Bread and circuses, while America burns...
Apr. 8th, 2008 01:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unusualmusic_lj_archiveGlenn Greenwald points out that: In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
Megan McArdle, a political writer for The Atlantic Monthly, argues, among other things, that Americans care more about Barack Obama than John Yoo because John Yoo is not running for President. Also, people don't know about "minor gov't functunaries". And of course, this perennial argument: that people don't care about weighty issues like gov't torture, they prefer to read about Britney Spears Seriously. Read the whole thing.
And as for Dan Drezner, professor at Tufts University, well... 2) There are more press mentions of an event when the target of the media inquiry actually responds to the press. To my knowledge, John Yoo has said nothing since the terror memo was leaked published, [2 seconds worth of googling disproves that see Esquire magazine article] and the Bush administration has clammed up as well. Barack Obama, on the other hand, clearly did respond to the Jeremiah Wright business, leading to multiple news cycles about that issue;[Really? Does ANYONE think that Obama ignoring this issue would have persuaded the mainstream media to back off? Remember John Kerry's swiftboating?]
3) Shockingly, the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future (i.e., who will be the next president?) than in events that look back at the past. [Me? Speechless.]
First to begin with:John Yoo responds in Esquire Magazine on April 3 I found that in two seconds worth of googling.
There are loads of WTFness in these McArdle's and Drenzer's statements. But Mr. Greenwald takes them apart much more effectively than I would have, to wit...
McArdle's principal point is that "Americans care more about [Obama] than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president" and that "most people don't care about minor government functionaries." Just think about that for a moment. Megan McCardle thinks that John Yoo is basically the DOJ version of Lynndie England -- just some low-level guy who went off on his own and did some isolated, unauthorized bad things in the past that our political leaders have now corrected.
She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.
And that's the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime -- war crimes by any measure -- and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle -- who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic -- will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won't stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.
and
Then we have Dan Drezner. He lists several reasons why the media's coverage is fine here, but what he writes doesn't even make sense on its own terms. He argues, for example, that controversies where the target of the controversy comments on it will understandably get more media attention than where the target doesn't comment (yet, almost immediately, John Yoo did comment extensively about his memos, while Hillary has said nothing about Lewinksy for years and Obama hasn't commented on whether his bowling prowess means he's an effete and out-of-touch elitist).
Worse, Drezner's rationale would mean that high government officials who commit serious crimes will be able -- and ought to be able -- to keep the press coverage to a minimum simply by refusing to comment on what they've done, since all the press should do is report what each side says. If the wrong-doers say nothing, there doesn't need to be press coverage about it -- because, hey, what can reporters do?
See why I love this guy? See why the MSM is fucking dangerous to the survival of democracy in these here United States?
Please do yourself a favour and read the whole thing And then, if you haven't already, set about finding yourself alternative news sources (and Fox anything doesn't count). Cause if you are waiting on the MSM to inform and enlighten you, you'll be waking up one morning to realize that the US is a fascist state, and be wondering how that happened. Also, keep a sharp eye on effort to fuck up Net Neutrality.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079
Megan McArdle, a political writer for The Atlantic Monthly, argues, among other things, that Americans care more about Barack Obama than John Yoo because John Yoo is not running for President. Also, people don't know about "minor gov't functunaries". And of course, this perennial argument: that people don't care about weighty issues like gov't torture, they prefer to read about Britney Spears Seriously. Read the whole thing.
And as for Dan Drezner, professor at Tufts University, well... 2) There are more press mentions of an event when the target of the media inquiry actually responds to the press. To my knowledge, John Yoo has said nothing since the terror memo was leaked published, [2 seconds worth of googling disproves that see Esquire magazine article] and the Bush administration has clammed up as well. Barack Obama, on the other hand, clearly did respond to the Jeremiah Wright business, leading to multiple news cycles about that issue;[Really? Does ANYONE think that Obama ignoring this issue would have persuaded the mainstream media to back off? Remember John Kerry's swiftboating?]
3) Shockingly, the press appears to be more interested in events that determine the future (i.e., who will be the next president?) than in events that look back at the past. [Me? Speechless.]
First to begin with:John Yoo responds in Esquire Magazine on April 3 I found that in two seconds worth of googling.
There are loads of WTFness in these McArdle's and Drenzer's statements. But Mr. Greenwald takes them apart much more effectively than I would have, to wit...
McArdle's principal point is that "Americans care more about [Obama] than John Yoo because, well, John Yoo isn't running for president" and that "most people don't care about minor government functionaries." Just think about that for a moment. Megan McCardle thinks that John Yoo is basically the DOJ version of Lynndie England -- just some low-level guy who went off on his own and did some isolated, unauthorized bad things in the past that our political leaders have now corrected.
She quite obviously has no idea that the memoranda John Yoo wrote -- legalizing government torture, declaring presidential omnipotence, and suspending the Fourth Amendment inside the U.S. -- are not merely his opinion, but became the official position of the entire Executive Branch of the U.S. Government. She also quite obviously has no idea that he did all of that in close association with the most powerful political officials in the White House, including David Addington, Alberto Gonzales and ultimately Donald Rumsfeld, nor does she have the slightest awareness that the torture-authorizing memoranda were used to brief Gen. Geoffrey Miller, the commander of Guantanamo who then went to Iraq to train the commanders of American prisons in Iraq, including Abu Ghraib, nor that the theories of presidential omnipotence underlying it all remain firmly in place.
And that's the point. Because we have an establishment media that completely ignores these matters in favor of chattering endlessly about how Obama bowls and the cleavage that Hillary shows, the U.S. Government, at its highest levels, can literally create a torture regime -- war crimes by any measure -- and explicitly seize lawbreaking powers. And when they do, even people like Megan McArdle -- who writes on political matters for the The Atlantic -- will remain completely ignorant of even the most basic facts about what the Government did, ignorance which won't stop her from defending it all and dismissing its significance.
and
Then we have Dan Drezner. He lists several reasons why the media's coverage is fine here, but what he writes doesn't even make sense on its own terms. He argues, for example, that controversies where the target of the controversy comments on it will understandably get more media attention than where the target doesn't comment (yet, almost immediately, John Yoo did comment extensively about his memos, while Hillary has said nothing about Lewinksy for years and Obama hasn't commented on whether his bowling prowess means he's an effete and out-of-touch elitist).
Worse, Drezner's rationale would mean that high government officials who commit serious crimes will be able -- and ought to be able -- to keep the press coverage to a minimum simply by refusing to comment on what they've done, since all the press should do is report what each side says. If the wrong-doers say nothing, there doesn't need to be press coverage about it -- because, hey, what can reporters do?
See why I love this guy? See why the MSM is fucking dangerous to the survival of democracy in these here United States?
Please do yourself a favour and read the whole thing And then, if you haven't already, set about finding yourself alternative news sources (and Fox anything doesn't count). Cause if you are waiting on the MSM to inform and enlighten you, you'll be waking up one morning to realize that the US is a fascist state, and be wondering how that happened. Also, keep a sharp eye on effort to fuck up Net Neutrality.
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no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 01:20 am (UTC)The solution is to make people aware of the ways in which commercial discourse attempts to influence us, and the values system that goes along with it. If you don't already know about the work of the Media Education Foundation, they'd be a good bunch of folks to check out.
I show "Advertising and the end of the world" in most of my classes, and I think it's been quite useful in getting my students to think more critically about the soup of commercial media 21st USans thoughtlessly swim in. Still, that's not going to get Bush and co. impeached so there are of course many other worthy solutions that people are working on.
thanks for your thoughts on this
no subject
Date: 2008-04-09 02:22 am (UTC)