What happened that day . . .

by Ken

The first thing I remember hearing as I regained consciousness was somebody asking somebody else if the somebody else had heard about what happened in Boston. What with my still-woozy state and the time it took to be moved to someplace where I had even minimal media accesst, it must have taken me awhile to piece together what-happened-in-Boston that day, a year ago yesterday, but in the days that followed I had an inoridnate amount of face time with the talking TV, so along with everyone else I was able to glean the occasional bits of news out of the 95 percent that could most fairly be described as news gibberish.

When my doctor's surgical coordinator had first proposed April 15 as a date for my knee-replacement surgery, I divined the hand of destiny: Apart from maybe January 1 or July 4, what easier date could there be to remember, then and forever? Of course I had no idea that "my" April 15 would be permanently linked with such an explosive public story.

I didn't have much time to reflect on that anniversary Monday or yesterday because I was in the grip of an even more than usually terror-ridden face-off with the "real" April 15. Thanks in good part to my surgical adventure and the related medical leave, I had what was for me an unusual and confusing tax year, the consequences of which were shrouded in mystery until I got up the courage to plug all the data into the tax software. Even I wasn't ridiculous enough to leave that whole process till April 15, but April 14 didn't give me all that large a head start.

As usual I was both surprised and relieved to survive the ordeal. What's more, in these days of electronic filing, it no longer even involves a countdown-to-midnight schlepp to NYC's General Post Office on Eighth Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets. (In the olden days of GPO-schlepping, there were years when the countdown cut it close indeed to the midnight witching hour. The worst part was having the TV on during the counting-down hours with live shots of the tax laggards who had only just made their way to the GPO -- still ahead of me.)

This morning there was still no time to reflect on the "other" anniversary, as I had to wend my way to my appointment for the one-year follow-up appointment with my doctor, or rather to the radiology floor an hour ahead of my appointment to have new X-rays taken first. Eventually I was sent off instructions to return for new X-rays in five years. Or when the other knee, in none too good shape, cries out for more intimate attention.

The one thing about the surgery which I was infinitely grateful for was that I have no awareness of anything, not even the passage of time, from the moment I was put under till the moment I regained some level of awareness -- and heard that question about what happened in Boston.

A year later I'd love to be able to say I have some thoughts worth sharing about what happened in Boston, or even a thought. But I don't.

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Tom Tomorrow asks how Fox Noise can be chided for breaching news ethics when it isn't in the news business

Scandal? What scandal?

[Don't forget to click to enlarge.]

"No one at this network would ever hack into someone's voicemail in pursuit of a news story . . . because we're not a news organization! I mean, seriously -- have you ever watched this channel?"

by Ken

It remains to be seen whether the News Corp people will seize on this obvious strategy to defend their, er, honor. Oh, it won't insulate them from any incidental law-breaking that's become part of the fabric of their "news"-gathering, but it will put an end to all the yammering about their shoddy journalistic ethics and culture of corruption and suchlike.

Of course it's true, though. In much the same way that Republicans -- and for that matter more and more Democrats -- facing aspersions regarding their ethical standards ought to be presenting the obvious defense: what ethical standards? How can you be guilty of ethical lapses if you have no ethics? And each house of Congress, after all, has its very own committee to vouch for the ethics of its outstandingly upstanding members.

If the government decides to raise some cash by going into the naming-opportunity game, high on the list should be a Tom DeLay Memorial Ethics Lobby.

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"The problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access . . . they don't challenge power" (Cenk Uygur)

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 1

"I'm holding onto the story that I've been talking about the whole time on The Young Turks, about how the problem with the mainstream media is they're desperate to get access, they don't challenge the government, they don't challenge power. . . .

"If I take the money, and I get a reduced role, and I just do whatever I do with it, and maybe I even rise up in the ranks again, what's the point? The point of this show was truth-telling. That's what we're supposed to do. And we're supposed to challenge the government. That's the role of the media."

-- Cenk Uygur, explaining his decision not to accept MSNBC's offer of twice the money for a much-reduced role as a power-respecting "insider"

by Ken

Look again at the short version of Cenk's quote that I've made the title of this post, or better the fuller version I've pulled out in the quote above. Then ask yourself how many professional media people would say "amen," as opposed to how many would sidle away until it's safe to break into an open trot. Of course right-wing media have no trouble challenging government when it's not being right-wing enough for their tastes, but that doesn't count. One thing that certainly isn't about is "challenging power."

In my other life as a scribbler about music, a quote I carried in my head was one from composer Virgil Thomson concerning his long service as a daily music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, in which he described criticism as "our only antidote to paid publicity." Again, this isn't how most, or even many, practitioners see their role. I think back to my most important editorial job covering the classical music business, when my boss had to explain to me that "we're part of the music business." And at this remove, I have to own that he was right, and maybe if we had been a more enthusiastically energetic part of the music business, the magazine would still be around. (Not really, but we can have that discussion some other time.) The question would be whether the magazine would have any reason for continuing to exist.

Think about it: our only antidote to paid publicity.

Shift the discussion to general news and public affairs, and the stakes become starker. It's not just "paid publicity" we have to be concerned with, it's the crushing weight of the political and financial establishment, where it's now understood that the role of "news" media is to serve it. Central to the whole concept of "the Village," or the "Inside the Beltway" mentality, is that politicos and journos are really all in it together, that they are one industry, or one something.

And again, this seamless alliance seems to me one of the issues that's most truly troubling about the News International scandal: the extent to which Master Murdoch's Minions, in this case at his four British newspapers (now only three, of course, with the shuttering of the embattled News of the World) have been intertwined in successive British governments. It's important to note that while the arrangement may be more open and egregious with a Conservative prime minister, it's far from exclusive. The former Labour government and the News International swells courted each other pretty assiduously, and the early years of the cover-up of the News of the World phone-hacking allegations were overseen by that Labour government.

The video clips at the top and bottom of this post have been popping up all over the Internet, and rightly so: In his characteristically bluntly eloquent way, Cenk takes us through his view of what happened to him at MSNBC: basically, that he had to be yanked from that evening time slot because "people in Washington" were complaining to his boss, "the head of MSNBC" (Phil Griffin, whom he doesn't bother to name), as he was informed in a meeting he describes pretty vividly in Part 1, that they "were concerned about his tone."

Here's how Glenn Greenwald interprets the objection in an excellent Salon piece, "Cenk Uygur and the ethos of corporate-owned media":

Uygur often refused to treat members of the political and media establishment with deference and respect. He didn't politely imply with disguised subtleties when he thought a politician or media figure was lying or corrupt, but instead said it outright. In interviews, he was sometimes unusually aggressive with leading Washington figures, subjecting them to civil though hostile treatment to which they were plainly unaccustomed.

In case you were assuming, when you heard about Cenk being canned as interim host of the MSNBC 6pm show, that the problem was ratings, it turns out: not at all. Cenk goes into the numbers in some detail in Part 1. In fact, as of April, when (a) the crush of world breaking-news stories, which draw viewers to CNN, subsided, and (b) especially when Cenk decided to ignore the notes he'd been getting from his superiors and do the show his way, his ratings were fine and growing steadily.

JUST TO BE CLEAR, CENK ISN'T NECESSARILY
KNOCKING OTHERS ON THE MSNBC LINEUP

In the Part 2 clip, he stresses that the circumstances are different for everyone, in terms of contract (he didn't even have one) and the things that give an individual the kind of clout you can stare down even a cable network with. He makes it clear how much he admires the job Rachel Maddow has done, explaining that she has shrewdly marshaled the clout she has built up by doing the show her way and leveraging the terrific ratings she's developed. It probably helped too that when her show went on the air she enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Keith Olbermann, who still had lots of clout of his own at MSNBC.

Glenn Greenwald recollects an interview Rachel did last week with Bill Moyers,

who for years -- based on experience -- has been explaining that the corporate climate that preveails at large media companies significantly restricts and constrains what can be said. In response, Maddow said:

I mean, I work at a big corporate conglomerate controlled media outlet. And I feel like the way to handle this as an individual journalist for me is that I have carved out a sphere here of editorial independence.

And on MSNBC, my deal with the company is I will do shows on MSNBC, and you will not tell me what to say. And they are very comfortable with that. And I think a lot of individual journalists find ways to do that.

Glenn notes too Moyers' stress on the factor of self-censorship that develops in the corporate media cauldron.

I served time at CBS News, enjoyed it, seven years in all. I was here at MSNBC for the launch of it 15 years ago. I worked at NBC.

But I saw in every one of those environments the growth of the shadow of self censorship when -- I mean, I happen to know that when I was here, Newt Gingrich and Henry Kissinger did their best to mute my influence on "The Nightly News" because of the freedom and independence Andy Lack, who was then the president of NBC News, had given me. It's up there all the time, like gathering storm clouds.

You do a terrific job of maintaining your independence. And I must say out of the Murdoch scandal has come a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press.

Bill and Rachel then point out that the story was finally broken by the Guardian, which is run by, as Rachel explains it, "a public trust, set up by the founding family to make sure that 'The Guardian' would always be commercially and editorially independent."

Tim Karr did an excellent summary of what he billed as "Cenk Uygur vs. 'The Club,'" and in response to a commenter who noted that Cenk is to be a guest tonight on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, another refugee from MSNBC, Tim muses: "Curious about the level of Comcast involvement in this decision. MSNBC's new owner is deeply embedded among the 'Corporate Democrats' in Washington. Cenk's braver brand of journalism would no doubt put them on the defensive."

Do watch Cenk's clips. You'll especially want to hear him talking about the money MSNBC offered him to be a good soldier in the army of the establishment -- not to mention the "perks" with which infotainment noozers are customarily seduced from any sense of journalistic mission. Right now I'm going to watch Cenk on Countdown -- and you may still be able to catch one of the rebroadcasts. I'm sure there will soon be clips up. But Cenk has already laid out the basic structure of the situation.

Why Cenk Uygur Left MSNBC, Part 2

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There's no expert like a CNN-certified "expert," helping them serve up the illusion of reality

Oh, that CNN! They always know the bestest experts,
willing to go way out on a limb. (This is from 2002.)

by Ken

Noah passed this screen shot along as a possible illustration for Sunday's final installment of his three-part year-end retrospective, "2008: A YEAR ON STERIODS" (Part 1 appeared earlier today), in which he has some, shall we say, unkind things to say about CNN. Without giving too much away, I can say that the phrase "the illusion of news" figures prominently.

(This is, by the way, an honest-to-gosh undoctored screen shot from 2002, as verified by Media Research Center, which noted that apparently somebody at CNN was watching their own show, and after two minutes the graphic was changed to "Al Qaeda Leader Out Of Sight For Months.")

Okay, we all make little goofs. The thing about this one is that for many of us it sounds like only the slightest exaggeration of CNN-ishness, which always has "another side" to air, especially if anyone on its air has the temerity to utter anything that's the tiniest bit removed from the ingrained orthodox worldview.

Note that this rule emphatically doesn't apply to right-of-center viewpoints, and it doesn't seem to matter how far to the right they may roam -- even if it's into the next gallaxy over. As Noah notes in his cable-news rant, any commentator whose viewpoints are known to deviate in the slightest from the agreed-upon center has to be "balanced" with at least one certified right-wing crackpot. The exact ratio is a subject of some controversy -- two-to-one is the minimum, with something on the order of four-to-one being far from uncommon.

Yesterday I offered a quick visceral response to David Sirota's report of his first-hand discovery that at Fox News a nutty revisionist version of the history of the New Deal, whereby the New Deal is said to have prolonged the Great Depression, turning the facts on their head, is regarded as agreed historical fact. Of course these are people who wouldn't know the difference between a fact and a loony revisionist theory if their sorry lives depended on it. The sadder fact is, their viewers don't seem to have any idea that they don't know the difference.

Commenting on my rant yesterday, our friend Balakirev offered a helpful walk-through of the rest of the process:

And of course, the media will take the viewpoint of trying to look balanced by letting the liars have equal airing with those who point out the facts.

The rightwing cynics will continue to spew as much garbage as they can to invigorate the troops and cause the left to lose focus. Like I've noted before, progressives need their own stalking horses, such as the Fairness Doctrine. Keep the nut-bound right engaged, so they can't strategize so much.

"The illusion of news" indeed, Noah. We might go so far as to say "the illusion of reality."


NEXT UP: Just how dumb are Fox Noise viewers?

In the land of the "fair and balanced," Karl Rove analysis of the Obama report.

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