Letters to the Editor
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To sum up
To sum up all this excellent discussion:
Never underestimate the power of seduction or the seduction of power.
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Intelligence Failure: It's a bit more than a Conspiracy.
Advancing conspiracies/false information theories assumes that once known to be a conspiracy/false, it will be rectified.
Did Iraq have WMD's and 9/11 connections? Does it matter? Evidently, for the vast majority of U.S. lawmakers and the 'savvy political class', this was simply a matter of 'intelligence failures'... but the cause, it is just! It must be, else we wouldn't be there.
What makes it just? Evidently, it is just because America - I suppose by divine virtue of our economic and military power - must rule the world and eradicate the 'evil' and tryanny condoned by a corrupt and/or ineffectual United Nations ...by any means necessary.
What else could explain, early on in President Bush's first term, the appointment of John Bolton - well known for his rabid anti-United Nations statements - as The Amb. To The U.N.? As one U.N official put it in a friendly 'open letter' to the American people; 'you (through Mr. Bolton) cannot pay lip-service to the U.N. while undermining it's authority' (paraphrase - lost the article!).
The broader and most harrowing implication of the Iraq war (for me) is simply this; a not-so-disguised struggle for world dominance/control between the United States and United Nations.
The choice - the line in the sand - for all nations is this; a undisputable Unitary Executive Authority (President) of the United States or the entire family of sovereign nations (all 192 nations) organized as the United Nations.
Every day the Iraq war is 'allowed'(?) to continue, in it's present ...form, is a vote for the Unitary Executive Authority of the United States to rule the world regardless of any moral or legal standards, foreign or domestic.
Who needs a 'conspiracy' when there is ignorance, a savvy political class and a well-oiled propaganda machine willing and able to exploit it?
As my Sen. Mitch-$isfreespeech-McConnell so eloquently puts it; money talks, BS walks (again, paraphrase).
I have never heard money talk... and I listen carefully.
O', I got some boots,
bah.
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Daily Orders To TV and Newsweekly Pundits Are Not Necessary
Because knowing what their corporate owners want said is part of their skill set. The radical domestic policies of upward wealth redistribution and radical foreign policies of forgiving any terrorist who cooperates with the US/Britain/Netherlands oil access alliance (Libya's Ghaddafi,the Iraqi al-Dawa Party) and fabricating terrorism charges against non-cooperators (Iraq's Saddam, Iran, Venezuela's Chavez)are presented to the public as the only realistic course. The pro-Bush media ownership control the message through the hiring and annual review process. If a pundit wants to hear his or her master's voice all he or she have to do is call up the White House political office or the RNC...or go to dinner at Andrea Mitchell's house.
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Karl Rove By Gloria Borger
This is but another person in the media that gets her marching orders [Talking Points] from The white House on a daily basis. Those of us that follow politics closely can just about name the pundits, also know as reporters, on the national level as well as the leading newspapers and magazines.
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Gloria Borger/ Disappointment
It was good to learn that Mr. Greenwald has the same
regard for Ms. Borger's pronouncements that I do after
cancelling my US & World Report subscription. For a
while I thought Borger was only decent journalist of
the crew; unfortunatly she's not. After Rove's
manipulation of Texas' Bush performance and his
use of phony issues to get "W" in White House and now
this phony issue of Sen. Clinton being most vulnerable
is way out of the orbit for a main stream Democrat.
Mr. Greenwald has never disappointed me.
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LIttle Man with a Big Voice
Joshua Green, in The Atlanta, has a good piece on Rove. Several anecodes illustrate not only how he alienated the Democrats, but also the Republicans. Tone deaf, a bully and very over-rated.
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Engineering, Black Box Problems, and Major News Production
I submit that it is not required that we initially prove each and every step involved regarding the systematic failures of our major news producers before we can understand the systematic nature of the failure.
A classic learning experiment is called a "black box" problem, which may be an actual experiment or a thought experiment.
What it means that you are given a device which is hidden away from your inspection. I.e., as though it were put in a "black box" in which all you can see is (1) What goes in, and (2) What comes out.
Occam's razor is also involved, sort of. If you know that you have a voltage going in and that the voltage coming out is halved, there could be any number of things going on in the box, but in the end, the only relevant factor for you at the moment is that the innards halve the voltage.
Inside that box anything could be happening, you could have an incredibly simple device composed of one element, or you could have an incredibly complex device which does a million things, only one of which is the halving of voltage.
The major news producers consistently act like these "black box" systems, whose operations may or may not be hidden from prying eyes, but whose output is systematically measurable just the same.
The major news producers consistently fall in line and fail in their basic journalistic responsibilities nearly every time the Executive and other power sources make very serious moves toward hawkish foreign policies.
They do so in ways which are childishly predictable and which are largely immune to most of our complaints.
They have done so all of my life, and they have done so fairly consistently for pretty much the last century.
Further, somehow the major news producers have fairly successfully suggested that these failures should only be examined by themselves or sources they trust (as opposed to independent academics, etc.), and that the default assumption we must all make is that somehow 'accusations' of 'bias' (i.e., simple measures of their mind-numbingly consistent and massive failures in favoring hawkish policies) face far larger burdens of proof than lazy assumptions of general good will.
Isn't this amazing?
Wouldn't you expect that, in hypothetically sane societies, such institutions of concentrated power such as major information and 'news' disseminators would bear the responsibility of proving their reliability?
If we were anthropologists studying the information disseminated by some ancient priesthood, would we face some huge challenge or higher burden of proof to suggest that the priests and their underlings tended to believe things and disseminate beliefs related to the structure of their priesthood and the measurable interests of that priesthood?
Rather than seeing our major news producing institutions as some sort of presumed objective information sources, we must protect ourselves from those who demand we not see them as cultural institutions, institutions which are embedded in relations of power and beliefs just like any other institution we set out to study.
For example, we might note that in the news production business, a valuable personal commodity is "agency", or autonomy -- it is considered (for sensible reasons) invaluable that journalists make their own decisions, unlike some other hired writers who labor in other fields.
Therefore, anthropologically, we could expect to see the evolution of systems of selection and control by these institutions which seemed to preserve "agency" or autonomy, while still ensuring institutional influence over the content being produced.
That is that hiring & selection & promotion process discussed on here earlier.
When you have direct intervention by powerful interests, it seems an exception. When the New York Times' Ray Bonner accurately reported on Reagan's 'foreign policy' (hired slaughters) in El Salvador, this displeased all sorts of powerful interests (Reagan, right wing flack groups, the Wall Street Journal), and the NYT responded by removing Bonner from that 'beat'.
They did not tell him to change his opinions, or his content, or any such punishment which would undercut their valued image of preserving the autonomy of their journalists.
They simply removed his ability to report on the entire topic of his professional focus. The fact that 10 years later in the wreckage of bodies massacred by Reagan's friends, the anthropological evidence confirmed Bonner's reporting, and the NYT graciously re-hired him -- precisely too late for it to matter to the powerful interests who wanted him silenced in the first place.
So I suggest to Glenn that although, yes, we should be curious as to the particular activities and organizational features give rise to news producers' measurably systematic output, it should not be our first responsibility.
Like the black box problem, our first responsibility is to carefully observe what goes in, and what comes out.
The secular priesthood of the major news producers and their related intellectuals may complain that we do not know the amazingly complex processes hidden within the box, and that we must know this before we proceed any further, but we can answer that, no, we can measure what goes in the box, and what goes out, and, just like engineers, we are free to hypothesize the simplest possible explanations for what goes on inside to create the measured output.