Ghosts Of The Before Time: April 13, 2005

I'll spare you the introductory paragraphs explaining the reason I'm running this limited series.  If you're interested, the link is here.  

Suffice it to say that, as I repost selections from my 20-year-old archives, perhaps you can understand my impatience with the many, many recently-former Republican who use their massive media platforms to insist that absolutely no one could have foreseen the dark places the GOP and the complicit media were headed.

So, typos and all, from April 13, 2005...

Here’s what a ship that has already sailed looks like 

Journalist worried: may find ourselves "on the wrong side of history."

This is by Nicholas Kristrof in today’s NYT. I have added a few comments.

Jim Taricani, a television journalist for an NBC station, was freed last weekend after four months of house arrest for refusing to reveal his sources. And Judith Miller of this newspaper and Matthew Cooper of Time magazine have been ordered to jail for up to 18 months for protecting their sources, although they remain free until their appeals run out.…

Dame Judith is still working over at your place, right? About so high...mousy hair? Ahmed Chalabi’s stenographer? Goes by the Title “Queen of All Iraq”? It was pretty scandalous. You must remember; it was in all the papers. Well, almost all.

Judges don't exactly decide cases based on public sentiment, but their decisions do reflect the values of their society. And in our society, public support for the news media has all but evaporated.

Oh it's much, much worse than that, and you have only yourselves to blame. A punk’s first punch is always a little hesitant, not knowing if you’ll hit back and, if you do, how much throw-weight your packing. Bullies are cowards and once upon a time it was the job of the Free Press to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”.

But you all never hit back when the thugs came. You flinched and cowered, and left us all at their mercy.

A recent report from the Pew Research Center, "Trends 2005," is painful to read. The report says that 45 percent of Americans believe little or nothing in their daily newspapers, up from 16 percent two decades ago. ...

Those of us in the press tend to get defensive about our dwindling credibility. We protest that we've been made scapegoats by partisan demagogues, particularly on the right, and I think that's true. But distrust for the news media, even if it's unfair, is the new reality - and we will have to work much, much harder to win back our credibility with the public.

Yes, you were scapegoated. You were kicked around like a soccer ball , and every time you came up for air you backed off instead of fighting back.

You wanna be thought of as crusading, then crusade. You want respect for your investigative savvy...then investigate.

In any case, it's not just right-wingers who distrust the media these days. The Pew Research Center found that while only 14 percent of Republicans believe all or most of what they read in The New York Times, even among Democrats the figure is only 31 percent. ...
...the one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on is that the news media are not trustworthy.

No pun intended, but this is news to you?! In your weird fetish to be “objective”, the Republicans learned the little trick that makes you dance like organ grinder monkeys. Whatever goofy-assed idea they came up with, you’d reflexively cede them half the distance between the truth and their goal.

There was a book I loved when I was a little driftglass called, “Half Magic” by Edgar Eager, about a talisman that granted the user exactly half of what they asked for. Wish to be ten times stronger that Lancelot, you’ll get five. Wish for a million in cash, you get 500K. In the Mainstream Media, the Right Wing of the Republican Party found their Half Magic Charm. And each time you met them halfway, they moved the goalposts another twenty yards again...and you jogged right on along behind them, ten yards at a time.

The “compromise” between the truth and a lie...is a lie. The “compromise” between science and superstition...is superstition. Now, would you care to guess what the compromise between tolerance and bigotry is? Between knowledge and ignorance? Between Ann Coulter and Paul Krugman?

I don't see any easy solutions, but print, radio and television all need to take much bolder steps to reconnect with the public...

Oh goodie! Another journalist making with the sackcloth and ashes! Every few months, year after year after year, journalist/self-flagellates moan publically about how awful it’s getting and how Somebody should really Do Something! As predictable as Aldermanic indictments in Chicago in Spring. And yet year after year after year it gets worse.

We also need more diverse newsrooms. When America was struck by race riots in the late 1960's, major news organizations realized too late that their failure to hire black reporters had impaired their ability to cover America. In the same way, our failure to hire more red state evangelicals limits our understanding of and ability to cover America today.

What, you mean “Lou Grant” didn’t fix all of this stuff ?

You may have missed it, but “red state evangelicals” have their own media – its called Fox/CNN/AM Talk Radio. They have their own literature – it’s called The Left Behind series. They even have their own political party... and in case you haven’t noticed they run the country and they're coming for you with ropes and pitchforks. But hey, maybe if you just bend over a liiiittle further and waggle you bare ass just a liiiittle saucier, they wont leave so many bruises this time.

So, they are hardly underrepresented. Many of them are, however, downright nuts. It might help your credibility with the 69% of Democrats who think you’re irredeemably McGoo-myopic about Evangelicals already if you would pause to notice -- out loud and in print -- that Falwell, Robertson, Wildmont, Schafly, Dobson, DeLay are not “controversial” or “traditional” or “conservative”. They are hateful, bigoted theocrats who work diligently to pave over the Constitution and erect a State Religion in its place.

If one word can capture the public attitude toward American journalists, I'm afraid it's "arrogant." Not surprisingly, I think that charge is grossly unfair. But it's imperative that we respond to that charge - not by dismissing it, but by working far more diligently to reconnect with the public.

No, the word you are looking for is “irrelevant.” I ask my college classes what, if any, news they read. The results are terrifying. By huge margins they don’t even bother reading you any more at all. They know craven and compromise when they see it, and they’re not buying any anymore. Some do enjoy some of the talk shows...but only the ones that are amused by putting red and black ants in a jar and watching them tear each other apart.

Unless we can recover the public trust, our protests about reporters' going to jail will come across as self-serving whining. And we'll wake up one day to find ourselves on the wrong side of history.
...

Sorry, that day was in 1987 -- the day the Reagan administration invited the Fairness Doctrine over for a little lunch, took it down in the basement and shot it in the head.

When it upheld the Doctrine in 1969 U.S. Supreme Court said, in part, that, “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of the broadcasters, which is paramount.”

The rule use to be the primacy of the citizen, but then then came Reagan and his FCC Chair Mark S. Fowler. Formerly a broadcast industry lawyer, who made it crystal clear that he held in utter contempt the whole idea of broadcasters had a civic responsibility for their product or a responsibility for making sure the media was really “Fair and Balanced” in a was that served democratic debate.

That was the moment for you to make your Glorious Stand!

Fowler peddled the ludicrous doctrine that forcing people who were getting Crazy Rich using the public airwaves the make sure that both sides of important issues were heard would somehow actually stifle Free Speech, because if you knew you might have to let the other side get a word in edgewise, then you might be less inclined to shoot your mouth off.

And Jimney Christmas, you also might be less inclined to hit a guy you disagree with in the face with a snow-shovel if you know a cop might toss your ass in jail…and you might get sued out of your split-level ranch and into a packing crate on Lower Wacker Drive.

But as with every single aspect of the GOP agenda – from speech to ethics to impeachment – the Republicans have no interest in a “fair fight” or in a marketplace of ideas. They’re interested in WINNING and since the Republican party cannot win in a straight fight, winning means cheating. Or, rather, raping and razing the rules once they come to power so that they’re no longer bound by any recognizable concept of “fairness”.

In other words, why risk jail time pounding someone’s face to steak tartar, if you can just pass a law that you now have the legal right to beat him senseless whenever you fucking well feel like it…and HE’S the one who can be jailed or sued if he fights back?

But how does one get away with such villainy? I’m glad you asked. Enter Reliable Republican Judicial Stooges #1 and #2: Reagan appointees to the D.C. Circuit, Judge Robert “Baby Face” Bork and Judge Antonin “Fat Tony” Scalia. Their 1986, 2–1 decision dodged around the whole question of the Constitutionality of the issue completely. By the interpretation of the nuanced use of ONE WORD (“under” instead of “by”) they declared that whole thing was an administrative matter, to be decided at the discretion of the FCC.

And in 1987, Dennis Patrick, Reagan’s new FCC chair, pulled the plug on it. Later that year, Reagan vetoed a bill that would have reinstated the doctrine, and in 1991 a movement to try again died why Bush 41 threatened veto.

And in 1988, Rush Limbaugh was off to the races.

For over 20 years, the Right Wing has gotten fat and rich and powerful running the same scam on you buffoons over and over again. No matter how batshit crazy their position is, you’ll concede half the stage, half the clock and give them the benefit of the doubt. Which give them an automatic victory. They showed up at the table with little more that bad-acid delusions, and now the control 50% of the battlefield because you defaulted it right into their laps.

And when you don’t completely capitulate to 100% of their insanity, they turn right around and feed that into their own Pravada Media as Further Proof of the evil left wing media conspiracy.

“Victim,” they shriek. “Anti-religious Bigot!” They rant this from the rooftops because of the tiny bit of sane ground you did not surrender...and you jellied eels dependably cave in even more.

And thus they have led you – and the rest of the nation you whose common interests you were supposed to be serving -- by these half measures, right into the foyer of your own slaughterhouse.

It’s really quite an amazing story. Too bad we don’t have a press anymore to report it.

End of April 13, 2005 repost.

Burn The Lifeboats