Manufacturing consent

A “balanced” survey

Blogs, Internet, Manufacturing consent, Media, Meta, US politics
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From Kos, found via Steve Gilliard:

Of course, there never were any Dean bloggers paid to act as spokespeople for the campaign. Yet this survey is perpetuating the lie that we were. And on a survey distributed amongst other journalists, no less. Several reporters who got this instantly recognized who the questioned refered to and passed it on to me.

Jerome Armstrong and I asked Ross to correct the question and issue a retraction, and Ross has refused. It’s telling that every single reporter we’ve had to contact to correct the record has done so immediately, and with full apologies. Professor Ross, mister blog ethicists himself, is the first to refuse. That’s the first irony. The second is that it was his college — the Columbia Journalism Review’s Campaign Desk, that gave me and Jerome the first mainstream defense in response to the WSJ hit piece. They awarded it the first ever Lipstick on a Pig” award for spectacular hackery.

But really, it’s telling that while most working journalists have been more than willing to correct the record, it’s the campus ethicists that run most afoul of those ethics they claim to uphold.

Update: Oh, and I forgot to mention. Why did Ross call us out? From an email to me:

I had a bunch of examples that seemed anti-business and anti-Republican so I wanted something different.
So the GOP and WSJ efforts to find moral equivalency on the Left to the Armstrong Williams and other such scandals worked. That’s why Jerome and I fought the original WSJ story so hard. Once it’s in print, it’s impossible to kill. It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Fact is, the examples of unethical behavior are all on the Right, and so he threw us into his little survey for “balance”, even if such balance doesn’t come close to existing.

This is the best example I’ve seen so far of how this need for “balance” leads journalists astray. Because it’s somehow become unfair to single out one side, even if this is no more than the simple truth, they make shit up. If Ann Coulter is a rabid nutcase, Michael Moore has to become one to. Bush is a coward? Then clearly we need to mention the allegations against Kerry, true or not.

Huffington Post Scooped: JimmyJeff’s ‘Tutor’ Identified

Blogs, Manufacturing consent, Media, Wingnuts
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Woah. Philadelphia Blog Attytood obviously has more stomach for the smug and self-obsessed than I have and has actually been reading Arianna Huffington’s group blog. In doing so he’s come across this nugget of pure political gold:

“…the overhyped site has been up and running for less than 24 hours, and already one of its many “group bloggers” has accidentially dropped a scoop right in Attytood’s lap.

The highly rated news anchor for the ABC affiliate in Pittsburgh (in a key battleground state, you’ll recall) admits in his very first post that — in so many words — he’s a conservative mole in the mainstream media, that he’s actively helping a Karl Rove acolyte to train new right-wing journalists, and that one of his “star pupils” is none other than the notorious “Jeff Gannon,” the gay-hooker-turned-bogus-pro-GOP journalist.

The TV newsman is named Scott Baker, and for nearly a decade he’s been the anchorman on the 5 p.m. and noon newscasts on WTAE (Channel 4) in Pittsburgh, a Hearst-Argyle station that carries ABC programming.

But Baker has another job — one that he doesn’t list on his resume, although he does (sort of) ‘fess up in his Huffington Post post. It turns out he teaches journalism to young conservatives at the Leadership Institute School of Broadcast Journalism, founded by Karl Rove associate and former national Young Republican director Morton Blackwell. And anchorman Baker is not just their star instructor — he’s also a graduate.”

A neat little illustration of the porousness between US journalism, paid lobbying and politics – not that the UK is much better; after all we are the country in which a Prime Minister elected on barely a third of the potential vote can appoint an unelected crony to the cabinet. But I digress. This is a very juicy nugget of information, if true.

Full story…

Who else is paid to shill for the White House?

Manufacturing consent, US politics
Published on 1 Comment on Who else is paid to shill for the White House?

Is the question Dave Johnson asks over at Seeing the Forest:

Beyond direct government payments, who is being paid by the Right’s heavily- funded network of “advocacy” organizations to propagandize us? Who is being paid by corporate trade associations to advocate “tort reform?” Who is being paid by oil companies and their fronts to say global warming is not a problem? The Armstrong Williams case opens up a crack in the door to this use of paid propaganda disguised as “news,” designed to influence the public to support Republican policies and candidates!

And, this case demonstrates the reach of this practice — I mean, Armstrong Williams? If they’re paying HIM a quarter of a million dollars cash, just imagine who else is getting paid, and just imagine the amounts they are paid!

This is huge. This is the White House again caught red-handed engaging in criminal activities.

The fake patriotism of Bush apologists

Manufacturing consent, US politics
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Crooked Timber has two posts up about
Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn’s smears against Max Cleland, one by Ted Barlow and
a followup by Chris Bertram.
Both drew a lot of Bush and Coulter apologists trying to excuse the smears; reading them made me think about how Bush and co use patriotism.

What I (once again) realised is that Bush and his apologists for the most part only use patriotism as a political weapon, rather than being genuinely patriotic. A genuine patriot would respect Cleland for going to war for their country and would respect him even more so for the sacrifices he made by doing so: the loss of three of his limbs. Genuine patriots would not belittle these sacrifises in order to glorify their own side.

But clearly, this is what Bush and co have been doing. Bush and very many of his cronies have never had to make the same sacrifices as Cleland made and in fact have gone out of their way to avoid having to do so. At the same time, they have also gone out of their way in creating the image of Bush the uberpatriot, while bludgeoning political opponents with it.

Which is why John Kerry and Max Cleland are so dangerous to Bush now. Because they have made sacrifices and their patriotism is more than skindeep. Because they’ve learned their lesson
when Cleland lost the Georgia senatorial election in 2002 when he was smeared as anti-American.
Kerry and Cleland know that Bush will again try this strategy and as recent events have shown, they are ready for it.

Gullibility of the media

Manufacturing consent, Media
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Ethel the Blog
on the gullibility of the media:

Let’s see. They’re getting more truth out of Baghdad than the Pentagon, but only because the Pentagon
is much more savvy about spreading lies than is Baghdad. That is, both sides are lying, but the
Pentagon is much cleverer and better at it. Then, in the very next sentence, the same source – when
wondering whether the Pentagon is lying about events because it’s really clever at lying, or because
it’s just incompetent and has no idea what the hell is going on – the source chooses the latter. After
all, they’re just a pack of good ol’ boys who are getting confused by all the clever lies being
propagated by Baghdad, who the source has already established is much better at lying than
is…er…golly, now I’m getting confused.

Observing such antinomial blithering is extremely entertaining. The lengthy and ongoing propaganda
avalanche to embed the “Iraq is evil and nothing but, but the Pentagon is Jesus in fatigues” meme in
the minds of the proles has apparently been so successful that even when someone actually looks at the
evidence and figures out that the Pentagon pretty much lies whenever its lips move, they still can’t or
won’t believe the evidence over the conditioning.