Letters to the Editor
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Kurtz is getting there
Congrats to you and other bloggers/commenters for getting through to Kurtz. While his little buried item gives him the opportunity to say in the future, "I do both sides, as witness my March column," it more importantly indicates he has heard and recognized your complaints and is less likely to be as slothful on this point as he has been in the past. So, good job.
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Dan D.
small quibble:
Iglesias, not McKay
Wilson, not Madrid.
I'm probably just sensitive due to the fact that some people actually believe New Mexico is not part of the United States.
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Why isn't Johnson responsible for his garbage?
Kurtz wrote: I don't hold either Web site responsible for this garbage
You mentioned that one could "voice several criticisms of Kurtz's conduct here" and it happens that I'm so inclined. Did Kurtz mention that Huffington immediately removed the offensive comments on her site whereas Johnson allowed the offensive comments on his site to stay? Why wouldn't Kurtz hold Johnson responsible for his site's garbage when Johnson could get rid of it with a few mouse clicks?
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gcc burger:
yes, corrections noted. Apologies. McKay is the Washington state USA.
Typical of GOP scandals, the complexity of the numerous players usually confuses most interested parties to the point of surrender.
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Look back in history...
There's a word for what they are doing. It's jingoism.
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Love us or leave it
Aren't we --who disagree with the president regarding Iraq-- as much a part of America as anyone? Aren't those who blame us also blaming America "or the part of it they don't like"? If they don't love the America that includes opposing viewpoints, the America that actually exists, maybe they should, you know, leave it...
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Fighting fire with fire.
"Generally speaking, there are two ways to combat an intellectually dishonest standard -- (1) argue in the abstract against its validity, or (2) apply it to those who wield it."
How does item 2 work, exactly? The right has a large megaphone in the Washington Times, Fox News, and the Drudge Report. Moreover, other media outlets treat them as legitimate news organizations instead of compenents of the right-wing propaganda machine.
Cranking up an equivalent noise machine on the left is not an easy undertaking. Just ask Al Franken. It strikes me that liberals have been most effective when they have the facts on their side and can get those facts heard. Through the efforts of some of the better blogs, it seems as if some progress is being made.
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Rightwing Hate Speech On HuffPo
I spend several hours a day reading The Huffington Post and battling rightwingers in the trenches of their comments section. I'm well familiar with all of the screen names of the regular contributors. After just a few minutes readers were not allowed to even post comments on the Cheney assassination attempt. Not a single one of the anti-Cheney posts that made it through were from a regular commenter. I believe that most, if not all of them were from what we call rightwing trolls, to be used for propoganda purposes.
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Easy test
I believe that most, if not all of them were from what we call rightwing trolls, to be used for propoganda purposes.
Politically-minded forum moderators might want to think ahead and be prepared to publish statistics on the the age and frequency of use for all commentors' nyms. Then, whenever a wave of suspected trolls comes up, the stats can be published in a prominent place with an explanation.
This would really not be much work, but there might be some drawbacks I'm not thinking of right now.
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Blogger News Analysis
This blogger appreciates your points about where the role of bloggers not only complements the work of investigative journalists, but surpasses that work.
I am a small potatoes blogger who put together the pieces of news reporting started so ably by Dana Priest and Anne Hull about the Walter Reed outpatients.
What they reported as shoddy living conditions, I was able to understand as meta healthcare systems failures.
They are actually reporting what healthcare looks like for anyone when professional nursing is absent. The Walter Reed outpatients are anyone without access to appropriate healthcare services at the right time, in the right place and offered by the right healthcare provider.
No large blog or mainstream media outlet has yet picked up on my work. But the Pentagon, the Army, the Senate and those who can use the analysis have done so. They are quickly forming a steady and growing readership. And that keeps me digging. And working.
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The blame-America game
Maybe we should go ahead and accept the title of "America blamers." After all, what is it we learn in therapy? "You can't change other people; you can only change yourself, the way you react to others, the way you deal with others." That's modern psychological thought and it works (I can attest) a lot better than, "If you don't agree with someone, kick their ass."
So yeah, when something isn't going right (e.g. when someone wants to blow us up), by all means let's ask ourselves if there isn't way we're contributing to that state of affairs. If we're digging and the hole keeps getting harder to see out of, it makes no sense to blame the shovel; let's "blame" ourselves as the first step toward correcting the situation (and maybe, just maybe, stop digging). Looking at poverty in Africa, it's easy to call Africans lazy and incompetent and maybe they are, but we're not going to change that. What we can do is look honestly at our agricultural subsidies and study the linkage, gauge the cost/benefit of enriching a few corpulent farmers over watching a continent starve. Maybe that's "blaming" America, but there's no more practical strategy on the drawing boards.
None of which means we don't protect ourselves, but kicking the other guy's ass (and his mother's and his father's and their children and cousins, plus blowing up their houses and burning their crops) isn't protecting oneself, it's just failing to deal with the interpersonals that brought the situation on in the first place.
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They're just following the scripted narrative
Each of the various players in today's political scene has constructed (but of course continually updates and modifies as suits its perceived needs to suit changing internal and external political, economic and other conditions) a working narrative that they then actively promote in their public discourse. This includes not only politicians, who have an obvious agenda to promote, but also the media, which has its own agenda to promote, that is not quite the same as, but is often in sync with, politicians' narratives and agendas.
Each party and politician's agenda is obviously to promote themselves and their and their side's politicians and causes, and they construct a narrative to promote this agenda. E.g. the GOP still supports the war, so it comes up with talking points like "cut and run" and "plan for victory". And the Dems generally oppose the war (to varying degrees and with varying levels of sincerity and courage, of course), and come up with talking points like "redeploy" and "we shouldn't be in a civil war". Everybody who pays any attention to what's going on knows this.
What is less understood, I believe, is the way that the MSM has its own agenda to promote, and a matching narrative to help promote it. This agenda is not, of course, to report the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as thoroughly and accurately as possible, but to further several fundamental goals. First, to generate as much ratings, ad revenue and thus profits as possible (thus the tabloid and "rah rah wave the flag" coverage). Two, to support its parent company's products, values and overall business goals (thus GE-owned NBC/MCNBC's rightward slant). Three, to occupy what they see as the most advantageous slot in the current political spectrum from a business perspective (ditto). And four, to promote the political agenda a given party (thus Fox's constrant pro-GOP bias).
None of these agenda goals has anything to do with doing serious and truthful reporting. Not in the larger MSM outlets at least. And to the extent that this IS still done, it's in furtherance of one of the above goals (e.g. if you don't occasionally do such reporting, even lazy and casual viewers will see it and lose faith in their credibility), and not for its own sake. Well, not at the corporate level, from what I can see, although I'm sure that this still exists to some extent at the staff level (e.g. Keith Olbermann, Dana Priest). But by and large, large MSM outlets are interesting in advancing the above agenda and goals, and not the goal of doing serious and truthful reporting.
And as such, they tend to develop narratives to deal with any given topic, that originate from, parallel and actively try to promote this agenda. Thus, with respect to the MSM's tendency to bow to whatever party and movement is currently more powerful, it was understandable and completely unsurprising that after Bush won reelection in '04, the MSM kept going on about how he had a "mandate", was promoting Democracy in Iraq and the mideast, the GOP was about "family values", and Dems were in "disarray", etc. And how now, with Bush and the GOP on the outs (but not completely so, of course), the narrative has changed to one along the lines of "Repubs in disarray, but so are the Dems". And, of course, it will change once again if the political dynamic moves in one direction or another.
Of course, this narrative does not completely spring from and parallel the agenda of the current dominant party, since the MSM's agenda has other goals than to cater to that party. Another of these goals is to support their parent companies' products and agenda. Thus, while GE-owned NBC/MSNBC are hardly cheering on the war, neither are they being fully honest in covering it by having on obvious right-wing shills who keep lying about how the war is going. GE is, of course, a huge multinational with a big stakes in the M-I complex, and hardly wants to rock that boat too much. It also doesn't want to alienate its right-wing viewers, which gives it yet another incentive to not be seen as anti-war and put on these shills.
What I'm basically saying is that the putative journalistic goals of any MSM outlet are often in (or seen by their executives or owners as being in) direct conflict with their business, political, ideological and other goals, and that this fundamentally, unavoidably and irreparably compromises their ability and willingess to engage in genuine, relevant, substantial, truthful and ethical journalism. The model is completely broken, precisely because the current MSM is owned and operated by companies in whose interest it is most decidedly NOT to do honest and subsyantial reporting (and in a legal, economic and political environment which further conspires against such reporting being done).
So as I see it, one can complain--completely credibly and necessarily of course--that the MSM is not doing its job. But the positive effects of such complaining are likely to be marginal at best, I suspect, unless and until this fundamental MSM model is somehow changed for the better. But I think that this can and will be done, and that there are several ways to do it.
(See next comment for conclusion.)