| Saturday, October 4, 2003 |
00:59 - The case for a state-run news media
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Phew. Sorry about the deliberately misleading title. I just did it to get your attention. Did it work?
But things that are deliberately misleading is kinda the subject of the day, isn't it?
I've gotten a lot of responses to my post from Thursday, in which I said:
Next year's election will be where the final hand is dealt. It will tell us how many people in this country have been able to weather the battering of the guiltmongers and the doom-seekers and the sowers of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and hold on to what we know is the right course of action for ourselves and for the world-- and how many are ready to cash in, give up, lie down and let blissful slumber overtake our eyes while the Pods placed by the social-progressive Europeans creep ever closer to our bedsides.
One of the more cynical responses said, simply, "Democracy's a bitch... isn't it?"
All I could think of in response was, "Yup... after all, it gave us Hitler."
There's an ugly expression-- or, rather, an expression that's come to seem ugly through modern eyes: "Making the world safe for democracy." It's an idea that seems to have gone largely out of style, mostly because people don't really "get" what it means anymore. To many, it sounds like a veiled form of idealistic imperialism, a presumption on the part of buzz-cut white males in Congress that our quaint and abstract and tired concept of "democracy" is something that the rest of the world wants, and only doesn't have because of some vague and imagined threat floating on the horizon.
It's been a while since anybody had to think of this as being reality. It's been a while since it's been reality.
Or has it?
It's at the core of what we're doing in the Middle East, after all. We're removing obstacles which stand in the way of democracy, such as the Taliban and Saddam. Democracy is a powerful self-sustaining force, but it's more fragile than we often realize-- in order to take root, it needs time, dedication, and stability. And even a stable democracy can be overthrown... or overthrow itself.
We fought against encroaching communism because communism was an idea that could be voted in by a democratic public, even though once instated it would effectively destroy the democracy that created it. It's a seductive, compelling idea, one that-- given enough play in people's minds-- can come to power and then burn the bridges behind it that brought it there.
For Marx, after all, had something right: he believed that it was the natural progression of a capitalist society to eventually evolve into a communist one. So we've seen can indeed be the case, in a sense: the richer and safer and more peaceful a country becomes on the strength of its free-market economy, the more its people will push for socialistic reform, more state services paid for by higher taxes, and so on. Guilt on the part of the rich leads to elites pushing statism as a form of philanthropy for the proletariat. A democracy can voluntarily vote into power a communist system, because its people will be convinced that it's the best thing for them to do.
Trouble is, communism isn't a "new and improved" form of economics, one that breaks free of capitalism-imposed chains and carries its adherent nations to the stars. It's quite the opposite, as we've seen; it can take a vibrant, innovative, individualistic people and transform it into a homogeneous, dull, dreary, bleak mass of impoverished welfare-slaves without hope of respite (let alone aspiration to excellence), crushed under the weight of a bloated and often unbelievably brutal State. The people might have voted for it, but it's not the enlightened panacea they'd hoped it would be. And they'd go back to the way it was before... if only they could.
Our goal during the Cold War was to "make the world safe for democracy"-- meaning that we would prevent communism from taking hold in countries that might be seduced into voluntarily trying it. Our doing so meant the support of brutal military dictators in places like Iran and Panama and Chile, and we've paid a bitter price in honor and human life-- but wasn't it the lesser of two evils, in the long run? Maybe not, but can the question be dismissed out of hand?
So here we are, "making the world safe for democracy" again. This time, the threat we have to fight in order to make democracy safe is Islamism and old-fashioned Arab strongman dictatorship. Both things that a democratic Middle Eastern populace can vote into power. It's unlikely that Iraq would choose an Islamist government like the Taliban or like the Iranian mullahs, but the possibility is there-- it could happen.
All it takes is for the free populace of a democracy to be fed misleading information, pervasively and from the sources that they implicitly trust. Whether these sources are the government, religious leaders, or a free press, all that matters is that the people believe it.
Gary Larson reminds us:
This phenomenon validates Joseph Goebbels' 1934 advice: Bombard the "primitive rank and file," with "propaganda...essentially simple and repetitive." To say this Nazi tactic works today is an understatement.
And, needless to reiterate, Hitler came to power democratically.
So: what is it that keeps our democracy strong and self-sustaining?
A free media, many cry.
Yeah, well, here's a question: What happens when a free media undergoes a trend wherein it decides as a bloc to accomplish some partisan end, even if it means perpetuating lies and deliberately misleading the public? What checks and balances exist in a free media to make sure it keeps telling the truth, so the populace is accurately informed?
Well, there are news organs of every political persuasion, comes the answer. If one is lying, another will balance it out and debunk it.
A fine theory. One that's served us well for many, many years. One that certainly seems always to have held true.
But what if it's not?
What if all the major news organs decide that their job is no longer To Tell The Truth, but To Get Ratings? What if journalists, ever seeking the scoop of a lifetime and the status of a Bob Woodward, commit to actively defrauding the public so as to advance their own careers within the media industry that's itself locked into a marketing/sales feedback loop of dispensing anti-Administration memes, being told by ratings that the people--fascinated and shocked--want to see more, and then having to produce more and more of the same slanted "reporting" because it's what the audience wants?
Americans have an insatiable lust for The Truth; it's part of our DNA. We also have a latent mistrust for authority, and we're always willing to entertain the notion that our government might be lying to us.
So we give the benefit of the doubt-- reflexively-- to whoever blows the whistle on them. It's a lot harder for us to believe that Jimmy Olsen is misleading us than that the government is, and we love a good stick-it-to-the-Man scandal. It's the media who always looks like the good guys... even when they're the weasels.
I'm not saying that this is what's actually happening. The media companies appear to be left-biased, but their relentlessly downbeat reporting about Iraq and Bush might stem simply from the "good news doesn't sell" adage, and a palpable sense of cynicism about blatant patriotism in the news-- even if all that can be interpreted as such is the ungarnished coverage of a positive development in the war. But it can hardly be denied that the media seems more willing to linger over the kinds of headlines that Michael Moore or Robert Fisk might pen, than over a dispassionate White House press release. It's hard to pin down the likes of CNN and MSNBC and the New York Times as deliberately lying as a matter of course. But their slant feeds free organzations like MoveOn.org, who do their grass-roots activism based on a fraudulently constructed impression of reality, as when they gleefully parrot New York Times Dowdifications like the "Ahnuld is a Nazi" meme even as it gets soundly debunked by the people who are paying attention.
So what happens if our free media, the institution that we so rightly place on a pedestal as one of our greatest achievements and the most obvious declaration of our unashamed belief in the strength of our democracy, lies to its patrons like Goebbels did?
We've grown to trust our free media precisely because it's free. Its freedom inherently guarantees accuracy and balance, we tell ourselves.
And that's where a lying free media is even more insidious than a Pravda. Because if we had a Pravda in this country, at least we would know it was lying. We don't expect lies from CNN.
I will reiterate, just for clarity: a state-run media would be a disaster for this country, a baldfaced denial of everything we stand for. I hate the idea. It's despicable. I would never condone such a thing, or deign to live in an America that had instituted it.
But... (and don't we all love that word now?)...
If our free society and its free press have embarked upon a feedback loop of anti-Bush rhetoric that has taken upon itself such a life of its own that we no longer care whether the things we accuse him of are even true, as long as they get him out of office... that is precisely what would signal, to me, the demise of the America that we know. It would mean that freedom had failed us. It would mean that in our freedom and our trust in those whom we trusted because of our freedom, we had wilfully deluded ourselves from reality in favor of a sickly-sweet poultice for our souls. It would mean that we had sacrificed Truth at the altar of pleasing fantasies. It would mean that we'd come to value other countries' present opinions over the lessons of our own history.
This has never been true of us in the past-- and the day it becomes true is the day that America ceases to be America.
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