I have no quarrel with TIME magazine devoting a cover to Glenn Beck -- so long as the accompanying story sticks to hard facts and harsh truths. The issue coming tomorrow, online today, sadly fails to do so in an apparent effort to woo the rightwing with a ludicrously "balanced" treatment of equally dangerous and wacko "ranting" coming from left and right.
It starts right away with a first paragraph that claims that only "liberal sources" estimated the protest crowd in D.C. last weekend as about 70,000, while conservatives say up to a million or more. Actually, virtually all mainstream media sources (even some on Fox News) endorse a far lower number. PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking site, cited an officer for the D.C. Fire and Emergency Department telling a reporter that, unoffically, he thought between 60,000 and 75,000 people had shown up.
If you get your information from liberal sources, the crowd numbered about 70,000, many of them greedy racists. If you get your information from conservative sources, the crowd was hundreds of thousands strong, perhaps as many as a million, and the tenor was peaceful and patriotic.
In this nugget TIME's David Von Drehle revealed his method. The "left" says one thing, the "right" another and, hell, who is to know the truth? He returns to this late in the piece by raising the crowd estimate gap again and explaining it as merely "who do you trust?"
Of course such coverage is anything but responsible. If you're going for "balance" rather than truth, then you only encourage the most unscrupulous to make the most outrageous claims. Then your "balance" will inexorably move the "sensible center" ever further in their fact-free, crazed direction. Any kindergarten teacher can explain this in detail, if necessary.
In sharp contrast to Time's egregious malpractice, Salon ran a deeply significant piece about Beck, exposing the nature of the man who's had the most significant impact on his recent devolution-- Cleon Skousen, described as "a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised." In fact, no less than J. Edgar Hoover and the elders of the Mormon Church regarded him as a dangerous crank. So if Time had wanted to ask the right questions, they could have had Hoover and Mormon elders representing the "left" as "balance" to Beck supporters. This article, "Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life", not only provides a striking contrast with Time's journalist slop, it also provides a valuable complement to Tim Wise's highlighting of Ayn Rand's hero-worship of sociopathic killer, which inspired Part 1 of this diary mini-series.
Together, these two stories, about Rand and Skousen, are not simply stories about the advancement of conservative ideas. Indeed, they are actually the exact opposite-they are about the destruction of conservative ideas by the rightwing lunatic fringe.
(Another diary about Bill Moyers last night. There's a message here: watch his show! Failing that, the full transcript is here.)
The Republican Party is not the enemy this November. They are a pathetic wreck. Hegemony is the enemy, and the Republican Party's recent inability to enforce hegemony has been superbly compensated for by the corporate media.
Cultural hegemony is a concept coined by Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci. It means that a diverse culture can be ruled or dominated by one group or class, that everyday practices and shared beliefs provide the foundation for complex systems of domination.
Or, as I like to put it, "Hegemony is ideology in common sense drag."
A key aspect of Gramsci's theory is that various different cultural institutions each fulfills their own function, often in ways that purportedly have nothing to do with one another-and yet they are actually functioning like various different units in an army-or nowadays an integrated fighting force, involving everything from infantry to satellites in space.
The media is an excellent example of this. In the 1990s, the media led the charge to depose Bill Clinton. As Gene Lyons meticulously documented in Fools for Scandal: How the Media Invented Whitewater, the New York Times and Washington Post persistently, repeatedly, and egregiously misreported virtually every major aspect of the so-called "Whitewater scandal." When that failed, and the Monica Lewinsky scandal emerged in its place, dozens of leading newspapers editorialized that Clinton should resign. Sixty percent of the American people disagreed, but they couldn't get a word in edgewise-which is where, when and how MoveOn.org was founded.
In contrast, George W. Bush has not merely subverted the most central aspects of our constitutional order with his dictatorial theories of unchecked executive power, he has shredded the Magna Charta as well as the Constitution, and yet the media persists in lying that only the "loonie left" thinks that there's anything amiss.
That's hegemony for you. And they do it, in large part, by following the supposedly "nuetral" rules of professional journalism. Although he makes no mention of Gramsci, Jeremy Iggers does a masterful job of showing that journalism ethics itself is the problem here in his 1998 classic, Good News, Bad News: Journalism Ethics And The Public Interest. So long as people think that the trouble with journalism is Jason Blair, not Judith Miller and her editors and publisher, then Houston, we have a problem. (Iggers, writing in the 1990s uses early Reagan-era examples, but the comparative misdeeds are eerily similar.)
