|
IN THESE TIMES -- November 10, 2004
Too Little, Too Late
By Robert Parry
November 10, 2004
George W. Bush's electoral victory is chilling proof that conservatives
have achieved dominance over the flow of information to the American
people and that even a well-run Democratic campaign stands virtually
no chance for national success without major changes in how the
news media operates.
It is not an exaggeration to say today that the most powerful nation
on earth is in the grip of an ideological administration-backed by
a vast network of right-wing think tanks, media outlets and attack
groups-that can neutralize any political enemy with smears, such
as the Swift Boat ads against John Kerry's war record, or persuade
large numbers of people that clearly false notions are true, like
Saddam Hussein's link to the 9/11 attacks.
The outcome of the 2004 election also highlights perhaps the greatest
failure of the Democratic-liberal side in American politics: a
refusal to invest in the development of a comparable system for
distributing information that can counter the right's potent media
infrastructure.
Democrats and liberals have refused to learn from the lessons of
the Republican-conservative success.
The history is this: For the past quarter century, the right has
spent billions of dollars to build a vertically integrated media
apparatus-reaching from the powerhouse Fox News cable network through
hard-line conservative newspapers and magazines to talk radio
networks, book publishing, well-funded Internet operations and
right-wing bloggers.
Using this infrastructure, the conservatives can put any number of
"themes" into play that will instantaneously reach tens of millions
of Americans through a variety of outlets, whose messages then
reinforce each other in the public's mind.
Beyond putting opposing politicians on the defensive, this right-wing
machine intimidates mainstream journalists and news executives who
will bend over backward and cater to the conservative side, do
almost anything to avoid being tagged with the career-threatening
tag of "liberal."
Liberal resistance
In contrast to the right's media juggernaut, the left relies largely
on a scattered network of cash-strapped Web sites, a few struggling
magazines and a couple of hand-to-mouth satellite TV networks.
Plus, the evidence is that wealthy progressives still don't "get
it."
Even with the election looming, Air America, a promising AM radio
network founded to challenge Rush Limbaugh and the right-wing talk
radio monopoly, was hobbled by the refusal of rich liberals to
invest in the venture.
In a new book, Road to Air America, Sheldon Drobny, one of the
network's founders, describes his frustrating appeals to East and
West Coast "limousine liberals" who didn't want to engage in the
project. I have encountered similar rebuffs dating back to the early
'90s, after my experiences as a mainstream investigative journalist
for the Associated Press and Newsweek convinced me that the biggest
threat to American democracy was the growing imbalance in the
national news media.
Yet even as conservative foundations were pouring tens of millions
of dollars into building hard-edged conservative media outlets,
liberal foundations kept repeating the refrain: "We don't do media."
One key liberal foundation explicitly forbade even submitting funding
requests that related to media projects.
What I saw on the left during this pivotal period was an ostrich-like
avoidance of the growing threat from the right's rapidly developing
news media infrastructure.
Right-wing money
As the liberals stayed on the sidelines in the '80s and '90s, the
conservative media gained powerful momentum from foreign sources
of money, particularly from South Korean theocrat Sun Myung Moon
and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Moon alone invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the Washington
Times and other conservative outlets, while gaining protection for
his dubious money operations from Republican defenders inside the
U.S.
government.
The right also made clear that its plan was to wage the "war of
ideas,"
which conservatives did not mean in a metaphorical sense. The right's
goal has been to destroy or at least marginalize its enemies through
various kinds of information warfare. To reverse Prussian military
strategist Karl von Clausewitz's famous dictum, one might say that
for conservatives the "war of ideas" is merely the continuation of
violent conflict by other means, including the use of propaganda
and disinformation.
Yet, instead of joining this ideological battle, the liberal-Democratic
side largely divided up its money between do-good projects, such
as buying up threatened wetlands, and spending on activism, such
as voter registration and get-out-the vote drives. While there's
nothing wrong with these activities, the election's outcome has
demonstrated again that in an age of media saturation, street-level
activism isn't enough.
Even when liberal money is earmarked for media, the funds are usually
controlled and spent by political activists. For instance, Campaign
2004's "Media Fund," run by former Clinton administration official
Harold Ickes, spent millions of dollars from liberal donors on TV
ads placed with mainstream media outlets. Little, if anything, was
spent on building year-in-year-out media, like the conservatives
have done.
That means that at the end of a campaign, nothing of permanence is
left behind. The liberals wait until the next election cycle to gin
up their operations again, while the conservatives spend the next
four years, every day, pitching their arguments to the American
people and making their political base even stronger.
The end result of this imbalance has been that American democracy
has been diminished. Indeed, the great American experiment with a
democratic republic may be on the verge of becoming meaningless,
since much of the information distributed through the conservative
echo chamber is either wrong or wildly misleading-and since the
mainstream press has been so thoroughly housebroken.
No birthright
Yet, while it's certainly true that the Bush administration and its
allies have shown little regard for truthful information, it's also
a legitimate criticism of the Democrats and progressives that they
haven't fought nearly as hard as they should for honest information,
the oxygen of any healthy democracy.
While many Americans see information as a birthright that is supposed
to be delivered to them by the press like a newspaper thumping on
the front doorstep, it is really a right that must be fought for
like any other important right.
As George W. Bush celebrates his historic victory, the Democrats,
left-of-center foundations and wealthy American liberals should
finally recognize that their long pattern of starving honest,
independent media has contributed to putting the nation-and the
planet-on the edge of catastrophe.
John Kerry's well-fought campaign-and the youthful energy that
surrounded it-may have been an encouraging sign, but the hard truth
is:
It was too little, too late.
*************************************
My comments: One thing Parry forgot to point out. If you had control of a vast, effective propaganda machine would you want the citizenry to know? If they did, they'd probably evaluate every piece of information in your favor, which they received from the media, with a grain of salt, because they know the media is biased towards you. No, you would want the people to think the media was controlled by your OPPONENTS. Hence, the myth of the liberal media undercuts the argument that the media is liberal, because if liberals really controlled the media, they wouldn't create this big idea that the media is "liberal". Rather it's the conservative media that's created this myth.
Secondly, this article NEVER would have been written 5 or 6 years ago. Even though virtually everything substantive said in it could have been said then. What has happened over the past 5 or 6 years has been a transformation... of the liberal left. It used to be that pundits in the "mainstream" press would look at Clinton's welfare reform, proclaim the death of liberalism, and there would not be a peep. My conservative friend would show me Rush Limbaugh's show, or there would be a Promise Keepers rally, or TIME Magazine would do a piece on the death of feminism, or initiatives to privatize education, or end affirmative action in California. Even Bill Clinton was essentially a lame duck, unwilling even to apply standard auto emissions standards to SUVs while they went from being utility vehicles to mass consumption vehicles under his Presidency. Going to sign a climate treaty that would be rejected unanimously by the Senate. All for nought. Liberals seemed not only apathetic but even willing to accept their own demise. Call me crazy, but in some sense, when I look at the political landscape at the end of the Clinton era, and at the beginning of Bush's second term, it wasn't much better back then than it is now. The difference is that this time progressives actually seem to care what is happening. Perhaps it took 3 electoral defeats and a radical President to do that.
|
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(78 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
