Letters to the Editor
Paul Rosenberg
Published Letters: 995 Editor's Choice: 16
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Props To Paul Lukasiak
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Way upstream on this thread, Paul Lukasiak weighed in with his comment "The 'Sharpton' treatment"--
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/26/moyers/permalink/212869ecccd21b11b90b3137e6db6ce8.html
Where he noted, after presenting a snippet from MTP:
What the media does when it comes time to discuss race and class issues is bring out an Al Sharpton to act as a spokesman, then actively attempt to discredit Sharpton (and thus by extension discredit the views he is there ot represent). (and for gawds sake, how retarded is Russert if he still thinks "Hymietown" is relevant after TWENTY THREE years---but is willing to provide Imus with Insta-Redemption.)
But the media never asks a Tom Friedman or a William Safire why they should pay any attention to his opinions on the middle-east, based on their record.
This is precisely the level of analysis that we need to engage in, because it's precisely the level at which the discrediting of black voices (in this case, but it generalizes to others as well) proceeds. There is an instiutionalized racism that's on display here of a form that's not usually recognized: it's institutionalized in conventionalized media tropes. Things that folks like Russert do automatically, without thinking.
It's a brilliant bit of highlighting by Paul, which quite aptly connects the reflexive institutionalized racism with its flip side: the privileging of white male apologists for white male power.
But, I also have to point out that Paul is the #1 researcher/expert on Bush's National Guard Service and the surrounding coverup. If Dan Rather had bothered to use him as his primary source, he'd still have a job at CBS. And, who knows? John Kerry might well be in the White House. I kid you not. Paul's work is that good.
Just go to his website, and behold:
http://www.glcq.com/
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Orbitboy
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course, if you go by the definitions (a sure sign of reality-based liberalism on your part!) then "liberal journalist" is a redundancy, while "conservative journalist" is an oxymoron.
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Reality Alert: NPR Not Liberal!
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here][Note: I know it's terribly unfair to rely on reality, since reality itself has a well-known liberal bias. But what's a mother to do?]
In 2004, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) did a study of NPR's guestlist, using trasncripts from 2003, here:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1180
It has plenty of interesting information about the nature of the guest list, such as the dominance of elite sources (64%), and the vast under-representation of women (21%), so I recommend reading the whole thing. But for the topic at hand, here's the money quote:
Despite the commonness of such claims, little evidence has ever been presented for a left bias at NPR , and FAIR’s latest study gives it no support. Looking at partisan sources—including government officials, party officials, campaign workers and consultants—Republicans outnumbered Democrats by more than 3 to 2 (61 percent to 38 percent). A majority of Republican sources when the GOP controls the White House and Congress may not be surprising, but Republicans held a similar though slightly smaller edge (57 percent to 42 percent) in 1993, when Clinton was president and Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. And a lively race for the Democratic presidential nomination was beginning to heat up at the time of the 2003 study.
Reagan was right! Facts are stupid things!
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Shorter Elephantman On FAIR
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with the facts."
An oldie, but goodie, to be sure.
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Hume's Ghost--JFK v. Bush
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You've pointed to a very important point. But there's more. (There's always more.) Allow me to start out, off in left field, and I'll circle back to what you've highlighted.
There's a lot of careless us of the term "groupthink," which has been applied to the Bush Administration and now--in the Moyers documentary--to the press.
While there's a vague commonsensical logic to this, as a synonym to "herd mentality," it actually undermines a very specific technical meaning that should not be lost. "Groupthink" refers to a failure of group cognition despite an intentional desire to come up with the best solution to a problem.
I've got part of a Ph.D. thesis from a student of Robert Kegan (whom I mentioned before) who uses the groupthink model and Kegan's cognitive development model in tandem, examinig how people at stage three and stage four both get trapped into groupthink, but in different ways.
However, what we've seen with BushCo--and with the press, as Moyers reminds us--is not up to stage three thinking, nor was it motivated by trying to come up with the best solution to a problem. In fact, they had the solution (invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam) years before they had the problem (9/11).
As for stage 2 thinking vs. stage 3. Recall that each higher stage takes the subject of the lower stage as object. Stage 3 has social structure and roles as subject. Its object is individual point of view. Stage 3 people can have a point of view, and at the same time understand another's point of view. But stage 2 people can't. Point of view is subject for them--it's who they are. ("I'm an American!") They can only understand another point of view when the views don't conflict fundamentally.
Thus, we have two different cognitive sources of difference between the classic definition of groupthink, and what we saw with both BushCo and the media.
What we saw was much worse than groupthink.
Which, of course, is why there's not just no interet in correcting errors, but intense hostility to even admitting them. It's an assault on who they think they are.
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Shorter Elephantman On Moyers Documentary
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shorter Elephantman:
[Let's not talk about the Moyers documentary...] Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's liberal media bias!
Back during the discussion of the Fairness Doctrine, there was some concern--angst, even--about the difficulty of defining balance.
Not a problem. All we have to worry about is staying on topic, and the balance issue pretty much takes care of itself, at least 90% of the time, if not more.