Glenn Greenwald, at CommonDreams.org http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/05/8103/ captures the "major media" doing what they do best: SELLING CONTENTLESS VAPID, DISTRACTION STORIES - "LOOK, everyone, it is OJ's WHITE JEEP!" - while mentioning true issues of national importance rarely, and usually BURIED well off the front page.
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The US Establishment Media in a Nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald
April 6, 2008
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/04/05/8103/
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079
And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.
“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly. In Great American Hypocrites, I described the process as follows in the context of examining the three-week-long media obsession with John Edwards’ haircut (to the exclusion of a whole array of revelations about what the government was doing or planning to do) and how they justified that coverage:
#1. Eric Boehlert, "Media TUNES OUT Iraq news... PRETENDS that viewers want inane gossip stories instead.
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200804020003
#2. Speaking of, INANE WP press whore HOWIE KURTZ compiles - FIVE PAGES of stories on Barak Obama's bowling skills! (Or lack theroof)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html
#3. Margaret Carlson jumps on the "Obama bowling gutter-balls" story too..
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&refer=columnist_carlson&sid=aAa467CxhOvU
#4. TIME slimey whore JOE KLEIN joins the media conga line with his "PATRIOTISM IS MOST IMPORTANT STORY FOR ME TO WRITE ABOUT!" story, where he offers this sage advice: "But now, to convince those who doubt him, Obama has to make the implicit explicit. He will have to show that he can be as corny as he is cool."
Coming from a white guy who wouldn't know "cool" if it bit him in the...
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1727502,00.html
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