Dakota

Pretending to be King etc.

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How did we miss Catherine Crier and her fine coverage of Bush's imperial ambitions. She's the female Keith Olbermann, locked away on Court TV -- let's move the woman out of cable into the mainstream.

Did you hear about the snappy new imperial tactic implemented at the President's press conference yesterday? I can't find it in print, but NPR, being all audio, was rather annoyed that the press was not supplied with microphones, thus protecting the king and the public from hearing embarrassing questions while, well microphoned himself, Bush criticized his lazy, disobedient congress.

Speaking of harassing journalists, Videoblogger Josh Wolf has been in jail for months for refusing to turn over this film of a 2005 protest in which a policeman was injured.

“The Federal prosecutor argues that Wolf does not meet the statutory definition of a journalist (under California law) or a common law journalist’s privilege based on the Federal Rules of Evidence. Further, they argue that even if he did, the protections afforded to journalists would not cover his activities in this case because he merely observed the incidents he recorded in a public place. He did not prompt them, nor did he offer anyone anonymity or confidentiality.”

Pandagon's Amanda Marcotta, late of the Edwards campaign, clarifies the issue:

Needless to say, the right hardly needs their volunteer army of truth deniers and propagandists, since the right wing noise machine is rather well-funded, which makes “citizen journalism” somewhat redundant and certainly no threat to the media establishment, though they console themselves by harassing one target after another. But no, it has no relationship to actual journalism.

Nor does the left blogosphere. There are some bloggers who do journalist work, but they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Truth told, good journalism is so utterly time-consuming and thankless that you need to farm it out to paying publications for compensation, so most bloggers who do that work will publish it outside of their blogs. But what left wing bloggers do offer is an opinion and analysis alternative, and as Mike says, a good deal of the time they simply are legions better than the paid pundits. For some reason, though, this obvious point about blogs is somehow avoided in most conversations about them.

My main theory as to why people avoid discussion the blogs’ major role in shaping opinion and offering analysis is that people are reluctant to admit outright that they look to others for opinion and analysis. The great myth of American politics is that we’re all just soberly analyzing the facts and opinions and “deciding for ourselves”, which would mean that we don’t lose out a whole lot if the field of available opinion is limited by Beltway wisdom. Unfortunately, human nature just isn’t like that. In reality, people tend to use the opinions they’re hearing as a gauge of what is possible and then reject the “extremes” of the available range of opinion and put themselves in the middle. There’s simply not a lot of thought that goes into it. Conservatives grasp this fact very well, which is why Fox News puts a bunch of conservatives on and characterizes them as left wing Democrats. Slowly but surely, they create the impression that very middle-of-the-road, boring liberal ideas are raving socialism—thus how I managed to hear this weekend from my dad how attempts to reduce carbon emissions through conservation

Refreshing.

It was pointed out to me that the left wing blogosphere reports on reporters. How did I fail to mention that?

Photo note: Pretending to be kings in Hong Kong. At least it is perfectly clear that these guys are pushing corporate nonsense on the public. The Chinese pictures are piled up in the archives -- it was the year of the golden pig so, as you can imagine, I have a generous supply of pig pictures too.

Posted by Dakota at April 4, 2007 05:59 AM