Category: Media

The Nose Knows

 

“A lie keeps growing and growing until it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
― spoken by The Blue Fairy in the 1940 Disney film Pinocchio.

This coming Monday at 5pm, Supreme Leader has promised to announce the winners of the Fake News awards, according to him. Media personalities are lining up for the most prestigious of the Fakies awards, because to be called a liar by the biggest liar of them all is quite an honor. Stephen Colbert of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) talk program The Late Show has taken out an ad in New York City’s Times Square to promote himself and his show for Supreme Leader’s top honors. This is becoming a big deal.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend – that’s the operating principle here. To be called out for Fake News by the biggest liar in the country is not only praise of a kind, but an endorsement. And now Supreme Liar will be bestowing awards of some sort on the highest honorees, though what that might be he has not made clear yet. Suffice to say that any news organization would be satisfied with the honor alone because of the boost to their ratings or readership, never mind the additional prestige. This must have been what Supreme Egotist meant in his recent New York Times interview when he suggested the media needs him around for the re-election campaign in 2020 to boost their income.


Awards and trophies have been a part of western civilization for millennia, at least since the ancient Greeks gave out laurel wreaths and cash gifts to winning Olympic athletes. In the twentieth century, the awards and trophies business really took off since entertainment businesses in particular found out giving them away in publicized ceremonies was a great way to let the tasteless public know what publications, movies, television shows, what have you, had the imprimatur of good taste from supposed authorities within the business, raising more revenue from the public, who now knew how to impress their friends and neighbors when they bought culture.

BBAward
The Big Brother Award from the United Kingdom based organization Privacy International. Near the end of George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the representative of state power, O’Brien, says to the protagonist, Winston, “‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.'”

The Fakies, as proposed by Supreme Dotard, promise something a little off kilter from the usual awards bestowing because they will be more in line with the Razzies, an anti-award for bad movie making. But since the Razzies awarders do not take themselves or their task too seriously, there will still be a difference in solemnity between the granting of Razzies and that of Fakies, because the awarder of the latter prizes takes himself all too seriously, as do many of his more die hard supporters. There are the cynical supporters among the upper classes who were only interested in seeing through the enactment of things like the recent tax cut package for themselves and their rich friends, and then there are the true believers among the lower classes who are mainly in it to spite leftists, with their definition of leftist being anyone to the other side of Dwight Eisenhower, who if he were alive today would himself be suspect.

The great Spike Milligan accepted a lifetime achievement award in 1994.

One important point that needs addressing here is that this very website has been first and foremost in denouncing the regime of Der Lügner since it started, and should therefore be in line to receive a Fakie as a promulgator of Fake News by light of how the regime judges these things. If this website receives a Fakie on Monday, rest assured the glow of its bestowal will shower contributors and readers alike with a penumbra of honor from an unimpeachable source – or an impeachable one, as may be the case.
― Vita

 

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Worse than Foot in Mouth

The pejorative expression “liberal media” has become a time-worn truth for some people after it has been repeated often enough, mostly by themselves. To them, attributing a news story to the “liberal media” is as good as saying the story is worthless. Their listeners are meant to take at face value the assertion that the media has a liberal bias, because they themselves never question the phrase. Of course the media has a liberal bias, because everyone says it does.

At least everyone within a certain circle says it does, and the people within that circle repeat the formula ad nauseum. Citing facts to these people about how the major media outlets are controlled by as few as a half dozen corporations, all of them concerned with promoting business rather than any leftist agenda, has no effect on them. They are addicted to the drug of blaming the faults of their right wing leaders on a mythical “liberal media”. Individual reporters within the big media corporations often lean to the left, but it does not follow that their personal views find their way into print or onto television or radio. The editors, who have their ears tuned to the desires of their corporate bosses, would not allow it, and they set the parameters for what will be in a news story and, more importantly, what will not.


Chuck Colson
Chuck Colson (1931-2012), officially White House Special Counsel in the Nixon administration, but unofficially the director of dirty tricks. After being sent to prison for seven months for his role in the Watergate scandal, he got religion.

Consumers of news media have no idea what is being left out, what questions are not being asked, and what assumptions are not being challenged. It is what a news organization leaves out that determines its political bias, more than what it releases for consumption. Yes, a newspaper may endorse the Republican or Democratic candidate for office, but what about the idea that neither candidate represents with sincerity any interests other than those of the business class that donated the largest sums to their campaigns? What about in the run-up to war in Iraq in 2003 the reality that there was very little skepticism of the Bush administration’s reasons for going to war from supposedly liberal media outlets like The New York Times and the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS)? To persist in labeling such organizations “liberal media” belies not only a willful ignorance of the facts, but a bent in political philosophy that is so far rightward it makes Rush Limbaugh appear centrist.

 

Before the 1950s, major media outlets were seen for what they were then and still are today – centrist or right-leaning organizations that were interested in a healthy bottom line, without investigating too deeply into the feathered nests of the owners’ wealthy friends in government and business. Starting in the 1950s with critical reporting of racial atrocities in the South, and continuing through the 1960s and 1970s with critical reporting on the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and the CIA, the major media strayed from it’s generally cozy relationship with the powers that be. It was an anomalous twenty to thirty years, and the Nixon administration sought to rein in the press using, among other tools and dirty tricks, the “liberal media” propaganda lie, repeated often. By the 1980s and the Reagan administration, a cowed press corps had reverted to previous form. By 2003, it would be difficult to distinguish the uncritical cheerleading among the press corps for the Iraq War from the rah rah press reports at the beginning of the Spanish-American War a little more than a hundred years earlier.

Harvey Korman and Slim Pickens brainstorm on the kinds of people they need to help them destroy the fictional western town of Rock Ridge in Mel Brooks’s 1974 film Blazing Saddles. No mention of any “very fine people” among them, however. Warning: foul language.

 

The “liberal media” excuse is a handy one, and some people will cling to it no matter how badly the current Oval Office occupant behaves or how heinous the words coming out of his mouth or from his Twitter tirades. Anyone who continues to excuse him by blaming the “liberal media” for slanting the words the president himself uttered in response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, last weekend, is in denial about the situation and is suffering from cranial rectumitis so severe that no one else should have to listen any longer.
― Vita

A case of cranial rectumitis.

 

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Bury the Hatchet

 

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer resigned this week, originally stating his intent to stay on until August. Apparently new White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci decided August was too long to wait for Spicer to leave and, as Spicer’s immediate boss, took the opportunity to name Spicer’s deputy, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the new press secretary, effective immediately. Mr. Spicer will most likely not be missed by anyone either inside the administration or in the press corps, though the satirists on the Saturday Night Live television show may miss him. They still have plenty of targets for satire in the current administration, starting with the Man with a Daily Message himself, the Tweeter-in-Chief.

 

The current administration has made no secret of its disdain for most of the press corps, certain favorites excluded, and may try to end daily briefings of White House reporters. It seems the briefings have been a White House ritual for so long that there was never a time they were not part of the scene. That is not the case. They are a fairly recent phenomenon in American history, and were not recognizable in their present form until the Eisenhower Administration. Even then the briefings were not conducted daily. It wasn’t until Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon, was elected president at the end of the 1960s that press briefings became a daily occurrence. Nixon also had the Press Briefing Room moved to its current location in the West Wing when he ordered the indoor swimming pool covered over and converted to that purpose.
Spiro Agnew by Edmund S. Valtman ppmsc.07953
A 1970 caricature by Edmund S. Valtman of Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, who was widely recognized as President Nixon’s “hatchet man” in dealing with the press.
Strange that President Nixon should have been the one to increase the frequency of press briefings, considering his often contentious relationship with the Fourth Estate. Nixon was not alone among presidents in feeling vilified by the press, and vilifying the press in turn. Most presidents have kept the press at arm’s length at best, viewing them as a necessary evil and trying when they could to control the tone and substance of their reporting about the administration. “Spin control” has always been a concern of presidents and their aides, though that particular phrase for it didn’t catch on until the Reagan Administration.

A scene from the 1983 film The Right Stuff, directed by Philip Kaufman, in which the 7 Mercury astronauts assert their priorities over those of NASA scientists by pointing out their leverage with the press.

Theodore Roosevelt was a rarity in that he cultivated a cordial relationship with the press, all the more to get them on his side when he used the Bully Pulpit to push his favored policies through Congress. His distant cousin, Franklin Roosevelt, went even further in developing good relations with the press, personally conducting twice weekly off the record briefings in the Oval Office. As briefings and presidential press conferences became more common through the twentieth century, people came to accept them as an indication of openness and a window into the executive branch, however distorted and murky the view might be. At least there was communication, and official positions could be known by the press and public.

Now this administration wants to pull down the shades on its workings. It makes no difference that Mr. Spicer is being replaced by Ms. Sanders. It hardly makes any difference that briefings are fewer and characterized by disrespect for the press, since this administration has demonstrated openly its contempt for norms of civil political discourse. When you know you will be lied to and treated shabbily, why stand there and continue to take it? Sooner or later, even the most profit hungry of the media outlets may abandon the White House press briefing as a source of anything other than insubstantial blathering worthwhile only as a target for satire. This administration may then find out, if the people in it are capable of learning anything at all, that if no one is taking seriously their side of any story or even listening, then there is no more spin control. With a little self control, the press may even stop giving undue attention to the daily distraction of outrageous tweets issuing from the Oval Office, and start paying attention to the important issues affecting this country.
― Vita

 

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The Enemy of the Free Press

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’ And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. ‘Reality control,’ they called it: in Newspeak, ‘doublethink.’

― from 1984, by George Orwell.

 

The idea, so long promulgated that people have come to uncritically accept it as truth, of a “liberal media”, meaning by that the mainstream, corporate media, has never been more laughable than today. If people think corporate media outlets such as Cable News Network (CNN), Microsoft National Broadcasting Company (MSNBC), the New York Times, and the Washington Post, are “liberal” then perhaps their definition needs adjustment, because all of these media outlets are owned by giant corporations, and giant corporations are not known for liberal views.

 

Franklin the printer
Reproduction of a Charles Mills painting by the Detroit Publishing Company, depicting a young Benjamin Franklin (center) at work on a printing press.
What is more important with news is what is left out than what is left in and reported on. Those are the editorial decisions that filter down from corporate headquarters. Individual reporters may be to the left of Karl Marx, but it hardly matters if editors change their stories at the bidding of headquarters. What matters are the terms of debate, or what is open to question and what is not. Much of this is internalized by reporters eventually, or they don’t get to become editors. They have certainly learned and adopted as Gospel the rules of the game by the time they are ready to move up to senior staff.

 

But readers or viewers of the news never learn what has been left out by politic editors on behalf of their conservative corporate masters. Not every corporate master is conservative? Doubtful. Liberalism doesn’t go with that territory. Some astute members of the public may pick up the general drift of coverage from a particular outlet, but when it comes down to really important matters, they are addressed in nearly the same way by all the corporate media. It comes down to the narcissism of minor differences that Sigmund Freud pointed out when he wrote “It is precisely the minor differences in people who are otherwise alike that form the basis of feelings of hostility between them.” For the diversion of the masses, educated as well as uneducated, the pundits on television and in the op-ed pages of the newspapers dispute how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, while their corporate masters fleece everyone of every last dollar. It’s a neat trick.

 

All of that aside, it truly is a disgrace to see the open contempt the current presidential administration and it’s Republican allies around the country display for the Fourth Estate, the Free Press. The corporate, greed-based media, have brought some of this treatment upon themselves with their craven promotion of a shallow reality television star for president – what did they expect? – but what is truly unfortunate is how the disgraceful treatment coming from the White House press room has overflowed to independent news outlets that try to honestly hew to journalistic principles.
Paul Cézanne 130
The Artist’s Father, Reading “L’Événement”, an 1866 painting by Paul Cézanne (1839-1906).

 

There are questions to answer, however, before getting up in arms about the bad behavior of the current presidential administration in how it treats media it doesn’t like. First of all, the question of how the current crowd got into office can be bypassed. They are there now, and that’s that. The main question for now is: Who watches these television news shows uncritically and then counts themselves as informed? and Who reads these newspapers that have long since stopped being liberal in anything but stale reputation only, and thinks that they are caught up on the latest left of center take on important issues? Who are these delusional viewers and readers whose uncritical attention and financial support allows this charade to continue and thrive? Are they the ones who support a Free Press against an antagonistic, authoritarian regime in Washington, D.C.? Don’t bet your last corporate media stock share on it.
― Ed.

 

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Macho Macho Man

 

On Wednesday, Greg Gianforte, the Republican candidate for Montana’s lone seat in the United States House of Representatives, allegedly body-slammed and then punched a reporter for The Guardian newspaper, Ben Jacobs. Listening to the audio of the encounter, however, and reading the eyewitness reports of others who were present, there really was no “allegedly’ about it. Gianforte was supposedly upset with Jacobs over a question he asked and maybe how he asked it. As much as the Gianforte campaign tries to spin it, all that really doesn’t matter except to the true believers for whom he can do no wrong. Gianforte assaulted another man who was simply doing his job, and whether Gianforte and his supporters agree with the reporter’s politics or his methodology matters not one whit and is no excuse for Gianforte’s actions or reactions. Gianforte is in the rough and tumble of politics now, and he’s no longer the big shot in charge of his own business empire who dare not be questioned by the hoi polloi: grow a thicker skin or stay out of politics, Gianforte, a lesson you could learn alongside your colleague, Markwayne Mullin (R-OK).

Chris Masters and MVP (Dec 2009)
World Wrestling Entertainment superstars Chris Masters (left) and MVP (right) perform for the troops on December 4, 2009, in Holt Stadium at Joint Base Balad, Iraq; photo by US Army Sgt. Ryan Twist.

Not to excuse Gianforte in the least, but this kind of incident has been in the works for the past year or more, and the mainstream media has been complicit in its development. The Thug-in-Chief, when he was on the campaign trail in 2016, routinely ostracized the media at his rallies and encouraged his supporters to berate them to the point of violence. Mainstream media outlets walked a tightrope regarding this behavior, because while it demeaned their efforts and made life harder for individual reporters, ratings were great and ad revenue was way up. Viewers and readers appeared to want some Jerry Springer style mayhem in their political reporting, and the media executives were prepared to give it to them and count the dollars rolling in, never mind that there would be a reckoning some day. The reckoning is now, but holding it in check may be too late for all of us. We were the ones who tuned in for this ugly, violent show, after all, and blaming the media does not get us off the hook. There’s no denying the television remote control comes with a channel changer and an off button, and there are other news outlets, particularly online, that do not cater to the basest urges of the voting public.

Greg Gianforte, now the Republican Congressman from Montana after his win on Thursday, has his own hypocritical tendencies to wrestle with after his assault on Wednesday, if in fact he is capable of that much introspection. Probably not. It wouldn’t be in character, given his background and proclivities. Public apology aside, he nonetheless probably feels entirely justified in his actions and recognizes no hypocrisy in them whatsoever. His supporters certainly don’t. The more important question that needs answering is how we the public will ultimately react to the ongoing freak show of thugs seeking political office, or already in office, who have been encouraged to let loose their worst behavior by the signals they are getting from the top. Do we reject them and say we will tolerate no more like them? Or do we continue to watch passively and ghoulishly like rubberneckers at a traffic accident, or the even more base viewers of the trashy Jerry Springer show? Don’t count on media executives to elevate the tone of civil discourse. They’re interested only in profits, make no mistake about that, and pay no attention to anything they say in contradiction to that imperative. In a democracy, what’s left of it at least, we get the government we deserve. Looking around at our politicians now, that doesn’t speak very well of us, does it?
― Vita

 

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Shut Up, Messengers, and Sing

 

The controversy in January over Meryl Streep’s remarks upon accepting an award at the Golden Globes seemed to have centered on whether an entertainment industry ceremony was the appropriate time and place for a famous actress to air her political concerns. Lost in all the hullabaloo were Ms. Streep’s actual remarks and how they concerned a humanitarian issue more than a political one, namely that we treat each other with respect and dignity, and that a good example should start with the president of the country.

Perhaps the most notable incident of humanitarian protest at a Hollywood awards ceremony occurred in March 1973, when Marlon Brando refused his Oscar for best actor in 1972’s The Godfather and asked Sacheen Littlefeather to speak for him at the podium. Brando was upset at the treatment of Native Americans in movies and television, and he also wanted to shine a light on the siege by federal agents of the Wounded Knee occupiers, which until then had drawn little media attention. Brando and Littlefeather succeeded in getting American news media to note what was happening at Wounded Knee. Their long term goal of turning around the portrayal of Native Americans in popular media is still a work in progress. The momentum of centuries of stereotyping by the dominant European culture is slowing but not stopped.

Meanwhile Ms. Littlefeather, more than Brando then and Streep now, took a tremendous amount of abuse in the press over her role in the incident. She was not a famous actress known for a lifetime of work in the public eye, she was female, and she was part Indian. Some in the press even intimated she was not Indian at all, implying she was a phony and therefore no one need pay attention to anything she said. In an interview on The Dick Cavett Show after the Oscar ceremony, starting at the 6:30 mark of the video clip included in this post, Mr. Brando expressed regret for having put her in such a vulnerable position. Beating up on the messenger is an old tactic, for some a gut reaction to unwelcome news, and for others a cynical ploy to distract from the message, and anyone who tells unpleasant truths has to prepare for it as much as possible. Still, withstanding the onslaught can be an ordeal.

The Dixie Chicks learned that unpleasant lesson in 2003 and beyond when, on account of humanitarian concerns, they made remarks critical of the rush to war in Iraq. It seems that calling out jingoism is the most unwelcome news of all for sunshine patriots, considering the level of vitriol they heaped on these singers. Fourteen years later, what has the uncritical pose of much of the major popular and news media toward the Bush administration’s justifications for war in Iraq brought to Iraqis and Americans that has proved worthwhile, that has proved anything but a destructive waste? And where do the jingoists stand on that now? They have not learned a thing, and instead have turned their attention elsewhere in the world, fanning embers into flames.
― Vita

 

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