“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."
"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."
Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister to Adolph Hitler
"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."
Adolph Hitler
Lately my inbox has been troubled by "Fwd"s from several well meaning but misguided older gentlemen who assume that their politics are my politics and that it's meet and good to spread The Word among like-minded folk. What kills me is that these emails come straight and un-homogenized, without even so much as a query regarding what I might actually believe or a disclaimer to disregard said email if it doesn't jibe with my own political beliefs; they are so bloated with their own cocky arrogance that they can't conceive that anyone they regard as mildly intelligent wouldn't love to receive such messages, weekly. Usually I earmark them for the the Junk folder so I don't even have to witness them but sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get fired up.
Early this morning I received one of these Fwds, reproduced in its entirety below:
I am not an Obama apologist, though I make no excuses about voting for him. He's the President and a Big Boy and he's on his own now. He doesn't need me to hold his hand. The successes and errors of his Presidency will be diagrammed by Time and History. Like most Presidents, he's sure to have a balance of both. As an observer of all things political in this society - a typical smartass who doesn't mind seeing himself as outside the fray so that I can't be held accountable for anything at all - I am mostly struck by the mediocrity of his Presidency. There have been some good things done for sure - America's Healthcare Industry was a shambles and the scandal of the Western Industrialized World; Wall Street's shenanigans over the past thirty or so years required some stout parenting; the chokehold Credit Card companies had on the American consumer were closer to mafioso usury than anything resembling Fair Market Practice. He got us out of Iraq in a timely manner too, which I salute. There's more I'd like to see him do, but he hasn't done them yet - and he might not at all - and those are the things I quibble with. Be true to your message, etc.
But he's not been a barnstormer of a President in any sense of the word, not like Reagan or George W. He's been - well, mediocre. Nothing more or less. His health care reform - that under No Cirumstances can be called even mildly socialist - didn't go far enough for moderates and liberals. The whole idea that he would throw away his Government Option because of vitriolic outrage from Talk Radio Nazis whipping up populist furor was seen by us as so much a gesture of bipartisanship that it smacked of weakness. But there you go. He's not a Savior, not by any definition.
And just to show you that I'm not a partisan yes-man, I also take issue with the President for the following reasons: I want more than lip-service given to Immigration Reform. I love Latinos but really, this thing has gotten out of hand; I think he should take a stronger stand vis-a-vis the September 11th Islamic Center. I believe utterly in religious freedom and tolerance but I can't help but think that the sponsors of this center are sticking their fingers up to us - and it's not like NYC doesn't have many, many mosques already. Why there?
He's not a savior, no, - but he's not the devil either, and that's where I begin to get pissed off - because we just came through eight years of some of the most dysfunctional, illegal and elitist Presidency in American history and none of these people who are sending me these fucking emails said a word. Why now? Why are you sending me these snickering, carping emails now - with a President who can, at worst, be described as mediocre or ineffective - where were you doing the last Presidency? Did you have nothing to say? Were you happy and satisfied? Were there no prayers that George W. might safely go on his way, or condemnations of, well, anything at all?
I mean, let's recap: beyond running a shamelessly dirty campaign, there are serious questions as to what happened in Florida when they office of Presidency was handed to George W. by none other than the Governor of Florida, George's brother - despite plenty of allegations of voter fraud and trickery. Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral votes because George's brother was in charge of retabulating the Florida ballots.
That's pretty bad right there, folks. How many outraged emails did I receive from Concerned Citizens? Zero.
Four years later, another filthy campaign in which allegations of John Kerry being a coward who lied about his war record are covered as if they were facts, and another curious vote tally - this time in Ohio. For those of you not paying attention, Ohio was infamous for the fact that every single exit poll showed Kerry as clearly ahead of Bush in that state. Then, when the ballots were tallied, lo and behold! Bush wins! What are the odds of every single exit poll being wrong? One in 959,000. According to Republican Strategist Dick Morris:
“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."
What happened in Ohio might have been cleared up if Michael Connell, Republican internet strategist in Ohio and - ironically - the guy who developed the website that hosted the vote tallying for Ohio - didn't mysteriously die in a plane wreck on his way to testify before Congress on this very issue.
Again, number of emails fwded to me on this issue by concerned citizen? Zero. The irate American electorate was curiously silent. Why?
This brings me to my final issue: Where was the Liberal Media when all this was going on? Shouldn't the Liberal Media have been trumpeting these issues left and right, filling our heads with their slanted and biased reporting to create the stampede of fear-mongering they're so justly famous for? They seriously missed the boat on these issues - both of the election irregularities mentioned here were pooh-poohed by the Media, liberal or not, as if they were nothing more than Conspiracy Theories whispered in corridors by mutants who believe in UFO abductions, etc. Really, the Liberal Media was as culpable as the Conservative Talk Show propaganda machine in creating an aura of Let's Just Sweep These Issues Away and Get On With Business.
I mean really, Liberal Media - I'm starting to doubt your existence! Where are you when we need you? God knows that there's a strong Conservative Media - a creature created when Talk Radio exploded in the eighties, after the Reagan Administration deregulated news and stopped requiring news servers to broadcast "both sides of each issue." Now a news server could broadcast only one side of any issue and not stand accused of being criminally biased. Suddenly we had Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter and the grand-daddy of them all, Rush Limbaugh. Everybody knows these guys - they're household names. Where are the virulent, dangerous, one-sided Liberal Fear Mongerers? Surely the multi-billion dollar media machine could whip up some convincing liberal crybaby to counter this alarming trend on the other side?
Again, another failure by the Libs! Why did they allow the Conservative Backlash Movement to take the initiative? Are they not even trying? It boggles the mind! All those billions of dollars they could throw towards their Barely Hidden Scheme to turn America into a Socialist Worker's Paradise are just sitting there, going to waste.
I don't get it. Unless - no, that's too crazy to even consider. Could it be that, despite everything we've been told, there is no Liberal Media?That would be a frightening thought, wouldn't it? Like the Nazis who united their people by creating a Straw Enemy - the Jews - so that they could form a rigid opposition, this theory means that we've been lied to! Maniupulated!
Let's step back now and look at this Liberal Media thing. In theory, if there was a Liberal Media that threw the weight of its power and wealth towards creating a liberal bias in the American electorate, would we not see some of that bias during the first post-Reagan Democratic Presidency? Wouldn't Bill Clinton's Presidency be given a "free ride" with all the power and prestige of the American Media Industry championing his every move?
Go back in time and look at how the Liberal Media handled Bill Clinton: from the very beginning they seemed willing to sacrifice their Liberal Bias by reporting every "scandal" perpetrated by the Clintons as fact without investigation, and without retractions when they were found to be patently false. Remember "Haircut Gate"? The scandal of Clinton tying up an entire international airport so that he could take his ease on Air Force One and get a personalized hair cut? Go back to Lexus Nexus and read how many headlines that one generated in the Liberal Press.
Remember Whitewater? Do you? Well, if you do - can you tell me what it was all about: I mean, before you Google it and try to put together something out of nothing? If you don't, Whitewater was a development scheme that the Clintons invested in and lost plenty of money. It was first printed in that bulwark of Liberalism, The New York Times in 1992 when allegations that ex-Gov of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, put pressure on David Hale to loan hundreds of thousands to the McDougals, business partners of the Clintons in this land-deal. The NYT did not mention the fact that Hale never said anything about Clinton's "pressure" during hours of FBI investigations of this deal previous to Clinton becoming President. Whitewater spun out of control, with the willing collusion of the Liberal Media so that eventually a Commission was set up under Ken Starr to investigate Clinton's involvement in fraud. This Commission lasted the length of Clinton's Presidency and, at untold millions of tax payer's dollar spent, proved conclusively that - nothing happened. Nothing.
"Nothing Happened" was certainly not the verdict in the Monica Lewinsky scandal where Bill became coy when asked if he had sex with a fat girl in the White House - a scandal on all kinds of levels. I mean, did you ever see her? I know some guys like Chubbies, but really! And in the White House? Bad taste, man! For Godsakes, man! A Grand Jury was convened to find out if this thing happened, presumably because there was a law against it and the reality of it might alter America's place in the hierarchy of nations. At the cost of another fist full of millions, a kind of neutral vote was given and we all schlepped back to business, somewhat ashamed that we were interested in this at all. In fact, if the Liberal Media didn't devote hundreds of square footage of newsprint on this story, no one would have cared. Another Liberal Media failure, dammit!
Which wouldn't have been so bad if the Liberal Media was doing its job and applying the same scrutiny to George W. Bush and taking him to task for this and that. Certainly they started off by giving W. a bye in such matters as non-investigating rumors that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the internet." They gave that man absolute HELL over that issue, didn't they? Fucking Liberals! Can't even back up their own man! Even when he clearly didn't say any such thing. Gawd, they fucking suck! Fail!
What about the whole Swiftboat Veterans for Justice, a group of so-called concerned Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had invented his war record and received medals that were not warranted. The Libs missed their (swift)boat on that one too: following the story closely yet, curiously, without investigating any of it. When the facts came out that the allegations of this group were anything but quantifiable facts, the Libs were silent again! Probably drunk or stoned or some damn thing. Bastards.
Still, you'd think after September 11th that the Liberal Press might have sobered up long enough to look into the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, the cassus belli for the US to declare war on Hussein, with the blessings of the UN, and topple that regime. Clearly, lying about these so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction to Congress and the UN were not on the same level as lying about a blow job from a fat girl in the White House - but still, you'd think that the Liberal Media might get off its ass for this one.
Despite the fact that over four-thousand Americans have died and an estimated 31,000 have been maimed, blinded, crippled and mentally destroyed at a cost of over one trillion dollars - one trillion dollars! all over the felonious misinformation that Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - there has not been any effort to convene a Grand Jury or a Commission or some fucking thing to look into this. If there was ever a Impeachable Offense by any US President in the past fifty years - surely lying about facts to Congress in order to orchestrate an illegal war would be one. If there was a Liberal Media worth its name, this issue would have been looked into with the same Eagle Eye for Details that we saw them focus on Clinton's Blowjob and his Haircut and Whitewater, ad nauseum. Surely this was almost as important.
We'll never know. They let us down. They never touched the issue. Why not?
This is where some smartasses like myself begin to wonder if, in fact, there is a Liberal Media at all?
“Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives' frequent denunciations of ‘liberal bias’ in the media were part of ‘a strategy’ (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: ‘If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is “work the refs.” Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.’” (Seth Ackerman, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, August 2001).
Bill Kristoll, arch-Neo Conservative editor goes Bond one better: ‘I admit it,’ Kristol told The New Yorker in 1995. ‘The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’”
Bill's a liberal when compared to ex-Nixon speechwriter and one time All The Way to the Right Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, who is quoted as saying, “‘The truth is, I've gotten fairer, more comprehensive coverage of my ideas than I ever imagined I would receive,’ [Patrick] Buchanan acknowledged in March 1996. He added: ‘I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage -- all we could have asked.’”
What the fuck? The Liberal Media gave him Fair and Balanced press coverage?
In fact, the Myth of the Liberal Media is one of the grossest lies ever perpetrated on the American Electorate. According to Eric Alterman, in The Nation:
"Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match--either in size, ferocity or commitment--for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda.
"In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."
In point of fact, there is no such thing as the Liberal Media and there never has been. In fact, in a study of
ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.”(Who's On the News?: Study shows network news sources skew white, male & elite, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 2002
Those media scamps aren't liberal at all! They're Republicans! And it shows, too:
Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim, David Croteau, Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, (archived at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), June 1998:
“The findings include:
“ · On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to health care and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.
“ · Journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation.
“ · The minority of journalists who do not identify with the ‘center’ are more likely to identify with the ‘right’ when it comes to economic issues and to identify with the ‘left’ when it comes to social issues.”
This is frightening stuff, because we're told over and over again that the Media is Liberal and that charge gives moral integrity to the very existence of a Conservative Backlash in the Press. If the Media wasn't liberal then Rush wouldn't be Right and Bill O'Reilley wouldn't need his No-Spin Zone to counteract it. If the Media wasn't Liberal, these guys would not need to exist.
Price of the 'Liberal Media' Myth, Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, January 1, 2003
“[T]he larger fallacy of the ‘liberal media’ argument is the idea that reporters and mid-level editors set the editorial agenda at their news organizations. In reality, most journalists have about as much say over what is presented by newspapers and TV news programs as factory workers and foremen have over what a factory manufactures...
“News organizations are hierarchical institutions often run by strong-willed men who insist that their editorial vision be dominant within their news companies. Some concessions are made to the broader professional standards of journalism, such as the principles of objectivity and fairness.
“But media owners historically have enforced their political views and other preferences by installing senior editors whose careers depend on delivering a news product that fits with the owner’s prejudices. Mid-level editors and reporters who stray too far from the prescribed path can expect to be demoted or fired. Editorial employees intuitively understand the career risks of going beyond the boundaries.
“These limitations were true a century ago when William Randolph Hearst famously studied every day’s paper from his publishing empire looking for signs of leftist attitudes among his staff. And it is still true in the days of Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.”
And more:
“The biggest lie fed the American people by conservative pundits is that the United States is dominated by the ‘liberal media.’ As if Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, General Electric, Time-Warner AOL and Viacom are owned and operated by liberals.
“Not only are these folks ultra-conservatives, but the people they hire to voice their opinions are so far to the right, they give independent journalism a dirty name. No, my friends, the corporate media is in the hands of right-wing kooks parading as moderates and pushing the political envelope further and further to the right.”
And that's the whole point, right there: they're pushing the political envelop further and further to the right. The entire reason for the existence of the Conservative Backlash Media, after all, was the perceived bias of the Liberal Media which desperately needed to be counter-balanced. But go back and look at those quotes that begin this overly long essay - create a lie, make it big but simple, and create your own reality.
The masses will follow . . .
1 comment:
This is why i gave it up . . . i followed it for years. i ranted, i raved, i sent letters to my senators, i sent emails to my friends and family. i watched CSPAN and cursed the news. And nothing happened, nobody listened as W. destroyed our country. i wept and wept and wept. i voted for Obama and when he won, i closed the book on it, i told myself, okay, let the Dems handle it for a while and i blew out the candle.
i get those emails now, from the people who told me i was nuts a few years ago. Now they are nuts. They wouldn't listen to me, and now i get to ignore them. its really ridiculous isn't it? and the sad thing is that its so important, all of it is important, its our country and its never going to be the same because of what W. and his lies and schemes did to it.
Obama would have to be God Almighty himself to fix it all. i thought that when i voted for him. i thought that when he won. But i was just so damn happy that he won and not that bear killing bitch from Alaska and the old man McCain who would have surely fallen down the stairs of the White House and broken his neck during the first months of his Presidency and She would be leading us straight to hell. So its not great, but i am of the mind that it could be so much worse, omg, so much worse.
good for you for writing this and reminding me that i have allies in my thoughts, thank you for reminding me to get my blood pressure up every once in a while about it all again . . . i will, someday again, but i am still so tired from shouting from the rooftops for 8 years, and even years before that when i saw the injustice of the Clinton impeachment and all the way back to Iran Contra, the trials of which i watched on the tube every day during that first hot summer i spent in Greensboro. Pyro and i shouted at Oliver North, but nobody could hear us.
now you know, you are not alone . . . nope, not at all.
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