I've been trying to formulate in my head what makes me so enraged at the mainstream media. I used to get annoyed when I heard the blatant falsehoods parroted as though they had some truth, some value. Now I can barely bring myself to watch, especially in the morning when there is literally no good option. Should I watch Joe Scarborough and his band of merry-yes-men, or the Sugar Coated Substance Free Robin Meade's wardrobe hour, or Fox and Frie.... here comes the rage stroke.
I wanted to move past rage, for once, and try to figure out why these shows angered me so. Have I become the progressive version of a Fox Viewer, unable to cope with anything that doesn't conform to my world-view. That thought shook me, could I have become everything I despise. I thought hard about that and thought about what perturbed me about the mainstream media and I realized what it is, follow below the fold for my revelation.
As the title may have tipped you off with the title, I came to realize a simple truth about the 4th estate in America.
Conservative opinion is treated with the weight of fact.
Progressive fact is treated with the suspicious eye of opinion.
This is what makes me enraged, this is what sends my blood pressure through the roof, this is what makes me want to chuck my tv off the roof. But let's not just take my word for it, I'm hardly a neutral source, let's look at some examples.
Here is Dr. Brzezinski (liberal) against Joe Scarborough (conservative)
Now of course Joe Scarborough is going to agree with himself and give himself the weight of the world's greatest thinker on his own show. But let's look at the facts.
Dr. Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski is considered the democratic Henry Kissinger, he has a Bachelors and Masters from McGill University and a Doctorate from Harvard and served as National Security Adviser to former President Carter. I'm not defending all of his theories and actions, I'm just saying that the man knows what he's talking about when it comes to foreign policy.
Joe Scarborough is a former Republican Congressman who abandoned his office after 6 years with a 95% rating from the American Conservative Union, he has a JD from University Florida College of Law, his most distinguished law case was helping to defend a man (Michael F. Griffin) who murdered an abortion doctor (David Gunn). He is now a conservative blow-hard on tv and radio. He is also far from a foreign policy expert, having sponsored a bill to force the U.S. to withdraw from the United Nations
Yet he sits there with his "stunningly superficial" knowledge and tries to play in the big leagues with Dr. Brzezinski, he compares op-eds and widely held beliefs as though they have equal bearing as to the events that actually occurred, and the whole time Dr. Brzezinski's own daughter sycophantically sits there in silence, occasionally giggling like a damn fool.
Dr. Brzezinski - If you are going to judge your knowledge by the collective standard of 300,000,000 people then don't be surprised that you're embarrassed.
Morning Joe - I'm not embarrassed, I read the New York Time and the Washington Post and the foreign affairs, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to throw those away and any time I have a question I'm going to call you up.
Dr. Brzezinski - Let me spell it to you T-A-B-A Taba Negotiations, it will be helpful
Morning Joe - I'll do that and I'll throw out papers and foreign affairs and everything else I read.
I don't know what the hell it means to read a "foreign affairs" but when talking foreign policy with a foreign policy expert maybe his first-hand knowledge of something is slightly better than the "foreign affairs" that you are reading. If you actually look up the Taba Summit you will see that Dr. Brzezinski's account of the facts were correct.
Morning Joe continued in his braindead defense of his position
Morning Joe - You and I both know, Bill Clinton gave Arafat and the Palestinians everything they could want.
Dr. Brzezinski - You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on it is almost embarrassing to listen to you. If you were to look more closely at what happened at the Clinton-Camp David discussion you would know that what you just said is absolutely wrong.
Dr. Brzezinski has the facts on his side on this one, but anyone watching would be led to believe that there is some dispute over what really happened, there is not.
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There was a recent recced diary Too Controversial to be shown in the US? OMG WTF? that centered around this fact (click through and read that diary too, its quite good)
British film about Charles Darwin has failed to find a US distributor because his theory of evolution is too controversial for American audiences, according to its producer.
Evolution is a fact, plain and simple. It happens, its happening right now, that's why you need new flu shots every year, this is not even controversial. There are no legitimate biologists who will tell you evolution isn't true. Men can disagree about the reason we are here or what sky god to believe in and all that, but the simple fact remains, that even if you believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster (peace be upon his noodly appendage) you are still faced with the incontrovertible proof that environmental pressures cause natural selection and that process over time causes evolution. We have fossils, and petri dishes, and evidence coming out of our ears supporting evolution.
Yet this fact is treated like an opinion. Science can never prove anything, quips the christian right, and they are correct, but that doesn't keep gravity from holding you to the ground. Science can't prove anything, but belief can not erase the fact that we have a fossil record clearly showing lower creature evolving into higher ones. You can believe, if you choose, that this process was guided by some deity, but you can not throw out the evidence because you don't like it.
This really isn't liberal fact or conservative fact, although the conservative christians are the main opponent to the fact which is why I'm putting it over on the liberal side of the equation. And so it is treated not with the weight of one of the most beautiful and revolutionary scientific theories every crafted that has been tested through the rigors of the scientific method for more than a century and never found wanting, no its some pie in the sky theory dreamed up by moon headed jesus-haters. And in some states is on equal footing with the belief that a magic sky man poofed everything into existence and then left a massive fossil record to test the faithful.
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They do it again and again in the mainstream media, facts supported by evidence and studies and research are brushed aside. Whistleblowers saying that telecoms are spying on Americans are considered crack-pots, people standing up for civil liberties are rabble rousers, claiming that the basis for War in Iraq was a lie is unpatriotic. The right though can claim that Obama is a Kenyan, perfectly fine, dress him as Hitler, what galant Americans they are, and have TRANSPARENTLY ASTROTURF events, that the media will report as organic surges of REAL AMERICANS that don't want healthcare, they would rather die because of some pre-existing condition because Thomas Jefferson wanted to water a tree or something.
Paul Krugman, you may know him as Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, or possibly as Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, or maybe as 2008 Noble Laureate in Economics Paul Krugman, says that inflation is not a concern right now.
Michelle Malkin (famed conservative commentator with a Bachelor's in English) is concerned with inflation
Most on the right are concerned about inflation Rush Limbaugh (college dropout), Sean Hannity (another college dropout), and Glenn Beck (high school graduate) are all very concerned with inflation.
These might seem like ad hominem attacks, and its not that these people aren't deserving of a little ad hominem attack, but that's not the point. The point is that these people are dangerously unqualified to attempt to offer up their economic advice.
Yet you will hear their concerns 100 times a day, spewed forth from the great maw of the mainstream media as though its truth, proven because people say it enough.
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I could go on and on, but this has gotten long enough. The facts that we have don't mean anything, FDR's New Deal ended the great depression, most economists agree, but it doesn't matter because the matter can be muddied and the right will claim that the war fixed it (because the government dollars knew that they were fighting nazi's if they had been providing healthcare they wouldn't have worked right). The right will continue to loudly proclaim things, and the media will regurgitate it like it is fact, and maybe after a week or two of doing that they will actually do their job and find out they've been helping to spread a lie and spend a minute or two apologizing or explaining, and then on to the next lie.
The facts can not win this one, sorry. Our facts are seen as opinion, evolution is an opinion, not torturing people is an opinion, civil liberties are an opinion, meaningful reform is an opinion.
Death panels are fact, creeping socialism is fact, widespread hatred of change is fact (odd after someone just got elected on that very message).
The country we live is now divorced from reality, its found a sexier lady to shack up with, perception. The right has poisoned the 4th estate, but no worries, they keep telling us that the media has a liberal bias, that must be true, because their opinions are fact.
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[update] On the Rec List, thank you all very much, when the MSM lets me down I know I can come here for reality based news.