Needlenose

Over at Raw Story this past week, David Edwards has been documenting a rather impertinent — and surprisingly sustained — effort by CNN anchor Soledad O’Brien to speak truth, if not to power, at least to a series of GOP spokespuppets appearing on her show.

It began on Tuesday with O’Brien refusing to back down when faced with a sputtering John Sununu in a dispute over the Romney campaign’s false spin on Medicare cuts:

“I understand that this is a Republican talking point because I’ve heard it repeated over and over again,” O’Brien observed. “These numbers have been debunked, as you know, by the Congressional Budget Office. […]

“Soledad, stop this!” Sununu shouted. “All you’re doing is mimicking the stuff that comes out of the White House and gets repeated on the Democratic blog boards out there.”

“I’m telling you what Factcheck.com tells you, I’m telling you what the CBO tells you, I’m telling you what CNN’s independent analysis says,” the CNN host explained.

“Put an Obama bumper sticker on your forehead when you do this!” the frustrated surrogate shot back.

“You know, let me tell you something,” O’Brien said. “There is independent analysis that details what this is about. … And name calling to me and somehow by you repeating a number of $716 billion, that you can make that stick when [you say] that figure is being ‘stolen’ from Medicare, that’s not true. You can’t just repeat it and make it true, sir.”

In the days that followed, O’Brien had similar disagreements with Romney surrogates Tim Pawlenty and Jason Chaffetz — a dogged refusal to accept talking points that, if she keeps it up, might make the GOP Wurlitzer launch into a chorus calling for her to be fired.

It’d be laughable proof of the old saw about Republicans believing the truth having a liberal bias, if it weren’t so serious.  Because on the one hand, sure, the Romney team’s aggressive dishonesty about Medicare and other issues is just classic Rovian strategy: accuse your opponent of the same thing they’re charging you with, so low-information voters will just throw up their hands amid the crossfire and not bother sorting out the truth.

But on the other hand, the all-out devotion not just to telling lies, but to “repeat[ing] it and make it true,” is Orwell’s prediction in Nineteen Eighty-Four come true:

In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy.

It’s understandable, on one level, that news journalists would rather not put themselves in the position of refereeing what is “truth” during a political campaign, when aggressive spin from both sides is to be expected.  But when one party tries to take advantage of that reluctance by outright inventing its own reality — and expecting the media to stay neutral — then a stance like O’Brien’s becomes essential.

Because if the Romney-Ryan ticket gets to the White House (and the Republicans gain majorities in both houses of Congress) based on a strategy of converting demonstrably false statements into political “truth” by the sheer force of advertising dollars and media repetition… well, they’re not going to just switch to honesty because the election is over, are they?  Of course not; they’ll just aim their rhetorical fire directly at the press, rather than Obama and the Democrats.

As Soledad O’Brien is demonstrating, Orwell was right when he wrote that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.”  And if the media doesn’t use that freedom while they can, they just might lose it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Anthony Shadid (left), in Syria shortly before his death

As you’ve likely read elsewhere by now, Anthony Shadid, generally considered to be the best Middle East reporter of the past decade or so, died Thursday from an asthma attack in Syria.

The deluge of sorrow-filled tributes and reminiscences that have been written by other journalists already testify to how highly Shadid was regarded among his peers.  But let me add a few words from a blogger’s perspective to explain how special he truly was.

I began blogging during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in early 2003, partly out of a desire to understand what was really happening in the war.  I was already familiar enough with the media to know this would take a lot of rigorous analysis and reading between the lines of officially sanctioned narratives — but in the case of one reporter, Anthony Shadid (then of the Washington Post), I kept finding that he was doing the job for me.

In late March, barely two weeks into the war, Shadid wrote a heartrending story about Iraqis’ reaction to the American onslaught and the resulting civilian casualties.  In April came a profile of Muqtada as-Sadr, the young cleric who in a year’s time would be become the most visible opponent of the occupation.

But Shadid’s incisive brilliance was only just beginning to show itself.  On June 2, the Post published a story that vividly demonstrated the delusions of the U.S. occupying army: as Thomas Ricks accompanied an American patrol through a Baghdad neighborhood, recording their satisfaction with what seemed to be a welcoming populace, Shadid followed the same route, talking in Arabic with Iraqis in their homes… and capturing their mix of concern and seething resentment.  Then Shadid did it again at the end of June, revealing the mutual distrust and resentment between Iraqi police and the American soldiers who were supposed to be training them.  That story ended with a local Iraqi resident saying:

There’s no security, there’s no stability in Iraq… I swear to God, things are going to get worse.

Further demonstrating the point, Shadid in late July uncovered a chilling incident in which a suspected U.S. informant was executed by his own father and older brother, under pressure from the rest of the village.  The U.S. hadn’t even acknowledged yet that an insurgency had begun, but Shadid’s reporting had laid bare all of the tensions that would undermine the neocon dream of an American quasi-colony in Iraq.

The Judith Millers of the media world thrive on access to government power-brokers, and in exchange glibly tell the world the often-misleading (or downright false) stories those officials want to see told.  Anthony Shadid was the exact opposite — he went to the ordinary people caught up in life-changing political events, and told the truth about it.

About a year ago, Shadid and some other New York Times journalists found themselves captured by pro-government forces while reporting on the uprising in Libya.  Reflecting on his experience, he wrote afterward:

Over the years, all of us had seen men detained, blindfolded and handcuffed at places like Abu Ghraib, or corralled after some operation in Iraq or Afghanistan. Now we were the faceless we had covered perhaps too dispassionately. For the first time, we felt what it was like to be disoriented by a blindfold, to have plastic cuffs dig into your wrists, for hands to go numb.

Anthony Shadid was probably the least guilty of any American journalist of the sin he describes, but even in danger he was reminding himself to do better.  That’s what made him valuable and unique, and probably irreplaceable.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Footnote:  Somewhat ironically (and flatteringly), Shadid claimed to be a reader of this blog back in its relative heyday.  His untimely death makes me all the more grateful that Fubar and I took the opportunity several years ago to attend a local book-signing event he gave for Night Draws Near and express our appreciation for his work in person.

Fox News viewers are less informed than people who don’t watch any news:

“people who watch Fox News are 18-points less likely to know that Egyptians overthrew their government” and “6-points less likely to know that Syrians have not yet overthrown their government” compared to those who watch no news”…”the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all.”"

That’s being charitable.  ”that something” is known as stupidity.

Tip of the ‘Nose to Film Critic Buddy

In a misguided attempt to appear ‘fair and balanced,’ the San Francisco Chronicle syndicates Debra Saunders, who may be one of the most poorly educated syndicated conservative columnists writing in the U.S. today.  In particular, she seems ignorant of the actual contents of that conservative fetish, the U.S. Constitution.  In a recent rant against the Occupy Oakland movement, she attempts the following bon mot:

“Free speech does not mean free camping.”

If memory (or cut and paste) serves me, free speech shares the First Amendment with a prohibition against:

“…interfering with the right to peaceably assemble ”

Except for a few miscreants, the camping has been relatively peaceable.

It’s not the first time that Ms. Saunders has demonstrated her ignorance of Constitutional law.  I understand why the paper feels the need to have a token Reactionary in the editorial section, but why did they pick the most stupid one?

In recent days, a long-simmering scandal in the United Kingdom over unscrupulous journalism (specifically, the repeated hacking of cell phones owned by celebrities, politicians, and crime victims) by newspapers owned by billionaire Rupert Murdoch has exploded, with leading Murdoch executives being arrested and top British officials forced to resign over apparent complicity with the papers’ schemes.

And now obvious questions are being asked:

… critics muse that Mr. Murdoch’s free-wheeling and politically conservative hand in British reporting may have influenced American journalism as well – particularly in the well-regarded Wall Street Journal, whose parent company Dow Jones was acquired by Murdoch’s News Corp. in 2007.

For its part, the Journal’s editorial page fired back about these charges in an editorial for Monday’s paper:

When News Corp. and CEO Rupert Murdoch secured enough shares to buy Dow Jones & Co. four years ago, these columns welcomed our new owner and promised to stand by the same standards and principles we always had…

… [regarding] Friday’s resignation of our publisher and CEO, Les Hinton, who ran News Corp.’s British newspaper unit during the time of the alleged hacking . . . on ethical questions, his judgment was as sound as that of any editor we’ve had.

To help readers understand what makes this such a galling non-denial denial, we pause here for a concurring opinion from the hereafter:

The WSJ editors lie without consequence

The above is from the suicide note of Vincent Foster, an aide to the Clinton administration who killed himself in 1993 after being savaged in a series of Wall Street Journal editorials during the preceding two months.

In other words, it wasn’t the Journal‘s editorial-page standards that anyone was concerned about when Murdoch took over.  The issue is whether Murdoch pushed the news operation into the op-ed section’s moral cesspool.