Politics

“Now They Tell Us”, a book by Michael Massing

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• Thursday 20th September 2007

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately (I have to do something with my time; I don’t watch TV), and one that’s made a huge impact is Now They Tell Us by Michael Massing .

The book’s subtitle is The American Press And Iraq. the preface of the book is by Orville Schell, Dean of the Journalism Grad School at UC Berkeley. Massing’s a contributing editor of one of my favorite magazines, the Columbia Journalism Review.

As you might expect, the book chronicles the mix of Bush propaganda and slick BS that passed for front page news in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and just about every other major media outlet in the hysterical runup to the Iraq debacle, and afterwards.

Turns out there was a bit (shamefully little, but still some) of critical examination of the stream of lies and dog poop from creeps like Cheney, Powell, Rice, and of course, Mr. Awol Cokehead hisself; the problem was that all of it ran on page 17, or page 22, or page 25. The front page was full of the WMD garbage.

The book makes several points; the most important one being that the real news – the stuff that could have made a differece in averting the war; the in-dep[th reporting and skeptical analysis that we’re supposedly due as citizens in a country with a free press – was either killed outright, massaged into incomprehensibility, or buried on the back pages. Because nobody wants to get Dick Cheney mad at them; he might not give them a “scoop.”

Judith Miller, who functioned as a one-woman Fox News outlet within the NY Times, when interviewed for the book offered the defense that gee, she just wrote what they told her; what else was she supposed to do? Read it and weep. She ought to be ringing up your beef jerky and blunts at the 7-11, not playing at being a front-page journalist for the newspaper of record.

And in case you were wondering, the book covers the Times’s self-serving apology for exceptionally crappy reporting (it ran on page 11, not page 1). The fact is, of course, that the Times, along with every other American media outlet, is still functioning as a cheerleader for the Bush Regime. Massing details how the military and the Bush scum maintain what amounts to a bogus virtual reality that comes to the US public pre-digested and unquestioned, while the rest of the world looks on in wonder.

I realize that many people these days feel that they’re post-literate; they don’t read much except for movie reviews and TV listings. And blogs, of course. Good news for y’all; this book is a compilation of articles written over the course of a year for the New York Review Of Books. It’s only 86 pages long, and there’s a lot of white space on every page, so it’s a genuinely easy read. You could sit down and read it at Barnes & Noble while waiting for the next feature at the quadruplex.

There’s a generous taste of it online.

And newspapers still figure that the way to maintain Wall Street profitability is to cut reporters, foreign bureaus and news out of the paper, replacing them with administration drivel and pictures of Britney Spears. Seems they’re willing to try everything but actual journalism and real news. You’d think as long as they’re headed for the toilet, someone would give quality a try, just for the hell of it.

There’s a great quote about this: “News is what they’re trying to hide; everything else is publc relations.”

True dat.