The big rap against blogs is that they're parasitic. They don't do any original reporting. Of course, the same exact thing can be said about most newspaper and magazine columnists, and they're just as much a part of traditional print media as reporters are. * [see footnote at end]
But the unfortunate reality is that, on the really big stories, the traditional media doesn't do much original reporting, either. They certainly didn't when it came to the long and tortuous connection between 9/11 and the Iraq War. The irony is that there actually was a good deal of very fine reporting, mostly from Knight-Ridder, but also from Gannet and elsewhere. The problem was, the whole was much less than the sum of the parts, and as the scattered excellent reporting was drowned in an avalanche of propaganda. Far too much "reporting" these days is simply massaging press releases, or taking stenography at press conferences, never bothering to cross-question what's presented by those in power, and the path from 9/11 to the Iraq War was a prime example of how this failed system routinely operates.
The value of the blogosphere does not come down to any one thing, but one major factor certainly is to expose what the traditional media choses to ignore. Most often this does not involve original reporting. But sometimes it does, and "sometimes" struck again this week with Bobby Jindal's nationally televised lying to the American people in his response to Obama's not-State of the Union speech.
This week, President Obama made news when he called on Sam Stein of the Huffington Post at his first press conference. It was, indeed, a significant occasion, a milestone in loosening the death grip that old media has had on our nation.
Examples of this death grip are legion. A few of the biggies include Whitewater, the multi-million dollar manufactured media scandal over a decade-old failed land deal. The media-assisted suppression of scientific evidence that global warming is a real and serious threat to human civilization as we know it. The media-assisted theft of the 2000 election. The media-assisted lie-based invasion of Iraq and overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the arch-enemy of bin Laden. These are not minor failures. Indeed, they're not failures at all: they are evidence of old media's true function, which is not to inform, but to deceive, and to do so in the interests of powerful reactionary elite interests.
I'm planning on writing about several major examples this weekend, but I thought I'd start off with something seemingly minor, a single story highlighted by Media Matters for America (MMFA) earlier this month. Because sometimes it's easier to grasp a problem by seeing it in minuature. And because one sees such seemingly minor examples virtually all the time.
This final installment to this series was delayed because of a domino effect set in motion when I had to cover a 6-hour Long Beach Harbor Commission meeting on Tuesday. For a refresher on the earlier installments, just click the links below
In this diary set, I've worked with the notion of historical cycles, or waves-specifically, three differently scaled waves all of which converge on this November's election, and in doing so, confront a wall--the intensely fortified network of rightwing organizations and their "moderate" and "centrist" enablers, together with the narratives they both depend upon and propagate.
The first part dealt with the roughly 32-40 year cycle of American Party Systems, The second part dealt with the rise and fall of successive world powers--Spain, Holland, Britain, and now us--described by former GOP uber-guru Kevin Phillips in Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich. The third part dealt with the recent wave of "post-materialist" values surveyed on a worldwide basis over the past several decades by the World Values Survey, and described most fully in the work of social scientist Ronald Inglehart.
Now, I look at the wall those waves are crashing up against...
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