| Over at Salon this morning, Glenn Greenwald began by reviewing a littany of dire warnings from before the last mid-terms about how the Democrats would suffer because of their extremist anti-war base. Here's an excerpt:
From an absolutely brilliant front-page article in The Washington Post, by two absolutely brilliant and serious political journalists:
Democrats Fear Backlash at Polls for Antiwar Remarks
By Jim VandeHei and Shalaigh Murray Strong antiwar comments in recent days by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean have opened anew a party rift over Iraq, with some lawmakers warning that the leaders' rhetorical blasts could harm efforts to win control of Congress next year....
That was from December 7, 2005. Jim VandeHei is now at The Politico saying these things. Otherwise, everything is completely unchanged. And then there was this, from "liberal" Joe Klein in Time in January, 2006:
How to Stay Out of Power Most polls indicate that a strong majority of Americans favor the act, and I suspect that a strong majority would favor the NSA [warrantless eavesdropping] program as well, if its details were declassified and made known. [L]iberal Democrats are about as far from the American mainstream on these issues as Republicans were when they invaded the privacy of Terri Schiavo's family in the right-to-die case last year. But there is a difference. National security is a far more important issue, and until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.
And then there was this, from "liberal" Eleanor Clift in Newsweek from March, 2006:
Republicans finally had something to celebrate this week when Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold called for censuring George W. Bush. Democrats must have a death wish. Just when the momentum was going against the president, Feingold pops up to toss the GOP a life raft.... The broader public sees it as political extremism. Just when the Republicans looked like they were coming unhinged, the Democrats serve up a refresher course on why they can't be trusted with the keys to the country.
After all that and more, Glenn reflected:
After spending the entire year doing everything the Beltway geniuses warned them not to do, not a single Democratic incumbent lost anywhere in the country -- not one.
This "wisdom" -- don't oppose Mighty George Bush on national security, repudate that angry anti-war "Leftist Base" -- proved to be as wrong as anything could be. So now what do we hear?
Democrats better not oppose the President on Iraq, warrantless eavesdropping, presidential powers -- otherwise they will look too weak and jeopardize themselves politically. They better repudiate the "inflammatory" statements coming from their angry "left-wing" or else they will alienate voters and it will serve as a "distraction" from all the great and important things they could be doing. They better go along with the eavesdropping and amnesty agreement cooked up by the Serious Jay Rockefeller and the Serious Dick Cheney if they want to win in 2008 because defying the Leader's orders will make them look weak.
In response to this post, I commented:
Over at OpenLeft, I've been wrestling with something that's closely related to this, in fact, I think it gets right at the heart of what's going on.
My argument has been that there's a duality between left and right (I use an illustration of duality in graph theory): the right/GOP is clueless on policy, but masterful politically, while the opposite it true of the left/Dems. This can be made more rigorous in terms of cognitive development theory, which descends from the early work of Jean Piaget.
In particular, a comprehensive formulation from Harvard researcher Robert Kegan explains the progression from one level to another in terms of the background, contextual, subject structure at one level becoming foreground, content, objects at the next. A key distinction for political purposes comes between levels 3 and 4. Level 3 is that of normal adulthood in traditional societies, and the subject at that level is composed of the social structure, roles and relationships of the society. The level 3 self is, quite simply, a social construct. The level 4 self is the self of modern society, which takes the social structure, roles and relationships of the society as object, and reflects and acts upon them from a position of moral autonomy. Historically, the level 4 self emerged because the pace of social change crossed a threashold that required people to begin consciously retooling social relationships that previously had only changed slowly over time.
How this applies to politics is fairly straightforward: when conservatives talk about "traditional values" much of what they mean is simply holding fast to level 3 mores, regardless of the fact that level 4 exists precisely because of the inadequacy of such mores. (This is not to say there is no value in such mores. Merely that they are not the end all and be all of human wisdom.) In contrast, liberals' willingness to engage in "social engineering" (freeing the slaves, giving women the vote, gay marriage, etc.) is a natural consequence of level 4 (or even level 5) thinking, which sees level 3 as providing a good historical foundation in many, though not all respects, but not as defining the limits of possibility.
Now, here's the thing: just as the above explains why liberal ideas have proven politically superior over the past 500 years or so, there is a reverse explanation for why conservatives have been so politically dominant over the past 30 years or so in the US: when it comes to political process, it is the liberals who have been embedded in level 3, taking the socially-defined limits of the American political system for granted as the defining structures of their own thought, while the conservatives have looked on those structures as objects to manipulate at will. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was a perfect example of this. So, too, the Supreme Court's selection of Bush as President, and, of course, the Bush/Cheney docrine of the "unitary executive."
The Versailles press is, indeed, "liberal" in this same sense: they, too, simply accept the limits of the political order as the limits of all that is possible. Beyond it lies only the madness of the blogs, "Bush Derangement Syndrome" and Michael Moore. Because the conservatives are constantly reshaping the political order, the Versailles press is constantly adjusting to accomodate them. What they write has, of course, no relationship to reality--as Glenn's post here so vividly demonstates. But it conforms perfectly to the conservative shaping of the political order that defines who they are. And that is what explains their behavior.
The last part of my comment is key, so I'll repeat it for emphasis: Because the conservatives are constantly reshaping the political order, the Versailles press is constantly adjusting to accomodate them. What they write has, of course, no relationship to reality--as Glenn's post here so vividly demonstates. But it conforms perfectly to the conservative shaping of the political order that defines who they are. And that is what explains their behavior.
I want to be perfectly clear. We often refer to how members of the Versailles want to be invited to the right parties, and so forth. And there is certainly truth in this. But that alone makes it sound trivial, makes them sound trivial. And, of course, there is considerable truth in the latter... but in the former, not so much.
First of all, the process of social rewards involved in party invites is just the tip of a very large iceberg. The media landscape is full of pitfalls, with very few pinnacles, and many, many opportunities for promoting those whose stories are pleasing to the corporate betters.
Second, there are daily operating pressures, not the least of which is the necessity to play by Versailles rules. A striking example of this occured when then-AP reporter Robert Parry, now of Consortiumnews, first broke the Iran-Contra story, and not just the Versailles press corps, but even Rolling Stone magazine turned up their noses at him.
Parry told this story at a book talk in Santa Monica 14 years ago, which I happened to attend. Here's an excerpt from the transcript:
So as much as I would like to say, like I was really some sort of journalistic genius who'd figured this all out, it didn't require that much. It just required sort of following the leads. They were all over the place. But we'd learned to sort of shield our eyes from the leads in Washington. And as we're doing this - I was now working with Brian Barger who we had brought on at AP - to help on this story, and we did the Contra-drug story in December of 1985, which was really well received around town [he said sarcastically], and we then proceeded to follow the North network into early '86 and we wrote the first story that there'd actually been a federal investigation in Miami, of what we knew as the North network. It had been suppressed because you weren't supposed to investigate this because it wasn't happening anyway, and the US. attorney who make the mistake of trying to investigate this, or the assistant US. attorney ended up in Thailand, working on some heroin case, and the investigation went literally nowhere.
So this was what was happening by the Summer of '86, when Barger and I finally did a story - we had 24 sources by this point - it was getting silly, you know? You know, it wasn't like two sources, or three sources, we were up to 24, and some of them named, and we did this story in June of '86 where we laid a lot of it out - we didn't have all of it, I'll grant - we didn't know about Secord's flights, but we had Rob Owen, and we had Jack Singlaub, and we had how the intermediaries were moving the weapons and so forth.
So we get to this point, and we put this story out, and finally Congress - which had been very afraid of touching this - the Democrats were extremely timid - finally Lee Hamilton, who was then Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee takes our little story with the rest of the Intelligence Committee over to the White House and they sit down with Ollie North and they say, "Colonel North - we have this story that says you're doing these things which are kind of illegal, uh, what about it?" He said, "It's not true," they said "Thank you," and they went back to Capitol Hill.
And I get a call from one of Hamilton's aides, and he told me, he said - I'll never forget this, because it was probably my worst moment in the whole Iran Contra Scandal - I get this call from a Democratic aide who tells me that Lee Hamilton has looked into my story, and he had a choice between believing these honorable men at the White House or my sources and it wasn't a close call.
And so, at that point, we were, sort of, done. They could have - as Ross Perot might say - they could have stuck a fork in us. Barger was stuck on the overnight at AP and was sort of pushed out of the company - he left. I was basically told, more or less, well, you know, take your medicine like a man, you got it wrong, you know, and we were wrapping up our investigation - it was over. During that summer we tried to get a longer version of this into any publication, virtually none would take it. None would take it - I mean, we even went to Rolling Stone and they turned us down.
So that's where we were. This phony, dishonest, false reality had won out. And the reality had lost out, and anyone who was crazy enough to actually believe in the reality was a real loser in Washington.
And then, as it all looked like it was pretty much over, one of the last planes of Ollie North's little rag-tag airforce, was chugging along over Nicaragua on October 5th, 1986, and just because history is like this - history is kind of, you know, it's quirky sometimes - there was this teenager, draftee, never filed a SAM missile in his life, didn't even know how to fire it exactly, but he described after the fact how he sort of aimed it at this plane that was sort of lumbering along through the sky, and it went off!
The SAM missile went off, and it went right at the plane, which really amazed this kid. They say it was Soviet made - I mean, what would you have thought? So the missile goes right at the plane and hits it right under one of the wings and the plane starts spiraling out of control. And another little quirk of history is that - most of the guys were kind of macho on board, and they didn't wear parachutes, but Eugene Hasenfus had just gotten a parachute sent to him by one of his relatives, and because he had the door open to start kicking out these weapons to the Contras, even though the plane spiraled out of control he could crawl to the door and pushed himself away from the plane and parachuted down through the Sandinistas.
And so, there was literally a smoking fuselage on the ground in Nicaragua, and the press corps in Washington suddenly said, 'oh gee! Maybe we had missed something after all.'
Sill, they were able to keep the larger story suppressed until after the mid-term elections.
Journalism Ethics As Problematic
But the workings of truth suppression revealed by Parry's account are only part of the picture. A deeper part goes to the very nature of how journalism as a whole defines its roles and purposes. This is the subject of a unique book of media criticism, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics and the Public Interest. In it, Iggers argues that the core problem with journalism is not that journalists sometimes violate their code of ethics, the problem is the code of ethics itself.
Instead of being a disinterested code, divorced from the everyday pressures of realworld journalism, Iggers shows how codes of journalism ethics are deeply interested documents, reflecting the over-arching material concerns. Conflicts of interest, for example, are held to be a very serious concern for individual journalists. Yet, dependence on advertising creates much more powerful economic incentives at the corporate level, which are routinely ignored. At the same time, it's clear that journalists and their sources both benefit from dealing regularly with one another, and yet the journalist-source relationship is regarded as a pillar of journalism, not a source of ethical problems. This is but one aspect of his critique, which demonstrates a complete lack of level 4 reflection on the practice of journalism from outside the system of relationships that practical journalism is embedded in.
Iggers also provides a compact history of how journalims ethics has changed over the years, particularly around the notion of truth-telling, as various different proxies for quasi-scientific "truth" have been tried and found wanting. In the end, we have arrived at a state in which "balance" has come to substitute for any concern with "truth"-we're much too sophistatced to believe in that anymore. This helps to explain why the media can get things so thoroughly and deeply wrong-as they have done continuously with Iraq, and as Glenn shows, with the 2006 mid-terms-and yet not be bothered at all: they have done their jobs according to the book.
Journalism Ethos As Problematic
Finally, one can consider the matter of journalistic culture and ethos. There are ways of promoting or validating some stories, just as there are ways of dismissing others. The Downing Street Memo provides a classic example. Here was smoking gun evidence that the President of United States had lied about invading Iraq, had planned for it roughly a year in advance, and worked to construct a plausible rationale. It was, by any sensible measure, a blockbuster story. And yet, it has been regularly and routinely ignored by the Versailles media.
When I interviewed a USA Today reporter who had co-written an excellent, high-profile article on the first anniversay of 9/11 which told a similar story, but without the evidence of the Downing Street Memo, she showed no interest in following up on it, and did so using a coule tropes I've heard before-it was an "old story" that was "up to the historians now." Of course, it went directly to the issue of impeachable offenses and the needless deaths of thousands of Americans, and many more Iraqi civilians. What's more an even "older story"-the Whitewater land deal, in which no one died-was kept alive ad nauseum by the press, despite copious evidence that the Clintons had lost money on the deal and done nothing wrong whatsoever.
But this only goes to show that such explanations are not to be taken seriously at face value. They are semi-ritualized behavior, by which certain unwanted stories are gotten rid of, while others are embraced-nothing more, nothing less. They are part and parcel of how level 3 life is lived, and as such they cannot be seriously questioned by a level 3 consciousness. Only someone who stands outside, someone at level 4 or above who regards such rituals and the purposes they serve as objects can properly question or challenge them. And any attempt to do so will be severely attacked. Just look at how Versailles screams bloody murder about the blogosphere, almost every day now.
Conclusion
What I've done here is to highlight several different convergent factors that all combine to shape Verailles journalistic practice in a conventionalized manner that cannot be seriously critiqued except from a level 4 perspective, which they do nothing to support, and everything to subvert.
The notion of an independent truth to be served--an 18th Century Enlightenment notion that fanned the flames of the press that helped win our freedom as a nation--is virtually nowhere to be found. Global warming, evolution, George Bush's numerous impeachable offenses, none of these are, or possibly could be matters of simple, straightforward truth, because such truth no longer exists in the lowly precincts of Versailles.
They owe their allegience to another 18th Century tradition, from which they take their name--an opulent, excessive, out-of-touch culture of gossip, terminal triviality and utter incompetence. That is their reality. It is all they know, and it has total dominance over mere facts, which are completely powerless to change the stories it tells.... just like it was in the old Versailles until the guillotine came.
Then, finally, facts cut to the quick.
America trembles, wondering... can we still avoid that terrible, horrific fate? Or is our ruling class simply too far gone? |
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