printFor news coverage, I’ve now converted almost exclusively to RT (on whose website my Paleolibertarian Column features). I recommend that thinking readers do the same. A few days with RT and you will begin to understand just how impoverished American media are (and how valid this writer’s media critique has been over the years); the degree to which broadcasters and journalists have degraded journalism and contributed immeasurably to the deep stupidity, gargantuan arrogance, and short attention spans of their viewers.
Americans are “a silly people in serious times” (Pat Buchanan’s words). Reason, intellectual honesty and curiosity, and standards of decency have been expunged from the national dialogue.
There isn’t a news story that isn’t biased, contaminated with every conceivable error in thinking, from pop psychology, to addiction and self-esteem fallacies, to obsessive, interminable negrophilia.
If you can no longer stomach the bombast in American broadcast media, the vanity panels, the egos in the anchor’s chair who’ve tailored debate and chosen interlocutors to fit their own limitations; if you’ve had it with Anderson Cooper-type journo-activism, the ubiquitous dog and cat stories, the constant stream of feel-good, feminized, soft news vignettes that festoon news and commentary; if you can stand not a moment more of the America über alles, navel-gazing, chauvinistic, delusions of grandeur and of empire promulgated by the self-important American media—I recommend RT.
Yes, there is leftist, even statist, programing at RT, but it doesn’t permeate every news segment like at CNN, where today, White House correspondent Jessica Yelling delivered a how-to for Obama on countering bad press about alternative energy. On RT you’ll find interesting segments complied by critical thinkers who pursue the kind of unorthodox angles I’ve pursued in my columns over the years, but which are absent from the American channels. “Exporting Revolution,” for example, with BAB A List writer Nebojsa Malic. (Related topic: “LaHood Is Still In The Egyptian Hood”)
This morning, as the Idiocracy at MSNBC, FoxNews and CNN counted down to the endorsement of Mitt Romney by the unthinking, crass, and Synophobic Donald Trump, RT’s Capital Account was tracking Ben Bernanke’s defense of “the Federal Reserve’s financial repression of savers on Capitol Hill.” Their words. Jim Rogers was on fire.
Sadly, I no longer watch the loud bluster on Freedom Watch, unless Lew Rockwell, always calms and Rothbardian, graces the show. The volume level, the Paul worship (such aggressive allegiance to any politician creeps me out), and the dueling perspectives political panels (featuring horrible, boring truth deniers like Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne) are pure torture.
Besides, when an anchor introduces his regulars (and boy are they day-in, and day-out fixtures) as “my good friend (Kirstin Powers),” or as “friend of the show,” it smacks of buddy-buddy influence peddling, not of an honest pursuit of ideas. Don’t get me wrong: I appreciate the work done on Freedom Watch to popularize constitutional principles among the masses, but it has become more like the other cable personality centered ego-driven shoutfests. And, of course, the regular robots from Reason Magazine, representing “Libertarianism Lite,” are tiresome.
Off to catch up on world events …
UPDATE I: Need I say more? Right now, as mainstream American media pretend jobs have materialized out of thin air, you can hear Jeffrey Tucker on RT’s Capital Account, talking about ending the Fed.
UPDATE II: Ann Coulter to Mitt Romeny at a fundraiser, “You owe me and you better be as right-wing a president as I’m telling everybody you’re going to be.’” Schmooze.
But another example of the narrow coterie that makes up the American media elite. Mind you, if the Judge welcomed “My buddy Ann Coulter, good friend of the show,” we’d at least have a few laughs. She’s always sharp and adds information, unlike the banal, boring, never-said-an-original-thing-in-their-lives Colmes and Powers.
UPDATE III: (Feb. 4): Do not distort my words, John D (in Comments). The style issue is minor. In your adulation, you’ve chosen here to do me a disservice by ignoring the repeated substantive comments made over these pixelated pages about the bent of “Freedom Watch.” In particular: 1) The sinecured Left-libertarian bores who’ve take up residence on the show, covered in “Libertarianism Lite.” Reason does not represent American libertarianism (Old Right), nor does it resonate with most Americans. American libertarianism is rightist.
2) As in all the cloistered and closed American programing—and contrary to RT’s which really welcomes many voices, and not only those of pundits and presstitutes who huddle close to Power—the habit on Freedom Watch is to shut out and expunge from the debate the unkosher faction, which is also, again, the libertarianism that most resonates with the American Right at large: paleolibertarianism.
3) In “Fox News And Its Truth Deniers,” I offered a substantive argument against the positively postmodernist “dueling perspectives political panel” perfected on the show. You, John, chose to ignore my case against the “parallel universe” created and paraded as truth, represented by the odious regulars listed: Nancy Skinner, Caroline Heldman, Tara Dowdell, Carl Jeffers, Joe Sibila, Erika Payne, Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Kirstin Powers, etc. “The above Fox News fixtures,” I argued, “no more represent truth or promote it than does your average Holocaust denier.”
“By presenting the public with two competing perspectives—you mislead viewers into believing that indeed there are two realities, and that it is up to them to decide which one is more compelling.” This Freedom Watch achieves handily.
Alas, in your blind adulation, John, you have chosen to cast substantive critique as a complaint about style (the latter—the delivery—being bloody horrible). What a shame.
CONTINUED IN THE POST, “More Reasons to Secede from the Pundit Pantheons of CNN, Fox and MSNBC.”
With all his faults, the Judge is the only rational man on TV besides Stossel that I know of. I’m damned glad he’s on there saying the things I’d never, ever thought would be allowed to air. It wasn’t too long ago that the Jeffersonian – style viewpoint was completely censored. Small progress, but given the choices, I’ll have to agree with his support of RP as well. He’s helping along a true intellectual revolution and for that I am thankful.
There may well come a day when Americans will hang their heads in shame over this, but, sadly, until we feel the consequences of our own hubris, it won’t happen to any great extent.
From inception, I had hoped Freedom Watch would be ‘fresh air’ in the fog of the MMS. But, alas, it has morphed into just as you say; but then, Faux is just another tool of the oligarchy, so, no surprise here. Sad, but true.
Gee, you know how to make a fellow feel ignorant! Keep up thought provoking blogs and articles!
The best thing I’d heard about was RT was “less unwatchable than European television”.
Does RT obscure for obscurity’s sake or security’s – they’ve just made some sort of deal with the nouveau louche Julian Assange, so I can understand security’s sake.
But the obscurity? The Corporate Profile link on their site is no such thing. Over two dozen satellite transponders, covering EU, and North America, telecasting/reporting in three languages – no advertising (internet RT). Who owns it? Who pays operating costs? The State? Media mogul? George Soros? Shadowy figures?
Cordially,
Doubter, Skeptic, & Cynic, (Wrapped In Easygoing Nature)
Paddy Chayevsky, the prophet, foretold the complete garbage that now passes for television news in his 1976 masterpiece “Network”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(film)
Agree with you about Ron Paul worship and the quasi-huckstering nature of Judge Napolitano’s programming but him and Stossel are the closest things to capitalism and limited government on American TV. [Stossel is a gentleman and a scholarly journalist. Agreed.]
And, yes, I disliked Ron Paul referring the Gaza as a “concentration camp” (perhaps mental asylum would be more appropriate since the Gaza “inmates” have helped bring about their own hellish conditions with their continual jihad).
Just look at the idiotic Republican debates where complex issues have to be answered in 30 second soundbites for ADHD idiots in the audience to boo and cheer and where the “debate moderators” goad the front-runners to get into idiotically staged “confrontations” over nya nya nya moronic political ads. Thereafter, the two main contenders get “scored” over who looked best in the pissing contest.
The old Hapsburg Monarchy looks better and better nowadays! Did they have a Transportation Security Agency, killer drones, national educational testing, toilet bowl and lightbulb requirements…? Oh, that is right, America contains the most “educated” (e.g. students pursuing worthless “degrees” from semi-Marxist pedagogical parasites) and freest people on Earth!
Of course the Judge is gonna shout. He’s a pudgy Italian in a pin-striped suit. It just goes without saying that he’ll be booming and shouting. [It seems a tad fake, don’t you think? The barking is certainly unbearable. My husband refuses to watch it. Nothing in it that’s original except the cringe factor is his opinion.]
That being said, I greatly admire RT.
I like RT, sometimes the left swings leave me asking “I thought you learned better” but otherwise, I appreciate reading their stuff. The fact that they have Jim Rogers economic comments helps. Stoosel is good but it’s ‘been there done that’ his experts are always Reason and CATO. The Judge overdoes the melodrama for me. I will be recommending RT to those few I think might listen.
I’ll file a dissenting opinion here. I think listening to the Enemy – Leftists, neo-cons, whatever – is a most useful excercise. On my days off, for instance, I’ll have Limbaugh, Hannity, and Hedgecock on the radio for 9 hours straight…while, of course, doing other useful things on my own or on the net, including ranting right back at them. TV, agreed, is pretty much brainpoison…and because it’s sonic and visual, you can’t do much else useful while engaged with it. Except eat.
So we’ll toss out the only stalwart daily defender of freedom based on… style? There’s a lot about the style and format that I dislike too. But he is the only one out there with a daily show who is right on the issues. So I don’t CARE about the style. Let’s offer him advice to improve the delivery instead of demeaning him. Nuff said.
[See my comments in post update.]
I would have to agree with John on this. Okay, so some of you don’t like the Judge’s schtick, that’s fine. Remember, TV shows are all about ratings.
As far as the “Ron Paul Worship”: For crying out loud, it’s election season.
Someone on our side needs to “bang the drum” all day, every day for our guy Ron Paul.
The MSM does this for Obama 24/7 & so does the Neo-con media for Romney.
Normally I trust your judgment Ilana, your my kind of gal, but RT (Russian Television)?! Ok, I’ll try it. Thx