Written on Monday, September 21st, 2009 at 5:18pm by Christopher Smith | 9 Comments

Big Media Sucks

big-media

If you don’t read Glenn Greenwald, on the regular, you’re doing yourself a disservice.  He’s one of the last of his kind, an actual journalist who investigates and reports the “How” and the “Why” as often as schmoes like David Gregory or Jake Tapper reports the “Who”, “When”, “Where” and least importantly, “Who’s winning”.

In a column from last week about the “debate” of how many people showed up for Glenn Beck’s Uninformedracistmoronapolooza march in DC, Greenwald wrote something that has been rattling around my head ever since…

Eric Boehlert has masterfully documented how right-wing claims about the number of protesters was literally invented out of whole cloth — Michelle Malkin simply made up a number (2 million) that was repeated by right-wing sources far and wide, and Glenn Beck then did the same (1.7 million) — and bears no relationship whatsoever to reality.  But either way, the reports of tens of thousands came not from “liberal sources” but from the establishment media.  Just yesterday, the Washington Post’s Fletcher reported that his journalist colleagues – not Daily Kos — “say it was in the tens of thousands, probably around 20,00 or 30,000.”

You might remember a post I wrote a few months back in which I said,

Once upon a time in this nation, there was an objective truth and then there was partisan interpretations of that truth doled out in the battle lines of politics.  Now?  Objective truth is hard to find as the partisan rhetoric and point scoring has clouded what is true and what is false.

Glenn lays out how the media is responsible for this pointless he said/she said reporting style which simply focuses on the horserace and not the substantive issues in the debate.

Time (Magazine) isn’t allowed to critique right-wing claims even when they’re totally false.  Doing that would make Rush Limbaugh and Fox News angry.  So rather than pointing out what actually happened — that right-wing claims about march attendance were false and debunked by news organizations — they have to pretend that this is, as always, nothing more than an irreconcilable dispute about reality between the Right and the Left, and it’s not up to Time to tell their readers what the truth is, because that’s not their role, since they’re objective and unbiased.  According to the rules of establishment journalism, there is no truth and no facts — only competing, irreconcilable claims from “the Right and the Left,” and their only job is to mindlessly repeat those claims

“Truth and accuracy” are completely different from “Fair and Balanced” and the failure to understand that is what is destroying American media from the inside-out.

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9 Comments

  1. Mike In WNY says:
    September 21, 2009 at 7:18 pm

    It wasn’t Glenn Beck’s march. The march was organized by http://www.freedomworks.org/files/capitol%20view%20lo%20res.jpg.

  2. Jackson says:
    September 21, 2009 at 7:55 pm

    Mike’s right, aside from picking the date, setting the agenda, touring the country in support of it, giving updates on progress, talking about it constantly on radio/TV, frequent Facebook/Twitter outreach, and sending producers to warm up the crowd before his live coverage…he had nothing to do with it.

  3. Chris Smith says:
    September 21, 2009 at 8:30 pm

    And I’d like to thank you both for completely missing the entire point.

  4. Mike In WNY says:
    September 21, 2009 at 11:47 pm

    I didn’t miss your point. Just didn’t have much time when I commented. I agree with the sorry state of journalism but am not sure where to place the original blame. It is kind of a chicken or the egg type argument. Personally, I think the news gone bad is just a symptom of the whole governmental system gone bad.

    I do read Greenwald quite regularly, he is a featured columnist on LewRockwell.com, you can access the archive of his article here. The collection is quite extensive.

  5. Ethan says:
    September 22, 2009 at 9:18 am

    PSA: Greenwald also writes quite regularly for Salon.com, so don’t feel like you have to drop pageviews @ some Libertarian site just to read him.

    The common thread of FAIL that afflicts both our Gvt & our media equally is unfettered control by enormous, deep-pocketed corporations and their lobbying groups; both institutions have come to serve them much better than “we the people.”

  6. Ethan says:
    September 22, 2009 at 9:28 am

    oh, and speaking of Salon.com, Lind has a great column there today on the history of neo-conservativism/paleoliberalism.

    http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2009/09/22/neoconservatism/index.html

  7. Mike In WNY says:
    September 22, 2009 at 12:17 pm

    Ethan, I do read Salon.com, in fact, I receive their daily email. I didn’t drop page views just so people can read Greenwald, I dropped the page view so people can gain knowledge that is lacking in many cases.

    Regarding the unfettered control by enormous, deep-pocketed corporations, the behavior is enabled by a government that treads on ground that should be off-limits.

  8. Ethan says:
    September 22, 2009 at 1:39 pm

    In a startling display of Jungian synchronicity, my Snapple “Real Fact” of the day was this: William McKinley had a pet perrot that he named “Washington Post.”
    What was that other bit you wrote about “plus ca change, plus c’est le meme chose…”?

  9. Ethan says:
    September 22, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    oh, FML, “parrot!” I meant “parrot”

 

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