Soros or Murdoch

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"?

Comments

[ihavenobias]

Interesting.

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

[mellene]

Murdoch, not Soros, should be named the single most dangerous individual in the United States. He's trying to destroy freedom of speech by his massive take-over of all things media. What can stop this man? Murdoch presents only his views. The FCC is guilty of complicity with Murdoch so people can't get the truth just Murdoch's version of it.

[realpolitic]

Bill O'Reilly tries to demonize George Soros at every turn. He says Soros is a "drug legalizer," forgetting that this is a libertarian position and among others Milton Friedman advocates the liberalization of drug laws. O'Reilly says Soros is an "open border guy." Whatever that means? But I am sure Soros believes in territorial integrity and national boundaries. O'Reilly's real argument is with Soros liberal belief system and cash to forward it.

[elkabong]

Conservative media's job one is to scare the living crap out of their (generally authoritarian) listeners/viewers and then to channel that fear into hatred (not a difficult task).

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.

[Overd0g]

Fortunately, liberal media never tries to scare people (loss of health care, exploitation by the "rich", loss of civil liberties, global warming, global cooling, population bomb, etc...), and then channel the fear into hatred.

[elkabong]

When people are actually losing their healthcare, you see it as rhetoric.

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.

[csbrudy]

there is no "liberal media", only a fake "liberal media" served up by Murdoch, Redstone, Disney and a couple of other oligopolizers of the mass media. What little reality that does come true is trivialized, and your comment shows the trivialization works.

[TJTelecaster]

Soros is at best a complicated and nefarious amoral investor who makes money as the head of the Quantum fund which specializes in weapons contract speculation and financing and also an Oil baron and magnate some of off-shore oil investments and oil interests..

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...

[DudeE]

Of course you've only told a portion of the story of Pavlik Morozov. You left out the part about his father being a drunk, a womanizer and a criminal engaged in document forgery. That and the part about Pavlik and his 4 year old brother being later murdered by his relatives in retaliation for having "ratted" on his father.

Of course this doesn't matter since you have no interest in balance - only plucking the facts that support your existing bias.

[Hume]

"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."

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.

[MaxTaylor1]

LMAO...talk about the fox (no pun intended) investigating the chicken coup. So Soros, the left's equivalent to Murdoch, is investigating propaganda? Ooooh how unbiased that report should be. Mr. Kaplan, do you realize how stupid that sounds. It's like Murdoch investigating Huffpo and all the leftist news organizations. LOL...just plain idiotic.

[dawlishgal]

Since when is Soros the "equivalent" of Murdoch? Murdoch owns a huge media conglomerate that controls communication all over the world, and distorts things to his own advantage and that of the richest of the rich. Soros wants to give money to a party that HE HOPES will help the disadvantaged.

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!

[buddycor]

George Soros made his initial forture selling the personal effects of his fellow jews who had fled Hungary to escape the NAZIs. The money went to the Nazis.

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.

[ihavenobias]

Those are the most well supported statements I've ever rea...oh wait, never mind.

[HermioneGranger]

First, Soros accompanied Hungarian militia men as a 14-year old in disguise when they were robbing the Jews. Second, the money did not went to the Nazis, it was robbed by the U.S. Army. Look up "Hungarian Gold Train".

If you are so concerned about Hungarian Jews you should lobby your Congressman to give them their gold back.

[ProfessorB]

It's impossible to argue against O'Reilly because he and his ilk offer no arguments to contend with. If you actually listen to him, an endeavor I would not recommend anyone do regularly, you will discover that he simply strings together non-sequiturs that only vaguely relate to whatever topic he started with. In this, his aim is to evince an attitude and to sweep into his web anyone who shares a similar attitude. Anyone who appears on his show is simply grist for that mill. His every uttertance debases language in Orwell's terms.

[lthuedk]

How many of the Neo Con-enabling 24% would switch in a nanosecond to the Constitutional side if they knew the true nature of the deeply evil right?

Thank you, Marty, for making the choice very clear.

And thank you, George.

[Kendo Nagasaki]

Well actually, none. It's the money.

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

[visionar7]

I'm hardpressed to even find a left media...where is it ...not at msnbc..........not really at cnn either...it's not Ted Turner's network anylonger. and Fox forget about it fair and balance my aunt fanny....it is not on th etv nework...so other than democracy now on cable the others are all corporate owned....where is this left media?????????????????????? what a joke...another republican spin

[kart0624]

visionar7:

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.

[Mark Bernadiner]

Mr. Marty Kaplan is wrong. Left media and network are very proficient in Geobbels propaganda and use Geobbels principles on daily basis. Ignorance of leftist journalists is astonishing virtually on any subject, as you compare against documents and facts.

[MaxTaylor1]

Mark:
I agree

[ihavenobias]

Yes, I agree as well.

I agree that someone *talking* about "documents and facts" but providing neither to support their point is ridiculous and embarrassing.

[HermioneGranger]

Goebbels, by the way, learned his work from an American PR-man called Edward L. Bernays, who was a nephew of Siegmund Freud. Goebbels had all his books.

[presto]

As Mr. Kaplan says "The task of an open society is to create a system that separates fact from falsehood...". That is the meat and potatoes of his argument and it is the one thing that is leaving serious liberal lefters flummoxed. Fact is not a matter of opinion, at least not in any realistic way, and yet it is treated as if it were the result of a vote or a straw poll or just a roll of the dice. Or, in the worst of cases, factual integrity is determined by the winner of a screaming match. Facts are facts. Falsehoods are falsehoods. Our societal inability to tell the difference is appalling.

[algibbs3]

Well said ,they tend to support their "facts"(opinions) with the opinions of like minded individuals , then call those who would disagree closed minded.

[Aramingo]

Yup. Just look around at the 9/11 conspiracy nuts, the Moon Landing folks, the anti-evolutionists, the global warming deniers. Facts are not relevant, whether your talking about the ductile characteristics of steal under thermal stress or the relationship between solar and greenhouse warming. Whi needs facts when you have opinions?

[jrosenb1]

I've been a fan of George Soros for a long time, as far back as the 1990s, when he was critiquing free-marked fundamentalism and setting forth his views of an open society. But why hasn't Soros used some of his billions to help fund a television network that would be an alternative not only to Fox News idiocy but also to the bland and spineless journalism of the big three networks? (NBC, to its credit, through its MSNBC cable arm, has at least put forth Keith Olbermann, who almost singlehandedly takes on the official lies and high-level corruption that the mainstream news networks otherwise tiptoe around.) It will take far more than a daylong conference even to begin to undo the damage already done to American democracy by the systematic gutting of substance from national news, a process that has been going on at least since the era of Reagan, and, in more subtle ways, for a lot longer.

[TRYKER]

Perhaps we should de-fund Bushco's propaganda allowance, which thru last yr had been over $2 Bil. We need to take his (entitlement) money and apply to toward SCHIP, right?

[fedupwiththis]

George Soros has lifted more people out of poverty than Murdoch and all his minions combined. As, I believe, Dorothy Parker once observed...no good deed goes unpunished. That is, at least, in this brave new world.

[dictatortot]

Do you deny that for decades American journalism had a liberal bias? I was a liberal journalist myself back then and was surrounded by fellow travelers.

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

[Dash Riprock]

I do deny it. The media was biased for truth. The media that brought down Richard Nixon did so because they brought out what was really happening in the White House. Today Nixon's crimes are childs play compared to the crimes of the Bush Administration - eavesdropping on our phone calls, torturing prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention, abolishing Habeas Corpus, and so on.

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.

[Uselessboy]

Wholesale falsification is overwhelmingly the practice of the right not the left. The right rules from fixed principles and is threatened by reality, such as the new information that the waste gas frontier has filled up, and we now need to regulate the sum of the entire specieds' activity.

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.

[UltraClassic]

Well said, dictatort, Soros is by no stretch of the imagination this faultless angel that the author implies. And those who do not buy off on the radical left and their fringe politics are not the "kool-aid drinkers" that the author states.

I challenge commentors to pull up previous posts by the author, he is consistent in his politics. But read the comments and then tell me who the real dillusional mouth foamers are.

The radical left is as dangerous as the radical right and yes, there are two sides to every story or opinion. The author seems frustrated by the fact that the public does not embrace hard core liberalism to the extent that he feels they should.

[MikeDu]

To use the word 'questionable' for Limbaugh is like saying jeffrey Dahmer had 'questionable' eating habits. Limbaughs no journalist by any stretch, he's a fascist propagansdist.

Liberal press? Operative word - 'had', like a generation ago. And what are you doing talking 'balance' between left and right? The right wing press is uniformly lies, jingosm, spin, fear-mongering, warmongering, sanctimony and bigotry. I'm reminded of the so-called 'liberal' PSB Newshour. A 'balanced' report to them is some interviewee giving true facts, with a Neocon pundit at his elbow purposefully skewing everything he says.

[morris1030]

dictator,

Listen you troll. I have been a liberal all my life. I am 81 years old. I love my country. I hate communism, and despise what Bush has done in allowing communist China to buy America [with our own money].

I believe in God and paractice my religion [which is none of your business]. I believe in choice, but I do not believe that our immigration policies are properly enforced. Bush has done ab solutely nothing about this. Fox with the right wing along with the timidity practiced by the networks, hardly balances your so called paranoia about "the liberal media".

It was this "liberal media" that gave Bush a free pass and still does not give us the full stories that are out there on BBC and other Media.

I believe in habeus corpus. We no longer have it as Bush convinced everyone to live in fear and take away our rights along with wiretapping.

I think it is treason to have outed Valerie Plame, and Bush's pardon of Libby contradicts his promise to prosecute her "outers".

As a liberal I am patriotic and concerned for the security of the United States and its citizens, which has been jeopardized by the incompetent,corrupt,Iraq debacle which has encouraged Terrorists in Iraq not heretofore existing, along with billions stolen in Iraq still unaccounted for.

I believe that Coulter,Limbaugh,O'Reilly are messengers of hate and bigotry, mean spirited and destructive. But they have a free speech right to do this, of course.

I am a liberal who despises Putin and his KGB practices of killing journalists and others who are against his regime. Ditto Castro regime.

And oh yes, since you have liberals so wrong, and smear and smear......There are times when I believe in the death penalty. I could go on and on......