anonymous, I don't know , look like Paul Street essay is pretty much on cue..If someone was walking the street saying the same speech as GWB, they put that person in a asylum.. At least under the rule of Saddam, Iraqis were assured to benefit with the nationalization of oil, this nationalization is now lost to privatization and to the profit of a few.. Couric statements should be to rapatriates soldiers, not promote an ideology that murders children..in my opinion, if navy seals rocks, they do it with the rocks that bury Iraqis children in their tombs.. Have a nice day and don't forget to heil to your fascist TV; remember GWB and little Courics are may be hiding behind it...

I just had the misfortune of stumbling across this idiotic rambling attempt at a blog, and am, I fear, the worse for it. Your entire argument reeks of  unexperienced academia. Have you ever experienced life? The fact that youve never been to Iraq is a given. You have no knowledge of the reality of war, or the oppression the iraqis suffered under the tyrrannical rule of Saddam. You lambast Couric for expressing gratitude that there are still men who are willing to endure what few can, thoroughly willing to pay the ultimate sacrifice so you can run around spewing this verbal dysentary in relative safety. That you no doubt use your educational bully pulpit to spread your silly liberal beliefs nauseates me. So many misinformed children...

It really pissed me off also. In another way, it was kind of scary that somebody that stupid could say something so ridiculous. By the way, I enjoyed reading Empire and Inequality.

Sports, entertainment, multi-national corporations and money. It has absolutely nothing to do with politics. In today's G8 countries you can group virtually all channels of communication that should impart substantative information under either the family of sports, or that of entertainment. The public pays enormous amounts of money to satisfy their perceived "need" to relax and lessen the stress of everyday life. Their passion, which under other circumstances, might be concentrated upon political activism, community improvement, hunger, education, medical care, social improvements, etc., are instead allowed to be directed towards entertaining themselves...and coincidently making big bucks for those that provide those services. So everything is designed to calm, to amuse, to entertain, and to avoid the risk of applying real mental effort to analyze a given situation. Afterall, it's far far better for John Public to concentrate his passions and his energy and his thoughts upon the NBA Finals or the World Cup than it is to direct all that energy into positive and socially (and personally) fulfilling activities to improve life on this planet.....and of course far less dangerous to those in power. Capitalism and Selfishness go hand in hand. True capitalism frees the markets to satisfy selfish ends. And thus we become no longer a Producer society, but instead a Consumer society, spending billions upon billions upon disposable, unrecyclable, self-satisfying consumer goods and services. And spending billions upon billions of dollars upon a military to protect all that and to aggresively accumulate more on our behalf. And consequently, less and less monsy is available for social infrastructure. A society only has so many resources. It can spend them on socially redeeming activities that improve the human lot, or it can spend them on iPods, movies and sports activities. We have made our choice. It takes great personal discipline not to allow one's self to be corrupted in such an environment. All of us, to one degree or another, are caught up in this - most of us far more than we think. And the result is that every dollar I spend to satisfy my own "need" for relaxation and fun is a dollar taken from the mouth of a hungry child in the Third World, or it's another day that a single mother in Asia has to sweat out a meager living in a G8-owned factory surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards. It is much easier to maintain discipline and purpose and spirit when your people are being repressed and brutalised - the human spirit always rises to its heights on such occasions. It is entirely another thing when you are being fed and entertained and protected and the subject of a cultural psyops program from cradle to grave. This is an evil, evil system - a far more sinister and powerful and pervasive empire than the world has ever known.

I think you have it right, Anonymous, that it's not about political bias.  It's useless trying to find a liberal or a conservative bias in mainstream news coverage because it is impossible to unify such a large, politically diverse group under a single political ideology.  There is one single ideology that they all share, however, and that is the necessity to make a profit to survive.  Therefore, the prevailing trend is to do whatever it takes to make the most money at the least cost.  That is why news is filled with fluff.  Fluff is cheap to produce, and is ideally suited to selling products.

By the way, you know those TV ratings they put at the begging of TV-shows, the ones that go TV-PG. TV-14, etc? You'll notice there absent from today and its counter parts, why? Because news and sports programming are exempt from those ratings and those programs are labeled as “news.” The daytime talk shows, Ellen, Oprah, Springer etc, , and the Entertainment shows like entertainment tonight, and access Hollywood do have those ratings because they aren't classified as news, but I have a hard time distinguishing Today from those other programs I mentioned.

Great Piece man. I have, on occasion, skimmed through the morning network shows and am amazed at how brain dead they are. A small debate has risen here about whether it's elite liberal or conservitve bias that permites through these septic tanks called "morning shows" but to me it seems less about politcal bias then about filling the air time with inane, useless fluff pieces.

And lest anyone think this shit is new, in the 1950's the Today show would have a fucking monkey come on air to do a trick or somthing, and they had interviews the "winners" from their corrupt prime time game shows. Nowadays CBS's Early Show interviews the contestants from Survior at the end of each season. Some things never change.

josesanders I agree on the "continuing trend toward commercialization of television news" and have also noted the networks actually yes "reporting" on their own idiotic but heavily ideological shows like The Apprentice and Survivor and on movies put out by studios under the same corporate umbrella as the "reporters." Its something they call "synergy" and the best analyst on how it all works is Robert McChesney; see his book Rich Media, Poor Democracy and much more. And we can easily overestimate the novelty of the sometimes surreal juxtaposition of mindless consumerist commercialization and hard news as all part of one big corporate media package geared to middle- and upper-class white people with money to buy stuff. I was just doing some research on racial violence in the 1960s and happened upon a March 1968 LIFE magazine with a long cover story on the "the cry" of the nation's hyper-segregated black ghettos. I'd go through about three pages of serious investigative journalism about ghetto conditions and experience and then hit some huge page-sized advertisement for a happiness inducing car, or a happiness-inducing brand of cigarettes and so on --- all replete with pictures of smiling, well-clothed, and bouncy white people so distant from the gritty ghetto stories sandwiched between the ads. The same LIFE issue had a bloody reality-based story about an imperial U.S. offensive in the South Vietnamese city of Hue, followed by a series of frivolous ads showing semi-rich white people being repressively desublimated ---- attaining pseudo-sexual and pretended culturalliberation ala Herbert Marcuse's One Dimensional Man --- through the semi-orgiastic consumption of various U.S. consumer products. So yes its not new and its hardly just on television. Reading the great New York Times, it's often striking to read a small story about some new mind-boggling horror inflicted by Washington at home and/or abroad and then see a full-page advertisement for a watch or perfume or whatever. The ad dwarfs the story by 10 to 1 in terms of space. It's gotten worse over time since the 1960s with stunning concentration in media ownership and related class polarization in the U.S., rendered more invisible than ever by a corporate-Orwellian "free press" that sees no market in telling more than fleeting and hidden truths (the NYT series on "class," recently anthologized as a book) about the depth and degree of U.S. poverty. Yes to the "news as a business opportunity." Same for politics and policy. This is capitalist totalitarianism of the business community's de facto dictatorship in the U.S.: the profit motive permeates all spheres, drowning politics, policy, religion, journalism, education, and even personal relationships in what Marx and Engels (1848) called "the icy waters of egotistical calcuation." What they (M&E) considered the "midwife to socialism" (the bourgeois mode of production and life) has turned out to be the gravedigger of democracy and, perhaps, barring radical revolution and democratic societal reconstruction in the not-so-distant future...human existence as such.

I think that hiring Couric is part of a continuing trend toward commercialization of television news.  Morning news shows nowdays are pretty much just commercials.  They do about two minutes of news per hour, then spend the rest of the time demonstrating new "gadgets" (making sure to tell you how much they cost and precisely where you can buy them), "reporting" on the latest developments on Survivor or The Apprentice or American Idol, depending on which network you are watching, giving glowing reviews for movies that just happen to come from studios owned by the same parent company as the network, etc.  News stories are seen simply as business opportunities.

This trend is much more advanced in the morning than the evening news, but now that CBS has hired Couric, I'm sure it won't be long before they catch up.

lol david, you got to be careful giving linkages tools to " the man"; there is not a day I don't fear for his life because of nature of his postings.. Also, to a certain point, reading Paul Street in public such as in a mcDonald is not recommended, if you can't contain your laughter.. There is some news on another fearless champion whom is now labeled as an imperialist.. In insight I don't know how peruvian Garcia got elected..

a dumbass mouthpiece. If She looked like Bella Abzug she wouldn't be in television news. Compare what TV Network News reporters look like with what print journalists look like. TV Network News has been, still is, and probably will be... a show. Entertainment aimed at gaining a large audience to entice advertisers and their business. TV Network News is no different from any other *program* the network broadcasts. Why do you think they call it "programming" anyway?

Congratulations on the hyperlinking! Now the world is your oyster!

 

Yes to the "FYA" advice.  One advantage of the Drupal over the ExpressionsEngine has been the greater capacity the Drupal provides.  (If 'capacity' is the right term.)  Whereas I frequently ran into capacity limits with the EE, I've never reached Drupal's limits.  This could really come in handy, when dealing with a lot of material lifted from other websites with a habit of changing their URLs at source or even placing subscription-blocks over their material after short periods of time.  (For example, the NYTimes, now at the seven-day mark, I believe.) 

On the other hand, I've experienced a lot formatting- and line-spacing and paragraphing problems with the Drupal that make pasting material herein (even "FYA") problematic. 

Though as always with the caveat---maybe it's just me.

 

Yeah, I guess "I am preaching to the converted." I also have the most problems with liberals and "progressives"/social democrats. I think Duncan Kennedy* captured the radical's frustration in his The Liberal Administrative Style. My point though (and this may seem like nitpicking or "political correctness" - I still think it's valid ) is that many lefties still look at it through the paradigm of who ever is in office at the moment. The examples you used to end your piece were Cheney, Rumsfeld and George Bush II. I agree with you on that. I think it would be better if you had used the words 'Vice-President', 'Secretary of Defense', 'President of the United States', so you could emphasize that it is the roles not the persona that is important. I see many leftist focusing too much on bashing Bush et al; they forget that his administration didn't start torture-as-policy, didn't start the ruling class welfare, didn't start the use of false pretexts for war (even worse under "progressive" Theodore Roosevelt) and unilaterally starting wars, didn't start the erosion of privacy (and it was as bad, if not worse, under Lyndon Johnson) and, well, I could go on... I doubt that any democrat or liberal would provide different results. The rhetoric might change a little (but see how Blair's arguements are slowly coming full circle) but the substance remains the same.

I know you agree with all those sentiments. Well, 'leftists' should act like it. Maybe it would radicalize more people if they wondered why the left refrained from going after Bush and his cronies specifically and almost always specified that it is the 'President of the United States' that is acting not Bush per see. And then they might read up on (radical) history and see that while the person might have his quirks, the role hasn't changed much, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal.

On the compostion of elite opinion question: I have this pet theory that the coordinator class tend to be liberal (if they want to push the boundaries they become Marxists), while the capitalist class tends to be conservative. And that their power struggle (although most of the institutional power is always with the conservatives) has played out in the political system through the Democrat and Republican parties. I don't know if any class analysis has asked this explicitly... but then I have yet to read Thomas Ferguson's Golden Rule. If anybody knows more about this (or thinks I'm way off), please reply.

I am that first anonymous poster (just because you are paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't out to get you...) but I decided to create an account after all. I've been a lurker here for about a year. Kudos to you for your dedication to your blog and replying to comments.

The hypertext is nice. Still, when linking to some outside sites, I would prefer to see the text reproduced here. Not only because I like to avoid the advertising (although I can sort that out with firefox on my personal computer) but also because sometimes those sites remove the information later. So, Paul, when you consider something important, don't forget to provide the text "FYA".

The point on NBC's military ownership was that she was accusing Aljazeera of inevitable bias while she was working for General Electric ...a leading master of war. The "I think Navy SEALs rock" comment is just unreal; really blows the mind to think things have sunken so low in the U.S. that somebody capable of such abject idiocy is even taken seriously as a news anchor at what was once sort of the New York Times of broadcast news, for what that's worth, which is perhaps not that much. CBS used to be owned by Westinghouse, a leading "defense" contractor, but no it doesn't have to be owned by a leading military firm to be part of a war media. "Servant of empire" is probably too weak for CBS or ABC (Disney) or Fox; the big networks are agents of global empire and in fact are parts of huge global corporations with all kinds of vested interests in the imperial globalization project and bottom line reasons to pander to jingoism.

Anonymous not sure how your opening comment applies to this particular post, but you are preaching to the converted in my case. The academic-institutional "doctrine-management structure" referred to in the original blog post here is run (like most universities) at least at the departmental level by liberals (and Democrats), though I heard rumors and saw some evidence that some of the top officials were in fact Republicans. I personally have tended to get along much better with conservatives than liberals, which surprised me at first. On further thought and experience I think I determined why it makes sense: it is the liberals in places like universities and at the New York Times and in the corporate liberal nonprofits (e.g. the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur and Ford Foundations) that set and police the boundaries of what passes for "left" discourse. They are the ones, not the conservatives, that a real leftist (a root-and-branch Gerrard Winstanley radical that is) has to actually interact with (generally on subordinate terms) in the academic and grant-making spheres. They are the ones who say "thus far and no further" and who sometimes (more specifically) say things to radical history professors like: "I hear you said the invasion of Iraq was a war crime; how about restricting yourself to your specific course subject matter?" Mostly they say nothing at all directly to a radical in their midst since most (not all) academicians (predominantly liberal in the humanities and social sciences though perhaps not in the business and engineering schools) are complete cowards. It's all very behind the scenes and hush, hush. They knife you in and behind your back, whispering against you at the cocktail parties and blocking publications anonymously in the peer-reviewed/policed journals and of course denying jobs and interviews and promotions in the name of something they call professionalism. It's all very polite and all very vicious and I've seen and experienced enough of it in two of the key spheres (academia and the nonprofit "civil rights" and social policy world) and can glean enough of the journalistic dimension from the "Lies of Our [New York] Times" (to quote the title of an (I think] journal that Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky ran for a while) to have developed a special lifelong aversion to the liberal virus. There are some good liberal exceptions and I'm lucky to have worked for one for a number of years in the 1990s. I miss clay tablets.

CBS and NBC are regularly considered to be liberal networks. (See: Law and Order, my new guilty pleasure show.)

Paul: Don't you mean CBS being a servant of empire, etc.? I mean, to bash on NBC in front of Couric is sort of pointless, non?

Paul: Yeah. Embedding the weblinks inside the text is a magical process and produces results that are so much more pleasing to the eye.  Plus, under the current blogs, anyone posting comments has access to the very same tools.One of the genuine powers of this particular tool is its capacity to create links to other electronically archived material.  As long as the URL isn't changed at its source, a tremendous amount of material thus can be archived.Beats clay tablets and papyrus.  Hands down.

 

Hey don't focus only on the Conservatives, the Liberals are just as bad. On a sidenote, does anybody know what the percentage of elite opinion is conservative or liberal? And whether the ratio has been constant through the years?

On Couric I think this quote applies to well:

It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.

- Upton Sinclair I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked (1935)

....to readers and especially to David Peterson for hyperlinking tips. As should be evident from the hyperlinked revisions above, I am now technologically equipped to inflict new levels of moral and ideological havoc on dominant authoritarian communications, socioeconomic, and military structures at home and abroad.