McConnellgate
Jonathan S. Tobin has a piece in Commentary entitled, “The Media Can’t Bury McConnellgate”:
Is it ever okay to bug an opponent’s political headquarters? Even those who are too young to remember what happened when officials connected with Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign unleashed an incompetent band of dirty tricksters on the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate complex, one would think the answer to that question is an emphatic no. While the Watergate scandal may have been more about the cover up than the crime, the line crossed by Nixon’s henchmen has always appeared to be a bright line that no one””not even liberals who can generally count on favorable media treatment””dare cross in this country. Yet someone or some group may have done so in Kentucky, and if that explanation of what happened at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s Louisville office holds up what follows will be an interesting test of the media’s integrity.
…[T]here are only two possible explanations for the tape. One is that one of the senator’s high-level aides made the tape and sent it to Mother Jones magazine. The other is that one of the senator’s political opponents was running their own version of Watergate and found a way to bug his private conversations. While one cannot exclude the possibility that the former is the case, it seems unlikely. If the latter is true, then we’re going to find out whether liberals can get away with the sort of thing for which they once took down Tricky Dick.
I agree with Tobin’s characterization of the McConnell taping situation. I disagree with his idea that there’s any doubt whatsoever anymore about the tack the MSM will take. “Interesting test of the media’s integrity”? That test has been taken, and flunked, too many times to count, in situations far more weighty than what Tobin refers to as “McConnelgate.”
“We’re going to find out” whether liberals can do the same sort of stuff they get all hot and bothered about when Republicans do it? No, we found that out quite some time ago.
It has been a long, long journey for me from thinking that the media was not biased, or that it was equally biased, or not really paying close attention (before the advent of the internet, I regularly read two periodicals: the Boston Globe and The New Yorker. Nuff said.)
When did I last subscribe to the idea that the media would be fair, or even somewhat fair, or at the very least fair if circumstances were clear and dire enough? Hard to say, but certainly it would go back at least a decade. Should have realized it longer ago that that, of course. But as I said, before the internet my reading matter regarding current events—even though at the time I considered myself fairly well-informed—was rather limited, to say the least.
But I also believe that, especially during the Bush administration (which seemed to rouse the particular ire of the media) and then in particular with the advent of Barack Obama (the opposite), the MSM hasn’t just appeared worse—or more blatant in its biases, anyway. It has become worse. More monolithic, more shameless, and with this particular administration more obviously, with very few exceptions, the propaganda arm of the government.
Yea, Verily!
I hate it when my liberal friends send me links to pieces supporting their various causes. If I didn’t feel so strongly about it, I’d be very tempted to send this post and Kirsten Power’s column to my friend the journalism professor. She told me once that it is simply impossible for a media outlet to be biased, because it’s just a collection of people. Except for Fox News, of course, which is laughably biased.
Perfectly stated. The only solice I taking is knowing that even they will someday fall victim to the corrupt system they now facillitate. They will be thrown under the bus at the first moment it suits the needs of the power brokers on the left. I hope I am around to watch it happen, and listen to the indignant bleating.
The media have turned themselves into Pravda. They have been propagandists for the democrats for as long as I can remember.
Neo
When did I last subscribe to the idea that the media would be fair, or even somewhat fair, or at the very least fair if circumstances were clear and dire enough?
The perception that the media was not necessarily fair penetrated my skull when I purchased Victor Lasky’s It Didn’t Start With Watergate in the 1980s for pennies at a used book store. Lasky points out that JFK, RFK and LBJ were no strangers to electronic bugging and other such shenanigans. Not to mention Mother Jones in our day. 🙂
By 1980, I had turned into a “plague on both your houses” type of third party voter. I noticed during an NPR rehash of a Reagan victory that the NPR announcer exhibited an an unmistakeably sneering tone towards Reagan. I knew full well that had a Democrat won the election, an NPR announcer would NEVER have adopted a sneering tone towards the victor.
I do not recall which of these two incidents came first. But Lasky’s book is still on my bookshelves.
[I warmed up towards Reagan with his foreign policy- such as his “Evil Empire” remark. What I knew of Central America from working there and from extensive library research in the US convinced me that Regan’s policy in Central America was on balance, the way to go. ]
I encountered another case of media bias in the 1980s when I sent letters to the editor of my campus paper in response to editorials in favor of the Commies in power in Nicaragua and of the Commies trying to take power in El Salvador. [Library research uncovered a 1980 Proclamation where the Sandinistas supported the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. So the Commie label is merely descriptive.]
My letters were very well documented- MUCH better documented than the editorials- but never got published. When I went to the campus paper offices to inquire why my letters didn’t get published, the reply was something to the effect that the editorial writer didn’t want my letter published. So much for tolerating dissent and all that.
A further point on lefty toleration of dissent. After the Sandinista electoral defeat in Nicaragua in 1990, I attended some meeting of lefties mourning the Sandinista defeat. At the meeting, I pointed out that Pinochet had a better record than Fidel Castro in reducing infant mortality. When I later opened my mouth to say something, I was interrupted and informed that if I said anything more, I would get beaten up.
I think a vague awareness of the problem probably arose during Iran-Contra with me, and certainly by the Clarence Thomas hearings I was all about the “WTF is wrong with these people” attitude.
I thought things would change when the Soviet’s spectacularly and utterly …and finally …failed shortly thereafter. “Vindication!” I thought.
LOL.
Not!
I don’t expect those pathetic useful idiot ignoramuses to ever change. I expect them to reincarnate many more times due to the depth of their idiocy in this life.
Karma is a bitch.
(I hope.)
Ok … the first step taken.
The media isn’t just post objective, it’s inhabited by persons -assuming it would not offend them to call them that – who are gleefully post-modern, post moral.
We, (meaning the cohort represented by the visitors here) spend years developing our analyses of what we are confronting socially, by tracing surface currents and disturbances – and then trying through a process of inference to link them up to various manifesto proclaimers and theorists with whom are familiar with from our university studies.
The problem is that most of us graduated before say, the mid to late 1980’s. We tediously weave together current events with what we learned of Comte, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Mead, The Vienna Circle, Gramsci , Cloward Piven, et al, and nod, “Yeah, that’s how it all fits together formally … but who could really believe, who could really embrace, internalize, all of this crap as their life project?”
We can’t believe that they believe.
Years ago, I can’t say exactly when, I came across and read a paperback titled “Deconstructive Criticism: An Advanced Reader”.
The book had probably been out 8 or 10 years by then, having been published about the time I left school. But Deconstruction was in the news as I recall, and I was curious as to what was causing the stir. It was then, generally mocked as if it had, or was destined to have, no real and lasting influence beyond perhaps some lit department faculty and a few fecally focused crackpot grad students in them.
In reading the book one could easily see though, how the doctrine of interpretation wove together and expanded upon trends and doctrines already long prevalent among intellectuals.
When within the context of political trend discussions I brought up the content, and especially the anthropological implications of what I was reading with some older peers who I generally regarded as intellectually competent, their reaction was either bafflement at the ideas and social implications of the ideas, or a kind of dawning horror and incredulity that anyone could even think that. One guy, even began sputtering something about “diabolical” and asked me where the hell I ever got such a book. LOL
The point is that we are only mystified because we are not swimming in the same intellectual current. This stuff isn’t hidden. All you need is access to the “plans” to know where it is going. And the plans are published and out there.
In line with this I want to mention what is I think, one of the most helpful books out there in understanding the mind of the people we are confronting … or at least the minds of their intellectual leaders.
It’s all the more valuable because it is not written by some outraged, sputtering and and uncomprehending conservative for use at an indignation party. It’s a manifesto.
Th book, and many of you have probably already read it, is “Contingency, irony, and solidarity” (pub 1989), by the philosopher (or maybe post philosoper) Richard Rorty.
It’s an easy read. It is lucid. It pulls no punches, and engages in no equivocations. He’s not at all shy about what he is aiming for; nor about the strategy for getting there.
Anyone with a reasonable background in intellectual history will find it easy going.
It is where those half a generation behind us have – many of them – already gone.
It’s subject to criticism and rebuttal. A great deal of genetic science has taken place in the last 24 years. Science which might, in some sense be said to salvage the concepts of “essential nature” or teleonomy, if not teleology.
But before you waste time developing counter arguments, take the time to grasp that this “doctrine” if these converging intellectual vectors can be called that, is already where your antagonists are.
My theory is that the MFM has always (in my lifetime anyway) had a left bias, except there was never a reference point to illustrate it with, which allowed them to simply and smugly deny it when challenged about it. Then came Fox News and the biases all around became blatantly evident. That’s when they became worse. And that’s also why they hate Fox so much.
When Fox News came along and had the ratings success they’ve had I believed it would have the effect of pressuring the big three networks toward the center. But it didn’t turn out that way. Instead the networks tacked even harder left. Which, from a business standpoint, makes no sense at all. What they’ve done is allowed their ideological biases to take precedence over what should be sound business decisions. For instance, the so-called “Tiffany Network,” CBS, is swirling the toilet bowl about to go ker-plunk. Since Uncle Walter retired the CBS Evening News has featured one partisan freak show anchor after another (Dan Rather, Katie Couric, etc). They would rather hemorrhage money and go broke than rethink their biases.
“When did I last subscribe to the idea that the media would be fair, or even somewhat fair, or at the very least fair if circumstances were clear and dire enough?”
In order to motivate one’s side to destroy the enemy, one must hate the enemy. There are other ways and motivations, but hating the enemy is probably the easiest. Whether for real or manufactured pretexts. The side that started the war, may say that it was the other guys that fired first.
But a strange thing happens in a war when one side does not hate the enemy. That side starts losing the will to fight and starts finding ways for peace. That may be nice when both sides want peace… however, that’s not always the case.
What it will take is for repubs to refuse to answer loaded questions, refuse to discuss MSM talking points and reserve the discourse. This will take cojones and a stiff back bone. They have to treat the MSM as the inheritors of Goebbels…. people who must eventually commit suicide in a bunker after first poisoning their children. They have become just as evil, perhaps without realizing the depravity of their actions. Nonetheless, judge them by their actions.
“They would rather hemorrhage money and go broke than rethink their biases.”
What people refuse to understand is that their ideals were always more important than their bank accounts. Or to put it another way, only by maintaining loyalty to the cult doctrine are they able to keep the cash flow open to themselves and their friends.
Different people often wonder why the US would be willing to pay money and blood for mostly useless nations like Afghanistan, Iraq, and even post WWII Germany.
Yea, well, when one is involved in a war, the costs aren’t really the goal, so to speak, nor is REDUCING the costs worth LOSING the war.
People refuse to look at that concept, probably because they still think they are in a political disagreement with the Left.
DNW Says:
April 11th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Which is what Artfldgr has been telling us over and over and over and over and over again…
Someone should tell Tobin that “media integrity” is an oxymoron.
rickl Says:
April 12th, 2013 at 5:42 am
DNW Says:
April 11th, 2013 at 4:44 pm
Yes, as I hit the submit comment button I realized that with the way I had formulated the statement, I was flogging Art’s horse.
I suppose that more accurately than a plan, what Rorty is doing is laying out a world-view and advocating on that basis a transformational social anthropology; a core re-envisioning of what we consider it means to be what we are. He does this on the basis of a radically a-theistic, thoroughgoing historicist, and anti metaphysical-questioning, perspective.
Rather than argue values and human nature, which is in his view, to join the logic choppers in their metaphysical presuppositions concerning the existence of an objective reality “out there” waiting to be ever more perfectly discovered, his program is the reinvention of social and ultimately personal meanings, through the programmatic re-describing of the world by means of a persistent social introduction of new metaphors and images.
We don’t argue, we reshape.
The logicians are to be replaced by a psyco-social revolution in perspectives generated by intellectuals, not out argued. Victory is to be won by making some perspectives or life ways seem “cruel” or marginal, not by proving moral propositions in accordance with some deduction based on the supposition of a fundamental human nature.
We ask why the media elites seem indifferent to “truth” and more concerned with narrative? It’s because they are already living in the land of the lost.
If the RNC had any brains (I know) they would be making darn sure that all of their 2014 candidates are not currently being bugged. They should also be (and have been) videotaping all of their media interviews to ensure that they’re no longer mischaracterized through the use of selective editing (like with the Palin/Couric interview).
This is actually a good thing to have happen this early in the campaign cycle, and also with such a flawed opponent like Judd. I think the Obama presidency has taught us that all rules (decency, law, etc.) can be ignored for the “right” in service to their agenda.