The Obvious

Everyone speaks the language of oppression.

Oppressors always speak it. When you read their propaganda you find they are always the victims. They're surrounded. Their people have been threatened. They have no choice.

This is the most obvious, and most eternal, law of politics. In a free society we expect -- we should demand -- that our journalists covering foreign policy understand this fact, internalize it, and thus view anyone speaking this language with a great degree of skepticism.

Since September 11 American journalists have failed this simple test.

When the memory was fresh, there was an excuse for it. When the hunt for Osama Bin Laden was on, they could say they had an excuse for it. When the case for war with Iraq was being made, and Bush was riding high in the polls, they claim to make an argument which was an excuse for it.

Today, in 2007, they have no excuse for it. Yet they continue to do it.

TV, newspapers and magazines are still filled with cheerleaders. The vast majority of voices I see in the media are still wishing away this basic fact, that the oppressor always uses the language of oppression. Just because our leaders continue to speak the language, to say "we have to stay," "we have to win," their words are reported as fact by far too many reporters.

It's not fact. It's an assertion, by defenders of the present policy. Only a Baghdad Bob would call such a thing fact.

This is not what a free press is supposed to be about. Freedom of the press requires that all of us in journalism work at peeling back the layers, seek objective truth, and separate spin from fact.

Yet most reporters, most editors, still refuse to do this. And the dwindling number of war supporters (amazing that their numbers dwindle while the cheerleading continues) continue their bullying,  calling truth spin and spin, truth.

I don't object to that. Politicians will always seek to justify their policies.

What I object to is  anyone in our press buying into it.

Yet despite their piss-poor ratings right wing bloviators like Tucker Carlson and Glenn Beck and Joe Scarborough continue to have their platforms. Lou Dobbs is treated as a serious journalist, not as the real Howard Beale, which is what he is. And anchors at networks like MSNBC and CNN have become mere "talent," chosen for their blow-dried good looks rather than any intellectual or journalistic quality. There are more $400 haircuts on the sets of our TV networks today than in the whole of the Democratic Party.

Why?

Media consolidation is part of that reason. But there is something else at work as well. Media oligarchs continue to seek favors from the government, and the government continues to grant them, implicitly conditioning those favors on continuing support for their point of view.

More important is that our major media figures have been bought, literally, for 30 pieces of silver.

Wolf Blitzer, Tim Russert, David Broder and the rest of our elite pundits have one thing in common. They are rich. Russert vacations alongside his sources off New England. He is one of them -- economically and socially. He is part of the power structure, and totally corrupted by it.

This is not supposed to be the case. This is not the way a free society organizes a free press. Those at the top of the reporting chain don't just join the Nomenklatura and become knee-jerk supporters of their own privileged caste.

Which is the ultimate answer. This era has succeeded in creating a caste system, and those who appear regularly on TV are, by definition, part of this privileged elite.

But a feudal society is not a free society. A feudal society in which power and wealth is concentrated in the hands of fewer-and-fewer people, passed down from Ted Koppel to Andrea Koppel, is not a free society. It is no different from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Were it not for this medium you are using right now, I sometimes fear free America might be dead, replaced entirely by  the self-righteous oppressor speaking the language of the oppressed from its castles and battlements, the serfs unheard and rendered unable to speak.

Of course that is not the way the world works. There are always, it seems, alternative modes of propaganda. In fact, 40 years ago, when conservatives felt the same way I do now, they had an alternative media to go to. This medium consisted of books, pamphlets, direct mail, the occasional radio show.

The real master of the 1960s' alternative media was Richard Viguerie. He's still at the same stand, and in fact has pastures new on the Internet. While I do watch his dis-information campaigns with admiration now, it's the same feeling I have for Keith Richards, another refugee from out of time. Neither has (really) sold out. Both are still (so far as they can) keeping it real.

Still, in their time, in the context of their time. Woo! Young Americans for Freedom, yeah baby. Jumpin' Jack Flash indeed.