The Nation: Why The Corporate Media Ducked The Real Story Of Those Flying Shoes

[Hissyspit]

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/114530/why_the_corporate_media_ducked_the_real_story_of_those_flying_shoes

Why the Corporate Media Ducked the Real Story of Those Flying Shoes
By Leslie Savan, TheNation.com. Posted December 22, 2008.

Corporate media swerved faster from the meaning of the flying footwear than Bush did from the shoe itself.

Once there was a time when a viral video hit didn't have to star the president of the United States ducking a shoe, and in those days it went something like this:

SEE LINK FOR HAMSTER VIDEO

"Hamster on a Piano (Eating Popcorn)" is #4 on Time magazine's Top 10 Viral Videos for the year, but if the people could vote, it would surely be pushed down to #5 in the wake of the George Bush shoe-dodging video. Or even lower, if one of the Bush mash-ups--Curly missing W and hitting Larry with a pie gets my vote--joins the original up there in desktop heaven.

I won't take up any more pixels analyzing the meaning of the original video, because Bush's loss of face was painfully obvious from the start (Robert Dreyfuss and Robert Scheer have laid it out really well in these pages). But what also jumped out during the first few days of coverage, when cable and even network news were running the vid as if were, well, "Hamster on a Piano," were the frivolous frames the newscasts constructed for every viewing.

- snip -

Other talking heads picked up on the shoes' dark undercurrents. Juan Williams told Bill O'Reilly that, yeah yeah, he gets the puns and jokes, "But on a serious level, how many American lives have been sacrificed to the cause of liberating Iraq? How much money has been spent while they're not spending their own profits from their oil? American money. So I just think it's absolutely the act of an ingrate for them to behave in this way."

I must admit, I never saw the ingrate argument coming. When CNN's Candy Crowley gingerly asked George Bush, "Was there ever a part of you that, in reflection, went, wait a second"--and here I thought she'd surely complete the sentence with "I understand why the Iraqi people are angry at me"--but instead she said, with perplexity, "We have poured billions of dollars, not to mention U.S. blood and treasure into this country, how dare this guy, even if he is a single guy?" ("Single" meaning not Zaidi's marital status but that, in Candy's eyes, his act didn't represent a group opinion, merely his own.)

Certainly, some MSM commentators got the video's message right and connected the glaring dots, but prominent instances have been hard to find. Overall, the mainstream media's inability to follow thoughts to their logical conclusion has been perfected during the Bush years. Nothing illustrates that better than the fact that after he was grabbed and beaten by security guards, Zaidi was dragged into the next room and presumably beaten again--his "cries could be heard from a nearby room," wrote the New York Times--but Western and Iraqi journalists stood by and went on with the press conference. If any of them crowded the door, tried to get a camera inside, or asked what all the screaming was about, we haven't seen or read about it.

It happens all the time, and in plain sight. When Jonathan Karl of ABC asked Dick Cheney earlier this week whether he thought that waterboarding prisoners in American custody was appropriate, and the veep answered, "I do," Karl got a scoop but he didn't follow it to its logical end by striking a comparison between Cheney and the Japanese, as well as the American, military men whom the U.S. sentenced to death for using that same form of torture. Instead, he went on with the interview.

Corporate media: It wants to know how much the hamster likes its popcorn, not why it's upside down and on its back.

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[SpiralHawk]

1. Corporate media = Hamsters on bent knees, gobbling popcorn while America is corrupted

by republicon lies, malfeasance, perversion and incompetence.

Thanks for posting this insightful article, HS. Very astute.

The k and the r.

[Swamp Rat]

2. k&r

pic by tomeboy:

[JohnyCanuck]

3. K&R n/t

[tbyg52]

4. Yeah, I saw an editorial cartoon Sunday

that nearly made me scream in the middle of the restaurant where I was reading the paper.

It showed a dog marked "Iraq" biting Uncle Sam's hand, as in "biting the hand that feeds you." We haven't done a thing *for* Iraq, just *to* Iraq.

I also get disgusted when people talk about why are we spending all this money there when Iraq has $70B, or whatever it is. That's *their* money - we spent *our* money trashing their country, and should spend *our* money straightening it out, as much as it can be.