Letters to the Editor
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Michael Harold:
Labeling people conspiracy theorists doesn't resolve the issues.
I really don't understand why people bristle at the term "conpsiracy theory" -- as though it is inherently derogatory. It isn't.
Someone who claims that a group of people are working together in secret to achieve a common, concealed goal is, by definition, espousing a "conspiracy theory." Some "conspiracy theories" are accuarate. Some are not. But those who explicitly espouse conspiracy theories -- such as the view that corporate heads issue secret orders to their news divisions about what to report and not report -- so frequently act like the term "conspiracy theory" is improper. It isn't. It's descriptive.
I didn't claim that the term "conspiracy theory" resolves anything, so why point out that it doesn't? I gave a SPECIFIC REASON why I do not believe this specific conpsiracy theory to be true.
Is the IRS a conspiracy? Are the stock markets a conspiracy? Is the military-industrial-congressional-executive complex a conspiracy? Of course not.
See my defintion above. The term "conspiracy" has a very specific definition.
What we are witnessing is the global, vertical integration of entire industries. That's monopoly capitalism. Monopoly capitalism operates under a different set of rules than "free market" capitalism.
It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see this.
Fine. That explanation is completely different from the
theory that I labelled a "conspiracy theory."
The ideologies and control of MSM organizations by their owners do play a large role in the narratives that we are barraged with day after day. Many of them have their thumbs in their pies. Their conservative ideologies enable their profits.
You don't need the CIA to see what is happening. All you have to do is read the bios in the Forbes 400.
You may not need to CIA, but you do need proof. At least in my view, you do. That Murdoch directs the content of his news is hardly in dispute. I don't dispute it. But what is the evidence that corporate heads at GE and Disney do?
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Danny Sleator:
Glenn, I'm surprised that you are unfamiliar with the memo from MSNBC management cancelling Donahue's show during the buildup to the Iraq war. The memo explicitly objected to Donahue's anti-war attitude. It's a perfect example of this phenomenon.
I've written about the memo before. Why don't you link to and quote from it?
There is no dobut that corporations want to avoid content that displeases their advertisers. And in 2003, media executives were nervous about content that was perceived as too aggressively anti-war.
That is a completely different matter from claiming that media executives have secret meetings where they dictate to reporters and editors what they should say, and then they go and say it. If there is evidence to support that claim, what is it?
So, for starters you really ought to admit your mistake. And I really don't understand your point, so perhaps you should make it again. Is it really that corporate management does not influence what comes out of their reporters and pundits? If so you should read more from Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen.
My claim is that there are many factors which account for why journalists behave the way they do. That they get secret instructions from their corporate heads about ideological viewspoints to promote is not one of them. If there is evidence to prove there is, what is it?
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Little Brother
Pardon my tangent, but I hope there's at least a trace of facetiousness in this observation; at first, I thought it was an intentional parody of the rhetoric of anti-conspiracist reactionaries. One of their favorite straw men is to postulate that it defies common sense to believe that any large-scale hidden agenda or plan would not be discovered as a result of betrayal and leaks by the hordes of agents carrying out the nefarious scheme.
That's hardly the province of "anti-conspiracist reactionaries." As but one example, that is exactly the reason Noam Chomsky cites as to why he thinks 9/11 conspiracy theories are stupid -- because it would be impossible for anyone, let alone a group as inept as the Bush/Cheney administration, to keep concealed a conspiracy that vast, requiring as many people as it would require.
It doesn't mean it's impossible . But the larger the conspiracy is, the more likely it is to be revealed. That's just basic common sense.
As in the well-known and extensively fictionalized field of espionage (and confidence games), with its isolated cells, codes and ciphers, trustworthy contacts, blind or innocuous go-betweeners, and other control mechanisms, things get done. Yes, this reads superficially like a paranoid perspective. But that doesn't invalidate it.
I am just a person who believes things only when there is evidence to believe them. I prefer not to make accusations or assert the existence of conspiracies in the absence of actual evidence that it exists.
Heaven forfend I should challenge Glenn-- watching him respond to his ineffectual detractors is like attending a joust at Camelot, watching Lancelot in the lists shiver shield after shield of foolish opponents. But I think it's a little too facile, even naïve, to discount claims of collusive action, pejoratively branded "conspiracies", on the grounds that such things couldn't be accomplished without some whistle-blower giving away the game.
I speak with a good number of reporters now, including many who are generally sympathetic to the critiques I write. Some are quite recognizable names and some work at the largest and most influential news organizations. If they were receiving secret instructions from corporate masters about what to write, it would mean that thousands of them were, and it only stands to reason that someone would say so.
It's always more appealing to think that Lex Luthor-like plots explain things. But if nothing else, very few people are sophisticiated or able enough to carry them out on such a large scale. I'll believe them when there is evidence to believe them, and not until.
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Glenn with a dash of Jay Rosen - it doesn’t get any better than that
One major difference between the two administrations is, IIRC, that Carville mostly got out of the way after the elections were over and left the governing to Clinton and his administration. There was a much clearer separation between the political campaign and the governing that takes place after a winning one.
This is where I think "Bush's Brain" (or "Bush's Brian," as The Major would put it) has had unprecedented, and obviously destructive, influence. We've all seen the damage done by Bush/Cheney’s almost-pathological rejection of sound governance in favor of faith-based politics and ideology. This administration never drew a line of demarcation between politics and governing, and obviously Rove’s continuing, even heightened, influence after the campaigns had a lot to do with that. Buffalonian’s good point about Clinton actually illustrates this difference, and it is testimony to Glenn’s quote of Jay Rosen regarding the media’s predilection with “savvy” that the establishment media has never looked at Rove’s rather unprecedented crossover and the damage it has caused to any substantial degree. I’m not trying to make Clinton out to be a political innocent or that he was defenseless to the media onslaught (obviously he wasn’t), but Bush/Cheney has taken political manipulation to an exponentially higher levels.
Another major influence on the establishment media driving the Clinton story were that the right-wing propaganda machine was in full gear by this time, and pulled the establishment media along with it. I have to go with Glenn, the problems with the establishment media stem more from their emphasizing “balance” (with Rove’s and others “savvy” being the skew “balance” to the right) over skeptical objectivity, being manipulated/influenced by access to officials and downsizing/reformulating unprofitable news departments, as opposed to some overall conspiracy to convey a particular political view. That is not to say we don’t need to worry about further incursions by the Murdoch's, et al on the establishment media going forward.
Also, as Glenn pointed out, Clinton actually was viewed as a beltway outsider during much of his term.