News Media
A remarkable indictment: “We Created a Monster: Trump Was a TV Fantasy Invented for ‘The Apprentice’" by John D Miller (head of marketing at NBC and NBCUniversal for some 25 years), U.S. News, Oct. 16, 2024.
Has the past decade of information war, alternative facts, and bothsidesing journalism been about conditioning us to believe we need crappy output from Silicon Valley’s LLMs?
I’m enjoying the DNC’s ceremonial roll call unmediated by television pundits. I did the same with a few speeches yesterday.
Fairness and Dignity
Lawrence O’Donnell had some tough words for his media colleagues yesterday on MSNBC. Journalists pretended to ask questions at a supposed news conference, broadcast live, while Trump pretended he was answering them. Throughout the charade, they gave him and his torrent of semi-coherent lies a pass, like they always do, most fatefully in 2016. Then O’Donnell showed a longer segment by the one candidate who actually had something to say yesterday, but whose talk had not been deemed worthy of a live broadcast on any network: Kamala Harris.
The vice president spoke to the United Auto Workers in Detroit. Her message was not a simple repeat of her Philadelphia speech the day before. In this smaller, more focused setting, she talked about the importance of collective bargaining for achieving a fair result. What’s more, she tied the term “collective” as used in an organized labour context to the community theme that figured so prominently in her Philadelphia speech. She linked the hard work of collective bargaining and of organizing politically to love of country, and she spoke of the dignity of labor.
Fairness and dignity. That’s a message Americans need to hear about. What they got, instead, was an impotent rehash of the same old resentments, lies, and insecurities. I’m not much for television news and opinion, but this 25-minute video (available on YouTube) is important. Broadcast and print media, take note. Your country deserves better.
Turned off NPR this afternoon because I am sick to death of the cliched, both-sides genre Let’s Talk to Voters in Swing States. This particular report (on Here and Now) was trying to be original by talking to swing-state voters considering voting differently this year, but it’s still the same old same old. Given the decimation of local news around the country, these national outlets need to do some actual reporting on goings-on outside their usual frames of reference.
“Here Come the Russians, Again” by David Corn, Mother Jones, May 24, 2024.
The media has an important role to play. The more attention it can cast upon the Russian efforts, the greater the odds that a slice of the electorate will comprehend the threat and perhaps be inoculated from being unduly influenced by these operations.
Of course, the media is largely failing us on this score.
Reading Aryeh Neier on Israel, International Humanitarian Law, and Justice
Aryeh Neier, “Is Israel Committing Genocide?”, The New York Review of Books, June 6, 2024.
The author, who has seen much as one of the founders of Human Rights Watch, has long been “sparing” in his application of the term “genocide” to state-committed atrocities over the past several decades. Initially he did not think of Israel’s indiscriminate, even criminal violence against civilians as genocide, because Israel had a clear right to defend itself against the barbarous acts of Hamas.
I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."
Reading about Israel's Universities during War
"Israel’s Universities: The Crackdown", The New York Review of Books, June 5, 2024.
Teaser: “Last October, Palestinian students and academic staff in Israel faced unprecedented penalties for their speech. Now the repression persists.”
Takeaway: This piece shows just how far academic institutions in Israel have been willing to go in order to serve the state’s goals at the expense of academic freedom, free speech, and the rule of law.
Question: How are universities governed in Israel? How vulnerable are they to outside political pressure under less fraught conditions? I am wondering about the political effects of Israel’s extreme right-wing government, on one hand, and the broad effects of the current wartime climate, on the other.
Blogging Politics
I ended the year with some political fatigue, so I have not been writing much about politics lately. Let’s face it. The campaign was a long one. I continue to be interested in politics, but I cannot be bothered to follow every little political squabble, especially not as it is currently being reported.
Right now each major issue appears in the media as a case of the Democrats say versus the Republicans say, and, quite frankly, I don’t really care what the Republicans are saying, not with their current tactic of doing nothing but say no in a situation where inaction is not an option. I’m more interested in learning how concrete decisions are being made, with or without the GOP. Not surprisingly then, I enjoyed Roger Simon’s opinion piece in Politico today,“Obama’s bold. What did you expect?"
One other thing has kept me from editorializing here more of late. The sheer size and complexity of the economic and foreign policy tasks facing us defies easy answers. Fortunately, we have an administration that gets that, even as it moves forward with amazing speed.
Labor Day
It is Labor Day in these United States of America. Observing this holiday became a bittersweet experience this morning, when Latin American workers showed up to take care of the garden outside my building, as if Labor Day was not for them too. On the other hand, allowing or forcing workers to observe this holiday would hurt them financially, because they would not be paid, just as millions of unorganized American workers are not being paid today. This circumstance is due in part to the weakness of organized labor in this country. Today I am also reminded of how most American media outlets treat news of Wall Street’s welfare as a story about the general interest but news of organized labor as a special interest. Even worse, far too many American workers have internalized this way of thinking.
By the way, did you know that most of the world celebrates this day on May 1st? I guess the internationalist and socialist connotations of that day were too much for this country.
War and Public Opinion
Last October, in connection with the bad news about Blackwater coming out, I made the following remarks on Clio and Me:
One of President Bush’s mistakes was to go to war with only enough public support to begin it. There is no such thing as war on the cheap. Private contractors are expensive in mere dollars, but they have helped the administration to avoid seeking a more solid domestic political foundation for the war—or accepting the consequences if it is unable to do so.
I stand by those remarks, but a piece in Sunday’s New York Times points to more sophisticated Pentagon management of the media than I had believed possible. In “Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” David Barstow reports on the Pentagon’s active courtship of so-called independent military analysts on the major television news networks. The analysts were seduced not only by the flattering attention by the Pentagon and the fees paid by the media, but also by the financial opportunities that their access to the Pentagon provided because of their ties to companies seeking military contracts.
On my tumblelog I was only half-joking when earlier this evening I wrote:
One more reason to watch The News Hour on PBS instead. So what is this now? The military-industrial-media complex? Or is everything okay since this has been stage-managed by our duly elected president’s appointed cronies?
Of course, propaganda or “psyops” [psychological operations] will only get the administration and Pentagon so far.