Okay, mainstream media, I’ve had it. You have frightening power to shape public opinion and, by extension, national politics. You are owned by a diminishing handful of corporations and serve their agendas and their shareholders above all else. And, to be sure, we’re seeing how well that’s working out via the Murdoch debacle. You can take us in and out of wars, recessions, scares, and all manner of crises, real and manufactured.
And most of us aren’t even half-listening. We hear you on the fly, going from room to room, channel-surfing, in-between work (provided we have jobs), school (provided we can afford it), family, sports, reality TV and just getting through the day. So much of your message is received uncritically, taken at face value. You know that—and you exploit it to create whatever “truth” you choose to market for that particular day.
And yet, despite the corrupting profit motive, there are many, many journalists in your employ who are attempting to do the right thing. And it is to those ink-stained wretches, et. al., that I make this plea.
STOP WITH THE FALSE EQUIVALENCIES, ALREADY. THE RIGHT WING NUT JOBS ARE EXACTLY THAT—RIGHT WING NUT JOBS.
Throughout the manufactured-by-the-Right debt ceiling crisis you are continuing to perpetuate the myth that “both sides are equally at fault” and that “the intransigent extremes on both ends of the spectrum” may sabotage any deal, the full faith and credit of blah, blah, blah etc, etc. Just as with the issue of hate speech and any number of other issues, you fall back on the “everybody’s equally guilty” fantasy.
No. Seriously. This is wrong. There are many thoughtful, sincerely patriotic conservatives, yes. There is, indeed, an entire body of conservative political and economic theory, dating back centuries, practiced by men and women of good will (however wrongheaded). But at this moment in our history the GOP—perhaps the entire government, even the global economy—has been hijacked by lunatic, fanatical extremists—known loosely as the Tea Party caucus—dwelling in a reality of their own invention with the glassy-eyed zeal of cult members. They are more than willing to take the country down, either to serve their hysterical Ayn Randian ideology, a belief that the world is only 6,000 years old and that he moon landing was staged, or—and perhaps above all— simply because they figure that President Obama will go down in the wreckage and that we’ll have a white president in heaven.
I’m sorry, but Dennis Kucinich on his loopiest day can’t even approach this sort of fevered wingnuttery. They lie, they fantasize, they hate-monger—all with the endorsement of corporate powers like the Kochs, and hacks like Grover Norquist, the folks who sign their checks.
Or, they’re being enabled by the likes of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, old-school pols who know better—who know damn well that if a Republican were in the White House, they’d simply rubber-stamp the debt ceiling increase just as they did all the gazillion times it was raised under previous administrations.
And yet, you sit there and act all judicious in the interest of being “fair and balanced.” You lend the Tea Party nihilists legitimacy. They are a fringe movement and have always deserved to be treated as such. They should be a sideshow. There is no one on the Left in national government who remotely compares.
I’m sorry. It’s got to stop. Sometimes one side is flat out, dangerously bathshit nuts—or just willfully dangerous, out of sheer political opportunism—and this time the wack jobs and the economic saboteurs are on the Right. Whether motivated by purist ideology or political cynicism, they are united in one goal: To tank the economy and inflate unemployment so that, ultimately, President Obama gets blamed—and goes down in flames.
Media—by which I mean non-Fox, legitimate media—it’s time you called them out.
Daily Damocles 