The always fantastic Glenn Greenwald had an article on his blog today wondering why the clearly biased and intellectually discredited Brit Hume continues to be treated as a legitimate journalist by the rest of the mainstream American press.
You can Read Greenwald's Blog on Brit Hume here
Greenwald, like all of us who believe in facts, critical methodology, science and cause-and-effect, rightly inquires why after repeatedly and substantively being exposed as a partisan fact-free manipulator, Hume remains coded as "journalist" while other water carriers for the Bush Cult are labeled as "opinionists," or "entertainers" or any number of polite euphemisms for "propagandist."
The answer to Greenwald's query lies not in the words Hume speaks but in the signification of his presentation.
The answer lies in the study of semiotics.
Semiotics is a field of study that emerged from linguistics and philosophy. It is the investigation of meaning structures that emerge from symbolism rather than from literal text.
Semiotics uses the tools of linguistics to analyze non-language based communication -- the visual, iconic, suggestive and often propagandistic communication outside of the written word.
As we've seen with Fox News, this form of communication is extremely powerful, influential and operates as a discourse completely removed from the surface level of "debate" that we hear coming from the mouths of the talking heads on the programs themselves.
Saussure, one of the founders of the discipline, divided communication into two concepts, the "signifier" and the "signified." "Signifiers" are words, sounds and images. "Signified" are the concepts at work behind the signifiers. Eco argued that meaning structures occur as "discourses" seperate and distinct from the "text." It is the difference between the two, between the words that they speak and the meaning that is being conveyed, that we find the fraud of Brit Hume locating within.
To analyze how these semiotic discourses and meaning structures occur, we have to study not just a specific example -- say the presentation of Brit Hume on Fox News -- but we must place this within the larger structural analysis of what our culture determines as "news."
To break this down in layman's terms:
We live in a culture that uses various codes and signifiers to create the suggestion of "news text." This is created visually using a number of physical codes, props and visual presentation, be it the animated American Flag in Fox's upper corner, the nerdy hairstyle of the middle aged actor, or even the use of dark suits, bowties, desks, flat framing and centering of the individual, divided screens during debate, etc.
These meaning structures determine what is "news" and what is not "news." The placement of the individual within this structure equally determines their "news gatherer" role.
Think of it in terms of dress-up. If you're putting on a high school play and you want the audience to immediately know that a character is a King, you put them in medieval garb and put a crown on their head. In the moment they walk on stage they have already communicated information to the audience before they've said a single word. Simply through visual dress.
Now expand that notion into mass visual communication.
The flashing graphics, the moment during broadcast at which certain anchors appear, the expression on their face, the dress, the supplimentary graphics, all contribute to communicating "serious news pundit" and to differentiate between the "blowhard opinion maker" (O'Reilly types).
Again, notice that as part of this meaning structure, what these people actually say, the words that come out of their mouth, have yet to enter into the equation.
So how does this relate to Brit Hume?
The power of Hume's propaganda lies precisely in his being coded according to meaning structures that place him outside the "pundit" aesthetic and firmly within the "news" template that has been a visual staple since the early days of Murrow and Cronkite. In this way, Fox News appropriates a pre-existing structure and relies upon those very tropes to establish the codes of "news reporter" to embed Hume in a cursory counter-aesthetic to, say, O'Reilly.
One cannot exist without the other. O'Reilly's gasbaggery and Hannity's rants MUST exist to create the framework for the stealth propaganda of Hume. By establishing a visual structural binary between "news" and "opinion" relying on the semiotics of meaning pre-existing in the news format, Fox forces Hume to remain accepted as "legitimate news anchor" precisely because the cultural codes allow no other discourse to be possible.
So when Glenn Greenwald rightly asks us why someone as transparently biased as Hume remains regarded as "sober news pundit" rather than "shill for the Bush Cult" it is because the structure allows no other possible conclusion without violating the entire rubric.
Asking the rest of the media structure to regard Hume outside of the very structure they exist within would be like asking the characters in a soap opera to work the fact they're on a fictional television show into their plot-line. It is structurally impossible.
Exposing Hume as a partisan fraud would be to expose the mechanism all of the intertextual news programs rely upon to code and structure not only their programming but each other's on-camera identities.
Thus pulling off Hume's costume renders them all naked.
You can not expose the structure from within the structure any more than you can attempt to speak better English by speaking Japanese. The two language systems are incompatible with each other. This is what semoitics understands.
Why blogs are so powerful right now is that they assault the meaning structures in ways that are impossible from within the structures themselves. They expose the lies, the fraud, the echo chamber reliance on false narrative that has defined the modern bankruptcy of 21st Century American news media.
The only way you can expose meaning structures is by threatening the structures themselves. The fraudulent dancing puppets on the news media stage, the empty, jerking marionettes like Chris Matthews, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and the blank faces on the nightly news like Katie Couric and Brian Williams, are simply incapable of reorienting towards objective truth because they are beholden to the meaning structural machine within which they reside.
These people can't even call out Fox News for being a shill for the republican party without fear of rocking their "news" boat so badly that it will swamp them all (and it will).
So getting back to Greenwald's query. Why does Brit Hume still exist as a "news" pundit? Because he has been placed within a structure of rigidity, in which his codes and signifiers affix his meaning within a far greater rubric than anything he says or does.
Exposing Brit Hume as a fraud is simply a matter of reprinting his own words. But that is not enough to structurally decode how he is presented. So long as Fox News continues to place him within his "hard news" slot, he will remain what the meta-text calls him -- a "news journalist." Nothing will be able to shake that meaning without breaking down the entire visual language of the discourse.
To answer Glenn, the only way we expose Hume is to expose the entire mechanism. This is what the blogs are now doing and why the conventional media structure is so threatened.
We don't defeat the pernicious evil of Hume and the rest of the frauds who continue to lie to and deceive the American public on a daily basis by micro-challenging the individual.
We defeat the individual fraud like Hume by exposing the entire mechanism within which they reside as cancerous and rotting.
This is what blogs and the internet are capable of doing.
The American public can be fooled for certain extents, but we still live in a free enough country that the truth can and will win out. Civil Rights saw many setbacks, assassinations and feelings of utter loss before eventually triumphing through the sheer power of the truth of their argument. Those who opposed the Vietnam War as a fraud took years and felt absolutely defeated when Nixon won reelection, but their truth was too powerful and eventually won out.
So too will we win out.
The American public know that the structure of "news" is built on "the signified" meaning structures instead of the truth of the "signifier." That cable news communicates text based on the supremacy of visual code, and that this communication methodology is inherently propagandistic in nature. Americans have seen the media support the lies that led to a disastrous war. They watched Bush created as a Made-for-TV movie hero until the weight of his real world failures shattered the illusion.
In short, there is a sense that the media is rotten that exists outside of the structure that continues to pump out the daily ritual of fake-news on a 24 hour cycle. When we tap into these outside discourses to expose the entire fraud of the mechanism, whether or not Brit Hume has all the flashy graphics in the world to proclaim his "sober, serious journalism" or not, the structure's exposure will no longer function as a successful communication process.
This is where you and I come in.
We can and should continue to attack the specific textual lies that these frauds pump out on a daily basis. We can and should call them out when they print ficticious Abraham Lincoln quotes and try to claim opposing this war is "outside the mainstream."
But we must also attack the very nature by which these pundit elites live within a structure that self-proclaims it's function as "news" when what it is really communicating is anything but.