...to where Crow now wonders:
I have seen ranting political pundits work their spin before but, like most people, I have always tuned it out until it involved my reputation. It feels pretty scary to watch credible news outlets run with a story that is clearly not true, debate my patriotism over my alleged desire to have toilet paper legislated, and be the joke of late night TV monologues, all as a result of a 2 week old blog and nightly comedy routine that was spun as truth, instead of the joke it clearly was. What terrifies me the most is that we not only accept this of our journalists today but we are oblivious to it, and thus, oblivious to the damage it causes. When "news stories" are broken, do we not expect a certain amount of fact-checking or source-checking? One has to ask if this falls under the guise of sloppy reporting or deception as a source of spin.
Imagine someone going up to Karl Rove... after the media manipulation, all the lies, the corruption, the bogus war, the torture, the thefts, the utter rape of the planet by the administration he has helped to orchestrate... and saying tenderly: "uh, Mr. Rove, about the environment...." Can you imagine any Kossack so demurely attempting the conversation, minus any mention of all the rest?
But Sheryl Crow did just that. And got the ugliest side of Rove right back in her face followed by an undying mass media echo.
[Update Because of some of the interminable misunderstandings in comments below, I feel the need to state the obvious: Sheryl Crow is wearing a new hat as a blogger. The blog I write about was frontpaged on Huffington Post.
This diary is a critique of her blog, not her environmental work. I would seek the same in her as anyone else in DKos, wanting good analysis. In her blog, she writes about a) Karl Rove, and b) the media (eg, spins, distortions). Even her title tells you what she is doing: On Deception, Spin, and Losing Our Way. She is not blogging about the environment.
In this diary I am making points about her work as a blogger and her anaylsis. I am not in any way treating of her work as an environmentalist. /rant/update]
To me, what is surprising and even ugly is that she was totally surprised. She has become both GOP scapegoat and an index for us all as to how out-of-touch our fringe media figures just might be.
What disturbs me more is what she does not mention in her blog: Iraq (at all), Halliburton, Blackstone, Chertoff, Katrina, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, the Patriot Act(s), the Plame outing... where do I start? Just her own case of media slander, and she’s worried?
Missed the whole deal with Jeffrey Gannon, did she?
I would tell her that no, one does not have to ask anymore about the media. The jig's up, as they say, and we know the lies are intentional. Then I would like to know where she and the rest have been hiding from the news all this time.
How did Sheryl Crow expect heartfelt conversation from the master of prevaricators? Or, with all her media pull, how about accepting this moment as her reasonable clue about her part in keeping the public better informed?
She also dealt Rove a hard jab to the ego. Rove, who is so invested in his self-image as mean, despicable, the king of mendacity... and we evidently are to understand that she came up to him clueless as to the kind of guy Rove is? Top that with her ironic astonishment at the disinformation campaign now aimed at her. Surprised at disinformation after a brush with Karl Rove, is she? Must have hurt Karl a lot, to know his menacing persona had escaped someone of Crow’s stature?
Your Mission, Sheryl, Should You Accept It: Wake Up the Dead
What we have in Crow is a portrait of a person with tons of pull in the media who is kind-hearted and earnest in her passion for the environment. I have no problem with her zeal there.
But she is surprised to learn what a breed of liars have taken over the MSM. Really? Who is "removed from reality" here? I would not pick on Ms. Crow, but instead entreat her to share her rude awakening with her peers among the media. Study up. If the carnage of the past six years all slipped by her, then how many more of her pals were too busy at their karma retreats to notice it all?
I almost felt sorry for her, reading her blog, that she even could be so "removed from reality" and thus serve herself up to Rove as such a fine, shining scapegoat supposedly representative of the misinformed evil "left" (Heaven help us). I played the geek in grade school, and I know the sting of being elected scapegoat. But unfortunately she is the perfect grist for the Rove mill. Read her blog: painfully reminiscent of Jane Fonda in cowboy boots, the kind of "liberal" voice which the hate pundits could easily drag across the lying face of the media in a tirade about sedition. Crow becomes their perfect scapegoat. Startled, she writes:
The planet will live on in whatever state it is in, however, it is humanity that will suffer. And as I sit and wonder, like so many other people in this country, where are the marchers in the streets, where are the voices screaming for injustices to cease, for greed and apathy to let go of it's hold, I can only come up with one supposition: Perhaps we have lost our sense of who we were born to be and instead, are numbed out beyond recognition by the ceaseless chatter that is the soundtrack to our lives.
Ahem. I would tell her: Sheryl, we’ve been waiting. Here at Dkos for one, we’ve been doing your job for you, minding the sober drudgery of the media. Where have YOU been? Remember Rather? Brokaw? There isn’t anyone covering anything anymore. It’s netroots or nothing.
Sure, sure, we’re talking about the fringe media here. I have concern that most of them live their pampered lives in the delectable zones surrounding LA, getting massages, facials, meetings with producers, deal-signings, brainstorming sessions with peers, jam sessions, parties... and live in ignorant bliss on their islands. It is a wonder that Crow or any others ever did get excited about the environment.
But yet because of my circumstance of being born/raised in south central Montana where the Hollywood fringe took over after Redford’s Horse Whisperer and A Realtor Runs Through It transformed the place into the perfect seasonal hideaway for the great and famous (eg Ted Turner, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Tom Brokaw, Micheal Keaton, More-Movie-Stars-Than-I’m-Going-To-Namedrop), I’ve watched fringe media figures collect in the Livingston area in particular... only to steadily sit on their barstools butt-slapping each other over their latest fishing/outdoor tales, their "how Hollywood came to Livingston" hagiographies dimming in the smoky air among them... never venturing forth to decry the administration’s predations upon the planet with the sole lone exceptions of Walter Kirn and Margot Kidder. It’s my hometown, I know it well, there are hundreds of people with media pull who do NOTHING about our situation.
How? Easy. Don’t watch TV, don’t dig among the netroots communities for information, and cluster among your own quasi-celebrities doing absolutely nothing but perhaps engaging in a little drunken mockery at your favorite watering hole. I’ve been watching these peripheral media figures do/say NOTHING to educate their broader community or the rest of the US as to what is really going on.
In the patriotic post-9/11 bravura, during the nationally televised patriotic whoop-up of the fourth of July 2002, Sheryl Crow played to the world from the little bandstand at the park in Livingston (population roughly 8,000 not including legions of second home owners). It is fair to say the community was adversely affected by the real estate deluge that followed. But such are not the concerns of media figures who "fatten [their] hearts in a day of slaughter."
I say, the blood of the US people be on the media’s collective head for their silence about what has become of our government..
"...all I wanna do is have some fun..."
I would tell her I think those days are over, at least for now.
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