Tag: Media

By now you've all seen the unofficial demise of the Rick Perry Express to the White House, a juggernaut of a campaign that met its end during the nationally televised GOP primary debate on November 9.

Two things about this are amazing. One is that in the pantheon of Texas governors, Perry will manage to be remembered as "the dumb one." The second is that I feel slightly bad for Rick Perry.

If there is a technical term for what happened to Perry during this debate, I don't know what it is.
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I do know that it happens to me all the damn time. I get paid to stand in front of large groups of people and talk every day, and then I do it again in the evening for fun. Regardless of my level of preparation, the use of notes, or experience with the material, I still encounter these Perry moments regularly. Sometimes you just…go blank. It happens. Unless you're lying or happen to be having such a moment right now, you'll admit that it happens to you too.

Yes, I got plenty of laughs out of seeing this and exploited it for more than its fair share of jokes over the past few days. That said, this is a better indicator of how poisonous the modern media environment has become than of Perry's lack of suitability for the presidency.
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There are dozens if not hundreds of reasons that Rick Perry should never enter the White House without a ticket for the sightseeing tour in his hand; this is not necessarily one of them. Yet it took this – something he forgot rather than any of the ridiculous shit he actually said – to knock him from the rank of Serious Candidate.

To understand what is happening to Perry is to make sense of the millions of dollars campaigns spend on image control. You can campaign on the most idiotic ideas on Earth and the Beltway media will take you seriously if you have enough money, but god forbid you do something that lands you in a viral video clip. Then you're radioactive. Ask George "Macaca" Allen or Howard Dean and they'll tell you how an entire campaign can be derailed by a 15 second YouTube clip. The key, as many campaigns have figured out, is to spout whatever brand of insanity most pleases one's targeted donors and to "look presidential" while doing it. Be crazy, be an idiot, or be downright scary. Just don't look silly while you're doing it.

I would love to look back at 2012 as the election in which Rick Perry was soundly rejected by voters because he has been a disaster as Governor of Texas, he seems to consider nullification and secession to be intriguing concepts, and he is the worst kind of right-wing populist loon. Instead we'll note that he was the updated version of Howard Dean, the guy whose campaign ended when he made himself look stupid for a moment on camera. It's a sad commentary on both our media and the electorate that Perry was taken seriously when he proposed eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency, and given the gong only after he forgot its name.
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Yesterday, the following link/headline appeared on the front page of CNN.com: "Bachmann's HPV claims disputed." Here is a screen cap:

I will spare you the video clip where her statement is discussed by Many Serious People, but here is what she said during the most recent debate regarding Rick Perry's executive order to have the HPV vaccine required in Texas:

"To have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat-out wrong," Bachmann said. "Little girls who have a potentially dangerous reaction to this drug don't get a mulligan," she said. "You don't get a do-over."

Afterward, she elaborated, explaining that "a mother" approached her after the debate:

She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection. And she suffered from mental retardation thereafter. The mother was crying when she came up to me last night. I didn't know who she was before the debate. This is the very real concern and people have to draw their own conclusions.

Let's briefly overlook the terrifying fact that the woman who wants to be president was repeating this story into a camera almost immediately after a complete stranger (or so she claims) said this to her in a chance encounter. Apparently that's the Bachmann mental vetting process – "Someone came up to me and told me vaccines made their daughter retarded. The best thing is for everyone to draw their own conclusions about the efficacy of vaccines based on anecdotal evidence." But I digress.

Having seen her statements, look again at CNN's link headline, "Bachmann's HPV claims disputed," in reference to the AMA and other medical organizations resoundingly rejecting her crackpot anti-vaccine statements. Only in a media environment in which Fox News and the cultural right have truly Won would this be summed up with such a headline.

"Claims disputed" might be an appropriate tag for candidates bickering over tax proposals – "Perry says cutting taxes would increase revenues, but Paul Krugman disagrees in today's column." Bachmann's statement, aside from being dangerously flippant and not thought-out, isn't "disputed." It's wrong. In an honest world the headline would read "Bachmann wrong about vaccines" or "Major GOP candidate does not understand basic science" or "Bachmann chooses anecdote from stranger over science."

But of course we don't live in that honest world. We live in one in which the media have been thoroughly cowed into "treating both sides fairly" – treating opposing viewpoints as equally valid regardless of whether the issue is objective or subjective – and are hyper-sensitive about offending their core daytime audience of stay-home moms with medical degrees from Parenting Message Board University.

For all the accusations of elitism on the part of the media, this is an instance in which a sense of superiority would come in handy. The media see their job as stenography, to quote people and then "let the reader decide" which viewpoint sounds better. What they should be doing is reporting facts. Michele Bachmann is wrong about the HPV vaccine, and she is wrong to repeat a story told by some random yahoo when its central claim has no factual basis. In fact the evidence is overwhelming that nothing like what this stranger told Bachmann can be caused by the HPV vaccine. But instead of reading a headline like, "Bachmann repeats debunked pseudoscience, offers inaccurate statement on vaccines" we see that her statement is "disputed," as though it is controversial, actively debated, and as-yet unresolved.

I've always liked the story, despite the fact that it may be apocryphal, about the brief fascination among the media in the 1980s and early 1990s with groups like the KKK. Supposedly the KKK itself had declined – other white supremacist and neo-nationalist groups were siphoning off members – to the point that one annual Klan rally was attended by only around 100 souls…more than half of whom turned out to be either undercover law enforcement or undercover journalists hoping for a salacious story.

I don't know if that's true, but it isn't hard to believe. The media have a strong interest in crowds of freaks, and they remain interested in such groups long beyond the point at which anyone else does.
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To the public, even among racists, the Klan rated a strong "Who gives a rat's ass?" by the Eighties. But among the media the response remained the same: make sure you get a burning cross picture and a few good quotes about the Jews or something. Journalistic interest in the group persisted beyond its relevance to the point that reporters began outnumbering participants.

Last week in Naples, Florida a group of around 15 journalists showed up to cover a book signing by Witch/failed Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell. Exactly five members of the public attended the event, one of them apparently an odd teen who asked her to sign his book on demonology. Having five people in attendance doesn't even qualify something as an event. Basement punk shows can get 50 people to show up with little effort. The average PTA meeting has five times that many attendees.

I could do a comedy show in Naples, Florida and get five people to show up.

I understand why the O'Donnell event is of interest to the media while events with larger crowds are not: they want to see the Tea Party Freaks in all their glory. They want misspelled signs, crackpots with guns, old people ranting about the gub'mint, flags aplenty, and some dipshit dressed as Paul Revere.
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Fox News aside, Teabaggers are entertainment for journalists and comedy relief in news broadcasts. The problem, of course, is that the continued obsession with the Tea Party ignores the fact that the Tea Party doesn't really exist anymore. For any number of plausible reasons the people showing up to events in 2009 and early 2010 aren't showing up these days. Tea Party USA is just another hacky activist group – as it always has been, arguably – fronted by dinosaur Beltway insiders like Ralph Reed and Dick Armey. It no longer even has the veneer of a populist uprising. Without the crowds of freaks it's neither entertaining nor a believable front group for a bunch of tycoons. It's just another fad entering its 15th minute of fame, a hollowed out orange peel from which the media are attempting to squeeze the last drop of ratings value. The unfortunate consequence is to further the false impression that the Tea Party continues to be politically relevant.

Highly observant long-time readers are probably beginning to notice that every time Ed has a doctor's appointment he ends up posting about Fox News. Well, I had an appointment Tuesday morning. Now guess what.

Like most of you (I assume) I don't watch much Fox News. In fairness I rarely watch TV news on any network, relying instead as so many Americans do on the self-selection offered by the internet. What little I see on the FNC comes from clips circulated on the internet, brief glimpses while I flip through channels, and maybe a few minutes here and there during election season. For the most part it is an alternate universe – I know it exists and I hear about it often, but our paths almost never cross.
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Except when I visit my doctor. He and his unironic "These Colors Don't Run" bumper sticker have FNC playing on multiple TVs throughout the office, so I usually catch about 15 minutes in the waiting room.

Today, through sundry intricacies of our remarkable system of managed care that I needn't recount here, I waited well over an hour before the good Doctor saw me. It would guess that it has been a decade since I sat and watched 80 or 90 minutes of Fox News, probably not since I last lived with my dad and thus was indirectly exposed to O'Reilly every evening after work. That DiMaggio-like streak ended today.
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The volume was up so loud (the old people need to be able to hear it, after all) I couldn't bury my nose far enough in Popular Mechanics to ignore it.

I am not an unbiased observer, obviously, and I watch Fox the same way most people watch circuses or episodes of Two and a Half Men. Despite these handicaps I am confident that the following is a valid conclusion: anyone who watches this channel for multiple hours daily would be categorically insane after a few months. Everything about public opinion and the Tea Party and oddities of the American electorate make perfect sense after watching this for an hour or two.
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If this was your only source of news, you would become one of them. Your relationship with reality would be tenuous at best, and more likely nonexistent.

You can actually feel the propaganda techniques start to numb you after a while. In small doses it has no effect, and we see it with a mixture of disdain and bemusement. It just seems kinda silly. Watching it all day, every day (as the staff at the office in question do) would be like the prison camp scenes in The Killing Fields – listening to Khmer Rouge propaganda blared over a loudspeaker until insanity becomes the new normal. Is Fox the Khmer Rouge? Of course not. They've just mastered the same methods of persuasion.

If my hypothesis seems implausible, I invite you to try it yourself sometime. Resolve to sit firmly on the couch and watch Fox News for two uninterrupted hours. Let us know how you feel afterward.

CNN's Jack Cafferty asks the kind of question that only media people could ask in the wake of a human tragedy. Or during a human tragedy in progress. Why is there no looting in Japan? Despite the poor timing this question is worth asking, especially given that Americans and their media will almost certainly arrive at a horribly incorrect answer.

The scale of the disaster in Japan is unprecedented – they have basically been through most of the events of the apocalypse and, factoring in the radiation, the origin story for both Mothra and Godzilla. Yet there is no looting. Haiti had looting. So did New Orleans. And Chile. And Great Britain during the floods. And New York during the blackouts. Hell, Montreal got looted after Les Habitants made it to the Eastern Conference finals last year. Cairo was "engulfed in looting" during Mubarak's decline. Baghdad was badly looted (including archaeological artifacts from the national museum) when the Hussein regime collapsed. Tokyo? Osaka? Sendai? Either there is no looting or the media for some reason chooses not to report it.

The answer to this puzzle, as Cafferty's viewers illustrate, revolve around vague differences in "culture" and western stereotypes about Asians (zen-like calm, efficiency, ability to endure hardships, excellent math skills, and so on). Some of the answers are reflective of people clinging to 1910s-era theories of racial hierarchies, as I'm sure a disturbingly large number of Americans do. Maybe loosely defined cultural differences are the answer.

Maybe not. Looting (or doing anything, for that matter) is pretty difficult after a tsunami. Note that there was little looting in Indonesia in 2004. But the most persuasive answers are…political. The Japanese government is by all accounts remarkably well organized and prepared to respond to this kind of disaster. All of the failures in New Orleans, by comparison, have their origins in the crooked, incompetent crony politics of the local government and the non-existent Federal response. Japan is among the many non-American nations that recognize that government is not inherently useless and evil. If government takes its responsibilities seriously (which requires the preliminary step of recognizing that responding to an unthinkably large natural disaster is a government responsibility) it is possible to see that the animal-level needs of its people are met. Japan does have the advantage of being a small, dense country, but nonetheless its public sector has managed to shelter, feed, and rescue itself admirably. Why? Because its government is not devoted to the idea that government should be abolished.

Beyond that, Japan hasn't build its entire society on the principle of every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost. Their idea of disaster preparedness is not hoarding enough bullets to shoot their neighbors who run out of food. When America has a natural disaster, the private sector immediately focuses on profiteering and jacking up prices. In Japan the prices are lowered and in some cases basic necessities are even given away gratis. Japanese are more willing to look out for and help one another because unlike the U.S., their social dynamics focus on group harmony (critics say "conformity") rather than constant reminders that You are responsible for yourself and no one else. If your neighbor needs help, the American response is to lecture him about failing to better prepare himself for the crisis.

That, and Japan hasn't created a massive, impoverished underclass that interacts with government primarily at the end of a police baton.

This discussion unavoidably paints with a broad brush. Lots of Americans helped one another during Katrina and lots of Japanese are probably assholes who don't care about others. Japanese culture also has flaws that should not be painted over, particularly the collective willingness to shame individuals into conformity and occasionally work one another to death. But there is no denying the differences at the heart of Cafferty's ill-timed observation. There is no looting in Japan for a variety of reasons – cultural, social, practical, and especially political. If half of Sendai's police abandoned the city as the sad excuses for cops did in New Orleans, maybe there would be looting. If there was no plan in place to rapidly rescue, feed, and house people in flooded areas, maybe there would be looting. If people were encouraged to see one another as The Enemy and to see government emergency planning services as a conspiracy to round people up in detention camps, maybe there would be looting. If Japan socially and politically abandoned the idea that there can ever be a collective solution to anything, maybe there would be looting.

Oh, and Japan does not have many black people. The media do not count anything as "looting" unless black people do it.

Following media, political, and cultural issues not only rapidly produces outrage fatigue – see 2000 through 2008, when merely treading water and keeping up with the barrage of scandals, graft, cronyism, corruption, maladministration, and disregard for the Constitution was nearly a full time job – but it also raises our outrage threshold over time. As the average teenage fan of violent videogames, Marilyn Manson, and horror movies can testify, something is shocking the first time it happens, somewhat novel once or twice more, and totally mundane thereafter. Making a career out of being "outrageous" means constantly having to up the ante to find new ways to shock people who have already seen, internalized, and normalized everything thrown at them so far.

It is not the intent of the media to shock us in most instances, and we may safely assume that they are not going out of their way to shock us with their raw incompetence. Nonetheless, over the past 30 years we have become numb to their complete inability to understand the basic tenets of journalism. It no longer shocks us to see basic spelling/grammar errors in major media outlets. Or press releases / product advertisements published unaltered as news items. Or water-carrying for corporate interests. Or victim-blaming crime stories. Or obsequious deference to elected officials. Or willful ignorance of social problems that should be major news stories. The media fails to do its job so regularly that nothing shocks us anymore. You can look at the final product and say "My god, this is ridiculous" but you cannot honestly say that it shocks you. It's just expected.

Somehow, despite the numbing repetition of embarrassing journalistic failure over the years, something comes along and shocks me every few months.

Tuesday's New York Times (and we could say "OMG! Even the NYT?" if not for, you know, Judith Miller and Jayson Blair and all that) ran this story entitled "Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town". A brief summary of the underlying story:

(An explicit cellphone video) led the police to an abandoned trailer, more evidence and, eventually, to a roundup over the last month of 18 young men and teenage boys on charges of participating in the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl in the abandoned trailer home, the authorities said.

Five suspects are students at Cleveland High School, including two members of the basketball team. Another is the 21-year-old son of a school board member. A few of the others have criminal records, from selling drugs to robbery and, in one case, manslaughter. The suspects range in age from middle schoolers to a 27-year-old.

Wow. The phrase "vicious assault" in the headline is actually an understatement. I should be glad to see a major newspaper covering this kind of story, right?

The case has rocked this East Texas community to its core and left many residents in the working-class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions. Among them is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act? “It’s just destroyed our community,” said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. “These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.”

Wait…what?

(T)he assault started after a 19-year-old boy invited the victim to ride around in his car. He took her to a house on Travis Street where one of the other men charged, also 19, lived. There the girl was ordered to disrobe and was sexually assaulted by several boys in the bedroom and bathroom. She was told she would be beaten if she did not comply, the affidavit said…they then went to the abandoned mobile home, where the assaults continued. Some of those present recorded the sexual acts on their telephones.

OK, I get that part, where the victim was gang raped by a dozen-plus males, but…

Residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands — known as the Quarters — said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months. They said she dressed older than her age, wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her 20s. She would hang out with teenage boys at a playground, some said. "Where was her mother? What was her mother thinking?" said Ms. Harrison, one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record. "How can you have an 11-year-old child missing down in the Quarters?"

Yeah, see, this is the part that isn't registering.

Now many of you are probably seeing this as run-of-the-mill Asking For It / Dressed Like a Whore / She Totally Wanted It argument. We have seen this enough times in newspapers and on TV that it should no longer surprise us. At this point I need to remind you, however, that this story is about an 11 year old girl who was gang raped on video by as many as 12 to 18 males.

As I reached the part of the story that describes how the 11 year old girl dressed (whorishly, of course) my mind raced to one of my favorite stand-up bits: Bill Hicks' description of Mark Fuhrman and Stacy Koon testifying at the Rodney King trial. "And the courtroom gasped…'Jesus! What balls!'" I don't suppose it helps to make light of this sad state of journalistic affairs, but the sheer balls required to play the "wanted it / dressed like a whore" angle on an 11 year old girl getting gang raped is, even by American mainstream media standards, pretty shocking. That this kind of crime could happen and the news story, particularly the comments of the interviewees, would focus on the plight of the perpetrators of the crime – Those poor boys! – is surprising enough. That this is only the second most fucked-up thing about the way this story is reported crosses the line from routine bad journalism to legitimately shocking.