Letters to the Editor
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billmon
http://billmon.org/archives/001842.html
April 19, 2005
Scoundrel Time
When I saw that Time magazine had chosen Ann Coulter as its Miss April, my first instinct – after I stopped retching, I mean – was to suspect an ulterior political motive.
I mean, Ann may think her cover photo was unflattering (a crime against humanity would be my term for it) but the write up
http://time.com/covers/1101050425
was pure journalistic cunnilingus – and John Cloud appears to have a very long tongue.True, Cloud never quite got around to giving her the full-blown Playboy treatment. (“Turn ons include tearing the wings off flies and sniffing Matt Drudge’s dirty underpants. Turn offs: the Bill of Rights; Victory in Europe Day.”) But it was close.
Combine this latest atrocity with Time’s decision to name Heilrocket and the other Power Line bundists as 2004’s bloggers of the year, and it looks the magazine has itself a new beat. Call it the “sucking up to goose stepping morons” beat -- like the celebrity beat, but without the heavy intellectual content.
Cloud: (salutes) It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it.
Granted, Time isn’t exactly blazing the trail here – Howie Kurtz has had his proboscis wedged firmly in a warm, brown conservative spot for some time now. But for Time, this kind of “reporting” finds a distant echo in the magazine’s own not-so-proud history.
Time Bandits
Once upon a time – back when Ann’s hero, Joe McCarthy, still crawled the earth – Time was what Fox News is now – the unofficial official propaganda organ of the Republican Party. As partisan a rag as ever befouled the propeller of American democracy, in fact. And, just as Fox News has Roger Ailes to keep it on the shining path, Time had its publisher, Henry Luce – who actually combined the roles of Ailes and Rupert Murdoch.
Luce was a rock-ribbed Midwestern Republican – the son of a China missionary, educated at Yale (back when God and man still cohabitated there) and raised in an era when the GOP faithful still regarded the Democrats as the party of Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.
A time much like today, in other words. And Luce’s Time reflected the boss’s prejudices in full measure, particularly when it came to the “who lost China” debate. Luce – a fierce friend of Chiang Kai-shek – blamed the debacle on Truman and the Democrats (which, from his point of view, was the sensible thing to do, since the alternative was admitting Chiang and his government were hopelessly inept and corrupt, and Luce, like his magazine, wasn’t very good at facing unpleasant truths.)
In any case, Luce and Time flayed the Dems – and the party’s presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson – in editorial language so partisan and vicious it might have been written by Ann Coulter (that is, if Ann had taken an intensive course in remedial English composition.)
[...] If you saw Apocalypse Redux, you may remember the hallucinatory scene of Marlon Brando, as big as a fucking Zeppelin, reading optimistic excerpts from Time about how well the war was going.
Then came Watergate and the ’70s and the left’s cultural revolution. Loyal retainers passed away and corporate drones replaced them, and by the late ’80s, Time, while still Republican-leaning (and Reagan worshipping) was no longer the magazine that Luce built. When media hustler Gerald Levin moved in and gobbled up Time-Life in 1989, it seemed as if the last traces of the old fire-breathing, Red-baiting, Time had vanished forever – suffocated in a vat of Hollywood schmaltz.
The "New" Media
But now Time – like the rest of the corporate media – is moving to the right as fast as its flabby journalistic feet can carry it. It’s one thing to trash Al Gore’s reputation or dutifully repeat every lie peddled by Swift Boat Lunatics Who Hate John Kerry. But putting Ann Coulter on the cover takes things to a whole new level. Is the old Time making a comeback?
The short answer is no. In fact, the differences between the old Time and the new Time not only show how much the magazine has changed, they also highlight how much the news media as a whole have been changed by the rise of the mega-monster entertainment conglomerates – such as Time Warner AOL CNN HBO Elektra etc. etc.
Time isn’t returning to its roots – if anything, it’s moving even further away from them. The old Time was conservative, right down to its DNA; the new Time is pandering to the conservatives, right down to its bottom line.
[...] However, just because the corporate media’s new conservative tilt stems from different motives than its old one doesn’t make the trend any less of a threat to our increasingly enfeebled democracy. In fact it may be more dangerous. Press baron demagoguery, however unfair, reflected the biases and passions of specific men, and was thus self-limiting. Or, as our neo-Stalinist judge baiters like to say: No man, no problem.
But the corporate media’s present eagerness to suck and lick the private parts of right-wing extremists is based on an increasingly frantic belief that this is what the audience wants. With their massive market power, however, the mega-monsters also have the ability to shape consumer appetites – creating, in effect, a demand for the kind of content they want to supply.
All the pieces are in place, in other words, for a self-perpetuating spiral into extremism – with the corporate bean counters smiling and clapping all the way. The evolution of talk radio into a contest to see who can shout the most deranged opinions into a microphone shows how the process can work. Something similar may now be happening in the print media. [...]
- - billmon, April 19, 2005