Letters to the Editor
DCLaw1
Published Letters: 839 Editor's Choice: 2
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One more thing, before I crash --
[Read the article: The Pat Tillman and Jessica Lynch frauds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just finished watching the Moyers show (I recorded it on the DVR), and it was just as refreshing as I thought it would be.
What I think amazed me the most was being taken back to 2002 and 2003, when the media was at its absolute apex of idiocy. The 3D animated graphics of AMERICA AT WAR, with thundering soundtracks, absolutely shock me even to this day. The rank dramatization of the invasion -- Shock and Awe -- was just so unbelievable to me even then, as one of the relative few who took the 2-3 minutes each day to actually read sources (like Knight Ridder) that, you know, had any degree of skepticism about what we were being told.
I would tell people that Iraq likely had no WMD, that there assuredly was no Al Qaeda connection, and that the post-invasion occupation would be an absolute nightmare, and by and large they would stare at me like I had just told them I had lunch with Elvis.
Absolutely unbelievable. And this slavish mentality continues. Bravo to Mr. Moyers for pointing out that some of the most egregiously wrong voices continue to be displayed and handsomely rewarded by our most "prestigious" media institutions.
This wave has to be cresting. There really are just too many smart, motivated, and capable people out there absolutely seething about the media's complete and total collapse of ethical and professional standards for there not to be a significant countermovement back to sanity and diligence.
I will remain cautiously optimistic. Meantime, yes, Glenn, I wholeheartedly support your decision to do more original reporting and investigating of your own.
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State of mind
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ultimately, whether the media is consciously aware of its complicity, and actively trying to convince everyone otherwise, or genuinely thinks it did no wrong, it doesn't really matter, and at any rate there's very little difference between those two possibilities.
Abject fear of bearing a significant portion of the responsibility for a historic calamity is a pretty powerful psychological force, to put it mildly. The human mind, consciously or not, is capable of positively acrobatic feats of rationalization -- often, the more painful the truth, the more subconscious and invisible the self-prevarications.
The complexity of the human mind -- the ability to compartmentalize and fragment thought -- most definitely allows a person to both pseudo-consciously realize they are full of shit and simultaneously believe they are right. This cognitive juggling act, however, is not without its price. It's exhausting, and cannot be maintained indefinitely. It works a great mental and physical toll upon its victim, sometimes even without the person consciously realizing the damage it is doing. Only the outright sociopathic or delusional can escape this invisible burden.
But most true of all, the contortion and distortion often becomes transparent to everyone else far before it becomes apparent to the person her/himself.
In truth, we are doing these lost souls a tremendous favor by demanding they account for their cardinal sin.
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Timberman
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem for them is that they're selling their hogwash into a diminishing market, just as they once did during the Viet Nam era. Their arrogance won't allow them to concede a point until they're almost literally impaled on it, to which all I can say is, hasten the day.
Yes.
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notre:
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I had long ago stopped tapping into the Washington echo chamber and was instead tuning in Amy Goodman every morning, reading The Nation and In These Times, listening to Pacifica and Free Speech Radio. Are those sources ideologically biased? Sure. But they're honest, and they're smart, and I can't say either of those things about the right-wing noisemakers *or* the corporate shills.
I think this is a very important point that must never be lost as we fend off (or tolerate) the right's constantly flinging at us the red-herring, "I defy you to prove that NPR, PBS, and blah blah are not liberally biased!"
I don't care for a second what the ideological predisposition of a news source is, if I am confident that it is being intellectually, factually, and morally honest and thorough. Interestingly, no one seems to want to acknowledge the possibility that the correlation between the liberal slant of certain media and many individuals' loyalty to it might have perhaps a smidgen to do with the fact that these liberal sources tend to provide truthful, accurate information, and make this the top priority of theirs.
Only in these absurdly bifurcated times could people get away with the vacuous (and self-contradictory) canard that the liberal point and the conservative point are always equally valid, yet at the same time the only reason one would ever favor the liberal point is because they are hopelessly biased. Thus, the insidiously hidden implication -- which is often wholly swallowed and digested by the liberal interlocutor -- is actually that the conservative point of view carries the presumption of validity, the liberal point of view a presumption of invalidity, and a person must paradoxically prove that the liberal point of view is not only factually or logically valid, but ideologically and absolutely "balanced," in order to legitimately stand by it.
There is just so much poison at the core of our mass psychology, I lose my appetite just thinking about it.
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Forgive the follow-up
[Read the article: The Bill Moyers documentary on our failed and barren press]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I just wanted to say that we may one day owe the modern right a great debt for having so completely relinquished the mantle of truth and logic to its opponents.
Their pig-headed unity and refusal to confront reality, once a pseudo-strength, has now become an undeniable millstone. If we can get the "mainstream" to acknowledge that.