THERE'S SOMETHING DELICIOUS about the whole story.I don't think I can add anything of substance, really, to the shitstorm of complaint McClellan's memoir has raised. There are things that I find funny and compelling in the coverage, though.
I think it's hilarious that the right wing dittoheads, (who surely have to be on the endangered species list by now -- don't hold your breath for protection there, boys) scream bias because Weasel boy Ari Fleischer's memoir opened dead.
Memo to the frothing, let's do this one more time: Man bites dog is the story. Dog bites man, not so much. And the dog gets bit in Scotty's book.
I also think it's notable that the "cashing in to get rich" argument (besides, you know, being an argument that Republicans should be able to get behind) is so easily refuted by the reality -- a five figure advance for a book like this? That's poking through the cushions money. Nope, McClellan's that most dangerous of things: the true believer who got burned.
And what really has me fascinated, watching this story play out, is the denial and the somersaults you see media types going through to try and douse McClellan's most explosive point -- that the media haven't done their jobs. Not after 9/11, not in the leadup to the Iraq war, and not now.
I find that interesting because a few years ago I had to make a choice. I was supremely uncomfortable working in "journalism" or "factual", because everywhere I looked, I saw people clearly writing with bias and then denying that's what they were doing. I saw obsequious toadying to those above, no matter what the facts on the ground were, to reflect the corporate agenda. I saw people clinging to this little torchlight of truth, when in reality, there was none. I saw self-censorship because nobody wanted to be accused of being "typical left wing media," so the most ridiculous nosestretchers from the other side got free passes.
In Canada, you get an extra level of deliciousness, because most of the time those same people will tsk tsk at the US media, and think we're better here. More measured, somehow. That may be so in certain pockets, but it's done while closing their eyes to the fact that, if anything, we're even more deferential to the power structure here.
I saw all that and felt queasy about it and somewhere in there I made the decision that somehow I had to get out of that business, because the premise was fundamentally broken. The things that James Brooks posited in Broadcast News had all come to pass. Hell, Network seemed to be playing like a doc. The poor, brittle, deluded few, left claiming objectivity in a sea of spin and bias; that was a lie, and that if I really wanted to stab at truth, maybe I should figure out a way to make things up the way I think they are, and get someone to pay me for that.
So I did.
As far as I see, I pretty much do the same job now I did then.
Yet somehow it feels more honest.
2 comments:
Amen!
You'll certainly get a righteous second and another amen from me there Denis - as this is precisely what has been driving me absolutely batty about this whole Scottie Inquisition.
Imagine for a moment,
if say a Democratic Administration had invaded a country in the heart of the Middle East without any plan for The Inevitable Resulting Occupation, or if a Democratic Administration had cornered Osama Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, before farming the job of ACTUALLY going after him to the local Afghan warlord, never making a serious and legitimate military effort to capture the man who was and is supposed to be public enemy number one during its most opportune post 9-11 moment , or had been responsible for, say ... Colin Powell's completely embarrassing display of deception before the UN Security Council in 2003, or my personal favourite - what if a DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENT upon hearing the news that "America was under attack" continued, for seven of the most perplexing and painful minutes, to sit in front of that Florida grade school reading class listening to the students dutifully recite their lesson from My Pet Goat? (make your own list, the possibilities are endless)
There wouldn't have been enough buckets nor barrels in all of the blessed United States to contain the condemning oceans of vicious, vitriolic saliva that would have poured forth from all the yakking right wing talk radio psychopaths and Fox News chicken hawk poseurs over such brutal, obvious and heartbreaking displays of base incompetence.
"(T)ypical left wing media" - indeed.
Anyone who still doesn't acknowledge that George Bush lied - that's right, that's the word for it - LIED- America into the War in Iraq is living in a state of willful denial. The man's approval ratings tell the story, and are no accident. And he and Cheney both should have been impeached.
But to say this on American corporate television news somehow necessitates being labeled in turn, a liberal, and thus somehow illegitimate, and part of the 'typical left wing media'. (though Ron Paul says it, all the time).
Certainly nothing Scottie is saying is new, and he's saying it in such a tame manner. And yet the manner in which they come back at him, the things that they say and the points that they actually argue are the measure of their paranoid defensiveness. As the Bush Administration and everyone who ever worked for them has just so much to deny. Perhaps this can just never be acknowledged as The Official Story. Ordained, as it were, by The Official Media. Perhaps the implications, moral or otherwise, are just too enormous.
As for "making things up" as a way to "take a stab at the truth", and doing this on fictional (again, 'officially') television - what is that the young hoppers of Hamsterdam are peddling during Season 3 of The Wire? What is their name for it, the word they keep calling out over and over to any and all of their potential customers?
"WMD!"
"WMD!"
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