An inconvenient irony

Pulitzer Prize-winning Leonard Pitts writes that CNN's Anderson Cooper called out the Mubarak regime's lies, and politically correct Fox News scolds him for telling truth.

For that, Cooper was ridiculed by James Rainey of The Los Angeles Times. CNN media critic Howard Kurtz questioned whether Cooper should be “taking sides.” And one Liz Trotta said that “any correspondent worth his salt knows that you shouldn’t be making editorial comments.” She, amusingly enough, is employed by Fox News.

All three critics concede Cooper was accurate: The regime did lie. Yet they question whether it was journalistically ethical to say it.

Take a close look. You will seldom see a clearer portrait of the timidity and obsequiousness that have infected and, increasingly, defined, American journalism.

Here is my pet theory: After years of criticism for their liberal bias -- some of it merited – news media, eager as a puppy to be liked, have corrected by over correcting. Which is to say that in the search for that mythical beast, objectivity, they have sought to banish from the news-gathering process an indispensable element: judgment. Excluding, of course, Fox, for which a reluctance to judge has never been a problem.

The rest of the journalistic world seems to have embraced its own version of those robotic, idiotic zero-tolerance policies where some kid gets suspended for bringing Midol to class. Meaning, in other words, a paradigm from which human reasoning and common sense are exiled.

So, on any given story, a reporter is encouraged to get the facts, make sure the liberal and conservative talking points are represented and, once those boxes are checked, to feel as if she has done her job, has been objective. No thinking required.

Me, I have no idea what objectivity means, at least insofar as news reportage goes. What I do understand is fairness, the requirement to give voice to both sides, all sides, of a given issue: abortion, immigration, gun control, the budget, whatever.

Real WMDs (Or, Ignorance is Bliss)

In an online commentary, Building a Nation of Know-Nothings, Timothy Egan uses John McCain's primary victory against "the flat-earth wing of his party" as the launching point to discuss the rather depressing trend in the Republican party to pander to imbeciles. (Okay, he was more delicate, referring to people with "head[s] stuffed with fabrications that could be disproved by a pre-schooler.") He writes,

It’s not just that 46 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush. 


Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.


Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. A growing segment of the party poised to take control of Congress has bought into denial of the basic truths of Barack Obama’s life. What’s more, this astonishing level of willful ignorance has come about largely by design, and has been aided by a press afraid to call out the primary architects of the lies.

The source of this "knowledge" is "the media" - in fact, a "lamestream media" all its own.

In the much-discussed Pew poll reporting the spike in ignorance, those who believe Obama to be Muslim say they got their information from the media. But no reputable news agency — that is, fact-based, one that corrects its errors quickly — has spread such inaccuracies.


So where is this “media?” Two sources, and they are — no surprise here — the usual suspects. The first, of course, is Rush Limbaugh, who claims the largest radio audience in the land among the microphone demagogues, and his word is Biblical among Republicans. A few quick examples of the Limbaugh method:


“Tomorrow is Obama’s birthday — not that we’ve seen any proof of that,” he said on Aug. 3. “They tell us Aug. 4 is the birthday; we haven’t seen any proof of that.”


Of course, there is proof as clear as that baseball box score. Look here, www.factcheck.org, for starters, one of many places posting Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate. [More specifically, http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/born_in_the_usa.html -jwj]
...
Finally, there is Fox News, whose parent company has given $1 million to Republican causes this year but still masquerades as a legitimate source of news. Their chat and opinion programs spread innuendo daily. The founder of Politifact, another nonpartisan referee to the daily rumble, said two of the site’s five most popular items on its Truth-o-meter are corrections of Glenn Beck.
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It would be nice to dismiss the stupid things that Americans believe as harmless, the price of having such a large, messy democracy. Plenty of hate-filled partisans swore that Abraham Lincoln was a Catholic and Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew. So what if one-in-five believe the sun revolves around the earth, or aren’t sure from which country the United States gained its independence?


But false belief in weapons of mass-destruction led the United States to a trillion-dollar war. And trust in rising home value as a truism as reliable as a sunrise was a major contributor to the catastrophic collapse of the economy. At its worst extreme, a culture of misinformation can produce something like Iran, which is run by a Holocaust denier.


It’s one thing to forget the past, with predictable consequences, as the favorite aphorism goes. But what about those who refuse to comprehend the present?