Category Archives: Media

It Takes a Man… Or A Merkel

Democracy, Europe, Foreign Policy, Iran, Israel, libertarianism, Media, Middle East

Be it in Africa or Arabia, liberals labor under the romantic delusion that the effects of millennia of development-resistant, fatalistic, superstitious, and cruel cultures can be cured by Facebook, an infusion of foreign aid, or by the removal of the Mubaraks and Mugabes of the respective regions. I hope they are right about Egypt. My non-interventionist, libertarian inclinations jibe with a certain detachment about the events on both the Egyptian and Iranian street. (See “Let’s Fret About Our Own Tyrants.”) I’m nothing if not consistent. As I said (“Frankly, My Dear Egyptians, I Don’t Give a Damn”), “I wish the Egyptians better luck with their next ‘son of 60 dogs’ — that’s an Egyptian expression for political master.”

So far, I’m buoyed by the peacefulness of the protest; Egyptians clearly wish to get on with the business of building their lives. Maintaining the peace with Israel would be an organic extension of the admirable restraint exhibited by the demonstrating Egyptians. Besides, what’s wrong with peace? However, American media have not paused long enough from slobbering to express what German Chancellor Angela Merkel has enunciated (“Merkel: Egypt must keep peace with Israel”):

[Merkerl] welcomed Egyptian President Mubarak’s departure in the face of pro-democracy protests as “a historic change” and a “day of great joy.”
But, Merkel said, “We also expect the future Egyptians governments will uphold peace in the Middle East and respect the treaties concluded with Israel, and that Israel’s safety will be guaranteed.”
Israel’s greatest concern has been that its 1979 peace treaty with Egypt might not survive under a new government, especially if Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood – the largest and most organized opposition group – gains influence. The Brotherhood has opposed the treaty.

Trust a German woman to keep her wits about her. Merkle also has a good record of refusing to heed the hedonist B. Hussein Obama (an agitator from Chicago), who urged her to print and inflate her country’s currency to Weimar-Republic levels.

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.

UPDATED: Boob Attacks Bachmann

Intelligence, John McCain, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Politics, Pop-Culture, Republicans, The Zeitgeist

Meghan McCain has issued another of her sub-intelligent messages, which is being lapped up by the most fertile seedbed for mind-sapping stupidity: MSNBC. “Michele Bachmann … is no better than a poor man’s Sarah Palin,” she told Lawrence O’Donnell in her most grating of Valley-Girl inflections. “I take none of this seriously,” McCain declared grandiosely about Bachmann’s Tea Party address.

Meghan McCain is a licentious, self-adoring, dense liberal. Yet nothing she does, including to plaster a grotesque image of her exposed appendages on Twitter, gets her laughed off the prominent platform she’s been accorded thanks to her famous father and her mother’s money. It is clear that Meghan is not working with much—and is eminently qualified to dim debate in the Age of the Idiot. The real disgrace here is that no conservative with clout has dared to eviscerate this cow.

If David Frum, a neoconservative with some sway, had any self-respect, he would have refused to dignify the host O’Donnell’s request that he address the bitchy substance-less attack McCain launched against her betters, in this case Michele Bachmann.

Bill O’Reilly, similarly, was quite serious about discussing “Ms. McCain’s” pronouncement with Laura Igraham, who played along peacefully. What is she afraid of?

Read the mild response of Breitbart’s Big Government correspondent.

What is Ann Coulter waiting for? I call on Ms. Coulter to dispatch this ding-dong forthwith with a few masterful syllogisms mixed with a sobering reality check or two. She’d be doing us all a mitzvah.

UPDATE (Jan. 30): To the funny letter below: I’ve heard the gangsta in the White House mention “Snookie,” so she must be a cultural icon as worthless as the others BHO entertains there—the president has even complimented one of the Kardashian hos for her performance.
I’m pleased to report I’ve hear the name “Snookie” mentioned, but have not bothered to find out who she/he is.