The American Conservative

A New York Times article on Libya exemplifies the tendency of the press to reinforce the government’s pretenses — as opposed to acting as a critical, nullifying force:

In the second-floor office of a burned-out police station here, the photographs strewn across the floor spun out the stories of the unlucky prisoners who fell into the custody of the brutal government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

Some depicted corpses bearing the marks of torture. One showed scars down the back of a man dressed only in his underwear, another a naked man face down under a sheet with his hands bound. The faces of the dead bore expressions of horror. Other pictures showed puddles of blood, a table of jars, bottles and powders and, in one, a long saw.

In a labyrinthine basement, workers were clearing out burned books and files. One room contained a two-liter bottle of gin. Gesturing into another room that was kept dark, a worker mimicked a gun with his hands and murmured “Qaddafi,” suggesting it was an execution chamber.

The authors, David Kirkpatrick and C.J. Chivers, retreat from straight reporting to haunt the readers with imagery of Qaddafi’s torture chambers. In an apparent attempt to retrospectively justify the recent U.S. intervention – that is, to demonize a regime that the American government has recently deemed adversarial, the enemy-du-jour – the New York Times again shows the biases of the mainstream media, which only seems game for criticizing authoritarianism once it becomes a story that bolsters the government’s case. Read More…

His Fox News program is coming to an end. I think Mike Church is exactly right: Beck was attempting to break out of the conventional Republican mold set by Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. For a while, the puppet shows and conspiracy theories were amusing, but once the novelty wore off, Beck had no substance to fall back on. There’s a market out there for something other than the conservative-movement mulch shoveled up by Hannity and Mark Levin, but it requires more depth than Beck is capable of.

As for Fox News, for all that it seems to be an indomitable ratings titan, its demographics are notably gray, as are those of talk radio. The political right is in for a significant philosophical change — in what direction remains to be seen — as the Republican-radio and cable-news generation heads into the sunset.

Iconic and haunting photographs from Vietnam helped turn the public against that war. Today, the military’s capacity to manage journalists is much more sophisticated. Kelley Vlahos writes:

Most of the mainstream photojournalism in newspapers, television and major online media has been self-censored and packaged according to the rules (who today can afford to lose access?) and in effect, works to the military’s advantage. While the images of remote bombings, snipers poised, soldiers kicking in doors—even the aftermath of IED blasts or insurgent attacks—offer enough excitement to maintain interest, they’re never graphic enough to inspire a truly visceral response, much less distress or malaise among the population. If anything, they become part of the wallpaper—“normal,” like everything else. …

So when pictures of tortured Abu Ghraib prisoners, the WikiLeaked “Collateral Murder” video, and, more recently, the “Kill Team” photographs break through the surface of the Middle American consciousness, the veneer begins to crack (if only a bit). Suddenly, we have adult access to the reality of war after extended periods of being treated like babies, spoon fed and coddled in hopes we don’t cry and make a mess of things.

Massachusetts Democrat Jim McGovern argues that taxpayer dollars should not go “for advertising on the partisan, political platform of Fox News.” The Washington Examiner‘s David Freddoso agrees — indeed, end all federal television advertising. “When there is a legitimate issue for the public’s attention, the news media publicizes it. When there’s an emergency, we have the emergency broadcast system. But advertising, that’s just a waste of money — welfare for Madison Avenue.”

This week’s swift downfall of National Public Radio’s CEO and chief fundraiser must have left Congressional Republicans — who are making another run at eliminating federal subsidies for public broadcasting — feeling like they struck a real blow to one of the conservative movement’s favorite hobby horse targets, the “liberal media.”

For all that both conservatives and progressives have invested in creating institutions devoted to exposing bias in various media outlets — George Soros’ Media Matters on the left and Brent Bozell’s Media Research Center on the right — their reams of reports figured little in the discussion about NPR’s future. Indeed, it’s striking how little relevant empirical data has been mentioned in this debate, which has lately been fought on a battlefield littered with appeals to class warfare. Read More…

There was just too much cheering when Ron Paul was announced as the winner of CPAC’s straw poll this year, so Fox News aired a clip from last year, when room full of disappointment Romneyites jeered Paul’s first victory. Fox has since apologized and said the tapes got mixed up. A commenter on YouTube had an appropriately skeptical response: “Yes, it was a simple mistake, because Fox doesn’t index its files by date or event. It indexes them by the appearance of the people in the video.”

Here Fox’s dubious explanation:

Mike Huckabee is on FOX, speaking from Israel, lamenting Mubarak’s–and Israel’s–betrayal by the US.

Mubarak deserves a defense and we would do well to hear one, if only to temper the giddy rush to celebrate Egypt’s impending chaos; but the Reverend Huck? Here he is now an apologist for Arab despotism. I didn’t hear him mention the plight of Egypt’s Christians, already under siege before the present uprising.

Neil Cavuto interrupts Huckabee: is it true, Jon Voight is there with you? I laughed so hard I think I missed the part about somebody soiling himself on a C-130. Voight’s presence remains unconfirmed.

I’ll be a guest (resident reactionary, I call it) this week at the blog of Seattle’s progressive free weekly The Stranger. I have no connection to the blog; the week was a Christmas gift, auctioned off for charity. Here’s my first post, excerpted below, which recycles my post last August on Omar Thornton as a resentment-driven lunatic appropriating the standard American race narrative. And on MLK day no less! If you do visit there, please be civil, regardless of the tone set by the readership. At the moment they are apoplectic, but mostly about my long-windedness and mere presence in their lair. This might get a little weird.

kinesis, n a movement that is a response to a stimulus but is not oriented with respect to the source of stimulation
[1913 Webster]
Ten days ago a madman, having legally acquired a handgun, killed six unsuspecting innocents. The Democratic Party, assisted by the braver elements of the national media, sprung into action, quickly wrestling the First Amendment to the ground and disarming it before it could do more damage. Alas, the culprit has escaped, spirited away by his longtime associates Hate and Intolerance, no doubt. Fear not; speech posses are combing the hinterlands even now in search of malicious metaphors and savage similes. Needless to say, these suspects should be considered armed and dangerous. In the event that you come into contact with one, make no attempt to engage it, avoid ear contact and back away slowly before fleeing to your nearest progressive cable news outlet or blog, where you can report the encounter. Don’t be a hero. That’s what we put Keith Olbermann in pancake make-up for.
But above all, just as Fox News and the DHS dutifully advise regarding the terrorist threat of such criminal masterminds as the Liberty Seven and donkey-borne Taliban in the Pashtun hinterlands: be afraid, be very afraid. Always. And trust in the government. Always. Just as in those heady days following 9-11, we are advised to “watch what we say”. The parallels between this and that panic make a handy and instructive analog for the confused citizen. Meanwhile, working with heroic speed, experts have already fashioned a new standard for acceptable public rhetoric–if it’s capable of provoking a raving lunatic it is illicit. Make a note of it.
This has been necessarily expanded from the original focus on white male Republicans, who nonetheless retain their place atop the hierarchy of hysteria. This all will take some getting used to, I know, but one can always observe Mom’s advice–if you don’t have anything nice to say, drown your hatemongering words and yourself in your acidic spittle, you fascist bigot. And if you’re incapable of recognizing what might set off a lunatic, you are the lunatic.

Above all remain calm; our enlightened betters are valiantly fighting to will into being this “new reality” that will have “changed everything”. They know what they’re talking about. Recall the media’s uncanny prophesy that AIDS “changed everything”, delivering us from our libertine sexual ways; that 9/11 “changed everything”, bringing the nation together finally; and of course the post-partisan transformation of Barack Obama’s presidency ushering in a new era of domestic tranquility and world peace. These are the people who saved you from Saddam Hussein’s killer drones and WMD labs, remember. Despar not of their wisdom and sobriety.

From The Onion:

NEW YORK—According to media analysts, the nation’s TV commentators and political pundits have proved uncannily accurate when describing the deeply disturbed inner thoughts of accused Arizona gunman Jared Loughner. “It’s strange, but when it comes to getting inside the mind of this human being who seems to possess no empathy, sense of morality, or hold on reality, and who is motivated only by personal animus and self-glorification, the nation’s major political pundits have been amazingly adept,” said Horizon Media analyst Bob Cullen, who has studied extensive tape of commentators on all major TV news programs and found their remarks on “what the killer is thinking” to be consistently thorough and detailed across the board. “It’s almost as though they have some way of knowing, firsthand, exactly what this demented and highly dangerous individual with the eyes of millions upon him is going through.” Researchers at Horizon Media also reported that a number of prominent TV pundits appeared to be mimicking the exact same chilling gleam in Loughner’s eye for what they could only speculate was “dramatic effect.”

In a recent Ron Paul interview at National Review Online, the magazine outlined some of the ways in which the 11-term Texas Congressman has always been out of sync with the mainstream Republican Party and conservative movement, determining that Paul was “unquestionably a little weird.” Is this true? Is Ron Paul “weird?”

Paul was so weird during his 2008 bid for the GOP nomination for president that the Republican Party wouldn’t even let him in the door at their national convention. Yet, Sen. Joe Lieberman — a big government liberal who’d been Al Gore’s running mate on the 2000 Democrat presidential ticket — was given a prime-time speaking role. Few mainstream Republicans thought this was “weird.”

Four months before the 2008 Republican convention, columnist Larry Kudlow gushed over Lieberman at National Review‘s “The Corner” under the headline, “Joe Lieberman: Absolutely Brilliant.” Wrote Kudlow: “Sen. Joe Lieberman gave a brilliant speech last night at Commentary magazine’s annual dinner at the University Club in New York. It was one hell of a great talk. Joe Lieberman was incredibly impressive. Absolutely brilliant. Mr. Lieberman talked at some length about how the Democratic party has completely departed from the strong national-security principles of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and John F. Kennedy… It was a tour-de-force speech that impressed me once again with the brilliance of Joe Lieberman. Frankly, he would make a good president.”

Lieberman “brilliant?” Has anyone at National Review ever called the much more conservative Paul “brilliant” or suggested he’d make a good president? At the time, did anyone think it was “weird” that someone at National Review would say this about Lieberman? Were such conservatives even concerned about Lieberman’s overall big government agenda that he had advocated for his entire political career? Or were Lieberman’s hawkish foreign-policy views so attractive to certain establishment conservatives, at National Review and elsewhere, that they were willing to form political alliances with fairly liberal candidates based solely on foreign policy-at the expense of everything else? Read More…