Big media blows dead yaks

It is truly incredible how duplicitous big media is with the statements of politicians:

Mondale and Kerry made this list for accurate statements. Reagan, Bush and Bush don’t appear, despite some famous groaners. In fairness, you can’t entirely blame the editors; their recollections faithfully track the culture of the insider press corps over the past forty years. All too often, groaning misstatements by Major Republicans have been ignored, fudged and wished away, eventually lost to history. Accurate statements by major Democrats have been turned into major scandals which linger in insider memory. Outlook is simply recording the era as it actually has unspooled. But during this era, the culture of the insider press has often turned truth on its head.

Democrats get pilloried for telling the truth. Republican skate despite obvious bullshit.

This is the reason our culture is in existential peril. Al Qaeda is the least of it. We don't care what's true any more, only what the conventional wisdom is - no matter how far nor how obviously it departs from reality.

The Daily Howler still got game! After all this time, Bob Somerby is a blogging stud!

Contempt

Tom Levenson has a really, really smart critique of George Will's extremely fact-challenged bullshit on global warming. Will's technique was to take one small fact glaringly out of context and pretend the lie that it showed the full picture.

If a wife's attorney had her Lothario husband on the stand in a divorce proceeding, he could claim, "I'm not fucking anyone right now," as if that were probative. But then it would turn out that he was getting blown while on the stand (see! not fucking!), and his attorney's explanation for this utter contempt of court would be that his client's claim had been kinda, sorta arguably true on one single day six weeks earlier. So we're all just supposed to let it go. Ah, bullshit!

There's a clear conclusion I draw from the repeated choice conservative pundits have made for expedient rhetoric over what's actually, inconveniently true. They are members of a movement, not truth-seekers. Their product and goal is to manufacture consent of the governed, and it doesn't matter one whit to them whether deceit is required. They may even relish what Bob Somerby calls fooling the rubes.

These pundits are paid handsomely for their prostitution. And in the current media climate, selling out the truth doesn't even come with any risk of being shunned for it.

Public domain map of Arctic Ocean (note: not showing the contentious sea ice) from Wikipedia. Click image for details.