The myth of objective journalism

By Frank Moraes 

The primary difference between Fox News and MSNBC is not ideology; it is that Fox pretends to be objective. Yes, in general, MSNBC does a better job of reporting actual facts and doesn't go out of its way to mislead. But they are both advocacy groups: one for the Republican Party and the other for the Democratic Party. But no one ever claims that MSNBC provides the Truth that the other networks don't want the people to know.

Other than this fact, I have no problem with Fox News. I believe strongly that news organizations should have an explicit political inclination because they all have an implicit inclination. But even worse than that Fox who any reasonable person can see is just GOP-TV, I'm concerned about the middle-of-the-road media outlets. I'm visiting my sister and I just overheard some reporting on the TV from a local station, KTVU. They were covering information about the company that did Edward Snowden's background check. It was anything but objective. The coverage was akin to the coverage of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial.

This has long been a thorn in my side: the idea that centrists are not ideological. They are -- every bit as ideological as those of us on the left and the right. It is just that their ideologies are usually incoherent. Let's think about my favorite centrist example: Nazis. On one side you have the Nazis who want to kill all the Jews, on the other you have people who don't want to harm any Jews, and in the middle you have those who just want to give all Jews life in prison. It's clear than the centrist position is ideological.

Similarly with Edward Snowden, the centrist position that he did something dangerous that put us all in danger is just as ideological as my position that he did the American people a great favor that did not put us in any danger. Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent article yesterday about this issue, "Hey, MSM: All Journalism is Advocacy Journalism." It is basically a defense of Glenn Greenwald.

Read more »

Here come the Clampetts

By Mustang Bobby

Matt Taibbi sums up the bailout of Wall Street:

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

And now AIG, one of the companies we helped get through rehab – and is running a PR campaign to say "Thank you" – is thinking about suing the U.S. government because their stockholders didn't get a pony. 

Digby says that's chutzpah. Wrong; it's typical.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Matt Taibbi on how the media are suddenly for big government

By Frank Moraes

Matt Taibbi is angry -- at a lot of different people, but mostly the media. He's been watching how they have reacted to the storm. Before, the main thing was that Big Government was baaad. Small government was the way to go. I've written about this: journalists are almost all in the upper or upper-middle classes. As a result, when it comes to economic issues, they are conservative. But more to the point: they are selfish. If it affects them, it matters; if it doesn't, not so much.

That has been brilliantly on display this week. I'm not suggesting that Sandy isn't a big deal (although few in the media were that interested in all the Haitians who died before it hit the east coast). But they are clearly a lot more interested because it has affected New York and Washington. Taibbi notes that Hurricane Sandy was all that was necessary to turn the mainstream media into Big Government lovers. And thus Obama lovers.

Except, of course, that of the two candidates, Obama has a far better claim to being the Small Government guy. He's the guy who has slashed the deficit, year after year. And Romney is Joe Isuzu giving away $5 trillion in new tax cuts and $2 trillion in new military spending. But just look at the record: Democrats are the fiscal conservatives.

Taibbi sees it a little differently. He thinks the federal budget will go way up regardless of who is elected President. Under normal circumstances, I would agree with him. (But don't misunderstand me: in general, federal spending going up is a good thing.) But with the Republican House, I think we will see more of the obstructionism that has defined the last four years.

But Taibbi knows who the true villains are in all of this: the rich Randians who depend upon government largess that the poor could only dream of:

But everyone lives off the government teat to some degree -- even (one might even say especially) the very rich who have been the core supporters of both the Bush presidency and Romney's campaign. Many are industrial leaders who would revolt tomorrow if their giant free R&D program known as the federal military budget were to be scaled back even a few percentage points. Mitt's buddies on Wall Street would cry without their bailouts and dozens of lucrative little-known subsidies (like the preposterous ability of certain banks to act as middlemen in transactions when the government lends money to itself).

And if it's not outright bailouts or guarantees keeping the rich rich, it's selective regulation and carefully-carved-out protections from competition -- like the bans on drug re-importation or pharmaceutical price negotiation for Medicare that are keeping the drug companies far richer than they would be, in the pure free-market paradise their CEOs probably espouse at dinner parties.

The evolution of this whole antigovernment movement has been fascinating to watch. People who grew up in public schools, run straight to the embassy the instant they get a runny nose overseas, stuff burgers down their throats without worrying about E. Coli and sleep happily in planes they know have been inspected by the FAA (I regularly risked my life in Aeroflot liners for a decade and know the difference), can with straight faces make the argument that having to pay any taxes at all is tyranny. It's almost as if people feel the need to announce that they don't need any help with anything, ever -- not even keeping bridges safe or drinking water clean.

That's right. But a big part of the problem is that the government goes out of its way to make welfare for the rich invisible just as it goes out of its way to make welfare for the poor as humiliating as possible. I once thought about getting food stamps. There were over 50 pages of documents to get as much as $200 per month in food assistance. The TARP loans of billions of dollars? Two pages.

We've got to get the government off the backs of the banks! Matt Taibbi isn't wrong to be angry.

(Cross-posted at Frankly Curious.)