Reading Newspaper Comments on the Internet Can Turn You into an Elitist

You would think that one the internet would do would be separate the knuckle draggers from the somewhat more evolved. After all, one has to be literate and moderately coordinated to type words into a browser. However, a simple perusal of the comments section of the Washington Post articles will disabuse you of that notion rather quickly.

Racism, long vanquished in many quarters to private homes and (homogenous) neighborhood bars, is in full throat in the comments section. It's one thing to have to explain to your integrated co-workers and other parents at your kids' school events and extracurricular activities why you keep a dog-eared copy of The Turner Diaries in your car and a photo of Hitler in your wallet, let alone your swastika tattoo; it's quite another to copy and paste blog posts from Stormfront on some public news forum under an assumed name (hey, I'm not dogging assumed names...I'm just suggesting that it's a bit more comfy being a racist when no one can call you out in person).

Of course, it isn't only racism. If only it were that simple. Conspiracy kooks of the first order hang out on these sites. Look, anything can be true when the burden of proof is that someone saw a youtube video showing how to knock down a building using magnesium shavings filed from a bicycle frame.

You people are morons.

And I'm sick of it.

I'm sick of having to explain the difference between registration and confiscation, and how slippery slope arguments are logical fallacies.

I'm sick of having to demonstrate that you can't compare a Watergate scandal that took two years to develop to impeachment level, with clear paw prints leading straight to the Oval Office, to last week's news, especially when it doesn't lead anywhere yet, and maybe never will. In other words, talk of impeachment is rather premature. Yes, I'm looking at you, George Will.

And I'm damn sick of people posting links to nutcase sites and claiming they "prove" anything other than that the person who posted the link is information illiterate. I spend a good chunk of my time trying to teach students the difference between scholarly sources and junk sources. If you have a link to a site purporting to have the inside scoop on Benghazi, and the site you've linked also has a story about how the moon landing was a hoax and crap about Hitler actually being a leftist, then you've failed the information literacy test.

And while I'm at it, let me talk to my besties on facebook. You may think it's clever to share pictures that match images of Obama with Nixon and claim Nixon was impeached for using the IRS for political ends, but then again you probably think the Civil War was actually a battle over states rights.

And seriously, stop posting twenty picture-slogans in a row. It's damn tedious.

The Washington Post: If you don't get it, sometimes you write for it.

Anne Applebaum has a piece in today's Post that goes a long way toward highlighting the real problem of the supposed "liberal media": they stop at corporate liberalism and think that they represent the limits of rational thinking.

In her critique of the protests, which utilizes the now dominant trope of mainstream media both right and center (there is no left mainstream media) that the protesters "don't have a program/don't know what they want," Applebaum believes the protesters, by exercising their rights under our democracy, are in fact undermining democracy. It's a profoundly conservative argument that usually comes from knee-jerk reactionaries and those who think that anyone who protests inequality in America should "see what it's like in [name your third world dictatorship]," as though those are models we really aspire to.

It's essentially a lack of vision. Applebaum cannot see around her belief in theoretical democracy to understand the critique is leveled at a gamed system, a democracy that unfortunately has come to resemble more and more, as V.I. Lenin put it a century ago, a "political shell for capitalism" (State and Revolution 14). Applebaum actually -- and in proof of what many a deconstructionist might argue -- admits what she can't admit, recognizing in the Occupy movement a coherent message that the process is broken: "national democracy cannot command the allegiance of a billion-dollar global hedge fund, with its headquarters in a tax haven and its employees scattered around the world," she writes, but she simply can't sustain the critique, because that would call into question all the "economic and spiritual benefits" of globalization (I assume she alludes to her ability to purchase cheaply the products of child/slave/prison labor and her ability to take those products with her to a spiritual retreat in some ancient ruins).

Unable to think beyond the boundaries of our corporatized democracy, Applebaum retreats, after throwing a gratuitous dig at the Occupy movement's claims of solidarity with and affinity to Arab Spring, into a laughable conclusion:

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further. 

One could have said as much about the American colonists. They also "already had a process," it it also was called the "British political system." The fact of a process's existence isn't the point. Serial killers "have a process." The issue is whether the process works.


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Lenin, V.I. State and Revolution.1917. New York: International Publishers, 1932. Lenin does a fairly good job of describing our current situation: "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism, and therefore, once capital has gained control [...] of this very best shell, it establishes its power so securely, so firmly that no change, either of persons, or institutions, or parties in the bourgeois republic can shake it" (14).

The Code of Silence.

It's been an interesting day of reading the paper. If you checked the Post today, you'd see a big story about people putting their pets to sleep at home. You'd see a story about another Tea Party Kool Aid Drinking induced Government Shutdown that's on the horizon.

Speaking of which, how in the hell did the Tea Party get to wield so much influence? Their rallies tend to be small affairs (I can tell you that more people marched on May Day from Malcolm X Park a few years back than have attended most Teabagger rallies...but the PLP marches get zero coverage), but I suppose they make good media with their frequently misspelled vaguely or outright racist placards that often threaten some form of violence. I suppose having deep pocket puppet masters is also handy, since they can funnel money to their brain-dead candidates who would have little reach if not for the complicit media.

So I'm looking through the paper, seeing these stories, reading a little bit about the protests in Greece, the possibility that a dissident army is forming in Syria.

Not a peep about another protest happening much closer to home in what you might call a major U.S. city. Apparently, NYPD has been entirely successful in cordoning off the area and preventing out-of-state media from entering to cover the story. Luckily we have foreign media, whose correspondents must have been trapped in the city and can now cover the story...until NYPD manages to discover their means of transmitting stories. Whatever the reason, the Post apparently is unaware of these protests.

I myself have recently discovered this amazing underground site called "youtube.com." It's pretty revolutionary because you can upload your own videos and other people can see them. Technology like this could be used to get information past the censors. If the Post and other outlets ever find out about this phenomenon, they may be able to cover stories even if their correspondents can't get through the intense police security apparatus.

Here's a sample from You Tube of the NYPD putting down a group of extremely dangerous and obviously threatening women. It's a good thing the cops had mace...I'm sure those women were about to charge:

The days are dark ahead I fear.

As a society we used to believe that education was an important component to maintaining the republic. Thomas Jefferson certainly believed that when he wrote to Charles Yancey, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." [1] The push for compulsory education in the U.S. arose from a belief that some education -- at least at the elementary level -- was necessary to secure the continued survival of the nation. The establishment of compulsory education has been maintained, despite the wailings of the right wing, through court decisions resting on the right of the state to secure the general welfare of its citizens.

In so far as schooling creates docile bodies, the right wing has come around to accepting universal compulsory education. However, the right wing has never been interested in the emancipatory power of education, bemoaning (a la Glenn Beck) the supposedly horrible fact that education does not seem to to reinforce their narrow definitions of patriotism, nationalism, or "American ideals." Despite their insistence on individual rights, the right wing has a great fear of individualistic thinking; theirs is the individualism of make-believe atomistic production and consumption, a fantasy land in which you or I simply float in isolating ether until we enter into contracts with one another.

Education at every level has been under assault by the right wing for at least thirty years (dated from the landmark scare tract A Nation at Risk which yeah I know is only 28 years ago but I'm rounding up), and while most of these scary myths have been promulgated ignorantly or dishonestly by those who fail to understand that the US tests every child while many other countries test only those who have already tested into rigorous academic-tracked schools, we as a nation still seem to swallow those lies hook, line, and sinker.

We have allowed the penny wise and pound foolish to control the national imagination where it comes to education, substituting job training for critical thinking. As we advance memorization of rules and procedures and denigrate problem solving, we train students for the next five years and leave them more or less on their own for the following thirty or forty. Or fewer if they happened to have been trained in a field that is easily shipped offshore in service of capital.

At the same time the right wing has sought to dismantle education, they have been aided and abetted (sometimes actively and sometimes simply by lucky chance) by the transformation of (visual) news providers into entertainment centers. Whereas the depth and breadth of your news organization used to signal prestige if not profit, now entire cable channels are built around nothing other than the presentation of news as the sole profit generator. The era of infotainment has been particularly destructive to our nation's ability to think critically, as the lives of the Kardashians assumes preeminence over the upheavals in the Middle East. Even when world events are presented in death, they are given the infotainment treatment with slick graphics and theme songs that transform them into Baudrillardian events. The emphasis is not on informing viewers, but on keeping viewers.

Recognizing that most people get their news from television and that the format doesn't allow for deep analysis or even a moment's reflection, and understanding that the media's ostensible commitment to objectivity has for the last few decades most often meant that even outright lies will be reported unchallenged, demagogues such as House Speaker John Boehner can spout off factually incorrect statements knowing they'll reach their target audience who either don't have the background, time, or desire to question the factual content of Boehner's lies.

This post is already incredibly long, and it would take another five paragraphs to analyze the ludicrous vomit that spewed from Boehner's mouth yesterday and was given an airing even on NPR, who would certainly have challenged the Speaker had he argued that Blacks or Jews were responsible for our current economic woes. However, what he did say was just as empirically incorrect and blindly bigoted as those statements, suggesting that businesses (or to use the preferred Republican nomenclature, "job creators") were shackled by onerous taxes...when businesses currently enjoy their most favorable conditions since the gilded age.


I suppose I'll stop here. I sense my blood pressure rising, and as disgusted as I am with the cynical content of Speaker Boehner's lies and the media's lapdog consumption of them, I am even more disgusted that a significant portion of Americans are unable to see this venomous fraud for what he is.

The always classy Glenn Beck...

Apparently not understanding just how irrelevant he is beyond the reason-addled adherents of the Tea Party and white supremacist fringes, Glenn Beck decided that the Norway killings would be a good excuse to bring up Hitler yet again.

However, it wasn't the white supremacist killer that Beck had in mind when making his comparison. No, it was the murdered children whom Beck compared to adherents of Adolf Hitler, likening them to a sort of "Hitler Youth."

Sure, it's disgusting to anyone who can think straight, and sure, Beck's idiotic ramblings eventually got him kicked off Fox News (now there's some food for thought: the home of Sean Hannity couldn't stomach the Beck hate parade...well, more accurately they couldn't stomach the falling ratings and loss of advertising revenue), but Glenn Beck still draws a significant population of under-educated voters, who are very visible reminders that the US education system has a long way to go to develop critical thinking skills in its curriculum. Unfortunately, with the high-stakes testing regime ushered in by George W. Bush and enthusiastically nurtured by Barack Obama, we are going in the opposite direction.

It's hard to break old habits...

It might be Pavlovian, but then again it might be that dull simplicity that you see in cows as they move on the paths they've been shown and come to a dead halt when confronted with something new.

Here's the front page of Rupert Murdoch's Sun on Saturday, July 23, the day after the Norway killings:


Now why the hell would The Sun, Murdoch's popular British rag, print such a ridiculous headline? Probably for the same reason that the racist Right in the US immediately jumps to blame Muslims (or Latinos or unions, etc.) for tragedies. For examples of which, simply read the comments section of Washington Post articles on the killings -- preferably the articles from Friday, when no one was sure who had done it. Or maybe I should say, when no one actually knew who had done it -- because these racist yahoos were pretty damn sure they knew who had done it, just as Murdoch's tabloid was certain.

And of course, you have the "experts" called in by the various television media, such as Cliff May, the president of the "Foundation for the Defense of Democracies," which despite its nice name often aligns itself with police-state reactions to unrest and overall has a xenophobic attitude. On Bloomberg/Washington Post, May immediately responds with a list of Norway's "enemies," all of which are connected in some way to so-called Islamic interests, and after giving that some expansion, he finishes up with "it may not be any of that, of course." Why was this idiot given air time?




We really don't need the sort of "analysis" that either May or Conley provides. Anyone can sit in a chair and speculate without providing any evidence. It's called fanning the flames of ignorance.

It isn't helpful.

The dominoes are falling...

On Friday it was Rebekah Brooks.

Shortly afterward, down went Les Hinton.

Over the weekend, the head of Scotland Yard, Paul Stephenson resigned.

This morning, Scotland Yard's John Yates resigned.

And if you parse Paul Stephenson's resignation statement, we're talking about issues that could touch the Prime Minister.

However, in the US, the Murdoch-controlled media refuses to acknowledge that anything important has happened or is happening.

We're beyond talking about Murdoch's minions resigning from their media perches. We're talking about top law officials in a relatively respected foreign country having to relinquish their posts. Although analogies always limp, Stephenson's resignation would be akin to the head of the FBI stepping down in the U.S.

Still, the Murdoch lie machine churns on Stateside, with the Wall Street Journal, a relatively recent Murdoch acquisition trying to deflect attention from their owner's criminal activity and instead arguing that this event -- the event that has caused two top law officials to step down, been the subject of hearings in Parliament, and has even caused an ostensibly contrite Murdoch to apologize to some of his victims -- is really about circulation numbers and ideological distaste for Murdoch's right wing media conglomerate.

Americans by and large will probably pay little attention to this mess. Fox News is hardly covering it, and when they do, it's mainly to dismiss it as overblown media hype, a minor incident that isn't really important, which is much how they would likely have reported on Watergate had they been around then: a minor burglary, committed by a few rogue operatives, who are being punished...what's the fuss?

NewsCorp's most damaging problem in the US will most likely be the bribing of foreign officials. It's not good enough for the WSJ, whose editorial team has always been ideological hacks whose ethical brain zones either never developed properly or were killed off years ago, to argue that "everyone pays for stories...so who cares" when that argument won't even get you out of a speeding ticket. Besides, we aren't talking about paying some celebrity for a scoop (or better yet paying a friend of the celebrity for a scoop); we're talking about paying bribes to the police. We're talking about official corruption.

We're talking, in short, of criminal activities and criminals.

Fox News, predictably carrying water for Murdoch, Inc.

Fox News, Murdoch's heavy hitter, has come out swinging in defense of the embattled criminal who heads their parent corporation. This coverage from the Guardian:

On the Fox and Friends show[*], Fox journalist Steve Doocy wondered just what the fuss was all about: "The company has come forward and said: 'look, this happened a long time ago, at a tabloid, in London, somebody did something really bad,' and the company reacted. They closed that newspaper, all the people got fired, even though 99 percent of them had nothing to do with it."

Doocy's guest, public relations consultant Robert Dilenschneider, was in agreement:
"If I am not mistaken, Murdoch, who owns it, has apologised but for some reason, the public, the media keeps on going over this, again and again. It's a little bit too much."

"The bigger issue is hacking and how we as a public are going to protect outselves," said Dilenschneider, who earlier listed a number of US companies which had recently become the targets of hacking.

Doocy added later: "One of the things about the media, you look at some sites and you would think that martians had landed in New Jersey - again"

Right. Because hacking over an extended period of time into the voice mail of celebrities, royalty, politicians, crime victims, and dead soldiers really isn't a big deal. Forget the fact that the people responsible for these crimes were rewarded with promotion within their criminal organization. Let's focus on the fact that we're all in danger from hacking...not that Murdoch's minions are the ones who have been caught doing the hacking.

And what the hell does he mean by "a long time ago"? For most people, "a long time ago" is in a "galaxy far far away." We're talking last decade.

And "somebody did something really bad"? Is he explaining this event to a five year old (well, given the IQ of the Fox audience, maybe)? And it wasn't "somebody": it was "somebodies," including but not limited to the head of Murdoch's UK News International. We aren't talking about the secretary stealing office supplies. We're talking about corporate criminals engaged in ongoing illegal invasions of privacy and electronic eavesdropping.

Absolute scum.

Seriously, Steve Doocy can't be called anything resembling a journalist. Dog shit is actually too noble to be muddied by association with that scumbag's name.

How stupid are Americans that Fox News can continue to dominate news ratings?

[*following long-standing policy, I tend not to link to hate groups]

Who listens to you?

This morning I was thinking about the power of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, which in the US is most noted for Fox News. Back in the 1990's, the upstart Fox News positioned itself as a "fair and balanced" alternative to the supposedly liberal CNN. It was clever positioning, especially as CNN's "liberalness" basically consisted of having actual foreign news bureaus and professional journalists. CNN was a network who, after all, came to prominence due to their incessant drum beats for the First Gulf War, which they slickly branded and marketed.

Nevertheless, Fox News claimed to be the center and cast CNN as the left, when in reality it was CNN running a corporate journalist center while Fox allowed themselves a very partisan voice on the right. That much is old news and goes many times over to show that most people can't tell naked partisan reporting from reporting that, while still implicated in all sorts of biases, attempts to tell the story honestly, i.e. traditional journalism as taught in schools and the old school news rooms.

Fox News didn't invent such distortions, of course. William Randolph Hearst famously (perhaps apocryphally) said, "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war." And Hearst had enormous influence through his media empire, just as Murdoch does today. I imagine Hearst may have been capable of tapping phone lines of not only celebrities, but also of crime victims, dead soldiers' families, and politicians. Hearst may also have been capable of bribing police for inside information.

We know Murdoch is capable of such things.

Murdoch will predictably argue that he had no idea what his underlings were doing. He will predictably point the finger at "rogue" elements within his empire. That was the strategy during the first fall out from the News of the World phone tapping scandals, when most of the UK thought only celebrities and footballers were targeted. Rogue elements, acting without authorization, Murdoch et al argued, were responsible for these criminal activities. However, this latest scandal directly implicates Rupert Murdoch's son James and the head of his UK branch, Rebekah Brooks. The Guardian has a great timeline here.

The Perpetual Campaign.

I was listening to NPR this morning as they covered the potential Presidential candidates' descent on Iowa. First there was Michele "John Wayne Gacy" Bachmann, who sounded as if she were speaking to a crowd of about ten based on the background clapping, but I think it was probably hundreds.

However, that crowd will have to be entertained by someone other than Tom Petty, who has told Bachmann to stop using his song "American Girl" in her campaign promos. It's an interesting song for a fear-mongering hate-filled xenophobe to use, since the song's lyrics basically depict a young woman trying to figure things out and looking for new experiences. Interestingly, Republicans have historically been tone deaf to a song's lyrical content, as when Reagan tried to use Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A" during his campaign, until the Boss told him to knock it off. As jingoistic as some Republicans may have thought the song was -- and the steady strong beat certainly adds to this sense -- the lyrics are anything but upbeat, even from the first line of "born down in a dead man's town."

Bachmann might want to find an artist more in tune with her politics, perhaps Ted Nugent. Or if she wants a song that's more a statement of her politics, she could try to call up the people at Resistance Records for a suitable act (OK, that might be going a bit too far, but I could seriously see her using some white supremacist record because it's "pro USA" and not understand the larger connections).

But wait, there's more! Bachmann wasn't the only hopeful in Iowa. Current President and 2012 hopeful Barack Obama was also out on the stump, although as President he can pass off certain visits as "part of his President business" and not as direct campaign stops. On the bits I heard from the NPR report, you can see why he'll be a tougher candidate to beat than the poll numbers might indicate right now: he knows how to connect to people (he's not as good as Bill Clinton, though: Clinton remains for me the top campaigner in the personal meet and greet in my lifetime). Marion Barry was also a hell of a campaigner. A shit executive, but a hell of a campaigner. Hmm.

And lest I forget, Sarah Palin, the undecided non-candidate whose on-and-off bus tour may be on again, was also in Iowa. Her ship has sailed, to bring in another transport metaphor, although I can only imagine Democrats salivating over their dream ticket of Palin-Bachmann.

But it's Iowa and it's June 2011. That's close to a year and a half from the election, and it's a sad thing when political campaigns have to start so early, because then we have to hear about political candidates for so long. I pity the fools. In the 24 hour news cycle, the media have nothing better to do than spend time trying to think of something new to say (or some new way to say something old) about the candidates.

In the age of the perpetual campaign, I suppose you could argue we're only six months and some spare change away from the start of the primaries, but what is Bachmann's shelf life on the national stage? I don't think the US has moved far enough right for her to win a general election, and I don't even think the Republican Party has moved far enough right for her to win the nomination.

The media.

What the hell is the Media anyway?

The most obvious answer is that it's anything the speaker wants it to be. The Pew Research Center released a report in fall 2010 on media consumption among Americans. I think it's important to talk about the survey in terms of consumption, even if the report is titled "Americans Spending More Time Following the News: Ideological News Sources: Who Watches and Why."

As I read the report (it's eight long internet pages with all sorts of charts), I started thinking that it really revealed the way in which the media has become an ideological sparring ground. News outlets have never been clear of ideology, but what gets me is the question of "news organization believability." Pew asked respondents to rate news organizations on a scale of 1-4, with 4 labeled "Believe all or most" and 1 labeled "Believe almost nothing."

I want to see the people who scored anything a 4. I want to do business with them.

Now if you asked me if I believed "all or most" of something a pundit said, like a Bill O'Reilly or a Keith Olbermann, I'd be a moron to say yes. If I had to believe "all or most" of what was printed in the Post, then I'd have to believe crap-dealers like Krauthammer, Gerson, Will, etc. Sorry.

Besides, "belief" is hardly the right word. The question itself is too cut and dry. Do I "believe" there's been a tsunami that caused a nuclear accident? Do I "believe" the Congressperson/President talking points from a press conference reported in the paper? These are very different things.

Perhaps the nearest sign that I'm growing crotchety and old.

I like newspapers.

I like holding one and reading the columns. I think there's an entire ritual that's passing away centered around sofas, coffee tables, and bulky Sunday papers with all those sections and circulars and supplements.

I don't know the economics of it, but I wonder if -- counter to all our amazement at the joys of the internet and the economic engine we believe it to be -- the internet hasn't killed not only the newspapers but also the entire economic system around it, from advertising artists and salespeople to printers and shippers and paper suppliers. Like I said, I don't know if there's a net gain or loss economically, and since I'm not Michael Gerson, I'm not going to write some utterly uninformed piece about it.

Besides, I like the internet, too.

Now it used to be that if I wanted a copy of the Post, I plunked down my coins and picked up the daily (OK, I actually subscribed when I lived in DC, and would be subscribing still if I weren't in PA). You paid for it. And advertisers paid for it. Then the internet came along and we all thought news was free. Newspapers were caught in a bind: they had to get onto the internet or become irrelevant, but the moment they got on the internet they undercut their print editions. People won't pay for internet content...or so the theory goes.

Even papers you never had to pay for are struggling in the internet age.

One of my particular joys in living in DC, especially when I was in my twenties, was reading the CityPaper's matches section. I especially liked the "none of the above" category, because it had the potential to supply in three or four very short lines astounding humor. Pair those ads with the ludicrous porn shop ads and there was great clipping material to send to friends in faraway places.

Then Craigslist came along.

I like Craigslist, too, but it's too easy. The trolls aren't terribly inventive, and the potential for surprising humor just isn't there, except in the area where musicians try to form bands...that can still be comedy gold.

Ben Franklin got his start printing papers. When papers close, old Ben sheds a tear.

Question to Ponder.

Is the USA still largely racist, or is it more likely that a predominant number of racists post comments on the Washington Post website?

Friday thought.

Just a quick one for a Friday before I head to the beautiful Maryland shore for vacation:

Is there a dumber pundit that smart people take seriously than David Brooks?

Discuss.

Thanks for the hindsight, Prez.

So on that most hardhitting of "news shows," "The View," President Obama has declared that the Sherrod Snafu was nothing more than a "bogus controversy." He's right to an extent, but it was his administration's blind kowtowing to right wing race-baiting media, of which Fox News is the most prominent example, that raised its level from a minor incident to a monstrous ethical and PR blunder.

By this time the Obama Administration, and in fact any Democratic administration, should recognize Fox News as the public relations branch of the most reactionary elements of the Republican Party and the further right.

The Obama Administration appears to forget that it received the most votes in the last election and has substantial support, even if that support doesn't have a massive media organization that panders to it (the few talking heads on MSNBC don't make up in either their own numbers or in national ratings any sort of credible resistance to the Fox machine, which is running constantly during both news and "talk" programs). However, since taking office, Obama has backpedaled on or simply shelved his more daring initiatives, a strategy that Democrats seem to think leads to success.

Democrats would be wise to remember that they were elected not on the basis of their similarities to what used to be the now non-existent moderate wing of the Republican Party, but on a promise that they were returning to the bold initiatives that saw them offer true alternatives to the bankrupt laissez-faire, "winner take all," "kick 'em to the curb" mentality of the Republicans.

Unfortunately, the Sherrod scandal indicates that Democrats have learned little to nothing about the current state of politics and the media. Instead of sniffing out a brilliant opportunity to demonstrate Fox News' shoddy fact-checking and ideologically driven huff-n-puff, they scrambled as fast as they could to accede to the hate-mongers' demands.

It shouldn't be this way.

No stone unturned.

During the Vietnam War, it became increasingly evident that television had changed the war. Not only did television speed up the home front's access to information about the war, but it also brought it vividly into everyone's evening news. Unlike the newsreels of World War II that were highlight clips available in movie theaters, the news reports from Vietnam showed reporters in the midst of firefights; the chaos of the war entered the living room.

Compared to nightly news reports, newsreel footage is quaint, sterile, distant, and downright naive:

In the decade and a half between the fall of Saigon and the opening of Gulf War I, the government and the televised news media learned some important lessons. For the government's part, they learned they had to control the message, so they released footage of "smart bombs" and held press conferences explaining exactly what was happening (or at least what they said was happening), and that information was dutifully lapped up and disseminated by the various news organizations.

News organizations, in particular CNN, had learned that war was not an event to be reported but a bankable commodity to be exploited. War coverage could be branded and developed: panels of experts could convene, pre-packaged pros and cons could be aired as if they were open debate, and occasionally an overview of the war, complete with military supplied footage and analysis, could occur. CNN saw the war as an incredible visibility boost, and of course marketed their coverage and references to their coverage to convince viewers that they were a reliable source for information:

More importantly, though, they branded the war. It became a show, complete with recognizable graphics and theme music:

But you don't have to take my word for it; you can read Baudrillard's excellent The Gulf War Did Not Take Place for a more lucid analysis of the media victory in the Gulf War I. While some illiterate morons believed Baudrillard was arguing that the Gulf War was a hoax (much like conspiracy theorists argue about the moon landing), Baudrillard's points consisted of a critique of the mediated nature of the event and whether the action actually satisfied the definition of war as opposed to massacre.

The advance of the First Gulf War was live 24 hour coverage and the development of stations devoted to nothing but news (which of course meant nothing but infotainment, since hard analysis doesn't sell and there's not enough news to fill 24 hours unless you repeat it, extend it, manipulate it, and turn it into an event). The advance of the Second Gulf War and the Afghanistan War (perhaps we could label both neatly as "Bush's Boondoggle" or "Middle East Adventurism") is the advent of the internet.

Digital recording has made (to use CNN's term) "iReporters" out of nearly everyone. Cheap cell phone images have fueled the cable channels' speculation shows, while higher quality hand held recording devices and widespread internet connectivity have allowed nearly anyone to produce and disseminate footage (and the accompanying phenomenon of "viral video" simply drives home the point that the production, dissemination, and consumption of images cannot be contained or controlled by the traditional media infrastructure).

Digitized material spreads beyond the control of its producer or its original broadcaster. Derrida argued that all text is "always already" beyond the control of its creator and especially so if it becomes public discourse (and you have to have a sense that Emily Dickinson understood that as well when she wrote that "publication is the auction of the mind"), and in the internet age the avenues of dissemination are simply multiplied and accelerated. They approach "real time," the "real" being more of a tease, a promise of revelation that often doesn't materialize or disappoints. Much like the CNN reporters of the 1990's (and present) who often stand around desperately trying to fill time in order to fulfill the promise of presence, the internet as entity promises everything -- unmediated access to information without respect to broadcast schedules, as well as an unfillable archive of everything that has ever happened.

Into this medium springs wikileaks, a site whose visibility depends upon its access to formerly secretive information; like most news sites, it's raw material is information, but unlike other news sites, it doesn't do anything with the raw material: it simply dumps it on the internet, making it freely available to anyone with an internet connection. Wikileaks represents the next watershed in the public relations of warfare, which is to say in warfare. Prior to the Vietnam War, the military and government could rely on a distance between the war zone and the home front; prior to the First Gulf War, the military and government could rely upon the dominant model of infotainment to spin their messages (and the embedded reporters of Gulf War II simply represented a tremendous advance, both in terms of control and in terms of PR victory, in the military's response to that model); however, the internet age represents a challenge that Lyotard first identified back in 1979 in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge: control of information will be the dominant field of warfare or interstate rivalry:

Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major --perhaps the major --stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.

In other words, knowledge as commodity has always served traditional interests. Wikileaks represents a denial of knowledge as commodity, or at least in the traditional sense. However, the news outlets who have always made information their stock in trade will find no real challenge from wikileaks -- they have simply been given immense raw material with which to work; the real challenge is to the government and the military, who are now finding that just as battlefield television cameras brought their combat actions under intense scrutiny, wikileaks (and the internet in general) will now bring their internal discourse on war into the light and under the same intense scrutiny.

Endlessly.

Coming in from the cold.

Everyone's acting like this Russian spy story is outdated, so 1970's. Like spying began and ended with the Cold War.

Of course, in today's news cycle, everyone's already forgotten about the Russian spy story. In fact, the news has so skewed towards entertainment, that the predominant reactions to the story has been to focus on the "beauty queen" spy, Anna Chapman, as if it's the first time an attractive individual has been a spy.

Great concern has been voiced over the possible boost this story will give to Angelina Jolie's latest vehicle, Salt.

Other than that, no one seems to care.

Now, it's true that these spies were pretty poor. I'm not even sure you can call them spies, really, at least in the classical sense. This point is being made by the Guardian's Alexander Chancellor:

One reason for this must be the complete futility of the alleged Russian operation. The FBI had not only been watching the suspects closely for up to a decade, but it had found no evidence that any of them had furnished Moscow with even a scrap of useful information during that time.

Perhaps, though, the mission was to discover the allure of suburbia, with its backyard barbecues, its well-manicured lawns, and its quiet desperation behind a privacy fence in a subdivision cul-de-sac.

But the time for the story has come and gone. Sure, it will crop up later, probably in two weeks when Angelina Jolie's movie opens, but it will sink below the surface rather quickly. Anna Chapman may find herself in a few years -- or as soon as her anticipated sentence will allow -- hitting the talk show couch circuit, flogging her story for a book or a movie, because one of the great secrets of American life is that we don't know how to handle anything as a culture anymore except through the tropes provided by the media.

Andy Warhol's laconic statement has proven not only to be true, but also to be descriptive of our attention spans and indicative of the triumph of the culture industry.

Metapost.

In looking back over my sources, I realize I'm relying far too heavily on cnn.com for my links. Now I should perhaps explain myself.

First, I don't watch cable news, or any television news for that matter. However, I am fully aware of the phenomenon of cable news: you can't escape it in doctor's offices, restaurants and bars, airports, and even some places that call themselves coffee shops. So I'm well aware of how these outlets, as money making ventures, are more about bread and circuses than they are about information, and that -- in perfect Baudrillardian fashion -- their effect is to smother an occurrence in discourse, to turn it into an event, and to take us as far away as possible from understanding it.

Second, cnn.com provides in both its content and delivery a perfect illustration of the poverty of most news organizations. Its content tends to be a mix of celebrity gossip, political chatter, human tragedy and triumph (e.g. baby falls down well, disabled man competes in marathon, young girl murdered, etc.), and general catastrophe (forest fires, oil spills, etc.). Its delivery is in breezy stories that rarely go beyond five paragraphs and quite often, especially in the case of political chatter, are three paragraphs or less.

So, let it be said that I do not link to cnn.com because I think it is a solid news source. However, as infotainment goes, it's a great example, and I won't link to foxnews.com because I don't link to right wing websites, especially ones that pander to racist elements.

Third, I actually get most of my news from NPR, The Guardian, Washington Post, and New York Times.

One of the things that tires me out, whether it's on the Washington Post, CNN, or Chronicle of Higher Education sites, is the pathetic level of commentary to be found on the "comments" section of articles. Reading the comments section, as I've noted elsewhere, can convince a person that the majority of readers are half-literate racists or simply -- and there's no other way to put it -- absolute morons. I rarely read them anymore, but sometimes I make that mistake and it often leads me to such depression that I have to step away from the computer. The stupid seem to have more time on their hands to flood comment boards.

Maybe it's time to get away from current events and popular culture, although it's the absurdity of both that often makes me write.

Short Term Memory Loss

Much stupidity has been shuffled around following this Tuesday's primaries. First, there was that idiot Sargent who writes for the Post opining that Arlen Specter and Blanche Lincoln were facing challenges "from the left."

Puh-lease.

It's perhaps true that those two incumbents are facing challenges from the left of their own positions, but that hardly qualifies as "the left" -- or what little we have of it -- in the United States.

Then, post-election, the media are tripping over themselves to create a story of "anti-incumbent anger." I'm trying to remember where exactly I read the howler headline about the "end of the era of the incumbent advantage," but it was at that point that I realized someone had been sniffing far too much glue as he or she tried to make deadline. Let's take a closer look at a few of the races, starting in Pennsylvania.

Arlen Specter is best remembered as a Republican. He was running in the Democratic primary this year because he switched parties in the face of a strong challenge from the right wing of the Republican Party. Registered Democrats tend to be a bit more party-loyalty oriented than the general populace, so it's hardly an anti-incumbent sentiment to reject a politician who for all but the last two years of his political career was in the opposition.

Parsing Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky should take about ten seconds for anyone who doesn't have papers to sell or air time to fill. You could start with the fact that Paul wasn't running against an incumbent. That should actually end the conversation. If it doesn't, and you feel like continuing a conversation with someone who has a fragile grip on consciousness, then you may need to go to tactic b: many Republican Party activists are right wing kooks. They are electing a fringe candidate who appeals to those divorced from reality, but that's no surprise -- Rand's father, Ron Paul, has been serving, off and on, in the very organization he despises for something like thirty years. But hey, I understand, sometimes you need to try to use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house, but Paul has been relatively unsuccessful at doing so much as removing a loose floorboard. Yet, voters continue to send him back to his government paycheck so he can continue not to do much about it.

Sure, libertarians are easy targets, since they're the biggest freeloaders in the history of mankind, stumbling through life with blinders on, pretending they're little atomistic islands rather than part of complex interconnected systems that actually do affect one another. However, it might be useful to see how much the Tea Party can do come November. Winning your closed primary is one thing, but winning a general election full of other parties and independents is quite another. Will crazy sell to more than a niche market?

I know it's difficult in this day and age to present the news without developing a storyline -- especially a real dire one -- but these primaries have not shown that incumbents are in danger in November. What they've shown is that in a few cases -- all of which are out of the ordinary -- incumbents have had to fight to win their primaries, and some have failed to do so.

Bread and Circuses.

I may not speak for many people, but I'm sure I speak for a few when I say I really don't need updates on Bret Michaels' condition on the front page of cnn.com. First, I remember this guy from an 80's glam metal band. They sucked. Second, I understand vaguely that he participates in every b or c list stars favorite nostalgia vehicle, the celebrity reality show. I have no idea what his particular show is about except that it has put him back in the news.

In the age of infotainment, a field in which CNN can take credit as being pioneers, I suppose this tripe is what passes for news. Forget any deep analysis of actual problems in the world, like Greece's financial collapse or Arizona's draconian unconstitutional immigration law -- too complicated and not nearly sexy enough to spend time on.

In a literate society, CNN and Fox and every other cable news channel should essentially be the equivalent of supermarket tabloids, ridiculed for their emphasis on celebrity scandal and death and not seen as trusted news sources. As for anyone who points out that the Nat'l Enquirer first broke the story of John Edwards' affair...well, who gives a shit? They first broke Gary Hart's affair etc....they excel in scandal. That's what they do. That's all they do. It'd be like lauding Rolling Stone or Pitchfork for being the first to report on a band's latest release.

Christ, the waning days of empire are tough.