Category Archives: Journalism

Watching The Words

Constitution, English, Glenn Beck, Internet, Journalism, Liberty, Literature, Media

Judge Andrew Napolitano delivered a fine editorial tonight on the not-so-wonderful-mind slot (The Glenn Beck Show). If only Fox News believed in the written word and posted the transcripts along with the image. (Good luck locating the same editorial on the Freedom Watch space.) For those of us who still like to read and post words, not images, FoxNews is one of the worst offenders. (I know, select transcripts will eventually propagate on the page, days later.) Reading is faster and more economical than watching a screen.

UPDATE II: Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt

Conspiracy, Government, Iraq, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Reason

The following is an excerpt from my new WND.COM column, “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt”:

“… I’ve finally figured out what it was that repulsed me so about American opinion-makers’ slobbering response to [the revolt that began in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, and swept the Egyptian president, Mohammed Hosni Mubarak, from office.]

It was not so much that the media ignored the likely possibility that democracy in a country that has become progressively more Islamic since the 1950s might not have a happy ending.

It was not that the media pretended that the Muslim Brotherhood, also the “best organized opposition force in the country,” would not field a viable presidential candidate.

It was not that, in their jubilation, Anderson Cooper (CNN), Neil Cavuto (Fox News) and Christiane Amanpour (ABC) failed to mention the precedent set in Lebanon, where Hezbollah has deployed the democratic process to get the better of the country’s Maronite Christians.

It was not even the fact that the journalistic imperative to provide nuance, detail, and an economic and historic backdrop to the unfolding events was replaced, by the journalistic jet-set, with the telegenic drama of the man on the street.

None of this bothered me as much as the patronizing position these American reporters adopted; the neat bifurcation they managed to maintain between “Us” (the “free” men and women of America) and “Them” (those pathetic, shackled Egyptians).

The fact is that the heroic movement for democracy in Egypt dovetails with an ongoing flirtation with fascism in the U.S.; the twilight of individual sovereignty in the U.S. contrasts with its rise in Egypt. …

Read the complete column, “Media’s Sickening Sentimentality On Egypt,” now on WND.COM.

UPDATE I (Feb. 18): To the letter writer below: I am not a conspiracy theorist. Here is a post that explains why conspiracy is usually irrational.

“The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.” …

UPDATE II (Feb 19): Daine: No; there are no conspiratorial. What we have are The Takers-–tax consumers—who want the Makers—the so-called rich—to support their parasitical life style. And the Über-parasites, the politicians, who make the most of this human nature.

Assassinations Under US Auspices?

Constitution, Criminal Injustice, Foreign Policy, Intelligence, Iraq, Journalism, Justice, Law, Media, Middle East

I hope the failed assassination attempt on Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s vice president, recently appointed to quell the unrest in that country, is not a harbinger of things to come. I am thinking of the vulgar cellphone images that circulated the Internet, in which a stoic Saddam Hussein, noose about his neck, is heckled by a hooded Shiite executioner. Even more repugnant than the hasty hanging carried out under US auspices were the US-sponsored legal proceedings that preceded it. (All the obligatory denunciations of Hussein obtain here, naturally. Bad man. Bad man. Bad man.) That Tribunal, which was branded “made-in-America,” had more in common with the French Revolutionary Assembly (See “No Due Process For A Despot”).

Similarly, such a barbaric specter in Egypt (conjuring the French, and not the American, Revolution), will have been greatly inspired, like in Iraq, by American media screeches.

I worry because the US is not necessarily averse to hasty hangings, considering that the strongmen we betray may turn around and tell all: You know; the stuff about how they helped the U.S. with its rendition and torture programs.

UPDATED: The MEDIA Is The Message (Amanpour’s Anticlimax)

Ethics, Journalism, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Middle East, Pop-Culture, Propaganda

Good journalism doesn’t assert or hypothesize; it reports the facts dispassionately, and from all sides of a dispute. Alas, I have just heard Neil Cavuto suggest, casually, to a guest on his FoxNews show, that the Egyptian police are probably embedded in the crowds and causing the commotion. The stupidity of the American media’s mindset; the need to see matters in simplistic, either/or dichotomies—this alone should disqualify them from reporting on the news. But inherent in what I’ve said is a presumption of standards. These no longer matter in journalism (and in many more fields of endeavor).

Cavuto’s sentiments, shared by the media monolith, proceed from the assumption that the Egyptian protesters are as pure as the driven snow, and that, therefore, the aggression witnessed must be the handiwork of agents provocateurs. This, even though we don’t have reliable information from all sources to determine what is unfolding on the streets of Cairo. Neil could be right. But good reporting is not a chance affair. In floating assumptions, Cavuto, like almost every other journalist reporting on Egypt, is out of line. They are helping to cement opinion in the absence of facts. Where is Michael Ware when you need him? (http://www.mickware.info/2011News/2011News.php)

Ware is probably too manly for the girls at CNN. Which brings me to that channel’s Alpha Female: the vain, posturing, preachy Anderson Cooper. Remember when this narcissist had his crew film him lugging around an injured Haitian boy? Cooper was roughed up in Egypt (a good producer should have taken him to the woodshed a long time ago). So he turned that into The Story; found a safe haven, where he hunkered down, and whiled-away the evening broadcast repeating what he had endured. Like Cavuto, Cooper also allowed himself to carelessly hypothesize—this time about the possibility of a Tiananmen-Square type occurrence the following day. Quite a few of his colleagues in the “profession” referred irresponsibly (almost wishfully) to the Tienanmen Square massacre, vis-a-vis Egypt.

The American media colors events by refracting them through a sickeningly sentimental prism, often creating reality on the ground, instead of reporting on it.

Marshall McLuhan said that the medium is the message. Is that still true? It is not the technology that molds the events—technology facilitates and frees information. Rather, it is the jet-setting journalist whose persona and ideology propel his pursuits.

UPDATE (Feb. 6): AMANPOUR’S ANTICLIMAX. Via Larry Auster:

Watching Christiane Amanpour on ABC this morning, it appeared this woman devoutly wished a revolution along certain lines. It had to be a world-shattering, epoch-shaping event. For this media moment, she was brought forth, along with her male counterpart, Fareed Zakaria.
However this breathless, transcendent moment got bogged down in bureaucracy. In her interview with Egyptian Vice-President Suleiman, it became apparent that Muburak would not step down before September, that the Egyptian parliament would proceed in an incremental, step-wise fashion to implement reform, and that the government was asking the crowds to disperse and go back home to their daily lives and jobs.
So much for the orgiastic climax to the days of rage and the revolution. ‘Twas not the consummation devoutly to be desired.

The point being that this is not how news is done.