Posted on 09/24/2004 1:05:08 PM PDT by .cnI redruM
The old adage that says you should never argue in public with a fool because passersby cannot tell the difference seems to have no weight in our time. The success of pumped-up volume and personal attack has contaminated everything.
That is why there is a great lesson to be learned from the mess at CBS News.
In his marvelously funny and unapologetic book, "Attack Poodles," James Wolcott opens up on right-wing pundits. He defines them as vicious pets that charge not with bites - that would be too dangerous - but with barks that translate into mud. Each bark is a big bubble of muck ready to explode.
Wolcott could not have imagined that this presidential campaign would descend into barking from the right and the left, with groomed poodles barking from their conservative parlors and unshorn poodles yelping the liberal concerns of our nation. The shrewdest poodles are fixed up or down dependent on the audience. Surfaces and attacks are all.
The phony Bush material is as damning and controversial as the Abu Ghraib scandal that CBS first exposed; both deeply punctured the reputations of accepted institutions.
CBS helped pull the patriotic mask off Sen. Joe McCarthy and bring him down as the demagogic monster he so clearly was. That was 50 years ago, when Edward R. Murrow was the best-known television broadcaster in America. Not long afterward, CBS' Walter Cronkite became one of the most trustworthy media .fathers the nation has ever known. And CBS' Sunday edition of "60 Minutes" consistently has given the country its best ongoing mass-media investigative journalism.
The baloney CBS News presented through Dan Rather may have been put together too fast because there was a chance seen to - again! - scoop its many competitors. But we cannot at all be sure that the rabies of attack poodles has not so contaminated our news media that we could be receiving as much foam as fact, even from such an esteemed television newsman as Rather.
This is not new. It has never been clear, for instance, whether National Public Radio's Nina Totenberg was behind orchestrating Anita Hill's accusations into what became the Clarence Thomas scandal.
The upshot is that too many who write editorial columns, who produce television news and who conceive of campaigns are considered outdated if they have principles. If they are taken by the issues of life and death, war, health, the environment, outsourcing jobs, education, housing, reducing energy dependence on the Middle East, law enforcement, incarceration, the federal budget and so on, they continue to be forced from their seats by muddy poodles hopping from chair to chair on the right and left sides of the political dinner table.
Originally published on September 22, 2004
I really don't get his point....the forum and format elitist argument?
The moron. McCarthy was right. CBS stood then and stands now for the commies.
How can the liberal media and its defenders simultaneously maintain that (a) they are objective non-partisan purveyors of information and (b) that right-wing critics of the media are bad, evil people who simply are too stupid and unenlightened to realize the truth of the liberal world view. It defies logic.
What was the point of this article?
Arf!
The old adage that says you should never argue in public with a fool because passersby cannot tell the difference seems to have no weight in our time....
Oh I don't know about that, I could recognize a fool just by
reading his article.
"Attack Poodles" would be a good nickname for the Kerry campaign.
Didn't know that. Now I have even more reason to disrespect cBS.
McCarthy may have been an obnoxious drunk. But he was a correct obnoxious drunk who correctly nailed the genuine communists in government.
Almost single handedly, he made the term "communist" an epithet, and created the atmosphere that allowed the cold war to be fought and won. He started the war against the communists that Reagan won.
McCarthy was a hero and cBS is a zero.
I'm confused. Are we "Pajama People", or are we "Attack Poodles"?
Your keyboard must have come from the same assembly line as mine. Mine keeps misspelling on purpose. It can't be me, it must be the equipment.
The article writer seems to be making an attempt to hand out criticism on both sides without any examples of egregious uncorrected errors or falsehoods from conservatives. Perhaps we could all type up some fake memos about Mr. Kerry and help him make his point.
He is not a disinterested commentator.
Ah. I see. It's all the fault of the blog fact checkers.
No wonder we're winning.
He is the typical gay activist, who hates GW and will say anything about GW to prevent him from being re elected.
In fact he describes himself as "a black, gay Christian'"
"Cultural Awareness
... STANLEY CROUCH. Stanley Crouch is a columnist, novelist, essayist, critic and television commentator ... identifies himself as "a black, gay Christian". His work addresses issues of ...
www.jodisolomonspeakers.com/culturalawareness.htm - 107k - Cached - More pages from this site
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