roachboy

i am unclear about what the "media bias" accusation amounts to in this situation: all media sources are "biaised" one way or another--it is useless to hold up some (fictive, absurd) notion of "objectivity"----there is no way around having to read critically.

and i am not sure at all that a simple statement of some (almost inevitably unfounded) notion of the general political line of a nonconservative press outlet, as such, amounts to anything analytically---what is does do is provide conservatives a rationale for beyond avoiding consideration of information that does not jibe up front with their predispositions--the non conservative press, unlike its rightwing correlate, encompasses a wide range of political positions and needs to be read with that in mind.

with the right press in the states, the matter of political line is easier to see and to deal with because the co-ordination of line is such an important part of how right media operates as a whole. the zones are not symmetrical: conservative media is not like other types of media.

the matter of "objectivity" in an information environment which for 20 years or so has been shaped to a significant degree by think tanks/industry groups buying science, buying pollsters, etc. and disseminating ideologically saturated information without acknowledging that saturation does nothing to resolve the problems---many of which are created by decisions taken to corrupt information in the interest of blunting critique. quite the opposite, in fact--in the contemporary press, "objectivity" operates to legitimate often inane conservative positions (for example) because the feature of objectivity that seems to matter these days amounts to the adoption of a kind of he said/she said game: if there is an argument from one "side" it has to be balanced with one from the other "side"--nothing in this even starts to address questions of quality of information--it is a paordy of balance.

holding to it generally benefits the right because it places their arguments on the same level as others. there is little doubt that the right benefits politically from this and that the various groups that operate within its purview have long since figured this out and adapted how they produce information to it. think about the coverage of antiwar demonstrations: you can have a demo of 200,000 people against the war and 35 people for it and the coverage will come close to placing them on an equal footing. he said/she said.

so like i said before, i am not clear at all about what this type of argument about bias, played out at a general level, resolves for you folks, but then again you make your own political bed and who am i to ask you why you do it the way you do? i just do not understand.

but such is the media climate that has been made for us, that somehow we swallow, that somehow--against all judgement--manages to structure opinion. it is a sorry state of affairs.

i would think it would be a nice idea for the folk on the right here to consider host's posts in more detail and maybe even repay the effort he puts into assembling them with a serious reading. it is also a sad state of affairs that this almost never happens. i would imagine that, after a while, he might grow tired of this space. i certainly would understand if he did. i have.

=====
so it is....
for what seem to be obvious psychological and political reasons, what should be a traumatic situation that has unfolded in new orleans--one that can and should function as a wholesale condemnation of the america way of doing class warfare in general (this implicates both "sides" within the reactionary oligarchy that is the united states--a single party state with two right wings) and in particular provides a demolition of everything about the right's conceptions of the role of the state gets diverted into a pissing match about what can and cannot be pinned on george w bush and his band of incompetents. the problems raised by the disaster in new orleans run well beyond this kind of trivia, and it seems to me that there is no way to see this bickering as anything more or less than damage control, not just on the part of folk like karl rove--whose motives and tactics at this point should be transparent to anyone who looks (consider the sequence of fake photo-ops for bush in and around nola, with phantom work crews that are busy busy busy for the duration of the photo op and then disappear, never to return)--but also for individuals around the country, who, for their own reasons, seem to use such bickering as a way pretend to be talking about something fundamental while in fact they work to avoid even beginning to confront what new orleans shows us, and the world, about what the united states has made of itself...the image of america presented across the disaster in new orleans is ugly indeed: better to run away.

but whatever--if the united states were even as democratic as any parliamentary system is, the bush squad would be facing a no confidence vote--one that they would in all probability loose, even given the republicans control of all things legislative. but no--so it is that in the absence of democracy in america, the miserable reign of george w bush continues---and now with the added treat of two supreme court nominations thrown in as if the cosmos was geared around playing an enormous joke on us all.

better not to think about it too much: continue as before.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite