Five years in to the collective insanity of Bushworld, the product of decades of sincere, dedicated effort by ideologues, partisans, just plain winguts, billionaire Mr. Burns wannabes and the like, there are signs that though the True Believers are as steadfast as ever, some in the MSM are beginning to smell the coffee and wake up. It's not a pretty process, but it is beginning.
Maybe it's the five years of broken promises and dismal failures. Maybe it's the spectacle of Congress being turned into a cash cow for partisan purposes while the President governs the country as if he were running a protection racket. Maybe it's day after day of content-free White House press conferences. Maybe it's the growing realization that something somewhere isn't quite right.
Watching this realization beginning to dawn on those in the Mainstream Media is simultaneously exhilarating and alarming. Exhilarating - because at long last it looks like the tide might turn. Alarming, because they still can't quite get it right. (more below the fold)
Faux News isn't going to change any time soon, barring the second coming. ("Jaysus is a LIBRUL - and he wants to talk to you about all that trash you been talking....") BUT (and this is a big BUT) it's becoming possible for some in the Media to openly entertain the possibility that maybe, just maybe things aren't quite as BushCo would have us believe.
Tom Friedman of the ever grayer Lady The New York Times seems to be suffering from a developing case of cognitive dissonance. After bravely proclaiming
"The World is Flat" Friedman is beginning to realize a
Flat Earth has an edge - and we may be headed for it. His column
Will Pigs Fly? which ran on February 3, 2006 shows that Mr. Friedman is starting to wonder if Dear Leader is really capable of Getting It Right.
Alas, it's behind the wall - but tristero via Digby
has excerpted some choice bits. Friedman is arguing with himself.
Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right -- remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!
[snip]
There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."
Pigs will fly before Bush says that.
Do you suppose he's been talking to Paul Krugman? Lest you think this is all good news though, Friedman also has this to say:
Yeah, I know all that. But here's what else I know: Mr. Bush is going to be president for the next three years. We do not have three years to lose -- not on climate change, energy efficiency or improving math/science education. I am not going to sit around for the next three years just trashing these guys and praying that some Democrat gets elected and does all the right things. We don't have time, you moron!
Sigh. What he gives with one hand, he takes back with the other. Forget about the Democrats - Republicans are our only hope. Still, once upon a time, Friedman's public doubts would have been virtual treason. (Of course, they may yet become actual treason now that you know who has ascended to SOTUS as planned by BushCo.)
All is not lost, however. Closer to my home, columnist Mark McGuire suffers an outburst of frustration in the Albany NY Times Union possibly as a reaction to ranting overlong about the efforts of the local Public Radio station to cover the upcoming hearings about domestic spying while trying to raise funds. Having released one load of bile, McGuire can't keep from dumping some more. Get a load of this:
I'm waiting for someone to say it on afternoon drive-time radio: If the lying, liberal mainstream media had the decency to stop being blown up and kidnapped and murdered, maybe we would get the real story of what's going on in Iraq.
The next time a right-wing pundit safely ensconced in some radio studio or opining from Washington rags on the media for not reporting the "truth" of what's happening on the ground in Iraq, I hope they think of ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and cameraman Doug Vogt, wounded Sunday by a roadside bomb. Or Jill Carroll, the kidnapped freelance reporter for The Christian Science Monitor.
For that matter, the same goes for unctuous lefty academics who declare from their fortified ivory towers that the press is just a PR arm of the Bush Admnistration. I hope they think of NBC's David Bloom, columnist Michael Kelly and the other journalists who have died there -- 61 and counting -- as well as the 23 media support workers (translators, drivers and others) killed since the U.S. invasion. Or the 37 reporters who, like Carroll, were kidnapped. I hope they remember that these people are risking their lives every time they leave their hotel or rented rooms, and sometimes even when they don't.
In a promo for "The Rush Limbaugh Show" that airs on WGY (810 AM), the bloviator tells listeners that "All you have to do is listen."
You might want to do a little thinking as well.
McGuire is so close, it's heartbreaking. If he thinks he'll have to wait for right wing radio to charge the press with covering up the real story in Iraq, well what planet has he been on for the last 4 years? I can see why he's upset with the leftwing ivory tower types. Obviously they haven't been seeing the headlines the MSM has been pounding BushCo with:
"President Lied to US About WMDs"; "Veep Behind Betrayal of CIA Agent"; "Abramoff's Deep Ties to Oval Office"; "Bush Military Service Bogus": "Bush Can't Handle Hurricanes-What of Al Qaida?"; "White House Destroyed E-Mails Needed in Investigation"; "White House Continues to Stonewall Congress"; "Bush Domestic Spying Scandal Widens"; "Bush Secret Sorrow - Still Can't Get Sexy Interns Past Rove"
And so on and so on. Darn those lefties anyway - don't they see how hard the press is working to spread Truthiness across the land? Tristero diagnoses Friedman as suffering Multiple Personality Disorder. McGuire appears to have more than a touch of Schizophrenia, with Bi-Laterality as a complication.
(Bi-Laterality: inability to say something about one side without saying something comparable about the other, whether it is actually true or relevant. Occupational hazard of the MSM. See "Fair & Balanced" Syndrome.)
There in a nutshell is one of the biggest problems the Democrats have. No matter how badly the Republicans screw up, no matter how corrupt and arrogant they become, there is one thing they have done superbly well. They have so discredited the Democrats and any who would oppose them that it doesn't matter how bad they are - they've made all the alternatives appear worse. The MSM has internalized this so thoroughly, it's going to take a lot of Reality Therapy to bring them out of it. Digby has an post about this.
This is why bad news for the Republicans does NOT equal good news for the Democrats. This is why trying to be Republican Lite doesn't cut it - not when the 'Real Thing' is still out there. The Republicans, whatever their ideals and convictions (if any beyond self-interest) have developed a relentless marketing machine even Bill Gates must envy.
On that subject, Guy Kawasaki once explained what it's like to compete with Microsoft. As best as I can recall, his explanation was: imagine your head in a vise. Imagine the vise as tight as you can stand. Now imagine it tighter. That's what it's like to compete with Microsoft. If that doesn't sound encouraging, remember Guy Kawasaki worked for Apple Computer - and his tactics in response to the Microsoft challenge is part of the reason Apple is still around today. That, and a willingness to follow someone willing to "Think Different." (You know, it wouldn't hurt to dump those consultants who've engineered so many Democratic victories of late, and go and talk to Guy...)
While it's still early to tell if Howard Dean is going to be able to pull a Steve Jobs, he apparently gets it. Rebuilding the grass roots, rebuilding the states, getting outside the beltway culture - not bad moves. Apple did three critical things after Jobs returned. They built on the best of their heritage, re-invented their brand, and backed up it with bold new products and innovations.
The Democrats are still getting there. It should say something that President Bush feels compelled to cite Democratic presidents to make points. It wouldn't hurt to remind people where/why social security came to be, nor things like clean air/water, safer workplaces, who actually got us to the moon, won World War II, and so on. There is definitely some great 'product' in the pipeline with all of the new entrants into politics on the Democratic line. What remains is to reclaim the brand - and that's where helping the MSM through detox is going to be important. After years of being force-fed the GOP line, they ought to be ready for something new. It's time to give it to them.