Cross-posted from The Stakeholder.
It often struck me as odd that the Republicans - though not necessarily their echo chamber - use the phrase "
liberal media filter" as opposed to simply "liberal media." A small thing, but it seems to violate one of the commandments of Republican message manipulation, namely that the shorter and more concise a talking point, the better.
So it got me thinking, and I understood their realization that it is not "the media" that is of primary concern - not even in the sense of the dreaded "MSM." In this country, you're never going to plug all the leaks, you're never going to be able to prevent a lot of stuff from popping up somewhere. Now there is a fair amount of fault to be found in the sources of actual reporting in this country, primarily newspapers, such as ignoring stories like the Downing Street Memo because the "manipulation of intelligence" narrative has lost popular steam, such as burying key pieces on page A17, such as Judith Miller's performance at the
New York Times. But it is simply preposterous to propose that the "deference" of newspapers to the president is responsible for the profoundly misinformed status of many in the American public.
When we talk about misconceptions in the public, there is still one definitive study on the subject, namely the PIPA poll which found huge numbers of Americans consistently believing that Iraq was behind 9/11 in one way or another, that at least half of the world supported the invasion, and that WMD were actually found in Iraq.
[As a side note, although there is much work to be done in the Democratic Party, the constant refrain that Dems have lost touch with the American people seems a little misguided when these facts are properly kept in mind. President Bush's actions take on an entirely different character under these mistaken beliefs, and even more so do the actions of the Democrats. Imagine how Democratic criticism of the handling of the war sounds to somebody who believes that the war not only took out the real instigator of 9/11 but secured massive stockpiles of WMD. Perhaps the most surprising thing is that more people held some of these massive misconceptions than actually voted for Bush.]
But getting back to the central point, look at how the misconceptions break down amongst respondents who list print media as their primary source for information as opposed to others:
Keeping in mind that "print media" includes sources like the Washington Times and Weekly Standard, that is a stark difference indeed. And I would go so far as to say that somebody would have to make quite an effort to hold on to those misconceptions while reading the Washington Post every day. Same goes for beliefs about the wonders of privatization, the innocence of Tom DeLay, etc. And yes, I realize that the editorial page still manages to absord such nonsense on occasion, but that is a separate issue from the world of actual reporting.
Point being that the problem of a widely misinformed public cannot be pinned on the relatively few sources of original reporting in this country. In fact, the misconceptions seem to persist despite often excellent investigative reporting from places like the Post, WSJ, and Knight Ridder. The truth has come out, it is in the public domain - but it does not reach the wider public. It is not a matter of "the media" - it is a matter of filters.
FOX News is a filter, Limbaugh is a filter, the thousands of extreme religious right radio talk show hosts scattered across the country are a filter. (Blogs too, on both sides are a filter, as Thune and "those helping with his campaign" obviously realized.) And while many newspapers produce mountains of damning evidence against the White House and Republicans in Congress, it is usually almost all for naught - these filters will make sure that this evidence never reaches the eyes or ears of the greater public.
Contemplating this is slightly terrifying for me, largely because it seems like such a massive, entrenched infrastructure that it would take decades to deconstruct even if we discovered how to do so. And day by day, this insulation of much of the public from facts essential to making an informed choice at the ballot box seems to be cleaving off vast sections fof the country into an entirely alternate universe.
I noticed this release Friday from Regnery Publishing...
Washington Post, May 12, 2005: "The Constitution specifies that Congress will set the jurisdiction and budgets of the courts, and Republican lawmakers began agitating to exercise that power after Schiavo's death. DeLay drew wide attention to the issue by declaring that the judges involved in that case would have to 'answer for their behavior.' As a guide to his views on the subject, DeLay has been urging reporters to read Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America, by Mark R. Levin."
Yesterday, NewsMax - one of the original backers of the book - picked up the release and ran with it. For those not intimately familiar with this book, this was a review by Dahlia Lithwick in Slate...
If a book lands on the best-seller list and nobody hears it, did it really happen? Mark R. Levin's Men in Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America was ranked eighth on the New York Times list this week; it's been on that list for six weeks now, and seems to be leaping off the bookshelves, despite the fact that it concerns constitutional law and the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet it has been reviewed virtually no place and written up by almost no one. True, Charles Lane did a piece about it in the Washington Post a few days ago; he noted that absolutely nobody who writes, talks, or thinks about the high court has even read it. It's selling, it seems, almost entirely due to endorsements by Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Fox News.
As it happens, Lithwick published that review the day after Tom DeLay started threatening judges, and obviously appropriately in hindsight, drew the connection. In our own universe, it is difficult to tell who should be hurt more by the link - DeLay or the author. In the alternate universe of the Republican filter, a high-profile Republican leader has finally jumped on the bandwagon for one of the greatest books on the judiciary ever written by the perhaps the best Constitutional scholar in the country. Just ask Rush.
So having found no support for their radical view of the Judiciary in the respected field of legal and Constitutional scholarship, the extreme right - now indistnguishable from mainstream Republican politicos - simply created an alternate field of their own. And this initiative is being carried out in just about every other field one might think of. Consider this piece on "intelligent design" from the Washington Post recently...
The growing trend has alarmed scientists and educators who consider it a masked effort to replace science with theology. But 80 years after the Scopes "monkey" trial -- in which a Tennessee man was prosecuted for violating state law by teaching evolution -- it is the anti-evolutionary scientists and Christian activists who say they are the ones being persecuted, by a liberal establishment.
They are acting now because they feel emboldened by the country's conservative currents and by President Bush, who angered many scientists and teachers by declaring that the jury is still out on evolution. Sharing strong convictions, deep pockets and impressive political credentials -- if not always the same goals -- the activists are building a sizable network.
And this other Washington Post piece on the counter-attack...
The Discovery Institute, the strongest voice behind intelligent design, at one point gathered the names of 356 scientists who questioned evolution. In response, the National Center for Science Education located 543 scientists named Steve -- including a few Stephanies -- who declared the evidence "overwhelmingly in favor of the idea that all living things share a common ancestry."
How long before Tom DeLay begins singing the praises of intelligent design, and lending the stamp of government approval to this alternate "scientific" universe? We picked up early on Tom DeLay's tactical shift to hijack the Republican base and use it to hold the Republican Party hostage, a tactic that came into full bloom this week at his dinner "salute." His speech at the dinner was chocked full of outlandish religious rhetoric, designed to put himself to the religious right of anybody else in his party and rally those groups to go on the offensive against any and all comers. If Bush's victory in November and the perhaps erroneous crediting of the religious right for that win emboldened the James Dobsons and Tony Perkinses of the world, Tom DeLay is hoping to consolidate them into one overpowering juggernaut that he can personally wield against Democrats, and especially against any potential Republican defectors. To defend himself, he would create a monster.
And so the alternate universe continues to grow, and continues to close of all avenues of penetration for what might be called "the reality-based community." The fundamental psychological enabler of all of this remains what Lakoff and others have described as "identity politics." Before joining the DCCC, during the run-up to war and before Lakoff had made his big splash, I wrote a series of articles discussing how many in middle America had taken on support of President Bush as part of their identity, how once this happened it became a matter of personal pride to defend him, and how once this happened, acceptance of information contrary to their idealized vision of Bush provoked a violent response. An attack on Bush was also an attack on them. Much like the racism in much of America during the Jim Crow era, hatred of "the other" was tied in with a sense of superiority that - like most forms of pride - became a crutch that had to be defended with utmost tenacity. To demonstrate my point, I invited submissions from readers in middle America explaining their experiences. I got dozens of responses, if not hundreds, including tales of people throwing trash at children protesting for peace, people being ostracized at local bars for even the slightest hint of dissent, etc. But perhaps the one burned most in my memory was this from a middle-aged wife in Pennsylvania:
I always thought freedom of speech meant one could speak anywhere, anytime. Boy, was I mistaken. One night listening to Bush lie, I said I'd love to go down to Washington and protest the war. My husband of 42 years turned to me and said, "You're a traitor and you're talking treason."
...Part of the problem now is that the Republicans won't admit they are and/or were wrong. Until they do so, their followers aren't going to either. And until that happens, the rift in our marriage isn't going to be healed, instead it just festers.
-A Pennsylvania Suburb
For a husband to react so violently even to his wife is simply staggering. If he is willing to dismiss even her comments with such fervor, one can imagine how little difficulty he would have dismissing criticism from the loathed Democrats or even "the liberal media." Once an individual has internalized these feelings so thoroughly, they will run with whatever you feed them. The default response for Republicans when faced with accusations or questions for which they have no answer is to dismiss them as "partisan." The logic is this: Any questioning of GOP policies or behavior is automatically partisan, anything partisan can be dismissed as insincere, therefore any criticism of the GOP is insincere. Short, simple, stupid - but enough to latch on to should one desperately be looking for a rationale to avoid cognitive dissonance. A general goal of the GOP is to permanently discredit any potential critics - just consider how in the early run-up to war, most Americans only supported the invasion if condoned by the UN. Since then, Republicans have launched an unrelenting assault on the credibility of the world body, and arguably the world in general in so far as their opinions are seriously considered, culminating in the nomination of John Bolton.
Thus can the alternate universe be sustained even under what would seem to be extreme duress with a modicum of effort.
So will this be another diagnosis with no cure? Well, the answer of how to penetrate the alternate universe while thousands of talk radio hosts, Republican operatives, and hacktacular right wing "policy groups" guard the border like "the minutemen" in Arizona does indeed defy a simple answer. Certainly Dems are chipping away, establishing their own filters, building a better infrastructure to influence filters like cables news, establishing mouthpieces for the religious left, etc.
But ultimately the only hope for a shattering of the foundation of the alternate universe may rest within that universe itself - flaws in the matrix, if you will. And as it turns out, that glitch is free will after all.
Tom DeLay has thus far not only had success in holding his party hostage, he has managed to gain the support of some of the more extreme religious right groups despite the fact that he is above all the nexus between the GOP and their wealthy corporate special interests. But as some of the ethical and legal troubles that DeLay, Inc. faces continue to escalate through hearings in the Senate and the trials in Texas, this bizarre marriage will be strained. Will the self-appointed leaders of the "family values" crowd have the stomach to defend ethics breaches in the service of protecting sweatshops? Indeed, the kind of coaltion building that has convinced these divergent groups to put aside so many of their supposed principles for mutual gain has been largely dependent on Grover Norquist as the founder and continuing glue - a man who will find himself in an uttlerly indefensible position when he goes under oath.
And while Norquist may escape "in-depth coverage" on CNN by virtue of the fact that he is a strategist, not running for elected office, no such luck for Golden Boy Ralph Reed. The Georgia media are already on his scent, and pieces have been trickling out from Georgia columnists with headlines like "Reed's campaign may generate political tsunami." Last night, Erick of Red State (who have been divided on DeLay, to their credit), wrote this explanatory post on the race between Reed and his GOP primary opponent, State Senator Casey Cagle, without issuing an opinion...
In raising his profile, Cagle has thus far made the race about Reed. Cagle already has on the payroll several people who either worked for Reed or with him. They have done more to attack Reed than promote Cagle, except for their handy work at the State Convention (we'll get to that). Joel McElhannon, Cagle's strategic consultant, is a master at earned media and has so far been able to directly and indirectly draw attention to Reed's flaws. Sources at several national media outlets tell me that a lot of national press coverage of Reed lately has come from unnamed Georgia Republicans. The fingerprints, at first glance, appear to be those of Cagle staffers.
His report jibes with everything I've read, although it fails to mention two other signals.
- 23 of the 34 Republican State Senators have endorsed Cagle - understandable in light of colleague loyalty, but still eye-raising given that supposedly Reed is on the fast track to become their presiding officer.
- This from Reed's former mentor, Pat Robertson:
Reed's former boss, Pat Robertson, has cited the Biblical warning that you can't serve both God and Mammon as part of Reed's dilemma. The problem, as one Republican consultant put it to me, is that a lot of these stories are causing people to question just how much of the outcry for morality in government is real and how much is just a smoke-screen for raking in big bucks.
Having Pat Robertson going around crowing about "two gods" has to be Karl Rove's worst nightmare.
One more Republican principle reached its apex in DeLay's salute: the fervent suppression of dissent. "With the exception of Chris Shays, who is a joke anyway, we haven't had any defections," said Craig Shirley of the ACU. It is this suppression of dissent on the Republican side that has allowed them to sustain one coherent alternate universe. This breaks down if suddenly conservative voters suddenly have a variety of opinions to choose from - enter the reality-based community. This process has already begun as a result of diverging interests between the White House, who want a lasting legacy, and Republicans in Congress, who want to be re-elected, in the seemingly dismal failure thus far of the privatization push. If people like Pat Robertson keep talking like that about people inches away from the White House - Cheney called Reed and "old friend" just this month - the universe could go into flux.
Tom DeLay's House of Scandal is getting wobbly...