Call for Pragmatism

Reynolds has it about right in a 25 May post, I think, but the question he ends with is the tough one: How do we get there from here? The media are extremely important for that question, and to focus on its role seems to me precisely correct. Today's major media have no difficulty marginalizing the wacko fringe of the religious right, but it does the job poorly in two respects. First, the media repeatedly patronize and slander ordinary religious people, who don't deserve it, right along with the wackos, who do. Second, because the elite media are in basic agreement with the secular left, the corresponding wacko fringe on that side of the spectrum enjoys a virtual immunity from searching analysis and criticism. Both of these failures are a direct result of the elite media's cultural isolation, something it continues to show little or no inclination to recognize and address. We can only expect that the elite media will therefore continue to see the left lane marker and think it's the center stripe.

The media's inability to recognize where the fringe begins on both sides, and its unwillingness to treat both extremes with equal opprobrium, is what makes the media a participant and contributor to the culture war, rather than a force for tolerance, balance, and pragmatism. The elite media really has lost its cultural bearings, and I think that is a predictable result of hiring practices during the last twenty years or so. I doubt that is a problem that can be easily solved internally; more likely it will only yield to executive action by ownership. Declining readership/viewership and falling profits may eventually drive those reforms.

Byron

Newsweek Fiasco

When, exactly, did the MSM become this sick puppy it's turned into? These news organizations have got to take a close, serious look at the composition of their staffs. Something is badly wrong when major U.S. publications are competing day after day, in a time of war, to see who can most effectively do the work of Al Jazeera.

Newsweek editor Evan Thomas apologizes, regrets, and explains, but does not retract. What a weasel.

Every military operation by the US beginning with Viet Nam has been a two-front war, with the greater threat from our own viciously anti-American media.

I subscribed to Newsweek for 30 years, and it was worth reading. Then it gradually morphed into a predictably left-liberal rag without much substance, and I finally dropped it. This latest mess is entirely a product of the ideological agendas of the people who work at Newsweek; they cannot put out a fair publication with the staff they have on board. The idea of a weekly news magazine became ridiculous some time ago, with even daily newspapers and network news broadcasts hopelessly late with everything. So, Newsweek revamped, going with lots of pictures, People Magazine-style splashy feature articles about celebrities, and relentlessly adversarial "Gotcha!" journalism. Thus, their trip to into the journalistic toilet.

Even if it had been true, publishing a story like this was beyond excuse, utterly destructive and irresponsible on every level. My guess is that they had finally wrung the Abu Ghraib story completely dry and were desperate to find another way to give the Bush Administration and the military a black eye. They will suffer some financial losses over this, and a few people might be fired. But nothing will really change until a new kind of editor or ownership comes in and cleans house top to bottom. It will not happen, because the Washington Post Co., which owns Newsweek, will replace Tweedledee with Tweedledum. Or Tweedledum with Tweedledummer. Both the NYT and CBS have had major changes at the top as a result of phoney news scandals, and neither one has changed a bit. Both Keller at the Times and Schieffer at CBS are ideological clones of the men they replaced. The liberal left is a largely discredited enterprise, but it will retain its hold for a long time in two places, the MSM and the universities, both of which are heavily staffed and thoroughly dominated by people stuck in a 1960s worldview. ABC, NYT, CBS, NPR, AP, BBC, New Yorker, Reuters, the identical agenda, hammered unceasingly.

Double Rainbow

Just happened to look out my front door this evening, and there was a nice double rainbow.

The primary rainbow went in a perfectly unbroken arc, horizon to horizon, extremely bright the whole way. You can see the secondary rainbow above the primary, just inside the bare tree. It was brighter by eye than in this low-res picture.



I've heard of people seeing triples here in New Mexico, but I think that requires extra peyote.

Byron