The Fortnightly Rant for July 30, 2010, from The New Hampshire Gazette, Volume 254, No. 22, posted on Saturday, January 15, 2011.
Casting stones is a risky business even in the best of cases. What’s more, your risk escalates with the egregiousness of the behavior you’re trying to condemn. Whenever you give in to temptation and deny another person’s humanity, you jeopardize your own.
That being said, the most revolting thing about the recent Andrew Breitbart/Shirley Sherrod flap is not what the self-styled “journalist” did. Releasing a bit of deceptively-edited video to manufacture a race-baiting narrative that is completely antithetical to the truth is exactly what you would expect a walking, talking heap of computer-literate pond scum to do.
No, the most revolting thing about this cheesy act of political sabotage was its effectiveness — that, and the probability that the same trick will continue to work, given the state of our media environment.
Coming as it did from a known fabricator and provocateur, whose modus operandi had been exposed less than four months ago in the Yuppie Pimp vs. ACORN farce, Breitbart’s “taped evidence” purporting to demonstrate U.S.D.A. official Shirley Sherrod’s reverse racism would have been quickly rejected by any legitimate news organization.
The Dissimulation Station
Enter Fox News, stage far right. There the clip was treated as if it had just arrived from Mt. Sinai, delivered by Moses.
Now in its fourteenth year, Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has perfected the art of injecting falsehoods into the public discourse. To an ordinary, honest person that might seem like a useless skill, not to mention a rather gross way to make a buck. Quite the contrary, at least as to the first part. Thanks to this country’s quaint habit of imagining that it is self-govered by an informed citizenry, inserting an adulterated “news product” into the larger flow of information is a cheap and incredibly effective way to defend the privileges of those who run the joint.
For one thing, chunks of ersatz news reinforce the beliefs of the truly weak-minded — those who still think George W. Bush was elected in 2000 and did a good job, for example. It also provides them with the latest non-facts which they can deploy in order to defend themselves in casual conversation against the constant threat of actually finding out what’s going on.
Faux news also induces confusion in the minds of those who may be truly in the political middle. The more time a member of this demographic spends pondering some totally bogus story about black racists on the government payroll, the less time he has to ask himself how some fat cat getting a tax break is going to do him any good.
Rewarding as they are, those effects are a mere bagatelle compared to Fox’s ability to create endlessly reverberating echoes throughout the allegedly legitimate media. They are to Fox as Fox is to Breitbart. By treating Fox’s trumped-up twaddle as if it might be authentic, they effectively lower the nation’s IQ by twenty points. Which is far more than we can spare.
A Profile in Cowardice
Talk about lost opportunities — this one was a twofer, at least.
Tom Vilsack, now the Secretary of Agriculture, took a shot at the Democratic presidential primary race in 2008 after serving two terms as Governor of Iowa.
When his sleepy department was suddenly everyone’s top story, he could have stonewalled for a single day, read the facts in the next day’s papers, then held a one-big-happy-family press conference with Sherrod and her good friends Roger and Eloise Spooner, the white farmers against whom she had allegedly discriminated. That would have left Breitbart and his Enabler-in-Chief Rupert Murdoch liberally coated with U.S.D.A.-inspected, Grade A egg on their disagreeable faces, and given Vilsack’s presidential ambitions a big, legitimate boost.
Instead Vilsack, the NAACP, and probably the upper reaches of the Executive Branch threw themselves into a collective panic attack. Just hours after Breitbart posted his little video clip online, the U.S.D.A.’s Deputy Undersecretary, Cheryl Cook, made three phone calls to Shirley Sherrod. “The last time,” Sherrod told the Associated Press, “they asked me to pull over to the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”
Predictably, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs got a thorough working over during a press briefing July 21st. Gibbs laid the blame for the hasty firing directly on Vilsack and erected a screen of plausible deniability around any pre-firing involvement on the part of President Obama. Then Gibbs and plausibility parted company.
A reporter asked Gibbs, “I’ve heard conservatives and liberals say this administration overreacted because you’re afraid of conservative commentators. Do you think there’s any truth to that?” Gibbs’s response, immortalized in the White House’s transcript, guarantees him a place next to Ari Fleischer and Ron Zeigler in the Lying White House Press Secretary Hall of Fame.
“No,” he said.
That same day, on CNN, Breitbart was interviewed by John King. Given that opportunity to repent and confess that he is a congenital liar, Breitbart chose instead to float a new theory: perhaps Eloise Spooner, the victimized white farmer’s wife, was not really who she said she was.
The King of Rackets
It may seem odd that supposedly legitimate news outfits would risk their reputations by letting Fox-generated swill slop over into their allegedly pristine news streams. But, like junkies who can take doses of drugs that would fell an ox, they have all, over the years, built up a tolerance through such methods as devoting air time to the likes of Frank Luntz, Dick Morris, Liz Cheney, and Karl Rove.
The most authoritative news organizations in the country routinely let those working for the side that’s winning the class war deploy false equivalencies, red herrings, and an arsenal of other rhetorical gimmicks — most of them dating from the time of the Greeks — to conjure up politely the same distortions that Murdoch delivers with the bark on.
Anyone who lives in the U.S. and makes more than a million a year ought to pay a tithe to the Church of Rupert, because he owes him at least that much. Murdoch does make out pretty well on his own hook, though.
Of all the rackets in existence, the most important one is that which defines reality. Many different organizations are involved in this racket, and they all have their own style. To the extent that their work keeps our civic discourse safe for plutocracy, they all serve the same set of masters — and by their tax breaks ye shall know them.