Why Facts No Longer Matter In The Media Discourse
How should we understand this latest and most troubling insight into the reality of our media ecology?
In the aftermath of the resolution of the Great Birther bash-up, even as President Obama tried to lay the issue at rest by producing the document that showed, proved, verified, documented, and validated his birth in one of the great states of our disunion, it was said that its release would only fuel more debate, and convince no one.
In other words, in the end, this long debated fact didn’t matter.
Facts no longer seem to matter on other issues, too, as articulated in the now infamous memo issued by retiring Senator Jon Kyle whose office, when confronted with evidence that he misspoke on the matter of how much money Planned Parenthood spent on abortions—he claimed 90%, the truth was but 3%—issued an advisory that said, “The statement was not meant to be factual.”
Jon Stewart and…
“Liberals” Take Over The Media
As far as memes go, “liberals control the media” seems pretty prevalent. People who long for the days of school spankings shriek it at the top of their lungs – actual liberals believe it if only so they can believe they control something. But as we slowly descend back to Earth we realize The Media is a business.
And the point has been made that you could look long and hard through the board of directors of any of the media giant(s) before you find an honest-to-God Liberal. Liberals are tolerated in the media to the extent that they can make their bosses money.
All these points became clear to me in light of a new propaganda film (made by Citizens Against Government Waste) making the rounds where we see a group of Chinese circa 2030 cackling over America’s demise. Maybe you’ve seen it too – where some communists attribute America’s immanent doom…
Chances Are, They’re Not Nazis
Aaron Cynic writes at Diatribe Media:
Back in the halcyon days following George W Bush’s inauguration, detractors and opponents of many stripes referred to W and his administration as Nazi’s. Even before the days of borderline fascist government policies like the PATRIOT ACT or warrantless wiretapping and torture apologists, lefties and others handed out poorly Xeroxed pamphlets featuring W’s face with a Hitler mustache.
Now, the jack boot is on the left foot, with hard line right wing conservatives dropping the Nazi card when referring to all things not Right as some form or another of Nazism. Most recently, Fox News chief Roger Ailes called the top brass at NPR “the left wing of Nazism” and said they have a “Nazi attitude.” Allies’ comments refer to the firing of NPR news analyst Juan Williams, after he told Bill O’Reilly that Muslims make him “nervous.”
It seems somewhere along the line the word “Nazi” devolved to…
Keith Olbermann Suspended by MSNBC
Photo: kirstenlovesputi (CC)
Wow — Comcast (owners of NBC) didn’t waste any time coming to terms with the United States’ political shift to the right! The leading liberal television commentator Keith Olbermann is left in the dust… From the New York Times:
Keith Olbermann, the top anchor on MSNBC, was suspended on Friday after the channel discovered that he had made campaign contributions to three Democrats.
The MSNBC president, Phil Griffin, issued a statement saying, “I became aware of Keith’s political contributions late last night. Mindful of NBC News policy and standards, I have suspended him indefinitely without pay.”
No one at NBC News would speculate about what this might mean for Mr. Olbermann’s future, though one NBC executive suggested this was not a step toward firing him.
Politico had reported Friday morning that Mr. Olbermann’s contributions were in apparent violation of MSNBC policy.
Mr. Olbermann hosts the most popular program on MSNBC, “Countdown.” He worked…
Why Aren’t There More Republicans in Hollywood?
Leslie Gornstein a/k/a The Answer Bitch, E! Online’s resident question-and-answer columnist, asks disinformation author Ed Rampell for help with this question:
Just saw a new video with Olivia Wilde urging people to vote progressive, and it got me to thinking: Why is Hollywood so darned liberal?
—Brenda, San AntonioYou speak of the MoveOn.org video featuring Wilde as a hard-bitten activist from the future who berates you—you specifically, thanks to some Facebook-aided personalization—for not voting in the upcoming election.
It’s certainly not the kind of message you’d see from, say, Elisabeth Hasselbeck. Here’s why:
Indeed, Wilde and Romany Malco, he of The 40-Year-Old-Virgin, jokingly warn that without your vote, President Palin will, among other things, declare an “ultrawar” against the Pacific Ocean and “whatever country Björk is from.”
Now, I talked to Ed Rampell, author of Progressive Hollywood, about this. Rampell offers three very interesting reasons why the entertainment business is so full of non-Republicans.
First:
“Creative people in general, but in particular actors,…
Researchers Find a ‘Liberal Gene’
Chemical structures of representative D4-preferring ligands.
From ScienceDaily:
Appearing in the latest edition of The Journal of Politics published by Cambridge University Press, the research focused on 2,000 subjects from The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. By matching genetic information with maps of the subjects’ social networks, the researchers were able to show that people with a specific variant of the DRD4 gene were more likely to be liberal as adults, but only if they had an active social life in adolescence.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter affecting brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and ability to experience pleasure and pain. Previous research has identified a connection between a variant of this gene and novelty-seeking behavior, and this behavior has previously been associated with personality traits related to political liberalism.
Lead researcher James H. Fowler of UC San Diego and his colleagues hypothesized that people with the novelty-seeking gene variant would be more interested…
Peter Berkowitz: Why Liberals Don’t Get the Tea Party Movement
Another take on this disinfo.com post. Peter Berkowitz writes in the Wall Street Journal:
Highly educated people say the darndest things, these days particularly about the tea party movement. Vast numbers of other highly educated people read and hear these dubious pronouncements, smile knowingly, and nod their heads in agreement. University educations and advanced degrees notwithstanding, they lack a basic understanding of the contours of American constitutional government.
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman got the ball rolling in April 2009, just ahead of the first major tea party rallies on April 15, by falsely asserting that “the tea parties don’t represent a spontaneous outpouring of public sentiment. They’re AstroTurf (fake grass-roots) events.”
Having learned next to nothing in the intervening 16 months about one of the most spectacular grass-roots political movements in American history, fellow Times columnist Frank Rich denied in August of this year that the tea party movement is “spontaneous and leaderless,”…
Notes Toward a New Political Taxonomy
Noah Millman writes for the American Scene:
It has become clear to me over the years that one of the causes of persistent confusion in our political arguments is the interchangeable use of taxonomic terms that, while they may have a natural affinity, are not actually synonyms.
Three terms that tend to get used interchangeably are:
Left / Liberal / Progressive
Their counterparts on the other side of the political spectrum are treated similarly:
Right / Conservative / Reactionary
The shades of difference among the meanings of the words within the triads, however, are not minor. One can very well be extremely right-wing without being a reactionary in any meaningful sense — think of Ayn Rand. One can be extremely left-wing without being a liberal in any meaningful sense — think of Lenin.
I propose, therefore, to accentuate the differences between the words commonly lumped together, to clear up all ambiguities by assigning technical meanings to commonly-used terms,…
Jonathan Haidt On the Moral Roots of Liberals and Conservatives
VIa TED:
Are you a conservative who believes liberals have no moral values? Are you a liberal who believes conservatives have no moral values? Either way, you’d be wrong.
Do you believe liberals have an unbiased grasp of reality? Do you believe conservatives have an unbiased grasp of reality? Again, either way, you’d be wrong.
Watch as psychologist Jonathan Haidt tries to lead a group of (mostly) liberals out of their “comforting delusions” (his exact phrase) at the 2008 TED conference, and wonder how successful he’d be in front of a group of Tea Partiers.
Liberals, Atheists Are More Highly Evolved?
Smarter people are more inclined to nontraditional values, a study suggests, reported by National Geographic:
Your apelike ancestors probably aren’t top of mind when you enter the polling booth. But a new study suggests that human evolution may have a big influence on whether you’re liberal or conservative—not to mention how smart you are, whether you believe in God, or whether you’ve got a cheatin’ heart.
It’s all linked to the evolution of intelligence, says author Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Kanazawa’s theory is that intelligence—particularly our ability for on-the-spot problem solving and reasoning—arose as an adaptation to deal with the unusual and unexpected, such as a sudden forest fire.
Since disasters like that are rare in daily life, responding to them wouldn’t likely be something our ancestors were hard-wired to “know” how to do. Surviving the fire required both the ability to think up…
Top 100 U.S. Liberals And Conservatives
Telegraph.co.uk presents its latest list of the 100 most influential conservatives and 100 most influential liberals in America a year after Barack Obama took the oath on the steps of the Capitol to become the 44th President of the United States:
The first lists, produced exactly a year before the 2008 election, sent then unprecedented traffic to the website and generated controversy that resonated on American cable television and talk radio for weeks.
Top conservatives: 81-100
Top liberals: 81-100
Since then, more than one political figure has approached us to inquire gently about what position they might occupy second time around. Some have cited their 2007 positions in publicity and biographical materials.
The difference between our new lists and the ones published last time reflect the unprecedented political and economic upheaval that has happened since then – as well as, we confess, some cloudiness in the Crystal Ball we used in November 2007.
Selecting just 200 key…
