In the Name of Objectivity, the Media Clouds the Reality of Terror Report

[babylonsister]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/57565/

In the Name of Objectivity, the Media Clouds the Reality of Terror Report

By Arianna Huffington, HuffingtonPost.com. Posted July 21, 2007.

The newly released National Intelligence Estimate which utterly repudiates Bush's war in Iraq is being spun as a mixed bag of evidence -- with the spin dutifully echoed by the media.

Here we go again. Another devastating report being spun as a mixed bag -- with the spin dutifully echoed by the media. Another administration brain tumor being "offset" by shiny hair.

This time it's the new National Intelligence Estimate report on the threat of terrorist violence against America that is being given the utterly ludicrous "on the one hand... and on the other hand" treatment.

A prime example of this came on AC 360, where Anderson Cooper reported that "both sides in the Iraq debate are spinning to support their case." To prove his point, he rolled a video clip of Bush making the case for staying the course in Iraq. Back on camera, he said, "The Democrats, of course, see it differently."

"Of course" they do. Not because there are always two sides to every issue, but because the facts are different than Bush claims they are.

more...

[tom_paine]

1. Gotta give Rove and the Royal Bushies some credit here for evil genius

Attack your opponent's greatest strengths and turn them into weaknesses, indeed!

Like Hitler and Himmler before them, Cheney and Rove clearly understood that to unscrupulous tyrants willing to "go all the way", liberal democracies, particularly moribund or complacent ones, do indeed have many weaknesses to exploit.

This is one crux example that is really a "big picture" comment expounding in dozens of sub-facets. But here is the "big picture":

Using their customary gestalt-based propaganda, they have taken honest journalism's desire for a full spectrum of facts and to see every legitimate side (i.e. like every story on global warming DOES NOT include the voice of Flat Earthers disputing ther term "global") and poisoned it.

Choked the "facts pipeline" with shit, created their own totalitarian Party-Loyal Sub-Media Infrastructure to mirror real media (Pat Robertson's UnReality-Based CBN paved the way, if you think about it) and posion the National Dialgoue, trivializing and making it meaningless as an exchange of facts. Hell both sides cannot even agree on indisputable hard data anymore, almost to the reductio ad absrudum where 1 + 1 = 2 could not be agreed to by Fox Noise, and they'd make a very "good" case of their fine-tuned sophistry.

This is the world we live in, and regaining a reality-based journalism will be very very difficult from here.

[pretzel4gore]

2. cooper's lying, just like only one 'side' of Iraq debate is lying

years ago i read "Babbit" by Sinclair Lewis, and was struck by the almost generic aspect of the dilemma Babbit found himself in- his sympathies were for the striking telephone operators, plus his extra martial affair, made him proto liberal but the rightwing biz group confronted him with 'what side you on!' question...so Babbit became the jovial freeper we all know today. Sinclair Lewis was tellng america's ruling class that they must never lose control of this tendency towards fascism, and until reagan they played both sides of the street. Here's the final sentence of the afterword to the 1960 Penguin Edition of the book, which i saved:

"The drift of our commercial culture in the forty years since ‘Babbitt’ appeared suggests that Lewis did little to alter it, perhaps, but he was the first novelist to tell us explicitly into what stupid, and finally devastating social damnation we were drifting. Have we landed?"
Mark Schorer, University of California 1961 afterword to ‘Babbitt’

The dishonesty featured in your post, by anderson cooper, is repeated everyday in every media outlet throughout our society (in Canada, the CBC spent entire morning talking about Turkish election, the systemic destruction of US democracy never getting even a mention...) and it was this dishonesty, propped up by cowardice, that turned George Babbit from a questioning seeker of a fuller life into a complacent bore who'd stand by and watch young ladies who only asked for simple dignity to be branded communist and get run outta town for daring to defy the men who also made plain to Babbit that he was being watched, and was found wanting! Babbit gave in, and it's apparent that the ruling elite has also given in. But as they say- 'cowards die a thousand deaths, while the brave die but once'

[AX10]

3. The WHOREington Post strikes again!