Get ready for a new Fox-wide onslaught on George Soros. The man Bill O'Reilly calls "the single most dangerous individual in the United States," and to whose name O'Reilly attaches the Homeric epithet "radical-left activist billionaire" as regularly as Spy magazine used "thick-fingered vulgarian" as a prefix for Donald Trump's name, is backing a new effort to unmask political propaganda, and Rupert Murdoch's minions can be counted on to denounce it in an orgy of hilariously self-incriminating projection.
The 60th anniversary of George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language" will be the occasion in a couple of weeks for a daylong conference at the New York Public Library subtitled "Orwell Comes to America," as well as the publication of a book called "What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics." Anyone who hasn't drunk the Murdoch/Cheney Kool-Aid will instantly recognize the legitimacy of the topic: American discourse has been hijacked by right-wing demagogues who win by smear, reign by fear, demonize dissent, treasonize reason, and accuse any public utterance which reveals their lies or intent as "liberal media bias."
(I know, Orwell would scowl at linguistic inelegance like "treasonize," but I'm weak, ok? And as long as I'm being parenthetical, I wrote a chapter in the Orwell book, but I'm saying so not as full disclosure; it's just old-fashioned self-promotion.)
The tragedy of modern mainstream journalism is that it is epistemologically incapable of revealing the heirs of Father Coughlin and Joseph Goebbels as what they are. Newspapers and networks have been so effectively mau-maued by reactionary talking-heads and politicians that they have largely abandoned the effort to separate true from false, and instead -- waving the cowardly white flag of "balance" -- they content themselves with juxtaposing warring contentions, as though this putative open-mindedness were no different from empty-headedness. The right has co-opted to its own advantage the very moral relativism it claims to denounce, conning the media into postmodern nihilism. Every story becomes he-said/she-said. Every debate is framed as two-sided; the sin of falling into the fallacy of moral equivalence, said to be so damaging in our war against the Other, is somehow supposed to be benign when it gives a podium to right-wing hit men and the women who love them.
The name of George Soros's foundation, the Open Society Institute, comes from a phrase popularized by a hero of his, the British philosopher Karl Popper. His two-volume work, The Open Society and Its Enemies, was an attack on a philosophical tradition from Plato to Hegel, and on the modern tyrannies, from communism to Nazism, which Popper saw as its consequence. Reading it in graduate school was, for me, one of those intellectually life-changing experiences. The difference between a closed and an open society, says Popper, is not that an open society says yes to all propositions. If it were, then the modern media -- where propagandists and nutjobs are cloaked in the same plausibility afforded to, say, legitimate investigative reporters and scientists -- would be the bedrock of a civic utopia. Openness doesn't mean "anything goes"; it doesn't mean "pick your poison." It means that there is a broadly agreed-upon process for a society to test and refute, or test and accept-for-now, the contentions and conjectures on the table.
Fox News isn't an open society, because there is in principle no way to convince its foamers that they are wrong. Rupertland, and its allied kingdoms in print and radio, are closed societies, no less so than the authoritarian states on left and right that Orwell and Popper took pains to lay bare. There is simply no way to persuade O'Reilly or the other bullies that they're wrong. No conceivable kind of evidence can be adduced which might bring them to modify or abandon their position. No fact can penetrate their bubble; anything inconsistent with their totalitarian mindsets is dismissed as left-wing spin and propaganda. The test of an open society is whether an argument, whether an empirical finding, has -- at least in theory -- the ability to lead that society to change its mind. By that test, the Fox narrative of America is as impenetrable to fact or reason as any Soviet or jihadist fairy tale.
But an open society isn't one that just welcomes all comers. That's the right's parody of liberalism -- multi-culti pomo spinelessness, the moronic "we'll have to leave it there" anchor babble that ends virtually every contentious segment on non-Fox news. No, the job of an open society is to figure out ways to rule in some ideas, and rule out others. How loud you yell is not such a way. Nor is whether you claim to represent a group, or how entertaining you are, or how successfully you stir up controversy, or how relentlessly you complain to bookers, producers, reporters and editors that your "point of view" is not being adequately represented.
The task of an open society is to create a system that separates fact from falsehood, a system that doesn't start from the proposition that accuracy is just in the eye of the beholder, that doesn't abandon the notion of objectivity as hopelessly and inherently political. In the public arena, these systems used to be called "education," "science," and "journalism." I can't wait to watch O'Reilly bang his spoon on his highchair and call the Open Society Institute's Orwell exploration propaganda. Any middle-schooler will know what to reply: "I'm rubber, you're glue." Or is it "He who smelt it, dealt it"?
Follow Marty Kaplan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/martykaplan
And this is the "most liberal" paper in America according to some of you?
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/19/opinion/19brooks.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Most often, the hatred is directed toward "libs" and what liberals think, believe, aspire to and prioritize; almost always defined or nebulously and purposefully undefined (ie: the overuse of the word "agenda"), erroneously, by the conservative bobble-head directing the hatred.
No matter how the country is diminished; the Dollar devalued; the debt unmanageable; the war un-winnable; the corruption unpalatable; the lawlessness unconscionable under conservative leadership, conservative media adherents will always support their own.
Authoritarian simpletons trust those who have made them afraid and help them manage the fear by telling them, in the simplest of terms, who the "enemy" is.
The conservative media's task is made simpler by the simpleness of their audience.
When civil liberties (like the right to habeus corpus and the right not to be wiretapped without a warrant) are actually being lost, you see it as rhetorical "scare" tactic.
When Hannity says that liberals want to take away your guns, you believe him. You don't see it as patently false.
That's why we think you guys are nuts or stupid.
I am not telling the half of it but funding a monument to a young boy the turned his own father into Stalin's NKVD in Russia to the tune of $10,000.00 is not exactly an act of an egalitarian or humanitarian..
See what I mean..?
"Don't let the devil ride, if you let him ride he'll wanna drive..!"
Ry Cooder...
This is precisely, as stated, what is not possible with the likes of O'Reilly. And why? Because he and the other foaming fanatics who make up the right-wing sound machine are at cultural civil war with America. It is not a dialogue we're having. These guys are committing logocide on an entire tradition of thought -- liberalism, or what they think liberalism is.
One should not waste time trying to engage these madmen in debate. One should respond to their charges with an emphatic denial, but then ignore them entirely, going on to make positive points about one's own vision. It is pointless to argue with crazy men, even if they do still have some sense of logic left. It's still not reason. Just logic.
And articulating what one is for or about is epistemologically possible, if one knows what one is talking about. The problem may be that many folks on the left really don't have a clue what their positive political or moral vision is.
Edwards is certainly working hard to put forward a coherent vision of what his presidency would be about. Maybe he'll make it.
It is the difference between a robber-baron and a philanthophist, but of course, that is difficult for the not-so-rich among the far right to see (perhaps because their brains are lacking that little chip that controls EMPATHY).
I remember from psych class the concept of a JND...a "just noticable difference"...the far right can't tell the difference between a rich person advocating for other rich people and a rich person advocating for the poor. (Except that they are far more likely to accuse the one who advocates for the poor as acting in "self-interest.)"
When they are griping about Soros and his "self-interest," perhaps they would like to take a moment to reflect on Bush, an oil man, who lied about reasons to invade an oil-rich country. And how about those choices as VP and SofD? The former CEO's of the two biggest war profiteering corporations in the US. Do they think that that is some kind of bleeping coincidence that all of sudden, with these people in power, we find our selves in a quagmire that enriches their former corporations beyond any war-monger's wildest dreams?
Sad--how these twerps are exploited and used by psychopaths who pander to their defects as human beings. .
Something SERIOUS has got to wrong with these gullible dolts....something that makes them betray the best interests of themselves and their families in return for WHAT? That is the mystery...what, exactly, are they are getting in this sellout to the Faux Newz propagandists and the crooks who pay for Faux? Some creepy identification with people who would wipe their feet on them were it not for their votes?
Some sense of deflected importance that important people would pander to them? Beats me!
He is the banker for the drug cartels of South America.
He outsources his business to avoid US disclosure requirements.
He is the an egomaniac.
If you are so concerned about Hungarian Jews you should lobby your Congressman to give them their gold back.
Thank you, Marty, for making the choice very clear.
And thank you, George.
But they are also insane, hateful paranoid angry bullies.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison
I can't agree with you more about the "liberal-media" nonsense. America's media is at most moderate and in most cases right-wing and that's when you start to understand what these right-wing nuts really want. If you watch Fox News, you'd feel as though Christians are being persecuted and that white people are victims of reverse racism, it's what people believe in that make-belief-land.
Have you ever seen Fox News have any investigative piece other than the ones bashing democrats and liberals? Have you seen any talk about the suffering in Darfur or other parts of the world except for Israel in Fox News or Hate-Radio? Nope never. If you ever tune into Limbaugh or Hannity, it's always about how the entire world is wrong and that how Reagan, a disaster for the world was a great President.
It's a carefully orchestrated flow of information, that talks about a select few things.
I agree
I agree that someone *talking* about "documents and facts" but providing neither to support their point is ridiculous and embarrassing.
Limbaugh and Murdoch have swung the balance back towards the right, and Limbaugh in particular has done so with questionable means...but to paint the right with such broad strokes while ignoring the similar antics of the left is either disengenuous or downright naive.
http://www.newsprism.com
Today's media is unwilling to investigate government or even question it. They simply take the talking points of the political parties and broadcast them as truth.
Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch are propagandists. They are not journalists. The pendulum should not swing either way. It should be in the middle.
They also need a hostile discourse environment because it shuts down participation and collaboration. Again, if you're governing from the top, there's no meaning to collaboration, it only emboldens the enemy.
On basic factuality there's absolutely no comparison.