Lies Our Media Tells Us

I’ve been reading. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman is a brilliant book. Not since Lee Harris’ great Suicide of Reason, have I been so riveted by a book. Originally published in 1985, and recently re-released with a new introduction by the author’s son (Postman died in 2003) it is still essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the media. (Oh, look, there it is, over there in the left hand margin! Just click on the picture of it to buy a copy from Amazon… Gee, Suicide of Reason is there too!)

Of course a lot has changed since 1985 but Postman’s landmark book puts everything in context. Postman understood television exquisitely well and the seeds of our current dilemma were sown in the television age. He was the one who coined the term “infotainment” to describe the softened, cooled out non-news that evolved on television. Even though the hegemony of TV over our news consciousness is now passing into history, its effect on the way we experience the world is still very strong.

You can see the effect of it in multiculturalism and political correctness which have been bred in the hot-house environs of local and network news broadcasts where the only talk about “hot” subjects like race, or religion and the only mention hot terms like “terrorists” when they can’t avoid it and even then in apologetic and equivocal ways. The TV medium, Postman tells us cultivates such “cool” issue avoidance because the medium cultivates an audience that is stultifyingly passive and entertainment oriented. As he wrote in 1985 he described, with horror, a society sliding inexorably down into a “Huxleyan” totalitarian Brave New World. He was right about the slide but he did not see the crocodile waiting at the bottom of the slope.

Even though he did not see it, he perfectly described the ignorant arrogance and soporific inattention with which western populations have allowed the media to anesthetize them to the very real threat of Caliphate Islam and lull them into acquiescence to the creeping resurgence of the already failed ideology of world socialism. With every new “big story” we get closer to the waiting jaws.

A case could be made that in the age of television, and especially since 1967, there has not been a news event of major transformative effect that has not been presented to the public without serious distortions. Some have been outright lies. The seriousness of the effects of these distortions cannot be understated. Here are a variety of examples:

• In 1967 the world was given the impression that the great victory in The Six Day War had solved the Middle East problem and secured Israel’s existence. This distorted view has set the stage for the Arabs, who still vastly outnumber the Israelis, are far richer and have an undiminished desire to utterly destroy Israel, to claim the mantel of “underdog” and even “victim” in the eyes of a majority of Europeans and very large numbers of Americans.

• The defeat of the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in 1968 was presented as proof that further support of freedom in Southeast Asia was futile. This perception turned allied victory into defeat and caused a substantial bloodbath in Viet Nam and contributed heavily to the cataclysm in neighboring Cambodia

• In 1987 the video of the Rodney King incident was shown over and over to the public on the evening news without the first segment of it which showed King attacking one of the officers. The public then could not understand the verdict when the jury (who, in court, had seen King’s aggressive attack) acquitted the police officers. The reverberations of the riots, in which 48 people died, that followed are still poisoning the “conversation about race” in the US today.

• The systematic demonization of the Serbs in the Balkans and the complete bestowal of “victim-hood” on the Moslems of Kosovo. Led to allied bombing of the Serbs and an overall tilt toward the Moslem side which gave prestige, courage and comfort to many foreign Islamist fighters who were active in the Balkans at the time. Many of those fighters, including Osama bin Laden himself, have gone on to terrorist activities against the west.

• The al Durah blood libel poured fuel on the fires of Islamist Jihad and the resulting wave of “retaliatory” violence that reference al Durah included the Ramallah lynchings, the beheading of Daniel Perl and 9/11. Even more damaging than the directly related violence, though, is that the wide acceptance of this particular fraud as truth has given credence to every other fraud, misrepresentation and slander since that time.

Postman saw no remedy for the distortions when he wrote his last edition of Amusing Ourselves to Death in 1987 but he could not have foreseen the sweeping changes of the last twenty years. The blind, soporific, hypnotizing blandness of the television screen has begun to yield to the computer screen with its infinite array of connections and (most importantly) its keyboard. This new medium gives hope that the endemic diseases of coolness and trivialized amusement” which contributed to Postman’s bleak outlook might find antidotes in the new millennium.

This is why I consider myself so fortunate to be working with Richard Landes to create Second Draft. Richard is uniquely qualified to understand and guide the process of finding these antidotes as this new and disruptive technology begins to correct the distorted old media. He is a specialist in millennial studies and the transformations wrought by new media of communication. He is able to put the changes we are experiencing now into a broad historical perspective. Our team at Second Draft is ready to build on the track record of success- to research and implement these antidotes.

One of the best antidotes we have in hand is the blog uprising. There is a major one, for instance, going on in Canada. Mark Steyn, my friend Blazing Cat Fur, Kathy at Five Feet of Fury, Kate at Small Dead Animals, WebElf Binky and so many other smart-mouths really seem to have begun a groundswell against the absurd neo-fascist CHRC. Many other blogs have tweaked the Religion of Pandemonium by running “ the cartoons, etc…, Maybe we at Second Draft need to set aside some resources to foster, manage and perpetuate Blog Swarming…

Stay tuned- Oh, by the way did I mention we are a 501 c 3 and are tax deductable?

Why Good People Believe Bad Things

Unconscious Anti-Semitism, Anti-Westernism and the Mainstream Media

How do people who are not anti-Semitic come to behave, think and speak in anti-Semitic ways? Why do well intentioned people who enjoy all the advantages of living in free and prosperous countries come to question and even revile the protectors of their good fortune? It has a lot to do with the way the media presents the world to us.

As individuals, we experience the world around us through our five senses. On a cultural level, the media are our eyes and ears, the lens through which we experience the world beyond our immediate experience. We depend on the media to bring us an undistorted representation of that larger world so that we can understand and adapt to it.

Many people of many political persuasions complain about the media lens’ distortions, which, they all feel is biased against them. The news media often point to this widespread disapproval as a good sign. “After all,” they say, “If no one is happy with us then that must mean that we are doing a good job, that we are fair.”

But the very concept of fairness may be the problem. Fairness and its often silent partner “evenhandedness” are the fulcrum by which the media’s good intentions are flipped into the upside-down world of moral relativism and political correctness. The media’s job is not to find the mid-point of competing political agendas, but to report the news regardless of how that plays out for or against any particular group’s interests. In the name of “fairness” our media too often aim for a sort of "average" position between opposing groups. Whether those opposing groups are political parties, cultures that are competing for survival or warring armies, the "mid point" between them is seldom anything but a barren no man’s land. The sort of fairness that we find routinely in the media is, at best a morally blind position based on reporting both sides equally credibly and credulously. The reason that no one seems to be satisfied that we are not getting fair and honest representations of events is, simply, that we are not.

This tautology of universal offense is one of the hand-maidens to the most dangerous public delusion in Western Civilization: moral relativism, which holds that no set of values or opinion or culture is superior to any other. This radical variant of multiculturalism, which refuses to judge other cultures by our own (or any) standards, dominates much of the media and academia.

It seems safe to say that in all of human history there has never been a conflict in which both parties were exactly as right (or good - or nice) as the other. In truth, the morally neutral approach actively undermines the side with the most moral clarity and confers an unfair advantage on any side that is less democratic, ethical and open. So why is the media intent on making believe that all causes are equal?

Leaving aside the reporters and outlets who are anti-Semitic and virulently pro-Arab, there is still a very strong anti-Israel bias to the mainstream media (and academia) that is directly traceable to this pernicious moral relativity. How does a measure whose avowed purpose is the elimination of bias become the source of bias and distortion? It is in the very nature of moral relativism- It Is a willful denial of real differences and denial can only ever deepen any crisis. Without trustworthy media, the more tolerant and open the culture, the more paralyzed and defenseless it is. Honesty in reporting requires, not blank indifference to cultural and moral values, but a firm grasp on the consequences of ideas and actions. Truly fair reporting does not present the average between two sides in a dispute; it finds the real center of gravity, based on the best estimate of the moral values of each side and presents the relationship as accurately as possible.

Nowhere is this problem of moral relativism more acute than in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Arabs have no compunction against making wild accusations. They make claims of humiliation, land theft, collective punishment, apartheid and massacres that never happened against Israel. Even though they have been exposed In many notorious fakes (al Durah, Jenin, Gaza Beach Kfar Qana…) they persist becausee the tactic succeeds. It succeeds because when the media tries to find the "evenhanded" center point between those wild inaccuracies and the honest, reasoned, compassionate apologetic approach of the Israelis, they invariably throw up their hands and say, “Who are we to judge?” or “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter” and find some way of reporting the events that put them half way between the wild lies and the halting attempt at truth. The Palestinians and their supporters are enraged because their outrageous accusations are softened a little and the Israelis are exasperated because they have once again been reported to be war criminals when they are nothing of the kind. The “fair" version is skewed far out of the real center point that Israel's integrity and earnest search for evidence is rewarded with labels like– apartheid, pariah and even Nazi. She winds up being tried and convicted in the kangaroo court of the "evenhanded" media of disproportionate response, massacres of civilians and collective punishment. All too often Israel and her supporters neglect to appeal this injustice and through their inaction the accusations stick.

Of course, this tendency to settle for the morally blind “geographical” measure of the center-point of a dispute, while pointedly ignoring the moral and cultural dimensions of it, is not just a media disease. In the culture at-large the uninformed, the morally weak, the self-loathing, and the politically immature flock to organizations and ideas that feed from this same trough. Sabeel, International Solidarity Movement and the various Israel divestment proposals (Academic, Methodist, Episcopal, Presbyterian) all lean on this central distortion of reality to support their activities. While it is true that some of these are motivated, at least partially by good intentions, many are moved by insensate Jew-hatred dressed up in genteel clothing. almost all have some mixture of the two.

Under normal circumstances, Israel's lack of self defense and the rest of the world's general disinterest in correcting the media is a mere disorder in judgment that might pass for generosity of spirit – Israel and the Western democracies are strong and can afford to be self-critical; Arab and Muslim countries have great difficulty dealing with modernity and need a break. But under current conditions of waxing global Jihad, the current media (and academic) approach is backfiring – disguising Jihadi aggression through (polite) under-reporting, encouraging that same aggression by a disproportionate self-criticism that registers as weakness, failing to hold the Arab world and their western abettors (journalists and their dupes) to any standards, undermining genuine moderates who really do want to live up to modern standards, and paralyzing Western capacities to resist Jihadi aggressions. The moral inversion whereby Israelis and Americans are spoken of as “state-sponsored” terrorists resisting Palestinian or Iraqi “freedom fighters” has catastrophic consequences for the Western world and any human being interested in Liberty.

The situation could be improved dramatically if the media would just be honest and accurate. Instead of contorting themselves, obfuscating their stories and persecuting their readers/listeners/viewers with evasive and inexact politically correct jargon, they should forget about balancing their spin on the news to keep everybody equally dissatisfied and concentrate on the facts and the realities. That will make those who most deserve to be unhappy the unhappiest.


Update:
Kate at Small Dead Animals (welcome SDA readers!) linked here with this quote added:

"In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube." - Ayn Rand

My thanks to Kate- this is a great quote!