Glenn Greenwald, in one of his "catch-up" posts, hits several interesting topics (as always). This item made me think a little:
(5) In the post I wrote last week on the Tillman and Lynch cases, I wrote: "Identically, the American media did virtually nothing to investigate the Bush administration's absolute falsehoods about how Pat Tillman died. We know about it solely by virtue of the heroic relentlessness of the Tillman family -- led by his mother and brother, Kevin -- in doing the job which our press and Congress so profoundly failed to do."
In December, 2004, Washington Post reporter Steve Coll published a lengthy and very well-documented two-part series (the first part is here) regarding the circumstances surrounding Tillman's death and the military's efforts to conceal them. Coll's reporting is actually quite good and, had I known about it, I would have included it in the post.
But I don't think that, standing alone, it negates the point. As I've noted many times, there are many excellent investigative journalists and numerous isolated cases of good investigative journalism. But it does not disprove the media's general abdication of its responsibilities. If anything, those exemplary cases highlight why it is so damaging that we have such a dysfunctional press. (Emphasis added.)
I realized, reading this, something that occasionally stirs at the back of my mind from time to time: I no longer get more than a bare minimum of news from reading the papers, either dead-tree or busy-electron versions. I do read news articles, but they are, by and large, articles that I've found browsing the blogs. (Which is why you tend to see links here to the Minneapolis StarTribune, the Salt Lake City Tribune, and the like.) I seem to have given up on the press. It's worth noting that many of our major local stories in Chicago have been broken by the alternative weeklies and only picked up by the big dailies when the fuss starts. (The Chicago Reader did a major investigative piece on a police torture scandal that had been buried by the administration. Then the dailies picked it up. The Reader, in fact, has a pretty good record in that area; by contrast, the Tribune and Sun-Times are also-rans. [Full-disclosure: I work for the Reader, but not in editorial. I don't have to say nice things about it; I don't have to say anything at all.]) It's not that I've been deliberately avoiding NYT or WaPo or the Chicago Tribune, it's just that they're no longer very interesting -- i.e., I don't see them as relevant, even when they're not parroting Republican-generated character smears or White House talking points.
In that regard, note this from Greenwald's post as well:
(8) If you haven't read the amazing 2003 speech by former MSNBC reporter Ashleigh Banfield -- one which Digby unearthed this week and which caused Banfield to be fired -- I highly recommend it. While the speech contain some vital insights about how television news operates, the fact that it led to her firing is, for all the reasons Digby highlights, even more revealing than the speech itself about the state of our media.
Here's Digby's post. And here's the key quote from Banfield's speech:
I'm hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.
Well, all of this has to do with what you've seen on Fox and its successes. So I do urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.
I'm tempted to delve into causes on all this, but I see them as very deep causes with no easy fixes, if any at all. Ideally, in a democracy such as the Founders envisioned, the press is a free organ purveying information to an educated and thoughtful populace. Most people aren't very well educated in this country, and most people aren't very thoughtful because they aren't taught to think. Rational thought is not natural -- it's a learned mode. In the ideal America, we would elect those best able to govern, based on our analysis of their vision of the issues of the day. Karl Rove found the key to persuading us to elect those least able to govern and managed to sell it. (Although I still have questions about both the 2000 and 2004 elections, but in Rove's philosophy, apparently, if you can't persuade voters, you just buy the vote counters.) Appealing to the lowest common denominator will not only make you a lot of money, it will gain you considerable power. I don't know that the answer is necessarily to raise the tone of the discussion. I think it more likely that the real answer is to raise the value of the denominator.
Strangely enough, this brings to mind once again Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis. Yes, we are hierarchical, and it probably is genetic -- it makes sense that behaviors linked to group survival have a genetic basis, although I doubt any one will ever find anything as simple as a "leadership" gene -- I don't think their hard-wired in at all the same way hair color is. Human behavior is much too complex for that. But, historically, we are hierarchical in small groups, just as we are most comfortable in small groups. It's only in the past couple hundred years or so that we've had to deal with things like national identities. (Note that the national movements that have so marked European history and later world history all started about the time of the American and French revolutions, and that many nation states in Europe didn't exist until after World War I. If you need further illustrations of the tension in the concept, think about the mess Europeans made of Africa and the Middle East with the political boundaries they drew that ignored tribal and ethnic territories.) So that, when we're dealing with a "group" of 300 million people, which is a number most of us can't even imagine, there's a lot of static in the way. Left-wing bloggers are very fond of citing the Our Leader mantra about George Bush and his base. But it's true; the difficulty is that it's a mantra that most of us don't buy into. The other fragments of American society are looking for their leaders.
I don't think big countries are a workable solution to much of anything. That, of course, doesn't give us any immediate solutions to our problems, or any real solutions at all, which is something I'd rather not think about.
Read Greenwald's whole post. It's worth it.
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