No time to obsess right now, but this was too much in the lies.com sweet spot for me to pass it up. From The Smoking Gun, a story about how imprisoned con-man James Sabatino apparently gamed the LA Times into reporting fabricated news: Big Phat Liar.
MARCH 26–Last week’s bombshell Los Angeles Times report claiming that the 1994 shooting of Tupac Shakur in the lobby of a Manhattan recording studio was carried out by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs and that the rap impresario knew of the plot beforehand was based largely on fabricated FBI reports, The Smoking Gun has learned.
The Times appears to have been hoaxed by an imprisoned con man and accomplished document forger, an audacious swindler who has created a fantasy world in which he managed hip-hop luminaries, conducted business with Combs, Shakur, Busta Rhymes, and The Notorious B.I.G., and even served as Combs’s trusted emissary to Death Row Records boss Marion “Suge” Knight during the outset of hostilities in the bloody East Coast-West Coast rap feud.
Honestly I wasn’t expecting much from Obama’s speech today on race, assuming that he would attempt to distance himself and Clinton from their respective supporters that have been trying to turn this into a racial election, in one direction or another.
As it turns out, Obama takes this moment — at the height and final stretch of an incredibly unpredictable nomination race — to speak substantively, expansively, and somewhat confrontationally on race and how it influences the opinions and opportunities of a broad swath of Americans today. Here’s the transcript.
Some continue to insist that Obama is all talk. Looking at what he has accomplished, they couldn’t be more wrong. But even if it were true, I think a President who is able and willing to speak words like these at politically inopportune times may do more to change the way business is done than any amount of political triangulation.
Intelligence is sometimes overrated. Stupidity can be a great source of truth, not to mention (black) comedy. In that vein I give you the Michael Scott of US television “journalists”: Tucker Carlson.
You have to sit through a commercial to view the video at that site (which is why I didn’t embed the video here; I will not let my teency piece of the web be degraded in that particular way, at least not yet), but I think it’s actually worth sitting through, because Carlson exposes so clearly what is wrong with US journalism, and the response of The Scotsman reporter Gerri Peev (who did the interview with former Obama advisor Samantha Power where Power called Hillary Clinton “a monster”) is so awesome.
This is coming courtesy of Glenn Greenwald, who has lots more insightful things to say about the issue, including a round-up of several YouTube clips of non-US journalists asking questions of US politicians. All highly recommended.
Credit to Tucker Carlson for being so (unintentionally) candid about the lowly, subservient role of the American press with regard to “the relationship between the press and the powerful.” A journalist should never do anything that “hurts” the powerful, otherwise the powerful won’t give access to the press any longer. Presumably, the press should only do things that please the powerful so that the powerful keep talking to the press, so that the press in turn can keep pleasing the powerful, in an endless, symbiotic, mutually beneficial cycle. Rarely does someone who plays the role of a “journalist” on TV so candidly describe their real function.
Over time I’ve become less and less interested in fisking (which I’m using here to mean the process of dissecting a dishonest online argument by posting a response that plows through it a sentence or two at a time, interjecting criticisms), but with that said, this piece by libertarian Julian Sanchez on something Matt Continetti wrote recently in the Weekly Standard regarding Congressional actions on FISA is worth reading: Substandard.
A January 27 report on CBS’s 60 Minutes attempted to answer what CBS reporter Scott Pelley claimed was a key mystery of the Iraq War: Why didn’t Saddam Hussein tell the world he had no weapons of mass destruction, and thus avoid the U.S.-led invasion? But if Pelley had been watching his own network’s exclusive interview with Hussein on the eve of the war, he would have known that Hussein did exactly that.
It’s really quite remarkable. I remember the run-up to the war, and CBS’s willingness to completely mischaracterize what happened then as part of its “news” reporting is fairly disheartening. I mean, I realize that Fox News is intentionally ridiculous in order to cater to its target audience’s hostile-media-bias perceptions, and that CNN has made a conscious editorial decision to follow Fox in order to defend its market-share. But CBS?
Oh, waiter. Can I get another media, please? This one isn’t very good.
It seems kind of ironic, given the prominent role Bill Clinton has been playing in the Democratic primary lately, but apparently it was 10 years ago yesterday that he gave the nation the finger-waggle while declaring, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Glenn Greenwald has some extremely apt things to say about Ezra Levant’s interrogation by the Alberta Human Rights Commission in response to Levant, publisher of a Canadian right-wing magazine, choosing to publish cartoons depicting Mohamed, and thereby eliciting complaints from an Islamic group’s imam: The Noxious Fruits of Hate Speech Laws. Among those apt things is his description of the above video as “nothing short of stomach-turning.” There’s also this:
For those unable to think past the (well-deserved) animosity one has for the specific targets in question here, all one needs to do instead is imagine these proceedings directed at opinions and groups that one likes. If Muslim groups can trigger government investigations due to commentary they find offensive, so, too, can conservative Christian or right-wing Jewish groups, or conservative or neoconservative groups, or any other political faction seeking to restrict and punish speech it dislikes.
If you’ve already decided that it was a conspiracy, in which Hillary got her friend Ray Buckley to rig the New Hampshire voting machines, you probably don’t care about this. (And you’ll probably want to avoid it, because it mentions something that seems like a pretty big hole in your argument: that exit polling showed the same Hillary win that the machines did.) But for the rest of us obsessives, this article in the Columbia Journalism Review is kind of interesting: The Polls: What the #$!% Happened?
No real answers, but some informed musing about what was and wasn’t a factor.
Update: Oh, and immediately after posting this, I came across the following Joshua Micah Marshall item at TPM: Enough.
There is also something perverse about the quick knee-jerk reaction to assume that any election that dramatically doesn’t go your way was stolen. It stems from the same fidelity to assumption and desire over fact that so many of us have excoriated in the present administration. There is a sullen childishness at work in this thinking that no robust political movement can ever be built on.
Maybe you’ve heard about the small furor over the Washington Post’s article, “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him”. It really is an excellent example of the trap that reporters often fall into: pointing out an issue, reporting opposing statements about the topic, and leaving it at that. In fact I hope the criticism of this article doesn’t get lost in a similar trap, with the controversy getting simplified to “Obama Supporters Object to Washington Post Report on Muslim Rumors”. The rumors are simply false, have been proven to be so, and should be reported as such. Period.
The problem here is the unwillingness to state hard facts and call lies “lies”, and do so first and foremost. Others have commented extensively, but as usual I think the clearest criticism is through satire. This cartoon, amusingly also printed in the Washington Post, gets it right.
I think this is the crux of many of the problems people have with the media and the perceived bias (in either direction) of various news outlets. When reporting has devolved to he-said she-said (as Colbert put it, “Just put ’em through a spell check and go home.”), it is almost impossible not to exhibit bias. My guess is that, for a news business, facts aren’t profitable. Facts must be carefully checked and if they are wrong, the business is subject to libel lawsuits. Transcription is quick, safe, and (particularly if you pick a side) profitable.
I remember when CNN still had some journalistic integrity. It was sort of like an appendix, I guess; a vestigial organ left over from an earlier evolutionary stage. I watched Bernard Shaw and Peter Arnett broadcast live from Baghdad at the start of the first Gulf War; did they know at the time, I wonder, that what they were doing was a weird sort of kabuki theater, a throwback to an earlier tradition that was well on its way to obsolescence?
Anyway, those days are long gone. As evidence of that, I offer the following clip, aired during “news” coverage recently by CNN:
This may also be in the “lighten up” category, but I have to admit that Eric Boehlert makes a point about Colbert’s fake candidacy, and the enormous media coverage it’s received. The joke is indeed on the press here, and as typical for the Stewart and Colbert crew, there’s serious news behind it.
I have enough personal interest in the process and the candidates that I’ve spent the time to read all about their stances, voting records and personal stories — so the ongoing campaign coverage doesn’t really do much for me. As such I find Colbert’s run pretty hilarious, but it could be argued that it’s not so funny when the media probably should be spending their time on more complete coverage of the real candidates in this the most important part of our representative governmental process.
Why is the media seemingly ignoring Ron Paul (who, while I wouldn’t pick him, is probably the candidate who America as a whole really wants) while continuing to cover a joke? Why is it that when I mention Obama to my coworkers, they still wonder aloud “isn’t he a Muslim or something?”
The main U.S. disaster-response agency apologized on Friday for having its employees pose as reporters in a news briefing on California’s wildfires that no journalists attended.
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FEMA had called the briefing with about 15 minutes notice as federal officials headed for Southern California to oversee firefighting and rescue efforts. Reporters were also given a phone number to listen in but could not ask questions.
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…with no reporters attending and a FEMA video feed being carried live by some television networks, FEMA press employees posed questions for Johnson that included: “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”
It’s just a quick funny, but very much in keeping with the lies.com spirit: Stephen Colbert writes Maureen Dowd’s column, unleashing his double-ironic conservative fury on the NY Times Op-ed. My favorite bit, explaining the confusing nature of 2008 presidential candidates:
For instance, Hillary Clinton. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to be scared of her so Democrats will think they should nominate her when she’s actually easy to beat, or if I’m supposed to be scared of her because she’s legitimately scary.
Or Rudy Giuliani. I can’t remember if I’m supposed to support him because he’s the one who can beat Hillary if she gets nominated, or if I’m supposed to support him because he’s legitimately scary.
Join me in exploring my obsessions in Lies.com Podcast 24: lying politicians, in-the-moment actors and reporters, and teenage girl pop stars.
I don’t know what people think of this format I’ve been using for the podcasts lately; people are downloading them and presumably listening, but the number is small and I don’t get a lot of feedback.
I mostly make these as audio journals of the more-interesting stuff I’ve been listening to on my commute. When I hear something that makes me think, huh, I could listen to that again, I make a mental note to throw it in a podcast. Then I try to add some music that seems appropriate, either in terms of mood, or in terms of a specific lyrical commentary.
I don’t know that there are many other people doing podcasts like this, which may be trying to tell me something. But I find it interesting, and I enjoy listening to them myself (re-listening to them) during the commute.
Anyway, if you’ve listened to these recent ones and have any comments pro or con, feel free to pass them on. Thanks.
Craig de-lurked long enough to vote “paranoia” on my earlier item about Barnett Rubin’s report that an anonymous source had told him Cheney was pushing the right-wing press to roll out stories building the case for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day. The substantive part of Rubin’s allegation went like this:
They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects.
So, as promised, I’m here with a report card on how faithfully the listed mouthpieces followed their alleged instructions:
the American Enterprise Institute: AEI fellow Michael Ledeen’s latest book, The Iranian Time Bomb, is being pushed by the institute this week. They list an upcoming panel discussion on the book, though technically that discussion won’t be taking place until this coming Monday, so one could argue that the timing is a little off there. The institute’s home page currently lists the same book in its “latest books” section, though that item was posted the week before Labor Day, so again, the timing isn’t very good.
Commentary: The best I could come up with in a quick perusal of the magazine’s site was this item, posted in the magazine’s “contentions” blog on Wednesday, in which Emanuele Ottolenghi criticized Michael Slackman’s article in the Interntional Herald Tribune characterizing Hashemi Rafsanjani as a moderate by quoting from a December, 2001, press release in which Rafsanjani seemed to imply that a nuclear exchange between Israel and a hypothetical nuke-equipped Islamic power would leave the Muslim world damaged but still standing, while Israel would just be gone.
“Usual suspects”: Not sure who to go with here, but National Review Online has a nice example from Tuesday, with Andrew McCarthy offering up a hagiographic review of Ledeen’s book.
As long as we’re evaluating Rubin’s story, we should also check out Rubin’s own followup posting from Tuesday (in which he points to a Newsweek article from AEI fellow Reuel Marc Gerecht as the beginning of the “war rollout”), and also from Tuesday, Spencer Ackerman’s report of a conversation with Rubin in TPMmuckraker. That item said that “Rubin said he didn’t know specifically that Gerecht was part of the campaign, but he pointed to the argument as fitting neatly within the pattern.” Rubin also cited the AEI panel discussion on Ledeen’s book, and mentioned another event scheduled for that day, in which Newt Gingrich will give a speech on how “it has been almost six years since the attacks of 9/11, and the United States has yet to confront the threat posed by the irreconcilable wing of Islam.”
So, summing it all up, what’s the verdict? Did the predicted onslaught of pro-Iran-war items appear in the echo chamber? Well, sort of. Most of the listed outlets did indeed run something prominent in the course of the week. And to be fair, Rubin said this would just be the opening act, with the big push timed to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 next week. Playing devil’s advocate, though, a lot of this week’s activity seems to be coordinated with the rollout of Ledeen’s book, which would have been fairly predictable in advance, even without top seekrit inside information about Darth Cheney having instructed his minions to make a push at this time. But that predictability cuts both ways: knowing that the book was due to come out, Cheney could indeed have put the word out that now was the time to push the story. Or, knowing that a flurry of book-related activity was due to happen, Rubin could have pushed an invented story about Cheney being behind it, knowing that events would bear him out, at least in the eyes of the paranoid.
I guess I’m left pretty much where I started. Which is pretty typical for the real world, which only rarely reveals itself all at once, in dramatic fashion.
Does this surprise anybody? From Andrew Tilghman’s The Myth of AQI:
Having been led astray by flawed prewar intelligence about WMDs, official Washington wants to believe it takes a more skeptical view of the administration’s information now. Yet Beltway insiders seem to be making almost precisely the same mistakes in sizing up al-Qaeda in Iraq.
In Test Marketing, George Packer quotes Barnett R. Rubin quoting a nameless friend who talked to a member of a neocon think tank (you still with me?) who allegedly conveyed the following:
They [the source’s institution] have “instructions” (yes, that was the word used) from the Office of the Vice-President to roll out a campaign for war with Iran in the week after Labor Day; it will be coordinated with the American Enterprise Institute, the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, Commentary, Fox, and the usual suspects. It will be heavy sustained assault on the airwaves, designed to knock public sentiment into a position from which a war can be maintained. Evidently they don’t think they’ll ever get majority support for this — they want something like 35-40 percent support, which in their book is “plenty.”
So: paranoia? Or is this really The New Cruelty? At least the test will be short. If we don’t get the barrage of making-the-case-for-war-on-Iran in the coming week, let’s meet back here and discuss the implications. Or if we do get a barrage, let’s all get serious about what we’re facing here.
Nice item from Christy Harden Smith of Firedoglake about the lies of the Bush administration and its defenders: The Good Neoconman.
Convenient how those little things called “facts” and “history” can be blithely swept aside, isn’t it? Each and every time there is no public accountability for this fact-free swill and directly contradictory statements, they push the boundaries of idiocy a bit further. Every time the press allows them to get away with it, rather than raising the obvious follow-up questions of factual inaccuracy? They are further emboldened to keep on lying. And until they are publicly and consistently called on the lies? The bulk of the public who do not bother to go fact-checking between carpools and soccer practice drop-offs and such will never, ever know the depth of their craven public farce.
Interesting discussion from the Minneapolis Star Tribune about how it was that they didn’t report on Larry Craig’s airport arrest at the time it happened: How did reporters miss the Craig arrest?
I’ve been thinking through tomorrow’s announced press conference, at which it is widely reported that Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) will announce his resignation from the Senate.
I hope that’s all he does. As I think through the various scenarios, though, I have this paranoid sense that, faced with the loss of everything he’s defined himself by, faced with the prospect of public recognition, of his own personal recognition, that he is not only a liar, but far worse, an abomination of the sort he was taught to despise from an early age, he might decide that his only way out is to kill himself.
Which is an inherently ludicrous idea on the face of it. Like the heckler who called out disdainfully at the end of his September 28 press conference, “what if you are gay? Come out of the closet.” It’s just not that big a deal, once one accepts the simple fact that his being attracted to other men is neither a disease nor a moral failing. It’s just how he is, like being left-handed.
I wouldn’t even be thinking about the possibility of a televised suicide, probably, if it weren’t for the example of Bud Dwyer. But there’s something about the zeal with which Craig has been asserting his non-gay-ness that makes me wonder how he will handle the announcement tomorrow. There’s something tense and fractured and brittle about him; he’s lived his whole life in this cage of his own construction, refusing to face the truth. How will he deal with reality? Will he be able to?
If I had to put money on it, I guess I think he’ll just continue the way he has. He’ll assert that he’s not gay, and did nothing wrong, other than the lapse of judgment that led him to plead guilty to the bathroom-incident misdemeanor. More in sorrow than in anger, for the good of the party and the people of Idaho, Nixon-like, he’ll step down. And then he’ll just continue in the closet.
But there’s that self-loathing, that mental illness, that underlies the choice to stay in the closet, and it just makes me nervous. And then there’s the Idaho factor, and his military service.
Sigh. Maybe this sense of dread I’m feeling is Stanley Kubrick’s (and Matthew Modine’s, and Vincent D’Onofrio’s) fault.
I very much enjoyed this essay entitled The Power of (Right Wing) Myth, and its analogy between the episode of Star Trek involving a race of aliens that speak only in metaphor and the tendency of many (I won’t limit it to the right wing as the author does) to fall back to a defined set of references to 20th century history to explain, even justify, a lot of things our government has done more recently. You can see it in Bush’s bizarrely ironic comparison of the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and all the way down through the ranks of officials and commentators throwing Churchill and Imperial Japan and Hitler around, seemingly without considering them anything more than archetypes of “good” or “evil”.
I was one of the generation the author mentions, who grew up in a republican household, imprinted with the mythos of the triumphant Reagan throwing out the unmanly peanut farmer; I had a “Reagan ‘84″ bumper sticker next to pictures of the Transformers on my bedroom door in grade school. But why haven’t more people like me given up childish caricatures and tried to learn the real lessons of history? I mean I wouldn’t use an episode of Star Trek to justify a war…
I’ve been only half paying attention to the ongoing saga of the miners trapped in the Utah coal mine. Something about the “Little Boy” (or adult mine workers) “Trapped in a Well” (or a mine) storyline seems so clichéd, so tailor-made for shallow, breathless coverage by a growing crush of media, that I feel a personal duty to avoid the story, the same way I feel obligated to say “no” to any extended warranty while buying consumer electronics, just on general principle. Which is callous and insensitive, I realize; those miners and their families are going through a horrible ordeal, and any decent human, given half a chance, would (and should) feel powerful emotional sympathies. Which may just be another way of saying the same thing: in a context in which large corporations are mobilizing armies of bubbleheads and technicians and equipment to tap into my essential humanity for the purpose of selling soap (or whatever CNN is hawking during the commercial breaks from the mine coverage), cultivating my inner cynic becomes an act of justifiable (if regrettable) self defense.
I did have a moment when listening to NPR the other day when it occurred to me how the rescue effort has played out like a metaphorical version of the Iraq war: ill-equipped, ill-trained (if sincere) efforts in the early going (like the True Believer twenty-somethings who staffed the CPA in the early Iraq reconstruction effort); followed by people with some sense of what needed to be done, but without the required expertise to pull it off against a tight schedule (as when the initial rescue wells went astray and missed the miners’ presumed location); followed by repeated expensive-but-doomed efforts that amounted to too little, too late. And the whole time, we had the spectacle of those in power (generals and politicians in the case of Iraq, mine owner and Bush-appointed mining safety official in the case of the collapsed mine), posing for the cameras and apparently focused at least as much on maintaining a fiction that they bore no blame for the unfolding disaster as on actually living up to their obligations.
Sigh. And now the metaphor gets an extra layer, as we grapple with the sunk-cost fallacy: More are continuing to die as a result of the initial mistakes. Do we keep going as a tribute to the fallen? Or pull out and face the realization that they died in vain?
So last night, suddenly, after the tragic second collapse at the Utah mine, there was a dramatic shift in the TV coverage of the story. All at once, faux folksy mining boss Bob Murray, who had been everywhere, was nowhere to be found (even sending in a junior executive to handle this morning’s press conference). In his place, at long last, were actual scientists, and experts on mine safety and the workings of the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Bush mine safety czar Richard “Recess Appointment” Stickler was also absent last night, and did not appear again until this morning’s press conference.
So many questions were finally being asked. Prompting one more: What took so long? Why did it take a tragic second collapse before the Murray and Strickler PR Show was finally replaced by actual journalism?
On the specific question she raises about the media, I think it’s just the latest in a long line of examples of how entertainment and business values are displacing journalistic ethics. Bloggers are gradually assuming the role of journalists. Which I realize is problematic in various ways, but it’s also just the reality of the situation.
The first casualty in wartime, famously, is truth. (Phillip Knightly’s book, The First Casualty, is an excellent resource in this area.) The military’s job, its very essence, revolves around the violation of the most fundamental moral principle we have (thou shalt not kill); it would be ludicrous to expect people steeped in that to bat an eye at the relatively minor transgression of bearing false witness. Or, to put it more charitably, for people who are engaged in an activity where the stakes are deemed to be high enough to justify the wholesale taking of human life, to balk at telling falsehoods would be ridiculous, even immoral (if morality could reasonably be applied to any aspect of such an undertaking, a point I’m not willing to stipulate).
There have been a couple of stories illustrating this lately. First was the case of “Scott Thomas”, a soldier in Iraq who wrote a piece (Shock Troops) for The New Republic, in which he talked about how his basic humanity had been eroded by the experience of fighting the war, recounting several icky-sounding actions allegedly carried out by himself and his fellow soldiers: mocking a woman with a disfigured face, taking a skull from a mass-grave and using it as a decoration, and intentionally running over dogs with a Bradley fighting vehicle. There was much howling from right-leaning bloggers that Scott Thomas must be a fake, since no real soldier would do, much less say, such things. Then it turned out that Scott Thomas was in fact Scott Thomas Beauchamp, a real soldier stationed in Iraq, at which point the focus shifted to whether or not Beauchamp’s statements were true. A great deal of blogging later, the question remains fairly murky; at a minimum, Beauchamp apparently got at least one significant detail wrong. But the actual truth of the matter, whatever it is, has been buried by an avalanche of self-serving theorizing and conclusion-jumping. The best source at this point is probably the fairly well scrummed (by which I mean, argued back and forth by partisans on each side, pruning away most of the bloggy snark and leaving only the principal pieces of published evidence behind) treatment at Wikipedia’s Scott Thomas Beauchamp article.
Making the truth murkier in this case is the fact that the military hierarchy is controlling the investigation, making Beauchamp stop talking to people and selectively releasing information to places like The Weekly Standard. Say what you will about the shortcomings of the media these days; even a fully functional media would have a tough time figuring out the truth in this context. One thing I’m sure of, at least, is that the military has not approached this from the perspective of an unbiased seeker of the truth.
The thing that got me about the Beauchamp story was that after reading all the reactions to it in the weblogs I frequent, I was surprised, when I finally got around to reading the original piece, that the actions it describes were actually as minor as they were. I mean, this is in a context of members of the military being successfully prosecuted for war crimes involving willfully killing unarmed civilians. But your outrage is reserved for a guy using his Bradley to run over dogs? I thought Philosoraptor’s take on that was pretty apt (even if the title puts me somewhat in mind of Jane Austen): The Scott Thomas (Beauchamp) Saga Draws to a Close? And Its Possible Effects on the War Debate With Comments on Memogate.
This is reminiscent of Memogate. It’s indisputable that Bush’s National Guard record stinks to high heaven. It’s very, very likely that something untoward went on there. But the Rather memo was a hoax. This single clear case in which the right was right goes proxy, in the minds of many, for all the other, more substantive debates about Bush’s Guard record. Having been right in one high-profile case, those eager to support him can tell themselves that they were right about the whole thing. Such a willingness to believe is the administration’s greatest ally on the right.
Anyway, moving on. The second story I’ve been thinking about lately that bears on the military’s trustworthiness concerns an op-ed piece that appeared on July 30 in the NY Times: A War We Just Might Win. It was written by Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, and describes their experiences on a military-hosted fact-finding mission in Iraq. In the wake of the piece’s appearance there has been much trumpeting by war supporters of the fact that even two liberal war critics now admit that the surge in Iraq is working. Here’s the key paragraph from the piece:
Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms. As two analysts who have harshly criticized the Bush administration’s miserable handling of Iraq, we were surprised by the gains we saw and the potential to produce not necessarily “victory” but a sustainable stability that both we and the Iraqis could live with.
There’s more, but the thing that gets me is how transparent the piece is at being a carefully planned opening salvo in the propaganda war that will surround Gen. Petraeus’ upcoming mid-September report on the state of the surge. Some background reading that helps put the piece in context:
It sometimes strays a little too far into snark for my taste (despite Hilzoy’s contention that that’s not the goal), but I mostly did enjoy this from Obsidian Wings: A Few Teensy Mistakes…
There’s a deeper issue at work here than just scoring points against the other side, and I’m impressed by someone like Rod Dreher (whose NPR commentary Hilzoy links to) being willing to confront more or less honestly his own error in supposing that invading Iraq was a good idea, and to consider how it was he came to be so in error.
But I agree with Hilzoy’s conclusion, in spades:
Again, I don’t mean this to be some sort of “I was right” triumphalism. What interests me is not so much who was right and who was wrong, but this particular version of being wrong — a version that involves not just error, but errors like “I didn’t realize until it was too late that I had to take reality into account”, or: “I didn’t fully appreciate the fact that making nice speeches isn’t all there is to being President.” And I’m also interested in why people seem willing to confess these kinds of profound error without any sense of intellectual shame, and why they continue to be given platforms in public life. Because until we find some way to ensure that we hear the opinions of people who know these sorts of things in advance, rather than having to learn them after hundreds of thousands of people have died, we are in deep, deep trouble.
David Neiwert points out the ritualistic elements involved in someone like Bill O’Reilly “retracting” a bogus story while not actually retracting it: The Kabuki Correction.
– The feint. This is the “correction” itself, such as it is. Typically this requires the pundit to suggest that some minor transgressions, none of which even potentially affected the overall thrust of the reportage, occurred.
– The assurance. This involves the pundit assuring both his interlocutor and his audience that he is well-intended and decent, and therefore any minor errors that occur along the way are perforce inconsequential. (Typically delivered with a smarmy, thoroughly insincere sincerity.]
– The defense. Here, the pundit produces some kind of half-fact, mischaracterization, or non-sequitur that serves to stake the claim that the overall thrust of the reportage is perfectly accurate, no matter to what extent it was built upon the foundation of errors or falsehoods previously admitted. Indeed, the more the reportage was built on those errors, the more ferocious the defense. This part of the ritual is almost always delivered in a bullying, petulant, intimidating tone, which makes the previous smarminess all the more clearly phony.
– The attack: The interlocutor is at this point accused of engaging in the same kind of error and smear tactics, forcing him to defend a point that has nothing to do with the pundit’s own rotten journalism.
The particular false reporting in this case concerned O’Reilly’s claim that gangs of lesbians packing pink pistols were engaged in a nationwide crime wave. No, really.
Glenn Greenwald wrote an interesting item today that talks about Bush’s increasing use of the lie that the people we’re fighting in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11, and how the media is covering that lie: Little outbursts of journalism — what causes them?
I’d like to believe that Glenn Greenwald’s writing of such impressive stuff as Our rotted press corps, a division of “Camp Victory” gives reason to hope for the future of our country, but at the same time I have to acknowledge that the fetid stench of what he’s reporting on undercuts that sense of hopefulness a wee bit.
It is difficult to avoid a sense of resignation when one reads things like this. I try to avoid language like this generally, but the sheer stupidity and dishonesty and servile, slavish personality attributes necessary to engage in that behavior is unfathomable — for any human being, let alone for a leading journalist. Yet that is the person assigned by our most read and most establishment-trusted news magazine to write a lengthy article purporting to inform Americans about what is happening in Iraq, about the great victories we’re winning there over “Al Qaeda,” about the resolute and brilliant military commanders killing those who flew the planes into our buildings. Journalists like Joe Klein are as gullible and dumb as they are dishonest.
Ken Silverstein, a senior editor for Harper’s, impersonated a lobbyist to mount a sting operation exposing the depths to which our current political culture is for sale (see Their men in Washington: Undercover with D.C.’s lobbyists for hire). Now he has an op-ed in the LA Times where he defends himself against critics like the WaPo’s Howard Kurtz, who say it was wrong of Silverstein to lie in order to get the story: Undercover, under fire.
In my case, I was able to gain an inside glimpse into a secretive culture of professional spinners only by lying myself. I disclosed my deceptions clearly in the piece I wrote (whereas the lobbyists I met boasted of how they were able to fly under the radar screen in seeking to shape U.S. foreign policy). If readers feel uncomfortable with my methods, they’re free to dismiss my findings.
What do y’all think? (It’s probably worth reading Kurtz’s critique of Silverstein - Stung by Harper’s In a Web Of Deceit - before answering.) For myself, I think Silverstein’s argument is compelling. We need real journalism, which means we need journalists willing to write real stories, and (this is crucial) real news organizations willing to employ those journalists. We don’t have enough of that these days. Silverstein’s lying was justified, and that he’s taking friendly fire from the mainstream media over the tactics he used is just more evidence (as if any were needed) that we’re in bad way.
The folks over at “The Leaky Cauldron” (AHPNATT … All Harry Potter News, All The Time) posted an irate (but very well done) editorial recently on an Ad the IMAX website had been running for Harry potter that was very clearly a Photoshop modified version of a stock poster for the 5th Harry Potter movie. Now this shouldn’t really be a surprise — I’m sure even the poster was Photoshoped to add “mood” to the original source photos; but what was changed for the IMAX ad was to make the boobs of a 15 year female character bigger. This got the attention of some mainstream press, and Warner Brothers forced IMAX to pull the Ad, since it was not approved by them.
Which goes to show, just because photos lie, doesn’t mean you can’t call bullshit and make them stop.
Since every TV “news” organization is giving the Imus firing and the Duke lacrosse players’ exoneration wall-to-wall coverage, the least I can do is quote from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings with some actual wisdom on the subject: Sometimes, justice prevails:
What the Imus episode and the Duke lacrosse case have in common is that in both cases, people seem to have forgotten that they were dealing with actual human beings. Don Imus was just doing (what I gather is) his normal schtick. I don’t suppose he was actually thinking: here are a group of young women who have taken their team to the NCAA championships; I wonder how I can completely ruin what ought to be one of the greatest days of their lives? They probably just weren’t that real to him. Similarly, though much more damagingly, I don’t suppose that Mike Nifong said to himself: I wonder how I can do something truly awful to some Duke lacrosse players? He probably just got caught up in the politics of it, and forgot about justice. Likewise, there were altogether too many commenters — probably on both sides — for whom this case was just an occasion for a canned political rant, not one that involved actual human beings.
I think that getting so caught up in what you’re doing that you forget that you’re dealing with actual human beings is one of the most morally dangerous things there is. It’s easy to see how it happens; we’re all vulnerable to this. But forcing yourself to remember the human beings on the other side, especially when it’s tempting not to, is absolutely essential. And it’s equally essential to remember that however closely a story seems to fit your favorite preconceived narrative, you can’t know that it does fit without evidence. The world does not exist to reinforce our preconceptions.
Check out the op-ed in today’s L.A. Times from Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI): Cheney lied. Again. It discusses Cheney’s recent appearance on Rush Limbaugh’s show, and gives a nice summary of the highlights of Cheney’s dishonesty with respect to Iraq and al Qaeda.
Levin’s conclusion:
By all accounts, Dick Cheney is one of the most powerful vice presidents in our history, if you define power as influence over policy. We need to ask ourselves: What does it mean for our country when the vice president’s words lack credibility, but he still wields great power?
I listened to Rush Limbaugh for a few minutes on my way into work the other day (I was stuck in a traffic jam and was patrolling the AM dial trying to find out why). And at this point, I really can only see three possibilities if you choose to listen to his show:
1) You’re aware that he’s completely full of shit, and just listen for entertainment value.
2) You’re aware that he’s full of shit, but you’re so ideologically committed that you believe it’s fine for him to do that. It’s all part of fighting the good fight, and the other side is lying, too, so good for him. Stick it to those liberals.
3) You’re so swaddled in right-wing propaganda that you actually believe Rush is telling the truth.
Have I missed any categories? If anyone reading this actually listens to Rush Limbaugh, can you enlighten me? Thanks.
A minor, but interesting, aspect of the ongoing US Attorney firing scandal has been this statement last Sunday on Meet the Press by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), questioning the qualifications of Carol Lam:
She’s a former law professor; no prosecutorial experience; and the former campaign manager in Southern California for Clinton.
Now, the interesting thing about that is that it apparently is completely untrue: Lam was never a law professor, had lots of previous prosecutorial experience, and was never associated with the campaign of either Clinton. Hatch wasn’t called on it on the show, for which I guess we can thank the kwality of TV “journalism” these days. (Though presumably Tim Russert will have Hatch back on some day and put the quote up on screen, asking him for his response.)
But I guess it could be worse. I’m willing to stipulate that there’s a smallish chance that Hatch was merely in the throes of creeping dementia. And maybe MTP’s failure to point out the falsehood was the result of mere journalistic incompetence. In the case of the following Rush Limbaugh comment from a few days later, though, I don’t see any way around it: The guy was just flat-out lying:
Carol Lam was a campaign manager! These people would normally be made ambassadors, but Clinton put her in as a US attorney.
Um, no. She was not a campaign manager, or anything else, for Clinton, and was appointed as a US Attorney in 2002 by George W. Bush.
If you want to find people willing to tell blatant lies to support your pre-eixsting biases, you can find them. For those of a right-wing bent, Rush Limbaugh serves the purpose nicely. Just don’t expect the grown-ups to pay much attention to your opinions once they recognize where they’re coming from.
Update: Interesting followup from Josh Marshall: I become frightened sometimes… It includes this great quote from Orrin Hatch, released today:
My comments about Carol Lam’s record as a U.S. Attorney were accurate, but I misspoke when making the point of discussing politically connected U.S. Attorneys. I accidentally used her name, instead of her predecessor, Alan Bersin, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Heh. My comments were accurate… except that they were about a completely different person who has no connection with the matter I was actually discussing. Wow, that’s cool. Let’s all try:
Talking to the IRS: Oh, right, yeah. My tax return was accurate… except that it was an accurate accounting of the income of somebody other than me.
Talking to an irate girlfriend: My statement that you have an enormous rear end was accurate… but see, I didn’t actually mean you; I meant Rush Limbaugh.
Talking to a boss: Oh, gee, yeah; that big cash deposit I was supposed to make with our receipts for