Letters to the Editor
ljwalker53
Published Letters: 559 Editor's Choice: 9
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It's The Right-Wing PR Machine, Stupid
[Read the article: Chris Matthews is right ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bravo, Glenn! Media pundits love the drama that their storylines create. Whether they are true or not is immaterial, so long as their ratings remain high. And what a huge disservice that is to democracy.
Kudos, too, for pointing out that MSM is about as disconnected from reality as GWB is.
Let's not forget, though, that just two or three corporate conglomerates own 'the media' thereby reducing it to nothing more than a dog and pony show to prop up right-wing Republican ideals and storylines.
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Celebrity Politics
[Read the article: Why campaign coverage sucks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm dismayed with Rosen's article. He keeps asking why campaign coverage sucks, then points to the "horse race" mentality and the "pack" mentality without really every delving too deeply into why campaign coverage sucks. It's like he wants to dive into the deep end of this question but can't quite go deep enough. Perhaps his own fear -- of being wrong, of being cast out from his brethren in the press, or of getting it right and not having anybody believe him -- keeps this analysis at the shallow end of the pool.
What Rosen doesn't mention is the significance of celebrity in our culture and how that drives at least some of the poor campaign coverage. Chris Matthews, Keith Olberman, Dan Abrams, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer (to some extent), Lou Dobbs, and other television "journalists" don't see themselves as journalists as much as they do cult heroes within the media. I need only point to Lou Dobbs' influence on American voters with his tripe about "independents' day" -- the idea that voters will disavow the traditional party system and become "independent" thinkers and voters. All the while Dobbs uses his celebrity to create fear and loathing of immigrants. Were he not a media cult hero, most Americans wouldn't bother to listen.
Dobbs is perhaps the worst of the lot, but nearly every other television "journalist" shares the traits of media cult heroes: popularity among the masses, white, usually male (with the exception of Katie Couric), vested in the media establishment, adheres to internal chaos theory (the louder, the more obnoxious, the more invested in competition, the better), and is driven not by such pesky details as journalistic excellence but by personal grandiosity -- how much can his/her personality influence the way viewers/voters think and act.
Tethered closely to this cult hero phenomenon is the issue of compensation. It isn't that real journalism and good pay are mutually exclusive. It is true, however, that when we worship our journalists as cult heroes, we create a monster. Who among us could turn away from the money, prestige, and power that comes with name and face recognition as a media celebrity?
The second issue Rosen could have delved into in more depth is the sports metaphor phenomenon, which ranks a close second to media cultism. The "horse race" mentality comes from sports: who's ahead, who's at the starting gate, who's on the rail. When our media cult heroes talk about candidates and campaigning, they resort to sports language: "fight to the finish," "duking it out across the country," "trading blows," "getting to the finish line first," "cross-country marathon." The fact that most of our media cult heroes are male simply adds to this phenomenon. Males seem genetically predisposed to view the world and everything in it as a competitive sport without regard to long-term consequences.
The third issue that Rosen fails to address in any serious detail is corporate ownership of the media and its effect on public discourse and election of public officials. In a way, corporate takeover of our lives, our country and our politics is nothing short of a PR miracle. "Journalists" are clearly not immune to the constant wearing-down of our internal thought processes and critical thinking skills by the "mad men" of Manhattan and elsewhere. When an interest or interests can successfully 'pitch' a product, service, attitude or belief to the masses, why would journalists not be affected? As we have witnessed during the Bush Administration, pro-business individuals within the administration have helped sell everything from the war in Iraq to the idea that evolution is simply a "theory," using journalism as the vehicle.
Maybe the real answer to honest campaign coverage and coverage of public policy in general lies in reeducating journalists about their basic role in the process: critical thinking and information discernment. When journalists are actively engaged in these practices, the cult of media celebrity and how best to spin a story take a back seat.
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Religious Pandering By Any Other Name
[Read the article: Barack Obama: "Committed Christian -- Called to Bring Change"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While I agree with Glenn Greenwald in principle -- that the Obama tactic is as questionable as Mike Huckabee's -- I stop there.
There is a problem with injecting religion into political campaigns, especially among Democrats. It's reductive in nature and pulls Democratic candidates farther to the right when what it needs is to rely on its own center-left compass.
Even more significant, though, is that as long as Republicans fan religion-as-politics (or, religion-in-politics, if you prefer) and Democrats fall over each other to out-religion them, "the issue" becomes religion/religious belief among voters, regardless of whether Democrats would use their religion differently to affect change. Democrats lose in this kind of battle.
There will always be "moral issues" voters who choose candidates based upon Biblical beliefs of right/wrong, good/evil, black/white. But these voters will rarely (if ever) vote for a Democrat, because of the underlying principles of the Democratic Party. Does it really matter then if they think that Barack Obama is a Muslim?
Democrats -- Barack Obama included -- do better when they keep to the high moral road of actually practicing their internal religious and/or spiritual beliefs to affect change for the greater good instead of pandering like Republican hucksters to "the faithful", in hopes that this time they will see the light and vote for a Democrat. That's a textbook definition of insanity.