House of Eratosthenes

That dinner coming up where we were going to invite Barbara Walters and blogger friend Joan of Argghh!….and seat them next to each other. You know what, I think we might be putting that one off a little while.

Courtesy of Judicial Watch, via Doug Ross’ Journal, we see a fine example of what it means to discern the times you live in, and to judge a man by his actions. You weren’t crazy, you were right all along. In this instance, two men and one now-grandmotherly woman all chummy with the political pervert’s plans to undermine our country:

Furthermore, Kennedy approached the Soviets with an offer to help undermine Ronald Reagan’s 1984 presidential reelection campaign. Kennedy proposed a public relations blitz and mentioned his friends — Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters, by name — as willing to assist in the propaganda effort.

Read Doug’s post first. There are no civil words for media and political figures like these. So, fuck Water Cronkite, fuck the Kennedys, and fuck Barbara Walters.

Every now and then, someone will scold me for taking the trouble to link to a blog. Read the mainstream news intead, they tell me. And I usually come back with something about evolving to address the realities of a changing world; using one’s intellect to recognize truths, and adapt to them. I try to remind them that it is a world of selection. We don’t subscribe to one of two major local newspapers or tune in to one of three alphabet-soup networks at six o’clock to find out what someone wants us to think. That’s a very 1960 way of taking in your information; a teevee-tray-and-rickety-folding-table way of doing it. The cliche I use most often is something like “The era of Walter Cronkite is over.”

I have no regrets about presenting it that way. None at all. Relying on a single-source for your understanding of what’s going on in the world, should be recognized as a bad move even by the most casual observer. Because people want power. It’s human nature to try to figure out how to have a bigger effect on things.

So millions upon millions of people saw Cronkite as the kindly old trusted uncle we could all rely on to tell us the news. Well, bully for those millions. Cronkite obviously didn’t see himself that way, and that’s what really counts.

Viewing the world through Walter Cronkite’s presentation of it, is going to be recognized by history on par with treating a case of tuberculosis with burning incense and magic spells. Whether it was a ritual engaged day after day by millions and millions, doesn’t matter one bit. It’s a ritual that is aging very poorly, and time is only just beginning to leave its harshest marks upon it.

Time to admit it. We were hoodwinked.

We most often complain that our leftist friends are stuck in the Sixties. When it comes to “journalism,” at least, I think they’re stuck in the Twenties.

That’s about the time J-schools started being founded, and that’s when this idea that scribbling for a newspaper is somehow a “craft” that has “standards” and can be taught. Back in the days, newspapers were openly partisan, and which local rag you subscribed to gave everyone a wealth of information about your personality, your political opinions, business prospects, and so on (and it’s actually great fun to see the wild contrast between the way the Grover’s Corners Democrat-Picayune and the Gopher Prairie Republican-Dispatch covered common events back in the 1800s). And when it came to national papers, everyone knew the Hearst one was the pro-administration one and the Pulitzer one was the opposition, or vice versa.

In short, they were a lot like blogs — occasionally informative, somewhat pretentious, but just as much about entertainment as actual news– and people treated them as such. Came the 20s, though, and all of a sudden seemingly “objective” reporting led inexorably to “progressive” ends — New York slums really were as awful as those Jacob Riis photographs made them out to be, and for once the “progressives” had both right and justice on their side. And the “muckraker” was born — the guy who could claim to be giving you “just the facts” about how awful government, big business, trusts, etc. all were.

I know I’m getting some of that chronology wrong — How the Other Half Lives was published in the early 1890s I think — but I think I’m right on the idea. The press got a taste of themselves as courageous, objective truth-tellers… and have been milking it ever since.
- Severian | 03/01/2011 @ 10:53
That’s a good point, I actually never thought of it that way. Uncle Walt was actually the agent of revolution before he was the entrenched legacy power…or at least, that is true of his methodology.

It looks like sometime after WWII advertising took a similar turn. In the Fortune magazines from the thirties or thereabouts, you put just the right color in your cheeks by scrubbing with the right kind of soap or drinking the right brand of whiskey. By the Watergate era, though, the message is different: Brand X is toxic, will hurt you, you’re making a bad decision by choosing it and you might even be deserving of a good heckling. I wonder if high-speed mass communication causes this.
- mkfreeberg | 03/01/2011 @ 11:08
I think it’s mostly a function of the never-ending need to be new and different, which high-speed mass communication really exacerbates.

There’s nothing wrong, ipso facto, with “sticking it to The Man” — sometimes The Man needs to have it stuck to him, and personally I’m glad that guys like Riis and Upton Sinclair shed some light on real abuses. But sometimes it’s equally necessary to not stick it to The Man — national secrets come to mind — and if J-schools had real ethics classes they’d spend lots of time debating “the public’s right to know.” Unfortunately, “Everything’s Ok, Nothing to See Here” isn’t a headline that sells many newspapers, and it’s lethally easy to justify publishing anything and everything that would boost ratings by citing “the public’s right to know.”

[One of my favorite leftist inconsistencies is that they scream how “the corporate media” does the bidding of “big business,” yet according to this narrative “the corporate media” routinely sit on stories that would corner the market for them for all time. If, for instance, Bush really did “lie us into war” — and the left all but insists that there are hand-signed memos out there from W. to this effect — the newspaper that published them would instantly sell more editions than every other newspaper in the history of the world combined. You’re telling me that evil corporate overlord Rupert Murdoch would hold of on quintupling his fortune just for the sake of his golf buddy George Bush? Ninja please.]

Everything in the modern media environment works this way, I think. It’s really hard to convince somebody that Brand X makes you sexier, but very easy to imply that it’ll kill you, or cause global warming, or something. It even works in academia — nobody would ever even look at a dissertation titled “Hamlet was a Great Play,” but imply that Shakespeare was a left-handed lesbian hemophiliac transsexual migrant worker and you’ll be the toast of the faculty lounge.
- Severian | 03/01/2011 @ 11:57
Hey, I finally found my password! :o)

I’ve been watching the so-called watchdogs ever since Woodward and Bernstein became rock stars. Steadily and surely, the news has become all about the news industry. The pundits opine on other pundits and make themselves the arbiters of all things. They have become a religion that demands a pretty blind faith in their pronouncements, world views, and whims.
- JoanOfArgghh | 03/01/2011 @ 19:05

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“Comrades: Kennedy, Cronkite and Barbara Walters”Tuesday, March 1st, 2011

“Comrades: Kennedy, Cronkite and Barbara Walters”
Tuesday, March 1st, 2011