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I had read that the WaPo ombudsman had already done something just like this. This morning I find it in the NYT:
The gist:
We at the NYT apologize to all you upright Real American conservative citizens that we didn’t recognize the ACORN atrocity as being the defining story of our non-corrupt times. Please accept my apology and don’t call us the "liberal media" anymore. You know how that makes us cry.
So I sent this e-mail. I hope I expressed myself effectively, not that I think it makes any difference with these people:
I can’t believe what I just read here.
If you think the ACORN story merited even one significant story space, you must think we need the equivalent of hundreds of front pages, every day, to cover the crimes and corruption of Blackwater, Halliburton, KBR, Pfizer, and of course the ongoing crimes of Wall Street.
You have to think this if you have even a child’s sense of proportion.
That you would instead engage in this most vile kind of false equivalence, that some trivial stupidity on the part of a trivial organization is the journalistic and moral equivalent of trillions of dollars in corrupt bank bailouts and defense contracts, shows how despicably far you personally and the Times itself have fallen from any ideal of journalism or even simple human decency.
I’d be inclined to attribute it to cowardice in the face of right wing thuggery, and certainly you are such cowards. They sure know how to play you: demanding coverage for their obsessions; screaming that the coverage is biased; all the while absurdly calling you (by any historical standard a rightist newspaper, and a rightist media in general) the "liberal media", a patent absurdity that you happily embrace. Yes, they know who they’re bullying.
(Are you historically ignorant as well? Do you not know how ACORN has been a right wing obsession for decades? Not because it has accomplished much by the measure of power, but because of the principle, because of what it’s trying to accomplish, which is to help empower the weakest, poorest people.)
But far more it’s simply that your corporate media, every bit as much as the political parties, are the bought and paid for flunkies of these criminal corporations.
That’s of course why Congress rushed to pass an unconstitutional bill of attainder against ACORN, and the IRS cut ties with them, even as the Blackwater State Dept. contract is happily renewed without a whisper of protest.
Why is ACORN being crucified for spitting on the sidewalk while Blackwater remains the privileged darling even after committing literal and figurative massacres? It’s very simple: because ACORN actually exists to help the poor and the weak. How quaint. How strange.
That’s why you in the corporate media always despised them and laughed at them in principle: because your mission has become to comfort the powerful and afflict the afflicted.
And that’s why, when ACORN is found to have done something silly but trivial compared to real corporate crimes, the right wing screams out the standard equivalence lie.
And when the media didn’t jump to with enough alacrity, when the thugs demand still more blood, we now have the "public editor" of all people solemnly intoning that the Times did indeed not sufficiently emphasize this pivotal story of our times.
I’d say you should be ashamed of yourself, if I thought shame any longer existed in this prostituted country.
If you don’t get that corporate power is the enemy of everything American, everything decent, everything human, and that the measure of any constructive action, and especially of journalism, to whatever meager extent it still exists, is to act on behalf of the public interest against this anti-public interest power, then you are utterly worthless to anyone other than those predatory interests.
I used to worry about the plight of "traditional journalism". How there would no longer be serious reporting if the traditional newspapers went down.
No longer.
Now I know real journalism exists only among alternative outlets like TomDispatch and the Nation. As for the corporate media, real journalism, whose core, objective, professional mission includes comforting the afflicted and afflicting the powerful, and most of all a commitment to truth, including the moral truths of proportion and true equivalence, is dead there.
Oh, there may still be good, important stories sometimes reported there. But these are accidents. They do not arise out of an underlying commitment to truth or to the public.
The real commitment of the mainstream media, including that of the NYTimes and its Potemkin Public Editor, is to the aggrandizement of the corporate power.
And yet all this vile subservience isn’t helping with your advertising rates. How ironic. How poetic. Does it seem worth it?
To repeat: Anyone who truly cares about reporting on corruption and abuse among government-funded groups could fill the front page for the next thousand years with nothing but stories on big corporations and powerful interest groups, while the likes of ACORN and what it’s accused of would never merit more than a blurb on page 17. This would constitute true objectivity, true lack of any bias other than the humanistic.
Anyone who says differently has another agenda, and a far more nefarious bias.
12 Comments
Thanks, Russ. That’s really a great diary. “False Equivalence” and insidious “centrist framing” are the two main journalistic sins of our time, other than, of course, just refusal to cover stuff that the President has said is “off the table.”
Yes, I forgot all about the sins of omission.
“corporate power is the enemy of everything American, everything decent, everything human”
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Yeah, let’s get rid of those evil corporations. Start with the corporations that make computers and software, no more oil companies, either. Screw those corporations that own airlines and even make the airplanes, we can walk. Don’t need corporate automobiles, my handy neighbor could build me one in his garage, one that uses locally grown straw for fuel. Publically owned corporations just can’t do as good and FAIR a job as a business owned and operated by an individual or family. So, let’s fly on Jack and Jenny’s Neighborhood Airlines and buy motor fuel from Grandma’s Petroleum Exploration, Development and Marketing Boutique and get the chip for our home-made computer from Cyber Ralph down by the strip mall. Problems over.
The moment a corporation passes from legitimate business activity to rent-seeking (which is the transition pretty much every corporation and every sector wants to make, as soon as it can), it becomes malevolent and antisocial, a criminal, a parasite. It’s very simple.
Too simple for nailhead, evidently.
Hey nailhead, I think Russ’s point is that unregulated corporate power is destroying democracy, and that we need to regulate that power so it doesn’t destroy the lives of regular Americans. In view of what’s happened over the last couple of year, the failure to bring the big banks, energy, health insurance companies and defense contractors under control, and the obvious anti-progressive bias of the big media, I think that only a really blind bat can fail to see Russ’s point.
Unregulated corporate power? First of all,federal corporate taxes range between 30 and 40 percent, which makes the federal government a big shareholder in every corporation. Corporate mergers and aquisitions require federal approval. The SEC regulates the trading of corporate shares. OSHA determines requirements for corporate workplace safety. The FDA, EPA, NLRB, and a practically infinite number of alphabet soup federal agencies dictate what corporations can and cannot do. And we haven’t even gotten to the state, county and city levels of government. It’s difficult to imagine how corporations could be more regulated.
I have to agree, a wonderful and needed rant. The media dutifully play up every conservative gripe no matter how detached from reality, turning it into a major story. As the Clinton impeachment and the Bush era showed, no Democratic peccadillo was too small to castigate and no Republican one was too great to ignore. What we are seeing in the neo-Republicanism of the Obama Administration is more of the same. Conservatives can act and speak as crazy as they please but anyone who stands with progressives or the poor will either be ignored if they are being sensible and doing good or ripped to shreds for the most minor of infractions.
In other words, the media has been acting badly but with great consistency and we should never have thought that a change of President would change it.
Thanks. There does seem to be a difference between how they handle e.g Mark Sanford. There it’s like, “We’ll report the bare bones facts, beyond that it’s a private matter”, whereas their whole tone with Monica Lewinsky parroted the Rep line that this is and should be some monumental crisis in our country’s history.
I think there’s alot to the idea that the piling on ACORN, even by Democrats, is simple bullying and contempt for an organization that’s not trying to run some profit-seeking scam and get over that way. On some level the mainstream sees them as unamerican and a bunch of losers.
I don’t defend the idiots in the video, but it’s a nothing incident. You fire the wrongdoers and move on, and the next day everyone forgets about it. That’s the way it works for every other organization, every day. Arggh.
Yes, I think the Democrats are doing the best they can to “sistah souljah,” their left wing. If they keep up the Clintonian BS, this time they’re going to end up as a marginal third party, or perhaps in a new party with the few Rockefeller Republicans still remaining. After the pyrrhic victories of the Clinton era and the recent Obama election, I don’t think many progressives are in the market for “sistah souljahing” right now.
Thanks for spotlighting an utterly infuriating article; I couldn’t believe that even by the time I got to the dreary, embarrassing end of it, Hoyt never got through his head what we both did in the first three paragraphs.
They charge six bucks for that miserable rag, too. The story, of course, would be how the right has vertically integrated the “news,” complete with fake, “independent” fillmmakers pursuing a pre-written script, then pushing it on FOX relentlessly and afterward systematically bullying the “mainstream” media into covering the irrelevant BS. Ah, but that would be journalism, and not warmed over, too…. Not included in the $6 price.
You are getting a Recommend from me. But to me it seems there has been some recent Diaries that have caused the average level of Seminal to decline. I like recommending a vote “up” without a vote “down” as is usually done. But some of these new folks do not have linkies. They do not bring new information to the discussion. They criticize each and every little thing. They never seem to have any new facts about the hidden off shore corporations. And they tell us how “progressive” they are. I have been bashing SAIC, but I am alone on that so far.