More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Those were Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72 by Hunter S. Thompson, Scoop by Evelyn Waugh, and Manufacturing Consent.
“the
best fiction is truer than any journalism.”
in the press we regularly sell people on a simplified image of politics, of two parties in complete conflict about everything.
they’re anti-idealists.
“purity-testing.”
terms like “false-balancer,” “horseshoe theorist,” “neo-Naderite,” and the Soviet classic, “whataboutist.”
My personal religion is neither right nor left but absurdist. I think the world is basically ridiculous and terrible, but also beautiful. We try our best, or sometimes we don’t, but either way, we typically fail in the end.
I do try to keep enough distance from politics to keep it in perspective.
it’s not a hot take.
Which “side” is better is immaterial: neither approach is journalism.
There will come a time, guaranteed, when Americans pine for a powerful, neither-party-aligned news network to help make sense of things.
People who would certainly engage in courteous chats at their kids’ birthday parties freely trade horrific threats on Twitter. It’s insane.
He had a ritual he called the “phone attack.” When he came home at night, he would pour himself a drink, light up a Camel unfiltered, and start going through a giant Rolodex, pulling names out at random. Then he would dial his clunky rotary phone and call people to chat. As a boy watching, I learned this lesson: sources are relationships that must be managed both when you’re doing a story, and also when you’re not. People need to feel like you’re interested in their lives for their own sake, not just when you need something from them. Also: ask people about whatever they want to talk about,
...more
stage-managing of public opinion was “normally not accomplished by crude intervention” but by the keeping of “dissent and inconvenient information” outside permitted mental parameters: “within bounds and at the margins.”
Advancement is meanwhile strongly encouraged among the credulous, the intellectually unadventurous, and the obedient.
there are a lot of C-minus brains in the journalism business.
Flak was defined as “negative responses to a media statement or program.” They gave examples in which corporate-funded think tanks like The Media Institute or the anti-communist Freedom House would deluge media organizations that ran the wrong kinds of stories with “letters, telegrams, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits” and other kinds of pressure.
Under this theory, a Polish priest murdered by communists in the Reagan years was a “worthy” victim, while rightist death squads in U.S.-backed El Salvador killing whole messes of priests and nuns around the same time was a less “worthy” story.
Cronkite’s famous “Vietnam editorial” derided “the optimists who have been wrong in the past,” and villainously imparted that the military’s rosy predictions of imminent victory were false. The more noble course, he implied, was to face reality, realize “we did the best we could” to defend democracy, and go home.
The uglier truth, that we committed genocide on a fairly massive scale across Indochina—ultimately killing at least a million innocent civilians by air in three countries—is pre-excluded from the history of that period.
Middle Eastern arenas like Afghanistan,
We also volunteered to reduce or play down stories about torture (“enhanced interrogation”), kidnapping (“rendition”), or assassination (“lethal action,” or the “distribution matrix”).
Using point of view rather than “objectivity” as commercial strategies,
“Shoveling Coal For Satan”—
The relentless now now now grind of the twenty-four-hour cycle created in consumers a new kind of anxiety and addictive dependency, a need to know what was happening not just once or twice a day but every minute.
One of the pillars of the “propaganda model” in the original Manufacturing Consent was that the media used anti-communism as an organizing religion.
The ongoing Cold War narrative helped the press use anti-communism as a club to batter heretical thinkers,
the virtual disappearance of socialist movements across the globe,
The press is a business above all, and boring third-person language was once advanced marketing.
The idea was to make the recitation of news rhetorically watered down and unthreatening enough to rope in the whole spectrum of potential news consumers.
The old-school anchorperson was a monotone mannequin designed to look and sound like a safe date for your daughter: Good evening, I’m Dan Rather, and my frontal lobes have been removed. Today in Libya…
In this show, the “liberal” Colmes was the quivering, asexual, “safe date” prototype from the old broadcast era, and Sean Hannity was a thuggish Joey Buttafuoco in makeup whose job was to make Colmes look like the spineless dope he was.
This was theater, not news, and it was not designed to seize the whole audience in the way that other debate shows like CNN’s Crossfire were.
On some days the conservative would be allowed to win, on some days the liberal would score a victory. It looked like a real argument. But Crossfire was really just a formalized version of the artificial poles of allowable debate that Chomsky and Herman described.
Crossfire became a propagandistic setup, a stage trick in which the “left” side of the argument was gradually pushed toward the right over the years. It was propaganda, but in slow motion.
Hannity & Colmes dispensed with the pretense. This was the intellectual version of Vince McMahon’s pro wrestling spectacles,
As any good wrestling fan knows, most American audiences want to see babyface stomped.
Fox chief Roger Ailes once boasted, “I created a network for people 55 to dead.” (Ailes is now dead himself.)
The explosion of cable television meant there were hundreds of channels, each of which had its own mission.
And I love that lawyer who wears a suede jacket! He looks like a cowboy!
(by necessity: an important principle in pre-Internet broadcasting is that nothing on the air, including the news, could be as intense or as creative as the commercials).
If you got them in different rooms watching different channels, you could get both viewers literally addicted to hating one another.
consumer version of “Two Minutes Hate.”
Without understanding how those pressures work, it’s very difficult for a casual news consumer to gain an accurate picture of the world.
They picked that story just for you to hear. It is like the parable of Kafka’s gatekeeper, guarding a door to the truth that was built just for you.
People need to start understanding the news not as “the news,” but as just such an individualized consumer experience—anger just for you.
This is not reporting. It’s a marketing process designed to create rhetorical addictions and shut any non-consumerist doors in your mind.
As it turns out, there is a utility in keeping us divided. As people, the more separate we are, the more politically impotent we become.
Fake controversies of increasing absurdity have been deployed over and over to keep our audiences from seeing larger problems.
