:
He has been a regular television commentator and has been a political and legal analyst for MSNBC, CNN, Fox Cable, CNBC and network TV news programs.

He has published numerous op-ed/analysis pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other national publications....
Snip 4:

Davis' new piece in The Hill and Politico demonstrates how this works. Presenting himself as the Responsible Liberal-Centrist, he warns of what he calls "The Dangerous Joining of the Far Right and Far Left." He argues that "the extreme left and extreme right share more in common than those on their own side of the ideological divide
...
What is missing from Glenn’s piece – and from the rest of the media – is an active voice regarding one, very specific matter: the identity of the decision-maker behind each, specific act of journalistic atrocity.

A newspaper, or a magazine, or a radio program, or a teevee show are all artifacts, and the placement of specific editorials or print opinion pieces are carefully shaped and edited into a pre-determined length or duration by many hands.

For those of us who repose these hot summer days in the gentle shade of our enormous piles of rejections letters from magazine editors, small presses, editorial boards and book publishers, we KNOW there is vastly more to Mr. Lanny Davis “…publish[ing] a new piece simultaneously in The Hill and Politico” than him doing what we do – assembling our very best words into sentences, bricking them into vivid, thoughtful paragraphs, crossing our fingers and then sending the off to Mr. Editorial Board Gatekeeper, after which we wait…

...and wait…

...and wait…

…until the rejection letter arrives, and then we send ‘er out again (Simultaneous submissions being unforgivably crass, or so says the received wisdom of the scribbling classes.)

Mr. Lanny Davis is not “treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well.”: he is treated that way by specific people within those media organizations.

People with names. With work phone numbers, email address, LinkedIn accounts, and various other phyla of professional contact information.

What you are looking at when trip over another steaming pile of faux Centrism being sold by the pound by Mr. Davis…or another blood-slick gobbet of hackery left behind by William Kristol like a slime trail as he meanders from one incredibly prestigious position to another (from Time Magazine, to the New York Times, to the Washington Post and counting)…or when we flick on the teevee and see a jaw-droppingly talentless, wingnut sex-doll like Michele Malkin sneering out at us from one of the very few seats reserved every week at the Mouse Circus for Serious Analysts…you are not seeing the product of fluke or coincidence.

What you are looking at are the toxic consequences of the decisions of some specific person.

Knowing full well what a poisonous hobgoblin she is, someone at ABC actively decided, “Hey, let’s put that Malkin shrike on! That’ll get ‘em talking.” That decision was seconded by another ABC employee, and then approved by still another employee at ABC.

Of course, once upon a time, a bazillion years ago when George Stephanopoulos was a guest on the show he now hosts, he had radically different standards (from the invaluable Media Matters here):

George Stephanopoulos's "threshold of credibility," then and now

August 03, 2009 11:24 am ET by Jamison Foser

George Stephanopoulos as a guest on ABC's This Week in 1996:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, I think that someone has to- should have to pass a bare threshold of credibility before they're put on the air to millions of viewers. You know, his story couldn't get past the fact checker at The National Enquirer, so I think before ABC News puts him on, then there should be some questions asked.

But someone else signs Stephanopoulos’ checks these days, and so he tucks that now-professional-inconvenient sense of morality up between is legs and...

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: With that, we bring in ... Michelle Malkin, syndicated columnist, also the author of the new book Culture of Corruption.

The disease is pandemic. Consider that, knowing full well what an abject and lethal failure William Kristol has been for years and years, some specific person gave that piece of shit one of the most coveted op-ed jobs in America. And then – just like George Bush -- when Kristol fucked that gig up, someone gave him another one.

And when he fucked that one up too?

Surprise!

Yet another someone gave this Hero of Free Market Meritocracy yet another job at which he has embarrassed himself like clockwork ever since.

Now of course, no one with a functioning cerebellum is ever going to mistake the denizens of FoxNews or Regnery Publishing or Hate Radio as anything other than $2 Conservative ideological handjob hookers, but if an ordinary American culture war civilian were to trip over one of them all tarted up on “real” media to look like a “real” journalist or expert, that civilian might mistake their opinions as valid and worthwhile.

We all know people, who know people. We are all six degrees of exasperation from these “unacknowledged legislators of the world” (to borrow a phrase from Percy Shelley) whose anonymous decisions foist the Malkins, the Davises, the Kristols and all the others on us week after week after week.

So why isn’t someone turning the camera on them?

12 comments:

darkblack said...

Those in charge have no interest in publishing or promoting those who make them afraid, forcing them to dwell as it were on the impending time when their prep-school gravitas and polished cocktail chatter will be inadequate cover from the gathering storm...Far better from their perspective to devote their time and care to ballyhooing those who would keep the sheep penned up with invisible walls of subjectively paralytic angst.

There's no money in candid, well-crafted truth, I suspect.

;>)

Mike Goldman said...

By the way, those airwaves? They belong to us.

Let's turn them into public internet bandwidth and see what happens.

CapD said...

Good analysis as always, Drifty, once I was able to get past the "King Dick Nut Spinners."

Fran / Blue Gal said...

One of the best posts you've ever written, and that's saying something.

Karen said...

They're all owned and operated by Wall Street.

equa yona(Big Bear) said...

LOVE the 'Nut Spinners'! Great post.
And Mike G, they are our air waves in theory. Just try to use them.

Cirze said...

And thus why we love every word you write and read Y O U.

Reminds me of the infamous "Soviet hero." Earlier Gogol or Lermontov.

Just brilliant.

So why isn’t someone turning the camera on them?

Wouldn't this be the end game? (For the good guys.)

S

So bite me, because the point is the same: however infuriating the professional liars on Right may be on camera and in print, they are, in the end, just tools in someone else's toolbox.

What is missing from Glenn’s piece – and from the rest of the media – is an active voice regarding one, very specific matter: the identity of the decision-maker behind each, specific act of journalistic atrocity.

A newspaper, or a magazine, or a radio program, or a teevee show are all artifacts, and the placement of specific editorials or print opinion pieces are carefully shaped and edited into a pre-determined length or duration by many hands.

Mr. Lanny Davis is not “treated by media organizations as being -- some sort of political pundit as well.”: he is treated that way by specific people within those media organizations.

or another blood-slick gobbet of hackery left behind by William Kristol like a slime trail as he meanders from one incredibly prestigious position to another (from Time Magazine, to the New York Times, to the Washington Post and counting)…or when we flick on the teevee and see a jaw-droppingly talentless, wingnut sex-doll like Michele Malkin sneering out at us from one of the very few seats reserved every week at the Mouse Circus for Serious Analysts…you are not seeing the product of fluke or coincidence.

What you are looking at are the toxic consequences of the decisions of some specific person.

The disease is pandemic. Consider that, knowing full well what an abject and lethal failure William Kristol has been for years and years, some specific person gave that piece of shit one of the most coveted op-ed jobs in America. And then – just like George Bush -- when Kristol fucked that gig up, someone gave him another one.

Yet another someone gave this Hero of Free Market Meritocracy yet another job at which he has embarrassed himself like clockwork ever since.

Now of course, no one with a functioning cerebellum is ever going to mistake the denizens of FoxNews or Regnery Publishing or Hate Radio as anything other than $2 Conservative ideological handjob hookers,


What darkblack and BG said. And, yes, immediatement, to Mike G!

tanbark said...

"...the dangerous joining of the far right and left..."

Absolutely! After contributing to MoveOn and DemocracyNow, I now go into the nearest telephone booth to put on my 9mm Glock, pick up my
"Obama is a fascist" sign and head down to the townhall for some thoughtful, judicious, debate.

It so fun covering both ends of the extreme spectrum. After the townhall, I think I'll see if I can work up three-wayer with O'Reilly and Coulter.

Davis, as they say in England, is a right fucking idiot.

tech98 said...

Kristol keeps getting gigs because the Sulzberger and Graham media tools are comfortable with him (and Bush) as a fellow member of the Idiot Sons of Nepotism.

Too good not to share:
"In the late 1990s Ira Katznelson, an eminent political scientist at Columbia, delivered a guest lecture. Prof. Katznelson described a lunch he had with Irving Kristol during the first Bush administration.
The talk turned to William Kristol, then Dan Quayle's chief of staff, and how he got his start in politics. Irving recalled how he talked to his friend Harvey Mansfield at Harvard, who secured William a place there as both an undergrad and graduate student; how he talked to Pat Moynihan, then Nixon's domestic policy adviser, and got William an internship at the White House; how he talked to friends at the RNC [Republican National Committee] and secured a job for William after he got his Harvard Ph.D.; and how he arranged with still more friends for William to teach at Penn and the Kennedy School of Government.
With that, Prof. Katznelson recalled, he then asked Irving what he thought of affirmative action. 'I oppose it,' Irving proclaimed. 'It subverts meritocracy.' "

knowdoubt said...

God, it does my soul good to "see" someone, who is somebody, actually say what I have known for some time now. Thank you driftglass and all the other commenters, M G too, who thinks we really can take back the airwaves. I live in the boonies where you can't get broadband. I finally got a connection in town thru a friend who gave me permission to use their property for an antennae and sent it out to the country that way. I can't share it with my neighbors without being sued by comcast the "provider". What a racket!

triozyg said...

tech98 -- thanks for the Katznelson story

Helena said...

The 4th Estate reminds me of a grossly dysfunctional father; the kind who delights in keeping his children perpetually off balance.

The kids never relax, a state of internal incohesiveness is essential to their father's success. This is really the only reason they even cross his mind.

I canceled my cable a few months ago, no converter box, no mass media feed. Try it!