During the reign of Rove/Cheney, reasons were replaced by excuses; and verifiable facts were replaced by free-floating assertions. That is, the GOP did what they wanted - and made up patently phony excuses for why they did it. They asserted whatever outrageous non-facts might justify their crimes - and were never pressured by any embarrassing media fact-checking. Because the Democrats agreed to "play by the rules" even as the GOP were shredding the rules, the so-called Overton Window of acceptable political discourse was shifted far, far to the right.
Today it is a depressingly similar, story. The increasingly surreal and counter-factual assertions of the GOP are still eagerly published without serious analysis by the corporate media whores. No one in the corporate media bats an eye at the unhinged rants of Glenn Beck or the open hostility of the GOP in a time of national crisis. Meanwhile, Obama is given the third degree for every raised eyebrow; and his nominees and proposals are subjected to merciless and cynical obstruction without evoking any media sympathy.
The failure of the corporate media to correctly move the Overton Window back to the left...
(i.e., to shut the violent lunatic rump of the GOP and the fundamentalist whackjobs out of the public conversation) to reflect the change in popular sentiment means that the Overton Window is broken.
It is as dead as the Philips Curve, a discredited economic theory balancing growth and unemployment. The Corporate Media have turned the Overton Window into the Overton Ratchet - it only moves to the right.
This kind of corporate media bias has happened before in history. It is the signature of proto-totalitarianism.
In a real democracy, politicians make arguments in favor of their proposals to citizens who evaluate those arguments. In a real democracy, media is an objective conduit, reporting the facts; and it refrains from editorializing or drawing too many implications from the facts. Its job is to deliver information, not opinion. When the public (not the punditocracy) makes its evaluation, a real media will make an objective report of that.
The path to the propaganda ministry
Since the early 1980s, the kind of objective news needed for citizens to make informed decisions has been increasingly crowded out. At first, it was by entertainment and titillation; but with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine in 1988, the floodgates were opened for ideologues (and only ideologues of the right need apply - witness the firings of Phil Donohue and Bill Maher). Since the major consolidation of the 90s, the media in America has been dominated by a handful of large conglomerates, all of them with ideological ties to either the hard right or the M-I-C. (See Mark Crispin Miller's chart ) "Analysis" and commentary replaced factual reporting. During our "babble-Rovian captivity", the FCC was run by ideologues, allowing this conglomeration to grow worse and trying hard to overturn Net Neutrality.
Those are the events that have destroyed the flow of honest information to the citizenry. (How odd that word, citizenry, sounds after three decades of ideological and corporate assaults against it.) Only court jesters like Stewart and Colbert are allowed to speak the truth to any meaningful audiences.
Deja vu news
At first, there was some consistency to the right-wing ideological rants: less government, more religion/morals, down with effete thinking, up with war. But, even during the Bush years, the contradictions of a bigger police state, a bigger Federal government, and a gigantic deficit forced the ideologues into pretzel shapes.
In the wreckage of the Bush economy, the Bush military/diplomatic policy, and the Bush version of law and regulation, the ideologues are now simply making up whatever they have to in order to serve their real masters: the big money boys on Wall St. That's why we get force-fed sympathetic whining about "tea parties" from "oppressed" rich asshole hedge fund managers, and angry letters to the NY Times from "exploited" AIG workers, and gotcha journalism about every quotidian happenstance of political life - if and only if it involves a Democrat.
I seem to have heard about this kind of disconnection from reality before:
The elite (of the movement) is not composed of ideologists; its members' whole education is aimed at abolishing their capacity for distinguishing between truth and falsehood, between reality and fiction. Their superiority consists in their ability immediately to dissolve every statement of fact into a declaration of purpose...the elite formations understand...that when they are told that only Moscow has a subway, the real meaning of the statement is that all subways should be destroyed...The outstanding negative quality of the totalitarian elite is that it never stops to think about the world as it really is and never compares the lies with reality. Its most cherished virtue, correspondingly, is loyalty to the Leader, who, like a talisman, assures the ultimate victory of lie and fiction over truth and reality...
To (the elite) ideological cliches are mere devices to organize the masses, and they feel no compunction about changing them according to the needs of the circumstances if only the organizing principle remains intact...(The Bolsheviks) are quite capable of interrupting every existing class struggle with a sudden alliance with capitalism without undermining the reliability of their cadres or committing treason against their belief in class struggle...
It is this freedom from the content of their own ideologies which characterizes the highest rank of the totalitarian hierarchy. These men consider everything and everybody in terms of organization...
- Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism"
As usual, the word-for-word applicability of Ms. Arendt's timeless exegesis of authoritarianism is shocking. She could be talking about how the GOP no longer "supports our president in wartime". I see many people on progressive websites scratch their heads about the willful blindness on display in the media. To the head scratchers, I say that its not blindness; its calculated falsehood, calculated to inflame and incite losers, created by the GOP policies, into attacks on the designated scapegoats. A head-scratcher (who hasn't read "What's the Matter with Kansas") might demure and say that no one is that dumb; but, again, Ms. Arendt has been there.
The only group supposed to believe loyally and textually in the Leader's words are the sympathizers whose confidence surrounds the movement with an atmosphere of honesty and simple-mindedness...
Totalitarian propaganda can outrageously insult common sense only where common sense has lost its validity. Before the alternative of facing the...total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices - and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect.
- Hannah Arendt
When the wholly-corporate news media abandon all pretense of objectivity and spout bald lies and unsubstantiated nonsense, it is clear for anyone with any memory of history that we are living in a propaganda bubble - even after the overwhelming defeat of GOP candidates and policies. Agitprop commentators call for "revolution" and "armed insurrection", while wingnut Congresswomen scream about needing "armed and dangerous" people. Yet, the corporate media just lets this stuff pass without serious condemnation. Nutcases shoot up Unitarian Churches and anyone else on Bernie Goldberg's hit list; and Bill and Bernie just roll along with calling out more "enemies".
Anyone who had a family member who lived through Nazi Germany will recognize these behaviors as the prelude to some kind of mob action, some kind of organized hatred. Gays and Moslems in America today are already on the receiving end of mob violence. Abortion doctors have long since been turned into pariahs in fear for their lives - what was that about how we are a nation of laws?
There are no movements without hatred of the state, and this was virtually unknown to German(s)...in the relative stability of pre-WW1 Germany. The movements originated in Austria-Hungary, where hatred of the state was an expression of the Social Democratic Party...were formed along national, and not along class lines...
- Hannah Arendt
I hate to go here, but two things must be said. First, it was the radical left that first began preaching hatred of the state - from a hippie/anarchist POV, perhaps - but still a desire to tear down a government they found oppressive. That history is why there are people like Bill Ayers still around, who can be used as weapons by the right, however hypocritical that may be.
Second, let me close this diary with just another of those deja vu moments from Hannah: the hatred of "liberal" America - the America of the Bill of Rights, the Enlightenment, and the Separation of Church and State - was virtually unknown in urban America fifty years ago. It is an ideological import from the most rabid, fundamentalist areas of the country, where hatred of the Constitutional protections afforded to the "non-saved" and to "heretical" scientific facts was an expression of the Theocratic Party, formed along religious, not political lines.
A final plea to wake the fuck up
In the end, propaganda that flies in the face of reality can only be supported by armed violence. At this point, given their refusal to negotiate, violence is all the rump of the GOP have left. So, when are we going to finally draw a line about how far you can threaten armed violence before we start doing something about it? Do we have to wait for more murders?
Can someone start a class action suit against Bernie Goldberg for his hit list? I recall an internet site that was shut down for putting up a set of "wanted dead or alive" posters.
Where is the NRA on this? If they are the side of democracy, they should say so. If they are on the side of mob violence, then they should be made to say so.
In general, can we have some pushback against this propaganda before its too late?