History is complex, but cable news executives are not. One of the problems created by the sudden meteoric rise of FOX News was that it influenced the people at CNN and MSNBC that were hemorrhaging market share to them. It was quite natural for CNN and MSNBC producers to look at the success of FOX and then seek to emulate them. This, in combination with the climate of fear created by 9/11 and the Bush administration’s sales job for the invasion of Iraq, created a hard-right lurch in cable news coverage. Disentangling the causality…and the complicity of the news outlets in the era of Bushism is difficult. But we know it happened…and we know it had a very negative impact on our culture and the knowledge base of the electorate.
Others have documented the effect…FOX News watchers are the worst informed people in the country. They’re worse informed than people that don’t watch news programming at all. That is because FOX is in the game of disinformation. They spread lies. They truck in propaganda. And the other networks are only marginally better. Anyone that tells you that the media has a liberal bias has not been watching cable news…nor have they been reading the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.
The country has traveled a long way since the year 2000…a long way in the wrong direction. There is an entire edifice that has been erected that stands in the way of our clawing our way out of the enormous hole we have dug for ourselves. And nowhere is that edifice more evident than in our mainstream media…the cable news…the Gang of 500…the Imus in the Morning show…the whole stinking rot of it all.
But the edifice is crumbling. It was so bound up with the culture of Bush and the culture of fear, that it was inevitable that it would come apart at the same time the Bush administration came apart.
Don Imus got himself in trouble for making racist, misogynistic statements. And you could see some of the Gang of 500, his regular guests (Howard Fineman, James Carville, Tom Oliphant) come running to his defense. This spectacle is a microcosm of what the Gang of 500 has been doing for the Bush administration ever since Iraq went sour and Katrina made landfall.
What Fineman said of Imus, could have been said by any member of the Gang of 500 about Bush and Cheney.
“You know, all of us who do your show, you know, we’re part of the gang. And we rely on you the way you rely on us.”
If this seems way too self-interested and way too incestuous…that is because it is. The administration needed bigfoot reporters like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon to sell their Iraq product. They needed opinion leaders like William Safire and Charles Krauthammer to spread the fear in a pseudo-intellectual way. And the reporters needed access…they needed material…they needed the Bushies.
And no one likes to see their country fail.
So…we’re in this big, deep, craterous hole. And the Bush administration is totally discredited. The DeLay/Frist GOP is in shambles. And the media has never looked worse. And now our critiques have currency.
When the Congressional Black Caucus Institute agreed to do a presidential nomination debate with FOX they thought they could get away with it. But they didn’t. First Edwards dropped out…then Obama…then Hillary. The rest of the candidates will surely follow. Why? Because FOX News is not a legitimate news organization. They are a propaganda outlet for the GOP. They dumb down the public, poison debate, stir up homophobia and xenophobia, tell religious people they are under attack, hype the threat of terrorism, instill fear, fear, fear…and push a rabidly pro-corporate agenda.
FOX has now lost two major debates (the other, for the Nevada caucuses). They are being marginalized. The pendulum is now swinging in the opposite direction, and soon the other cable news producers will be studying FOX News to see what they should avoid, not emulate.
Bushism is like a fever that seized our nation. The fever is breaking. We are truly making a difference. Not only have we provided an ample record for posterity that no…America was not uniformly suffering from ague, but we have chipped and chipped and chipped away at the edifice of fear and hatred and incestuous enabling that allowed our country to fall into such a state of shame and ineptitude and disrepute.
As Mellencamp said:
Some people ain’t no damn good
You can’t trust ’em, you can’t love em
No good deed goes unpunished
And I don’t mind being their whipping boy
I’ve had that pleasure for years and years
No, no I never was a sinner-tell me what else can I do
Second best is what you get-till you learn to bend the rules
Time respects no person-what you lift up must fall
They’re waiting outside-to claim my crumblin’ walls
Not a perfect analogy…but it’ll do.
Ha! You get a free makers tomorrow at DL for quoting JCM. I love that stanza.
I watch CNN these days when I go to the gym, and I can’t stand it.
I’m sorry I missed the discussion in the Orange Zone, which totaled over 900 replies. Unfortunately, at the joint where I am temping doing data entry work, I cannot e-mail or Websurf, thanks to previous transgressions by employees who loved to store and surf porn.
Instead, I was listening to Ed Schultz this a.m. and p.m. on WXXM-FM in Mad City. Frankly, it was getting beyond the point until one really irate black music producer got on the air near the end and really told it. Particularly, that whites have no interest in what black people do and say among themselves until whatever it is they say and do threatens them in some way.
Earlier, some d*ckheads got on the horn and told Schultz that blacks should stop calling each other hoes, the n-word and even stop having their own magazines and entertainment shows before they decide to attack whites for using racial slurs. They also alleged that the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson weren’t doing enough to stop the racial talk themselves, implying that their ‘inaction’ was close to condoning such talk and behavior.
Again, this gets back to the caller’s original premise. That whites pay no attention to what blacks do until… Sharpton and Jackson have been doing their level best. Everyone has. Just because these whites couldn’t or didn’t see it (or it wasn’t publicized in the white media), doesn’t mean that such pressure, cajolings, appeals, dialogues and roundtables were not and are not occurring between the generations. We’ve always seen it as a in-house struggle, something that few whites have the consciousness to comprehend–namely certain media elites and pundits who like to parse things for consumption.
Let me tell you, the idiocy today was almost too much for me to stomach.
But what brother man truly insisted was that it was all about power, especially the power of the media conglomerates to make money off such talk whether in punditry or in hip-hop music. Too bad he didn’t have enough time to really open some eyes and ears.
And perhaps, even his placement as the last caller was deliberate. NO one seems to want to analyze what that power does, which to me is nothing less than another arm of the white supremacist power structure. Schultz seemed sympathetic, but he needs a few go-rounds before he really gets a grip on what this means other than the usual free speech bullsh*t.
I’ve got another week at this place, and then I can get back online…but by that time I do, it will have been blown over for the next public controversy.
I am damn sick and tired of the hate. And I am sick and tired of faux liberal idiots like Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks on Air America Morning who think that this episode is nothing and love to snipe at Sharpton for doing his job.
Gwen Ifill.
Booman’s comments, followed up by that Times opinion piece from Gwen Ifill finally explained it to me.
Since all the outrage broke out over his “remarks” I have been baffled as to why anyone even noticed this – coming from Don Imus. Remarks like this aren’t out of character for Don Imus at all. I’ve never been a big fan of his show but sometimes in the morning, I’ll catch it on MSNBC and watch/listen for a little while. He has good guests on the phone, so it is mildly entertaining… but then, without fail, he or one of his “back-up singers” in the studio says something cold-hearted or just plain insensitive about one group or another that might be intruding on their straight-white-male-dominated turf. In my case, it was their very obvious homophobia creeping out in their brief exchanges between each other. Like their constant expressions of deep love for jerks like Rick Santorum, whose only successes in life have been by exploiting the fears of “good christians” at the expense of regular gay people like me.
So this whole controversy struck me as somewhat overblown – almost phony even. This is Imus we’re talking about. He’s a crusty old guy stuck in a different time. A time where it is okay to make hateful off-color jokes, so long as you don’t use certain “forbidden words” while doing so. The joke is still there, even though it may be said in code. And I know that “faggots” like myself, “Cleaning ladies” like Gwen Ifill or some “nappy headed ho’s” on an underdog college basketball team who are rightfully seeing some success are just being “put back in their place” like we always have.
I guess I just got used to it. Shame on me.
Maybe America really is starting to change. First Ann Coulter gets called out on her hate. Newt Gingrich. Bill O’Reilly. Now Don Imus. Wow. Who’s next? Limbaugh? Glenn Beck? So many more I couldn’t possibly name them all in one sitting.
Carry on…
Sharpton is without doubt more than unfairly criticized most of the time.
That man has given people a voice at the podium for the Democratic nomination, and his inclusion there makes me happier to consider myself a liberal participant in party politics.
Honestly, I think he’s really intensely smart, and that years from now people will look at his presence, his very black presence, as immensely significant. I look forward to hearing more of him in politics in general.
Al Sharpton has come a long long way but the sad fact is to a majority of the white audience he’ll never be good enough cause well simply put he ‘looks'(and sounds) too black.
I know I’ve said it before but I’ll say it again…I loved his speech at the Dem convention even more than Obama’s….he knows how to give a speech that can be entertaining and still say something substantial.
Particularly, that whites have no interest in what black people do and say among themselves until whatever it is they say and do threatens them in some way.
And it’s got to be the most feeble-minded bunk ever. As if referring to Black women as whores is some new invention. It isn’t. It’s older than the republic. As if referring to any woman as a whore/slut/cunt who speaks out or acts “out of place” is some new invention. It isn’t.
I swear, “But, but…hip hop!” is the silliest rejoinder outside of “Everyone’s doing it!” that I’ve ever heard.
it’s like you hip-hop community embraced the blackploitation films of the 1970’s by co-opting its stereotypes…which is all fine…a way of taking ownership of hate and turning it into something more innocuous (like the ‘n’ word).
But, then that is turned around, again, and thrown back at the black community to justify the hate all over again. A sad spectacle.
The pimps and hos routine was somewhat amusing when it was used as parody, like in Hollywood Shuffle or the Afros. Its time is long over now. Hip-hop should move on and find something political and progressive to talk about. That goes for celebrating gang-banging too. It started as a statement about police brutality…now it celebrates criminality.
should say ‘the hip-hop community’.
There’s a whole area of study of how hip/hop and rap turned on itself in a way…and yeah it can be a conspiracy if you want to think so..as to how MTV would only promote videos of rappers that were not political statements but the ones that degenerated into the whole pimp/ho/thug life glamour as an insidious way to prove that is what all Black life was about ..perpetrating myths.
Look at Ice T’s song, ‘copkiller’ that got the white community so riled up that Charelton Heston for shit’s sake went and protested at Time Warner wasn’t it?
See, “But, but…hip hop” is a straw man. Period.
To me, this is about sexualized degradation. The racial comments just made his comments more specific. There’s never any reason for it, but again, it’s used to try to put women “in their place.” This jackass just used it for giggles and shits. They weren’t doing anything other than playing their hearts out, and their accomplishments are now marred by this idiot.
Again, referring to Black women as whores, in one form or another, is as old as the republic. I don’t like hearing bunk like this from anyone. But since Imus decided to unload on these women like that (one would be tempted to say “unprovoked” but that assumes that there’s a place, a legitimacy, to ever attacking a woman like that), he’s the one that deserves to be in the hot seat.
I see this from white suburban kids talking about gangstas and hos and pimps, and they think it’s hilarious. But they don’t have the context and they don’t know that the whole image, glorified in hip-hop, was originally a backlash against the whole Dolemite, Superfly, Car Wash kind of image that Hollywood threw out at the black community in the 1970’s. I do see it as similar to the ‘n’ word. People have trouble understanding that black people adopted the ‘n’ word as a way to take the power out of it. They see it used and then think it is okay to use it themselves. But that misses the entire point.
A curious sidebar to this is young women calling themselves ‘hos’. It might be an effort to diffuse the power of the word, but, in this case, I think it is a futile effort.
And whether it is the ‘n’ word or ‘hos’, in the end you never really escape the underlying premise that there is something wrong with being that. Making it self-referential is therefore a problem.
As for the primary problem here being the misogyny and not the racism? I don’t know. I don’t really see them as isolated like that. I think the racism was pretty overt here. It’s usually coded a bit. This was blatant.
Now in orange.
…takes charge of the symbolic debate over substance.
If Hillary is going to be for real at all, she will have to speak from the philosohical pov she and Bill both know. If not, she is now very much out of her element, b/c she very much had to follow her fellow contestants.
Also in this sense, we see Obama begin to answer the question of substance. Being politically media-savvy with gesture is very near the root of popular assessment of substance. With this gesture, Obama has demonstrated a clear political intent, moving to the left of Hillary (who would simply never have been the second to move, nor the first), and noticably towards Edwards.
Oo la-la.
The thing that really irritates me is that Imus has done this before. He is a bigot and a racist and an anti-semite, and no one has ever called him on it until now. Read this from FAIR:
As you rightly point out BooMan there is increasing friction in the previously thermodynamic conduit of right-wing sludge. Under this increased pressure, admissions by top-level newsies that “Drudge rules our world” and “we’re all part of the [Imus] gang” are starting to pop out. This is progress, but I’m not satisfied.
IMO, there remain two elements of the modern news business that need sunlight and pressure:
First, and more concretely, is the process by which various news orgs find and recruit the “experts” or “representatives” for their shouting heads matches. Often the terms of debate on a given issue are defined by who exactly is selected to do the debating. Much mischief and confusion has come from repeatedly pitting a centrist/moderates against a hardline ideologue and pretending that the result is a “balanced debate”.
I’m certain that the news orgs themselves will scream and cry when and if we try to shine a light on their decision-making, but the process by which the “experts” are booked deserves much more attention.
Second, and sadly harder to follow through on, is an examination of what media critic Jay Rosen calls “audience lore”. That is, the (often unspoken) assumptions that media management types make about who their audience is and what they want. For example, its evidently taken as gospel among TV newsroom managers that “what people want” is taboid stuff, and that substantive discussion is a sure path to low ratings.
Similarly, I think “audience lore” plays a large part in deciding what opinions are and are not “acceptable”. One need only turn on the TV in passing to see that there is literally nothing that someone like Malkin can say that will cause her to be disinvited, while left-leaning bomb-throwers are notable only for their total absence.
Do you agree that these areas need attention, and if so, do you have any suggestions about how to ratchet up the pressure?
Thanks very much for a GREAT post. Once again, for a better understanding of how we got to this point, calvin recommends reading Howard Zinn’s, “A People’s History of the United States.”
The truly wealthy have pitted us against each other so that we don’t happen to notice that they are stealing all the money for themselves. When the impact of global warming and the end of the oil economy hit, they will survive, we will not.
Ooops. Scratch that entry. calvin fell alseep. Meant this to go on the comment section for Steven D’s diary on racism.
My husband and I were discussing the Imus thing and it occurred to me that it happened because during the past decade, beginning with the Newt brigades, somehow it become okay to say these things again. Under the GOP’s watch, meanness has become popular. Undercurrents of racism, sexism and homophobia, disguised as policy, bubbled to the surface, and validated people’s personal feelings about race and sex.
Come on, we have a vice president who told a colleague to “F off,” and supporters cheered. Our own President mocked a woman about to be put to death, and supporters cheered. We’ve all seen the video of him – the leader of the most influential country in the world – flipping off onlookers like a punk. And supporters cheer. They’ve been given permission to act out their racism and sexism and homophobia again. Newt is back out there with his “language of the ghetto” schtick, and Pat Buchanan is on MSNBC every day whining about brown people.
But you are correct. There is a sense that the tide is turning. Even the most diehard of the braindead sheeple must cringe a bit when Imus’ sidekick calls Hillary Clinton a bitch. The comments about the Rutgers women are not isolated, do not stand alone. They are part of a pattern of ugliness that has gripped our national dialogue for too long. These homophobic, racist and sexist comments have been an ongoing feature of the Imus show, as has been pointed out repeatedly. So why now? Why the outrage now? I think because people are weary of it all, the same way they are weary of GWB and everything he stands for. It’s not just that Imus crossed a line. The line has been crossed over and over. Shock jocks and reality shows and lies and distortions and senators who use words like “macaca” because they’ve been able to get away with it. It’s all part of the pattern this administration has created to divide us and divert us. And finally, people have had enough, in the same way they’ve had enough of W.
Interesting Spike Lee interview.
This has spawned quite the comment thread on reddit.com 🙂
Really, I wholeheartedly and completely find this entire affair offensive. A guy made a statement he should not have and then apologized. Period. Yet it gets elevated to the status of we need thought police.
It is an artificial elevation in status of an infinitesimally small and insignificant event. It is done so on purpose to elevate the stature and status of the “left”.
As far as the decline of Faux viewers this is a good thing but I am going to stop when the left tells me how I should think, feel, say when it comes to just about anything. I’m really not a bad person and don’t go out of my way to hurt other people.
As to those questions everywhere and everyone wants to ask me about my race. For the rest of my life I’m going to refuse to answer. Hey if we are all “equal” then why does it HAVE to go into everyones NSA/CIA F**ing computer dataF**ing base.
Could you at least provide some kind of source or link when you spout accusations as harsh as this one?! It doesn’t lend much credence to your post. Makes you look like an amateur, really.
Now who’s in the game of misleading people? You’re trying to imply that people who don’t get any news are more informed than FOX viewers. But the paper you are talking about (http://65.109.167.118/pipa/pdf/oct03/IraqMedia_Oct03_rpt.pdf) doesn’t say anything about that. It says that people who get their news from print sources know more than people who watch FOX News. So technically, you are right: people who don’t watch news programming at all are more informed than FOX viewers. But that report also says people who don’t watch news programming are more informed than people who do, with the exception of PBS/NPR viewers.