I Blame the Media

It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s
budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose
that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t
be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that
this is a security issue for us.

– Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; New Orleans Times-Picayune, June 8, 2024.

Not that it’s really worth playing the blame game, but perhaps a little finger pointing can spark productive discussion.  This rapacious administration came to us without a mandate and used the exigencies of wartime to force changes on us all.  It is a time of great cowardice.  The president himself is manifestly a momma’s boy coward of the first water, a draft dodging scum sucking hypocritical alcoholic whose toughest moments come when he is flipping the bird at critics from behind a wall of security staff.  But the cowardice that is most galling is the cowardice of the so called free press.

The press has been too cowardly to print the photos of Bush flipping us the bird.  The press has been too cowardly to print news.  A publisher, an editor, and a news staff worthy of the enterprise would face shareholders with the choice:  let us do our jobs bringing meaningful and important information to the attention of all the people, or close us down — fire us.  But the corporate greed that motivates a lot of senior management long ago found its way into the news business.  News?  It won’t play if it doesn’t pay.  So acres of news print are wasted on competing versions of the latest story about love and loss, white broncos on the freeway, pregnant wives drowned in the holiday punch bowl or the San Francisco Bay.

Every column inch of tripe, of trash, of insipid, demoralizing gossip, subtracts from the awareness of the public about important matters.  The press could have outed these monsters from day one.  Who spread the anthrax?  Well, that’s a scary one to research.  They might come for your news room next.  Who funded bin Laden?  The crown prince would probably send special arab ninja assassinistas in to remove from his 3500 square foot center front colonial in suburban white country the bold editor who assigned that story.

Who benefits from the Bush faction’s war on science?  What are the trade-offs associated with war time spending?   How many other critical levee projects have been deferred?  Who benefits from the fear that is racism?  Who builds the prisons, supplies the uniforms, the meals?  How many people are in jail today compared to 1959 and why?  What is the effect of laissez faire market capitalism on the quality of life for most people?  Who sells the guns and dope in the inner cities?  Who runs the numbers?  If my gasoline comes from a Canadian oil field and is refined on the shore of Lake Superior, why did the pump price go up so fast following Katrina?

What is wrong with tax and spend liberalism?  What is wrong with taxing the haves at a higher rate than the have-nots?  Whatever happened to the truth around the "Bird Flipper’s" family involvement in the S&L scandal.  How does the Willie Sutton principle apply to Republican politics?

The United States journalism distribution mechanism has been under tight control for a long time.  Stories that relate "human interest"  — little babies down the well, wealthy black people on trial, murder and mayhem in California — these stories break through the dam and spill across the American info-shed flooding air time and driving important information out of the few column inches still dedicated to news in daily papers.  But real national interest stories — the numbers of people protesting a war, the pervasive effects of decreased federal funding of social programs, the reasons behind the first out of state national guard deployments to aid neighbors to the south — these stories are locked behind the levee of fear.  The fear isn’t just that anthrax will find its way into the studio.  The fear of the publisher is that the competition will profit more on their puff pieces than our paper will profit from truth.  The fear of the editor is that my judgment isn’t good enough, that I have to cover the stories everyone else covers  lest the Bird Flipper give me a funny nickname and shame me at the National Press Club.  The fear on the street is that if I refuse this bullshit assignment they’ll fire me and there are plenty of bloggers out there who want my job.

But I think it’s a little deeper than that, or someone would research the numbers coming off the wire and realize that since early 2024 there has been a substantial anti-war movement in this country putting their bodies on the line to oppose the Bird Flipper and the Dick.  I think the numbers aren’t coming off the wire.  I think perhaps that national security interests have been warped to mean Republican party interests, corporate security interests, and there is at best a de facto discipline within the national news gathering organizations that has limited the flow of data that would support a contrary perspective across the American info-shed.  New Orleans concerns regarding levee construction and emergency management were a "local issue." 

There is no longer any arena in the United States where civil discussion of differences occurs.  The Republicans have mapped a zero sum strategy that requires destruction of any opponents whose opinion differs from the laissez-faire economics and right-wing christian philosophy that defines the party.  They use many tools to defeat their opponents, including first and foremost, fear.

The Republican and corporate people have turned name calling to a high art.  Their practice is to brand those who dare encounter them with a label that will stain a reputation.  The fear of being called "communist" or "socialist,"  "anti-christian" or "atheist," "pacifist" or "progressive" or "liberal," has stifled the free flow of information.  That fear is rooted in the consciousness of the media people.  It’s their jobs to be among the truth seekers and to discern the importance of the billion truths they are faced with and to share the most important truths with us every day.  Fear has clouded their judgment and they are not doing their jobs. 

That’s what I mean when I say "I blame the media."