Gene Lyons at Salon ("Media fooled by right-wing propaganda -- again") and Eric Altermann at the Nation ("Journalism's Age of Shame") both make a simple point regarding the now-exposed Andrew Breitbart against former USDA official Shirley Sherrod. Lyon's subhead says it all: "Reporters and editors are too scared of the 'liberal media' label to fact-check the right." And Altermann's lede paragraph says much the same:
The black political art of "working the refs" with constant and vociferous complaints of "liberal bias" in the media has a long and distinguished history. Few of its practitioners, however, have succeeded so frequently-and nakedly-as the ex-Drudge drudge and Arianna acolyte Andrew Breitbart. The estimable E.J. Dionne terms Breitbart to be the MSM's virtual "assignment editor" and, indeed, it's hard not to be impressed. Breitbart has already been exposed as a provocateur who cares not a whit for honesty or accuracy in his self-declared war on all things liberal. Yet reporters, editors and producers remain so frightened by his accusations that they continue to trumpet them as they search their souls to purge themselves of the bias that prevented them from seeing the world from a Tea Party point of view.
The failure is so blatant and obvious that no one can possibly believe that the press as it is today will ever cure itself of this terminal illness. Nothing internal to the system will do. It is the power structure that is at fault. It's not a matter of writing or editing, or anything like that. It's a matter of ownership, groupthink, and brainwashing.
I go back a long way on these politicized hoaxes. Courtesy of the Clinton administration, Arkansas journalists got an early introduction into the creepy methods of conservative political operatives and their ability to hoodwink the national press. The local version of the Shirley Sherrod story was an equally admirable public servant named Beverly Bassett Schaffer.
As long ago as 1992, Schaffer found herself implicitly accused of "Whitewater" corruption in the New York Times. Although she'd provided the reporter with documented evidence that she'd done everything in her power as Arkansas savings-and-loan regulator to close Jim McDougal's Madison Guaranty S&L years before federal regulators got around to it, once the Times committed its prestige to a bogus narrative there was no turning back. Schaffer soon found herself hounded through the streets of Fayetteville by "mainstream" TV crews with GOP oppo researchers openly riding shotgun.
Most surprising to me then was the national media's pack behavior. Even incontestable, dispositive facts could be ignored for years if it meant keeping the longest political shaggy-dog story in recent American history going. It wasn't that reporters were stupid, mainly cowardly and career-driven. Indeed, they always understood precisely which facts couldn't be admitted into the narrative if they wanted to keep feeding out of Kenneth Starr's hand. By the time Schaffer's vindication came, they'd lost interest in her.
While the parallel between Sherrod and Schaffer is compelling, what's even more informative is a wide-angled view of how the New York Times and the Washington Post basically created the "Whitewater" scandal. Oh, of course, they didn't originate it--it originated with Clinton's rightwing enemies. But those enemies could not have created the media scandal over a non-existent financial scandal, which in turn provided the scaffolding for Clinton's eventual impeachment--and, of course, the media's "revenge" on Al Gore for not playing along with them, which in turn brought us the unelected President G.W. Bush. For that, they needed the Post and the Times to do their dirty work for them. It takes a whole book for Lyon's to tell the story, but a key episode encapsulates the entire thing, so far as practical and moral lessons are concerned, and that is how the Post and the Times ignored the 1995 Pillsbury Report, clearing the Clintons of any wrongdoing. The report was commissioned by the Resolution Trust Corporation, and by all rights it should have halted the Whitewater investigation dead in its tracks. But because it totally contradicted their own scandal-monger, the Post and the Times chose to bury the report--a key turn of events in condemning American to more than decade-long nightmare.
By now, you've probably seen at least part of the video of Delaware Congressman Mike Castle's town-hall encounter with the Birther base:
What struck me immediately on seeing it was how perfectly it epitomized something I wrote about roughly a year ago-the power of mythos as opposed to logos, a topic that has only grown more important over the past year, as all pretense of rightwing logos has crumbled into dust. As I explained, following directly in Karen Armstrong's footsteps from The Battle For God, logos is all about how things work, mythos is about what they mean. As I quoted from Armstrong in "Tales of the City IS Fiction-And Mythos":
Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence. Myth looked back to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning. Unless we find some significance in our lives, we mortal men and women fall very easily into despair. The mythos of a society provided people with a context that made sense of their day-to-day lives; it directed their attention to the eternal and the universal. It was also rooted in what we would call the unconscious mind. The various mythological stories, which were not intended to be taken literally, were an ancient form of psychology. When people told stories about heroes who descended into the underworld, struggled through labyrinths, or fought with monsters, they were bringing to light the obscure regions of the subconscious realm, which is not accessible to purely rational investigation, but which has a profound effect upon our experience and behavior. Because of the dearth of myth in our modern society, we have had to evolve the science of psychoanalysis to help us to deal with our inner world.
In the good old days, people were smart enough to keep the two separate most of the time, but this has become virtually impossible as logos has become so incredibly successful over the past thousand years or so. This is the deep irony underlying fundamentalism-rather than being a reassertion of traditional religion, as it takes itself to be, it is a total abdication of the power of mythos on which religion ultimately rests.
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