On The Media

Jamison Foser writes a long and well-argued indictment of the media. The thesis is generally that the media has accepted narratives and applies them to Democratic and Republican figures, no matter the actuality of the matter. This goes down to even the most trvial and meaningless of stories: Hillary Clinton's discussion of the music on her iPod is necessarily calculating and indicative of poll-testing, while George Bush's iPod choices show his authenticity. Right this second I have that harpie Chris Matthews slobbering over the New York Times' tabloid gossip report about the Clinton's marriage (and as Foser points out, this is a marriage between a 60 year-old quadruple-bypass survivor and his wife. Sexy, huh?). And Foser makes an excellent comparison between the coverage of the complicated Whitewater fake scandal, which went on for years and years and revealed no illegal conduct, and the well-known knowledge that Bush, with foreknowledge, sold 200,000 shares of Harken Energy stock right before it tanked, which has rated all of 26 words in the Washington Post.

It's very important to recognize these pre-made narratives and fight against them. Foser focuses on how the media grafts sterotypical personalities of the two parties onto all their public figues. Republicans are "authentic" men of the people, while Democrats are fake, dishonest, and out of step with regular Americans. Republicans are champions of the military despite the fact that none of them served, Democrats hate the military, and anyway the ones that served fake their war wounds. (by the way, Big John, couldn't you have done this in September 2004?)

I think you can actually go further. I remember David Sirota saying last week that, on economic terms, the media is deeply conservative. And this is true. When's the last time you've heard anyone in the media outside of the Nation magazine challenge the precepts of globalization and free trade? This story, the biggest blow job I've ever seen on the front page of a respected national newspaper, might as well have been written by the World Bank. It's a sunny depiction of how great the global economy is, which of course you can say when you ignore the practical slavery employed by Chinese manufacturers. Nobody tries to shake out how low costs undermine labor security everywhere, how we pay for $5 T-shirts in the sweat and sorrow of workers around the world. The media tracks in knowledge, so of course they don't understand (and don't want to understand) the interconnected nature of the global economy.

I think we just have to accept that the media whores and the chattering class are going to bloviate away and continue using these frames and narratives. That's where we come in, pointing out their focus on the meaningless issues and not the issues facing the country. I think that which each passing story the media announces their irrelevance (even when they're talking about bloggers; this is a dumb story that attempts to marginalize the competition). We'll be here to pick up the slack and crash the gate.