Spyhopping the Right.
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David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. He is the author of The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right (PoliPoint Press, May 2009), as well as Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community (Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, June 2005), Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America, (Palgrave/St. Martin's, 2004), and In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press). His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. Neiwert is also the managing editor of Crooks and Liars. He can be contacted at dneiwert@hotmail.com.
Liberal Fascism: Two responses:
A: Review and Debate
B: "If conservatives really, really hate being called fascists ..." Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6
Sara Robinson has worked as an editor or columnist for several national magazines, on beats as varied as sports, travel, and the Olympics; and has contributed to over 80 computer games for EA, Lucasfilm, Disney, and many other companies. A native of California's High Sierra, she spent 20 years in Silicon Valley before moving to Vancouver, BC in 2004. She currently is pursuing an MS in Futures Studies at the University of Houston. You can reach her at srobinson@enginesofmischief.com.
Sara's recent series:
Kauffman's Rules: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4
Cracks in the Wall: Parts I, II, and III.
Tunnels and Bridges: Parts I, II, III, and IV, plus a Short Detour.
Dave's recent series:
"Eliminationism in America": Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX and X, and Appendix.
The March of the Minutemen
Intro: Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Unhinged: Unhonest
Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
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Other books by Dave:
[limited availability]:
"The Rise of Pseudo Fascism": An essay
Available in Adobe PDF format here
Original posts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, and Part 7.
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Choice essays:
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"The Political and the Personal"
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"Bush, the Nazis and America":
Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.
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Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis
[PDF file]
[In HTML: Parts I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X,, XI, XII, XIII, XIV and XV. See explanatory note.]
[Also available in HTML, and with art, at Cursor.]
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Orcinus Principium No. 1
Orcinus Principium No. 2
Why Orcinus?
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The joke line
Saturday, March 24, 2007
-- by Dave
Eric Alterman yesterday:
- Have you noticed that every time Klein is asked to defend something he has written, he responds with a personal attack against the person making the charge? It's not just me; it's anyone. Look at the names he calls Media Matters and the bloggers generally. Note that Tom Friedman and Howard Kurtz, among others, react similarly. Pundits are used to making Olympian pronouncements and then having everyone praise their wisdom and courage, the way Walter Lippmann defined the job. Asking people whatever happened to the last 10 times you said Iraq has only six more months, or that Bush is sure to be a centrist, and they flip out and call you an ideologue or an "obsessive."
Much of the cause of the current dysfunction in "mainstream" media, as I think Alterman has correctly identified (and I've discussed a bit myself previously), is the fundamentally elitist architecture of the Lippmann/Laswell model of communications theory: wisdom is handed to the masses by a special corps of "wise men" atop the media hierarchy and distributed downward through the system.
What's especially noteworthy about this model is that it was designed as a means of social control -- that is, it is fundamentally both authoritarian and antidemocratic in nature. Rather than trusting in the ability of citizens to become reasonably informed and aware participants in a democracy, it presumes that most people are fundamentally incapable of this and actually need to be controlled. Lippmann in particular was prone to observing that "the common interests elude public opinion entirely," and he argued that they can only be understood and managed by a "specialized class" of "responsible men" wise enough to figure things out for the rest of us.
Well, the presidency of George W. Bush and the war in Iraq has demonstrated pretty clearly how well that model has worked out. And a large part of the tide that has finally turned against this presidency, and conservative rule generally, is predicated not just on opposing their insane policies but on breaking down the old model of elite rule and social control -- beginning with the media. And the people atop the heap, the people who have benefited profoundly from that model, are rather predictably lashing out at those responsible for their slipping grip.
Journalism is a funny business. It does indeed attract some of the most civic-minded people in our society, people who truly believe that an informed electorate is the essence of democracy, and that providing the best and fullest information they can to that electorate is a sacred task. They're the only reason to continue to hold the current mainstream media in any kind of esteem.
But it also attracts some genuinely malignant personalities, and people who've been in the biz for any length of time at all can tell you about their many misbegotten dealings with them: ruthless backstabbers, cynical manipulators, and generally sociopathic users who see media work as a means for self-aggrandizement, enrichment, and most of all control over a public they hold in rather low esteem.
I've known any number of these personalities over the years, and one of their more noteworthy traits is that they are all incredibly insecure people -- the kind of people for whom the primary value of an advanced academic degree is that it certifies your superiority over others. Being atop the heap, continually moving up the ladder, is their entire raison d'etre. The only friendships, as such, that they form are with acolytes who see some value in being pulled up the ladder with them.
And what they really can't tolerate is being questioned by people they consider their lessers. It touches every little button in their insecurity complexes. Their response, uniformly and without fail, is to attack the person of the questioner -- attacking them as bad and incompetent people, rather than responding to the actual facts raised.
The other funny thing about the news biz is that, unfortunately, these are the same people who make it farther up the hierarchy and become our "elite" pundits, partly because the elite model is something of a self-sustaining system. The authoritarian personalities of the ladder-climbers clearly appeal to the authoritarians who have ruled the roost for years themselves.
This is the model that gives us people like Joe Klein, Maureen Dowd, Bill O'Reilly, David Broder, and Howard Kurtz. News Corpse the other day dissected Kurtz's response to those dirty-hippy bloggers who questioned his newsgathering methods, and satirically gave us the penultimate formulation of the elite punditry's attitude toward their lessers:
- What these critics fail to understand is that it is none of their business. I don't have to answer to them. For what it's worth, I could have created the sites myself to provide corroboration for my preconceptions. Or I could have had my wife, Sheri Annis, do it. As president of Fourth Estate Strategies, she has the requisite skills and experience to produce convincing right wing propaganda. So what if we did invent these sites? What are you going to do about it, tell my boss? Go ahead. You'll be lucky if you get a response back that tells you to "stuff a sock-puppet in it."
In the end, these sniping parasites need to get off my back. Don't they know who I am? I'm Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post and CNN. I am the unassailable voice of Mainstream Media™ and I will not tolerate such impertinence from my lessers. F.O.
I really don't think any of these characters has any conception yet just how far, how deeply, and how permanently they have fallen in the estimation of the news-consuming public. Their continuing insistence in their unassailable authority, their elite wisdom, expressed mostly as ad hominem attacks on anyone undermining that authority, even in the face of exponentially mounting evidence of their buffoonery, just keeps digging the hole deeper. They are, indeed, fast becoming their own joke lines.
[Note: Lightly edited for corrections, minor additions.]
1:09 PM
Spotlight
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