Posted on 09/28/2003 5:33:24 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
A Litany of Lies
By Gary Larson
CNSNews.com Commentary
September 26, 2003
The establishment media's mugging of President George W. Bush is a daily drumbeat, a smear campaign that stops at nothing. Raw partisanship in "news" reporting and punditry today is nearly pervasive.
Not surprisingly, it is reflected in recent polls. Given the intensity of the barrage, the only shocker is that Bush's popularity is not lower. Still, the steady rollback in his popularity is evidence of elite media's power. Public feedback depends on input, as in "garbage in," so poll results likely are for real.
Iraq is key. Tax cuts, invariably "for the wealthy," are up there too, joined legitimately by the economy. Being well-educated sorts, media people ought to know better. Likely they do. Collectively they have no excuse short of being louts for swaying poll results - i.e., "garbage in," a.k.a. the libeling of a modern-day president.
Sophistry in reporting and opining is shameless - as if self-parody - and heatedly denied. Even irrefutable facts are challenged, such as Big Media being staffed predominantly by the caustic "liberal" mind-set.
Mean-spirited and at times grotesque ( e.g., "Bush knew" prior to 9/11), the whacking of this president erases any doubt about media's liberalism. Seething bias is evident now even to casual observers. Notice is being taken.
Hate is the subtext of this assault. Pundits' spew hateful screeds and letters to editors bristle with hostility. Choruses of "Bush-lied" are daily fare, their premises all screwed up. Letters recycling readers' fictions find ink, duping more sadly misinformed people.
This phenomenon validates Joseph Goebbels' 1934 advice: Bombard the "primitive rank and file," with "propaganda...essentially simple and repetitive." To say this Nazi tactic works today is an understatement.
The media want Democrats to win in 2004. Desperately. That much is clear. Payback for a war media don't want? Trying to remake this war into something it's not - a Vietnam? ("Quagmire" anyone?) Besides, a score is to be settled - the damn 2000 election in Florida. Neither the media nor the "Florida Supremes" got their way. Sore losermen, indeed.
Repetition of simple lies ensures the ill-informed stay that way. Witness the cries of Bush "stealing" the 2000 election. Witness the high court "throwing the election" his way. Witness "only the rich" getting tax cuts. Lies like these, endlessly repeated, stick like dung flung at a wall. Hey, it works! Polls prove it.
What George Orwell (1903-50), novelist and ultimate realist, wrote in his essay "The Prevention of Literature" (1946), speaks volumes: "What is really at issue [regarding press freedoms] is the right to report contemporary events truthfully,or as truthfully as is consistent with ignorance, bias and self-deception. . ." [emphasis is added].
Ignorance is inexcusable, but it happens. Bias is something else. Truth might be known or sensed, but might not fit one's reality, so it needs to shaded, often craftily, to ensure a proper fit. Bias is a prism reflecting what the truly biased want to be their own reality. Writ large, Orwell called this "the fog of lies and misinformation."
Bias must "rearrange past events," Orwell said. The trick? "...not playing into the hand of" an adversary. After all, admitting someone else is (gasp!) counter-productive. Bias does that; it affects perception, both for the left and right, permitting ego to trump reality.
Self-deception is the kissing cousin of bias. Self-deception, Orwell wrote, "is not due to conscious dishonesty." It stems from adhering to a point of view that must, of psychic necessity, "acquiesce in deliberate falsification," to protect fragile egos and preserve firmly held beliefs.
Orwell observed the litany of untruths in his day, "provoked no reaction from the left-wing intelligensia as a whole." Sound familiar? Past was prologue to the silence of liberals today. They are too busy shouting "liar liar," as their own deceits gain traction courtesy of a willing media.
Near the Twin Cities, where I live, a rabid left-wing newspaper editorially assaults Bush daily, and never mind the truth. The other daily in this rare two-paper market, not taking sides at first, now edges closer to the partisan savagery of its larger, more leftist counterpart.
Alas, both Twin Cities' dailies now reveal a myopic bias found usually in only wild-eyed party organs. How do you spell A-G-E-N-D-A?
McClatchy's left-wing Star Tribune of Minneapolis reflexively calls Bush, and all in his administration, liars. Editorial cartoons depict him as a Dr. Frankenstein, a Dr. Jekell, always the Ultimate Jerk. Bush is "cowboy" (snotty for reckless), "gunslinger" (ditto), "Lone Ranger ("unilateral," and from Texas). On its front page, Bush is called "fund-raiser-in-chief." Can you imagine Clinton being called prevaricator-in-chief, or uncharged suspected rapist?
In Knight-Ridder's once moderate St. Paul Pioneer Press , a contemptuous editorial (9/9) insists the Iraq war is a "cowboy war," a Bush "adventure," marked by "unsustainable unilateralism." Yeah, like the Brits suffered no casualties? Note how "cowboy" is chic in snippy, juvenile put-downs. Have these people no creativity?
"Bush never told us," insisted the Star Tribune ( 8/20), that the war was, in part, to "free the Iraqi people." Oh, really? Then why in hell did he call it Operation Iraqi Freedom?
More lies from the same paper on Sept. 12:
1 - Iraq Iraq posed "no threat of attack with WMDs." Then why the gas masks on both sides?
2 - Saddam never "possessed weapons of mass destruction" What about the roughly 5,000 chemical-dead corpses in Halabja, Iraq. What was it, ptomaine poisoning?
3 - Bush "created a threat [Iraq] where none [sic] existed." Tell that to the Kuwaitis, Saudis, Iranians and Israelis. This parade of lies - all in a single day - continues with:
4 - Iraq had "no links to al-Queda." Only in the editorial writer's party line dreams, along with sugarplum visions of the USA actually losing a war he or she didn't want.
Spelunk the mind of a left-winger today and you will find in its dark recesses the motivation: The avalanche of Bush-bashing is an attempt to undermine him as well as "his" (not " our") war in Iraq. To heck with the war on terrorism, first things first - like getting people we approve of (like us!) elected. And if it takes calling him a lying cowboy, so be it.
To successfully brand someone a liar, it must take root among the uninformed, as master propagandist Goebbels observed 70 years ago. The only Big Question is 'why'. Shall we call it a perverse example of Orwell's definition of self-deception, or its blood relative, spiteful bias? Perhaps it's part of a furious campaign to win the next election? God knows.
Honest difference of opinion is one thing, but the on-going thrashing of Bush is sheer travesty. Americans - all of us - are diminished by its hate-based, mean-spirited brutality.
Gary Larson is a retired business magazine editor in Minnesota. He is not the retired cartoonist of the same name.
Broadcast journalism uses statistical projections to predict the outcome of the elections in the various states before the official results are available. The odds against error in a statistical prediction depend on the margin of error and the margin of victory. As data on voting accumulates and the number of unknown votes yet to be counted declines, the margin of error gradually shrinks--but goes to zero only when the official vote tally is announced. The margin of victory can be quite large or (as FL 2000 illustrates) can be quite small.Retrospect shows that the statistical reliability of the call of a state for Gore was in nearly every case much lower than that of the call of nearly every state for Bush. In the famous case of Florida, of course, broadcast journalism's first call was not merely of low statistical quality but actually erroneous. And yet, the following day journalism focused like a laser, not on that huge error but on the ultimately correct call by Fox News.
As Coulter points out, journalism's postmortem claim that the FNC call was an illegitimate attempt to affect the outcome can most sensibly be understood as an admission that their own premature 8pm call of FL for Gore (that the relatively premature call of almost every Gore state) was an illegitimate attempt to affect the outcome of the election in favor of Gore.
Journalism believes in the power of PR, and deployed that power as strongly as it dared in support of Gore. Yet Bush won. Above all the constituencies in the Democratic party, it is journalism which was most aggrieved by the rejection of its own god.
That presumes that journalism can be spoken of as an entity, that it is an Establishment. To say that is to deny that journalism is competitive. Journalism is famously competitive is certain ways--especially being the first out with a story--but in ways that matter like accuracy, journalists all "go along and get along." It is in the nature of an Establishment to deny its own existence while viciously defending its turf, and that is exactly how journalism behaves.
FNC breaks that mold, is willing to at least insinuate that the competition doesn't live up to its reputation.
Their agenda is propaganda, not journalism.
More are coming to see that, hence their decline.
The Clinton years demonstrated to me that, if the Democrats are accusing the GOP of doing "X", it most likely means that it is the Democrats who are, in fact, doing "X". Or, at the very least, it is what the Democrats would do if they were in the GOP's position.
They project their own misdeeds onto their opponents. There is a name for this kind of pathology. In the law, it is called "guilty"...
The press can't silence the homecoming troops, or those who were awake on 9-11, or millions of Iraqis with new free speech - or the internet, the will of the free people around the world.
Keep sharing the true, good stories with others. Click my Freepname. Today alone there are many supportive stories from the press - our conservative outlets, plus a good write-up on the raid from AP and SOD Rumsfeld's wise essay in the WSJ.
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