Last Day of Fundraiser and the Role of Opinion and News

More recently there was a story that Russia had offered bounties for dead American soldiers to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Agitprop

I worked for the adults in the room. They wanted blood.

You can’t draw a firm line between news and opinion. That’s why you have newspapers like The Daily Worker. Before you write, before you even start collecting facts, you have a viewpoint directing you. Do you report economic figures as bad because American workers lost ground or as good because businesses were able to hold labor costs in check? An article ruminating on both would be analysis, rather than news, so you choose one.

Journalist training appears not to understand these issues. They seem to think that opinion means taking a political side. As long as they can write “he said, she said”, they believe that they are doing news rather than opinion. And so the real news is lost — the assurance that what’s written is based on accurately reported facts with credible sources.

In fast-moving areas of war, previously/unknown “sources” almost always seem to pop up, deliver their message, and then disappear. Once the dust has settled, it’s seldom that anyone goes back and checks these sources, and even if someone does, no one cares. The source did their job, the damage is done, let’s move on, look forward not back. And the next fake source will also be believed unquestioningly.

The Times just caught in a case like this , but nothing will change.

Oh. cut the crap, Brennan. At this point we’re all in bad shape and no one knows what to do., you. Least of all. Quit prancing around pointing fingers at people.

The distinction between news and opinion belonged to an era of journalism that was fading away before Ian came of age. It is a distinction that finds no difference to elucidate in our time.

In the division of labor, journalists are intermediaries, who sell and deliver narrative meaning. They bake bread in the form of narratives and we eat that bread for the sweet taste and sugar-high of meaning.

Humans hunger for meaning, but we resist the hard work of processing the flood of information. It is among the contradictions of human nature that we can, as individuals in specialized social groups genuinely enjoy immersing ourselves in depths of knowledge, though even in those contexts, ego, charisma, bullying and cant can take over and suffocate the possibilities of genuine understanding.

The anachronism of distinguishing between “fact” and “opinion” in contemporary journalism harkens back to a legendary, now mythical time when journalists, like academics of yore, were in the “truth” business and their integrity was a valuable asset to be conserved and protected. Now is Facebook using the pretense of “independent” “fact-checking” as a cudgel against political views and organizing they wish to suppress and marginalize to serve the ends of the plutocracy’s oligarchs.

The NY Times peddling lies about Iraqi WMD and 9/11 conspiracies was an intermediate step in the evolution of our decadence. It happened that way because, at the time, the NY Times had institutional reputational capital to burn thru. That flames from that pile of kindling have flickered out now.

The flood of narrative propaganda marketed as “news and opinion” is the output of a vast industrial operation now, in which journalists and pr hacks labor as cogs in the machine, a few master manipulators and celebrity spokesmodels playing their roles and earning millions and fame doing what they do, but pretty much no one can find either an economic resource base to support the costly processes of research and verification necessary to be in anything like the “truth” business in a serious way or an audience that appreciates the “gourmet flavors” of moral ambiguity and deep understanding based on detailed knowledge and considered judgment associated with actually knowing what you are talking about.

Ian talking about people mistakenly trusting that “news” has a factual basis is ludicrous now. The example of the “news” of Russia paying bounties on American soldiers’ lives in Afganistan is an example narrative manipulation, choosing a storyline for the emotional response it will elicit from people with little attention to spare, but who will eagerly consume it uncritically, precisely because they enjoy the emotions, like being a distant spectator to the melodrama on offer. The thing to notice is not the absence of a factual basis for the narrative, but the irrelevance of facts for either the audience or the propagandists. That irrelevance is the rule now. A complete absence of facts is hardly an exceptional circumstance when no one really cares or has the resources to ascertain and consider the facts or would be rewarded with “likes” or “views” or a favorable “demo” if they did. Is that how anyone becomes TikTok famous?

Well, the news business in the US and much of the rest of the world has always been mostly about propaganda and marketing. When we think of some former golden era of press and media integrity, unfortunately we’re misremembering an era that never happened.

Archives of newspapers, magazines, newsreels and other news media exist and many are easily accessible back as far as the 18th century, and at no time was most news media not ultimately propagandistic and intended to sell ideas, beliefs and products to the public. Often, newspapers (especially) simply made shit up, on the theory that wild stories about this or that would sell papers — and they did.

Some were more rigorous about reporting facts than others, but which facts were reported had to be filtered through editors and publishers and sometimes owners (just like now) with a distinct political point of view. What was considered “news” depended on how it fit the narrative framework of the particular outlet.

Skepticism, then and now, has always been a virtue when it comes to the news, because there is no uniform standard, and truthfully there can’t be one, which applies to every outlet all the time.

What is reported and how it is reported… it all depends…

Not much different than with opinion journalism. Opinions in media were and are often bought and paid for and they can and do change depending on who’s paying for them, and these days, depending on what branding the opinionator is trying to market for him or her self. And those brands can and do change, sometimes in a twinkling.

This is one reason why critical thinking is so important, and it’s a reason why it is so rarely taught any more.

If we don’t know how or why to sort wheat from chaff — or even that we can — in the news media, we can be much more easily controlled, much more likely to believe whatever we’re told, but even when critical thinking was part of the public schools curricula in the United States, propaganda and marketing were paramount purposes of the news media.

Sadly, it can be harder than ever to sort out the crap and hold on to kernels of truth in today’s cacophony of yada, yada.

If news is a toxic medium then we should expose ousrselves to it less.
Afterall, it is easier to get a handle on information with a bit of distance and a bit of indifference.

No, that why it “news”: you have to respond to it now. Dante’s Commedia has time, COVID-19 requires urgency. The problem is that “news” on your video is not really news – it is somewhere between opinion and whack-job-conspiracy-bullshit.

the conspiracy theory was: FDR deliberately and knowingly let Pearl Harbour happen to get the country into WWII.

twenty-three years later, in an act of moral mirroring, LBJ manufactured the Gulf of Tonkin incident. and no one in 1964 suggested a conspiracy, though the incident was both implausible on its face and completely false.

so go figure

Trump would be gone in 2014

Don’t you mean 2024?

\ and the progressive field wide open but…

Wishful thinking on your part. There are plenty of *young* corporatist/neoliberal Dems to run too.

because enough D-voters bought into the NeoDs nonsense [and you Ian!] that Trump was an existential threat to humanity

Because, this time, they were probably right. A Trump win this year would very likely mean no more free elections. (There’d be elections, sure, but Hitler had elections; elections don’t matter if you can either control who’s running or what who’s running can do or who can and can’t vote). Or elections that did not matter, as Trump was already blowing off SCOTUS or other court decisions with impunity and diverting funds to whatever he wanted.

Remember what happened to Germany’s communists who though Hitler winning was a good idea, as “after Hitler, it will be us?” Not good.

I’ll credit the “Russians are paying bounties” story as being true. But what of it? In the Soviet era, we declared those bastardly Russkies to be the enemy of all that’s profitable right and good, and openly, proudly, boastfully, sent weaponry and aid to the Afghans to kill Russian soldiers. Aren’t those guys human too? Didn’t they have famlies and wives and sweethearts and friends? And if captured, these Soviet soldiers didn’t get a good reception from these ‘freedom fighters’–no better than ISIL.

People forget that the government the Soviets were supporting *wasn’t* a puppet state. It had popular support. It in fact outlasted the fall of the Soviet Union. It in fact instituted policies that would be considered progressive—universal education for both genders:

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1015&context=njihr

Karmal and his Soviet handlers reaffirmed and expanded the efforts of Daoud and Taraki regimes before them to promote greater equality for Afghan women. The communists “officially sanctioned a wider public role for women, whose status improved.” By 1985, 65% of the students at Kabul University were women, and Afghan women worked in most government agencies, social organizations, factories, the national airline, and the health care sector. By the time the communists lost power, “women accounted for 70 percent of teachers, 50 percent of government workers, and 40 percent of medical doctors.” Women worked as police officers, members of the military, and journalists. Afghan women increasingly appeared unveiled in public, as their counterparts in Soviet Central Asia had done decades previously. Communist reforms intruded into Afghan family life when the communists banned the purchase and sale of young girls as wives, and provoked rage by demanding that fathers allow their daughters to learn to read. The regime’s family courts were “mostly presided over by female judges” and protected women’s rights in marriage and divorce and to equitable child custody and support.

And it was precisely policies like these, in fact, that gained the ire of the most reactionary elements in Afghan society: *Those guys*, not surprisingly, are the guys we supported. Moreover, as later events would show, they had no love for the US or the West, and were happy to turn their ire towards us later.

I’m also perfectly happy to accept that RUSSIA(!!) interfered in our elections, insofar has promoting propaganda that was misleading, inflammatory, and at times outright false. But this is no different than the stuff the Repugs had been doing all my life. This was just as another example of the Republican Party outsourcing ‘jobs’ once done domestically to someone abroad who would do it better and cheaper. No surprise there. And besides, once again, we intervened in Russian politics in the 1990s and bragged about it.

https://imgur.com/gallery/gXRqf

SB has been cheerleading Trump and attacking Democrats daily for the last year. Now suddenly, we are supposed to forget all his stacks and stacks and stacks of ranting. Why? because bruce wilder finds it inconvenient.

Maybe he identifies with SB. Much as SB kneejerk defends Trump, bruce kneejerk defends Russia and Putin. You would think they must be getting paid to hang out on this small but influential progressive blog and spout their anti-progressive bilge. SB is a pretty straightforward Trumper nutcase. Bruce is more controlled until any mention of Russia comes up. Then it is Putin is the great man of the age and any criticism of him or his country gets thrown into the Russia, Russia, Russia dustbin.

“the conspiracy theory was: FDR deliberately and knowingly let Pearl Harbour happen to get the country into WWII.”

We were already in WWII in all but name – but it was an important name. FDR did not think that it would be Pearl Harbor and he underestimated the determination of the IJN carrier forces. Others did want to see and cover over clear signs. It still is not clear whether the US Carriers were deliberately sent to sea.

Che Pasa thinks I am brilliant! How sweet.

I am all in favor of “critical thinking”. It would not take much more than basic skepticism to poke some pretty big holes in the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in real time in 1964. It made no sense for Vietnam to attack warships of the U.S. Navy with pea shooters.

But, somehow the experience of WWII and its prequels primed the public to accept uncritically LBJ’s call to action and primed LBJ himself to think he was doing the right thing in some sense best known to himself and his advisers.

Drowning in details — and believe me, I can debate Kimmel on Oahu with the best — or cooking bureaucratic conspiracy theories for a deep state that surely existed by 1964 but was not so deeply mad as ours today — is not critical thinking.

We should be asking why government is so prone to error. Collective or social, organized action is not easy, apparently. A key vulnerability is the need for responsible leadership both controlling and controlled by responsible followership. Prescriptively, it is a matter of progressively developing better institutions, able to investigate and verify. But, put that aside. Leaders in a position to dominate are vulnerable to corruption and never more so when the people they lead are ignorant, stubborn bloody-minded fools more easily persuaded by a fairy tale than complex truth.

I think LBJ was afraid a Nixon would ask, “who lost Indochina?” The calculus from that overwhelmed the instinct — if LBJ even had such — to act prudently from realistic assesssment of facts. That LBJ knew an electoral majority could be persuaded by Nixonian tales led to making up his own to control that same credulous populace. As Ian sometimes points out, the people do not get what they need, but they often perversely get what they seem to want and it can be ugly.

“saying that the Dems are equally at fault for our problems today, and have been nearly as bad as tRUMP is not “defending” tRUMP.”

I have no problem beating up on the Democrats, but Trump has been President the last four years, and when I see some comment on Republican and Democratic failures where Trump rates half a line followed by four paragraphs railing against the Democrats, yeah, for me, that is a de facto defense of Trump and the Republicans.

And just because the Democrats hate progressives doesn’t mean they are always as bad as the Republicans. Pelosi passed a second large covid relief package in the House 7 months ago. McConnell sat on his turkey white _ss for 8 1/2 months blocking any action to extend covid relief until about two weeks ago. And as Bernie Sanders has said, this current relief bill is mostly a sham. Most of its money comes from stripping out remaining funds from the original relief bills and it is deliberately made short term so that Republicans can have a third relief bill fight with Biden in a couple of months. And even this was not enough. The most recent hang up came because the Republicans wanted to deny to Biden the power they had given to Trump to make loans to business through the Fed.

So sure, you can say both Democrats and Republicans play political games, but the difference here is that the Democratic games would still have helped tens of millions of Americans while the Republican ones thrust those same tens of millions of Americans into poverty and desperation. As here, bad does not mean equally or nearly as bad. The Republicans have been flat out evil in this. The Democrats, arrogant and out of touch.

Hugh lives in the subjunctive.

Ian,

Shut it down at $10,999!

Z

A non y mouse
Anony mouse
An onymou see
Ano nym ous se
So many ways to say exactly the same, wrong, thing.

So lets just keep bashing mother until she gives up and abandons the family. Yeah, that’ll work.

I just saw an interview with a D rep who said that one of his peers was gifted a brand new Tesla, perfectly legal, by some donor. Imagine working in an environment where you’re the only one who has enough ethicality to actually do your job with integrity, refusing to play along to get rich. While your peers are ridiculing you for playing the martyr, your constituents are hammering you for not being enough of a martyr. Be enough to turn me misanthropic.

Why not work on getting constituents regardless of party to focus on the problem?

Willy: While your peers are ridiculing you for playing the martyr, your constituents are hammering you for not being enough of a martyr. Be enough to turn me misanthropic.

I think this applies not just to politicians, but also to many journalists and pundits. Think of Generals retiring from the Pentagon to join the Private Sector behemoths of the Military-Industrial Complex. Or, any number of journalists and opinion writers, who must trim their sails to navigate a paying career. Or, academics in many fields where, for example, being friendly say with Big Pharma is a pre-requisite to research funding or being selected for professional-society and public-regulatory committee work.

Corruption of this sort is increasingly out of control in the U.S., the decay a by-product of increasing inequality of income and precarity in what used to be the middle-class.

Politician’s salaries have long been under scrutiny by the public — this was true way before income inequality skyrocketed, and a Congress critter has a comfortable salary by middle-class standards, but not nearly enough to hob nob with today’s movers and shakers, belong to their prestige Country Club, or live in their neighborhoods and send her kids to the their private school.

It is easy to see the highly corrosive potential, even before realizing that the extent to which structural changes in institutions compound the problem. The death of newspaper-based, local classified advertising, followed by concentration of ad revenue in Google and Facebook has interacted with increased corporate concentration, centralized strategic control of different media platforms and the networking effects of concentrated social media (Twitter, et cetera).

Systems within systems are dysfunctional. It is probably beyond the intellectual capacity of any individual to comprehend the problem, let alone propose a path of effective reform. People will try — Matt Stoller with “Big” is trying hard to get something started and that is just one example.

Ordinary people with little time or training are likely to fall back on simplistic slogans, with no realistic program or policy attached. Idealists on the Left will go with “get the money out of politics” reforms the very purity and simplicity of which makes any program derived from concept of the slogan both too impractical to work and too vulnerable to circumvention or constitutional challenge. On the Right, anger and frustration tend to fuel a “burn it down” sentiment. The futility of “drain the swamp” in the mouth of a swamp creature attracts not support but laughter and cynicism.

On this comment board, we tend to get hung up on the false dichotomies of “lesser evil” arguments. Even though everyone agrees that the Dems are awful and untrustworthy and generally useless (to us) tools of the plutocracy, we still get into arguments over whether Reps are “worse” (or whether “Reps are worse” is a redemptive defense of Dems that needs to be aired or simply a distraction to obscure how blameworthy Dems are), even while the political system that comprehends both Parties and corporate Media as they are, keeps up the looting and drifting.

Meanwhile, in the larger political world, a political re-alignment is underway, aided by long overdue generational change on the Democratic side of the aisle. I would like to encourage the commentariat here to pay more attention to how that is unfolding. Not as an object of “hope” (because I, personally, do not see the likes of Josh Hawley as a plausible savior) but just because it is what is happening. Inevitably, we here will take opposing rooting interests as things move further along, but for the moment, it is just interesting to note the Republican “populist” play alongside the Democratic determination to forego any strategic choice at odds with pleasing their Wall Street donors and thus go down with a rapidly sinking ship. First up, keeping an 80 year old Speaker. Followed in short order by the elevation of the one candidate who did worst in the Primaries to the Presidency in the midst of a pandemic and unfolding Great Depression, as the Democratic Party’s base shrinks geographically and in terms of class and demographically, not to mention the dominance once again (well-played Dems!) of Republican Legislatures in post-2020 redistricting.

“Generational Change”? Spare me that nonsense, please. The Dem old guard is just being replaced by Neera Tandens, Pete Buttigiegs and Rachel Maddows. The triumph of IdPol is change in only the most cosmetic of ways.