Time to connect some dots again.
Comes today a dismayed David Brooks, who occupies the neoconservative slot in the lineup of the New York Times‘ Op-Ed page, declaring that “Newsweek‘s retracted atrocity story has sent everybody into cloud-cuckoo-land. Every faction up and down the political spectrum has used the magazine’s blunder as a chance to open fire on its favorite targets, turning this into a fevered hunting season for the straw men.”
As Brooks sees it, even the White House has become unhinged. “We’re in the middle of an ideological war against people who want to destroy us, and what have the most powerful people on earth become? Whining media bashers. They’re attacking Newsweek, while bending over backward to show sensitivity to the Afghans who just went on a murderous rampage.
“Talk about the [soft] bigotry of low expectations.
“Maybe we should all focus on what’s important. Newsweek‘s little item was seized and exploited by America’s enemies in a way that was characteristically cynical, delusional and fascistic …. [E]xtremists,” Brooks says, are people who “use manufactured spasms of hatred to desensitize their followers,” and he concludes, “The rioters are the real enemy, not Newsweek and not the American soldiers serving as prison guards.”
Meantime, he stops to chide some of his more blinkered ideological allies that “The people who run Newsweek are not a bunch of Noam Chomskys with laptops. Not even close. Whatever might have been the cause of their mistakes, liberalism had nothing to do with it.” (We at CJR Daily would take it one step farther and add, “But so what if they were a bunch of Noam Chomskys? Where does it say that the Noam Chomskys among us cannot start up their own newsweekly and run it as they wish? Nowhere in our playbook.”)
Which takes us to our next dot, a story on the front of the Times‘ Arts section, in which David M. Halbfinger discovers that left and right wingnuts had, even before the movie “Episode III — Revenge of the Sith” opened last night, leaped in with blogs, ad dollars and boycotts to choose which of the flick’s heroes and anti-heroes to line up with. Halbfinger tells us that Moveon.org is prepared to spend $150,000 to run ads on CNN comparing Republican Sen. Bill Frist to the movie’s evil, power-hungry Chancellor Palpatine, while righty blogs are jeering George Lucas for putting some lines in the mouth of the vile Darth Vader that sound distinctly like they came from George W. Bush. (We have to admit, “Frist!” does indeed sound like a name right out of a list of “Star Wars” characters.) One Web site has even added Lucas to its list of boycotted entertainers, along with Jane Fonda, Sean Penn and the Dixie Chicks.
Poor Lucas. He, it turns out, serves the same purpose as Michael Isikoff in sending the moonbat sector of the populace spinning off into its own version of outer space.
Our third dot is on page 2 of the Times business section, where Virginia Postrel introduces us to two Harvard economists who suggest that instead of trying to market themselves as nonpartisan observers of the passing scene, newspapers adopt the British model — bias, announced upfront and loudly, as an identifying marker and a marketing tool. In an age of cutthroat competition, the economists write, “bias is not a bug but a feature” that can differentiate news outlets, help deflect price competition and increase reader loyalty. Certainly Rupert Murdoch, major domo of Fox News and the New York Post, has brought that British sensibility to his own sense of journalism; Murdoch has no hesitancy at all to use the news pages under his control to bludgeon political enemies and toss rose petals to politicians whose positions he admires.
The business premise is simple, the professors say: the more extreme the position you take, and the more deftly you twist your news reports to reflect that position, the better your odds of holding on to and, perhaps, even expanding, your loyal base.
And if there’s one thing we’ve all learned over the past five or 10 years, it’s that the press, first, foremost and always, is a business.
–Steve Lovelady
Steve Lovelady was editor of CJR Daily.