Category Archives: News Media

Hectoring Dimwits and Other Media Matters

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For an example of how Left and Right aren’t viewing the same reality, check out this post at rightie blog Radio Blogger. There is a transcript plus link to an MP3 file of an interview by Hugh Hewitt of reporter Helen Thomas, in which Hewitt shamelessly badgers the 85-year-old Thomas until she finally hangs up.

In Rightie World, this is called “winning an argument.” I call it “bullying.”

Several rightie bloggers are celebrating this travesty as if it proves something bad about news media. But all it proves is that Hugh Hewitt is a bullying, knee-jerking, Kool-Aid drinking Bush apologist who wouldn’t recognize professionalism or objectivity if it bit his butt.

See Tbogg for more on what is loosely called the Hewitt interview “style.”

Meanwhile, Peter Daou posts


A Challenge to Rightwing Bloggers Who Blame the Media for the Cheney Mess: Prove it.

Peter writes,

Despite the glaringly obvious fact that major media narratives favor the right, we get bloggers like this, this, and this attacking the “MSM” for hyping the Cheney hunting scandal. Rather than waste cyber-ink explaining why it’s a big deal that the Vice President of the United States shot a man in the face and heart and went to bed without letting the American people know about it, let me share a question I asked of a blogger at Real Clear Politics who questioned my premise about the pro-Bush press:

I know the assertion that [supposedly neutral or liberal] reporters favor rightwing narratives blows your mind; after all, the liberal media fiction is hard-wired into the right’s political nervous system. But why should I believe your foregone conclusion that these people are left-leaning? Just because you say it with such conviction? Give me concrete examples of bias, not of negative coverage. (How can there not be negative coverage of the mess in Iraq? Or Katrina? Or the Plame outing? Or the NSA fiasco? Or do you want our media to simply fawn over the government? Is anything less than total pro-Bush propaganda considered media bias?)

The thing is, righties can’t tell the difference between negative but factual coverage and bias. For righties, anything they don’t want to hear about their dear leaders is “biased.” Whether a report is true or not is just an insignificant quibble.

Update: See also Tristero at Hullabaloo.

That Liberal Media

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There are some must-read items on the web today — let’s start with Digby’s “Dispatches From The Fever Swamp.”

The president’s approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the reporting in the mainstream media or by the “reasonable” Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don’t say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush’s approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catastrophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush’s powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections —- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

It’s a beautiful thing to see reality crystallized into a few concise sentences. Makes me want to cry. But this is why I started blogging. What was being reported as “news” on television and in newspapers was such obvious propaganda, such nonsense, I had to speak up.

Among the few negative emails I got after the recent C-SPAN gig were from gentlemen (why always men?) who patiently lectured me that news media is overwhelmingly liberal and for me to say otherwise was a self-evident lie. And I think, who am I supposed to believe — the Republican Noise Machine or my own lying eyes? And there’s no use arguing with them, you know. They’ve been told all their lives that the media is “liberal.” If you go back to the early 1950s you find Joe McCarthy saying it. Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew declared all-out war on media in the early 1970s. Rightie talk radio, Faux News, and the rest of the echo chamber pour this lie into the ears of millions of non-thinking listeners, who accept “liberal media bias” as gospel.

That excellent resource Media Matters has a new study out called “If It’s Sunday, It’s Conservative: An analysis of the Sunday talk show guests on ABC, CBS, and NBC, 1997 – 2005.” The executive summary is here; the full report in PDF format is here. And the report tells us what any viewer with a usable brain surely has noticed — the guest lists of the Sunday television political programs are lopsidedly right-wing. “Panel discussions” also tilt right. In the crucial period leading up to the Iraq invasion, congressional opponents of the Iraq invasion were largely absent from the Sunday shows.

What’s particularly galling to me are the phony liberals — people who don’t speak for us liberals and progressives at all, yet they represent us on television. For example, take Christopher Hitchens and Joe Klein. Please.

Kevin Drum discusses the Media Matters report and also links to an article by Paul Waldman in the current Washington Monthly:

This ideological imbalance isn’t only evident in the “official” sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly “balanced” by journalists from major newspapers.

….The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow “balanced” by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are “liberal” almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.

Kevin says,

The result is that genuinely liberal pundits get almost no exposure on these shows. You get conservative guests, super-conservative guests, moderate liberals, and journalists. And though it’s not part of this study, they’re almost all men. Only 10% of the guests on Sunday talk shows are women.

Some balance.

And this is particularly strange when you consider that the right-wingers are to the right of the majority of Americans on many issues. For example, 62 percent of adults recently polled by CBS News and the New York Times said that the “federal government should guarantee health insurance for all Americans.” If you listen to “mainstream” political talk shows, however, you’d think the only people supporting this view are the far-left Marxist fringe.

The right-wing agenda is presented incessantly on mainstream media; genuinely progressive policy ideas are rarely presented at all. Yet the media has a “liberal” bias. Uh-huh.

While you’re at Hullabaloo reading Digby, see also this post by Tristero. Excellent. For example:

The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

We can’t return America to the people without straightening out the problems in media, IMO. Democracy can’t work unless the people are truthfully informed. And when they aren’t seeing their real concerns being addressed by the political psychobabblers on television, most people will just tune out politics as being kind of pointless. And the Wingnuts will continue to run our beautiful country into the ground, because people don’t even know they might have had another choice.

The Democratic Party seems largely unable to pull itself together and push back. There are individual Democrats who are terrific people. But any Democrat who sticks his neck out is instantly, and visciously, smeared throughout news media, and the Dem Party won’t provide cover.

So it’s left to the Blogosphere to push back. It’s not much, but it’s all we’ve got.

Michelle’s a Twit

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Proving once again that she lacks a basic appreciation of traditional American culture and values, Michelle Malkin is outraged at Dana Milbank’s gentle ribbing of the Vice President on last night’s Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC.

If you watch Countdown, you know that the program mixes humor with hard news. So it was not at all out of keeping with the show’s format for reporter Dana Milbank to appear dressed in an orange vest and hat. His current location was near the vice president’s residence, he said.

Cute, I thought.

But Michelle Malkin and others on the Right are on a rampage. Media bias! they scream. They want to know when Countdown will display a bumper sticker that says “I’d rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy.” Can they not tell the difference between good-natured kidding and hateful meanness? I’d hate to sit down to a family dinner with these folks.

In some ways its a sign of respect to be able to kid our leaders. It says we’re comfortable enough with them to tease them. And Americans have made fun of our leaders since the guys at Valley Forge sat around the campfire and badmouthed George Washington. Some of our most-beloved humorists — Mark Twain, Bob Hope and Will Rogers come to mind — showed how it was possible to poke fun at leaders — often in their presence — without being mean about it. Here’s an example from Will Rogers —

The fire at the Treasury Department started on the roof and burned down until it got the place where the money ought to be and there it stopped. The Harding Administration had beat the fire to it. A fire in the Treasury Building is nothing to get excited about during a Republican Administration.

Damn, that’s still funny.

Malkin et al. will argue that Dana Milbank is not a humorist, but a journalist. To which I might say, since news coverage is a joke, what’s the difference? (Ba-bump BUMP) But I think it could be argued (to anyone not a twit) that Milbank’s costume showed a pro-Cheney bias. It signalled the audience that this is not a serious story. Nothing to get fired up about. Let’s have a chuckle and forget about it.

Believe me, a reporter with a real anti-Cheney bias would have taken a more sober approach to this story. In fact, I bet the White House has a crack team of joke writers on the job right now …

Updates: See “Cheney Accident Triggers Jokes on Late-Night TV“; “After Cheney’s Shooting Incident, Time to Unload“; “Groans at Home Re: (Cheney Joke Here).” See also Ezra Klein.

Update update: Boy, was I right about the White House crack team of joke writers, or what? Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports:

The White House has decided that the best way to deal with Vice President Dick Cheney’s shooting accident is to joke about it.

President Bush’s spokesman quipped Tuesday that the burnt orange school colors of the University of Texas championship football team that was visiting the White House shouldn’t be confused for hunter’s safety wear.

“The orange that they’re wearing is not because they’re concerned that the vice president may be there,” joked White House press secretary Scott McClellan, following the lead of late-night television comedians. “That’s why I’m wearing it.”

The president’s brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, took a similar jab after slapping an orange sticker on his chest from the Florida Farm Bureau that read, “No Farmers, No Food.”

“I’m a little concerned that Dick Cheney is going to walk in,” the governor cracked during an appearance in Tampa Monday.

A Grand Hypocrisy

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Yesterday Glenn Greenwald published a post called “Do Bush followers have a political ideology?” in which he argues that much of the Right has utterly abandoned principle and has devolved into a George W. Bush personality cult. “Whether one is a ‘liberal’ — or, for that matter, a ‘conservative’ — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views,” Glenn writes, “but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.” It’s a great post, and spot on.

I thought of this post this morning when I ran across this article by Elisabeth Bumiller in today’s New York Times. It begins:

What happens if you’re a Republican commentator and you write a book critical of President Bush that gets you fired from your job at a conservative think tank?

For starters, no other conservative institution rushes in with an offer for your analytical skills.

“Nobody will touch me,” said Bruce Bartlett, author of the forthcoming “Impostor: Why George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy.” “I think I’m just kind of radioactive at the moment.”

What follows is the sad tale of how Mr. Bartlett, a domestic policy aide at the White House in the Reagan administration and a deputy assistant treasury secretary under the first President Bush, became persona non grata in the rightie think tank crowd because of this book. Of course, we’re mostly getting Mr. Bartlett’s side of the story here; could be there are other reasons for his prolonged unemployment. Still …

Glenn writes,

The blind faith placed in the Federal Government, and particularly in our Commander-in-Chief, by the contemporary “conservative” is the very opposite of all that which conservatism has stood for for the last four decades. The anti-government ethos espoused by Barry Goldwater and even Ronald Reagan is wholly unrecognizable in Bush followers, who – at least thus far – have discovered no limits on the powers that ought to be vested in George Bush to enable him to do good on behalf of all of us.

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

This is not hyperbole. These people are frightening. Glenn provides proof in his post. Do a search for “Malkin” on this blog and you’ll find a lot more proof. And, unfortunately, these people have been able to implant their warped worldview on a big chunk of “mainstream media.”

In the comments to Glenn’s post, Jay Rosen notes,

The dynamic you identify–liberal means anyone who questions Bush–was a major factor in the blow-up surrounding the Dec. 10th column by Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell, The Two Washington Posts, in which she wrote: “Political reporters at The Post don’t like WPNI columnist Dan Froomkin’s ‘White House Briefing,’ which is highly opinionated and liberal.”

To this day Howell doesn’t realize that she misspoke. She didn’t mean “liberal,” she meant “critical of Bush.” But she doesn’t know it because of the phenomenon you describe here.

Neither she nor the Post reporters who “don’t like” White House Briefing could find in Froomkin’s work any liberal positions taken, because he does not take such positions. He holds Bush accountable and subjects him to rigorous scrutiny, and he certainly doesn’t like the way the White House operates. There’s nothing “liberal” about that.

I wrote about it, and Dan testified about it, here.

On top of that, there is a mindset among the Right that says labeling any opinion “liberal” makes it self-evidently false. One need to argue why it is false, or find flaws in the argument’s logic or presentation. The word “liberal” (or variants thereof, like “leftie”) covers all ground. Glenn discusses this today in a follow-up to yesterday’s post.

Most (though not all) of the responses were quite heavy on name-calling and extremely light on substantive replies to the actual points in the post. More notable than the unsurprising fact that the post prompted lots of name-calling is the specific name-calling insults that were chosen. Almost invariably, bloggers told their readers that what I wrote can be disregarded because I’m just a “leftist” and a “lefty” and a “liberal” spewing forth the “KosHuff” party line.

According to Rick Moran at Right Wing Nuthouse, for instance, my “writing is little more than a tired echo of what conservatives can read on a daily basis at Kos or any other lock-step lefty blog where Bush Derangement Syndrome reigns supreme.” And at Little Green Footballs (more on it below), my post won the award for “Leftist Lie of the Day” and was held up as an example of “dishonest, ethically-challenged childish babbling that passes for leftist ‘debate’ in this modern age.”

So, they label the argument and the person making it “leftist” and “liberal” and – presto! – no more need to address the arguments or consider its substance because it’s all been shooed away with one fell swoop of name-calling cliches.

(Note that Glenn links to Little Green Footballs, which is something I will not do. It just encourages them. If you are all-fired determine to find the site, it isn’t that hard.)

The name-calling phenomenon is old news here. Nearly all rightie comments to The Mahablog are nothing but name-calling. As you regulars know, it is my policy to delete any message that consists of nothing but insults to me or another commenter, which pretty much takes care of most of the right-wing stuff that gets left here. And, nearly always, the poster who gets deleted emails me about it and whines that I should be more broad-minded and willing to listen to other points of view (expressed with more invective, of course). Personal insults, however, do not constitute a “point of view” in my book.

Now, I think it’s true that there are real conservatives Out There who are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the Bush Regime. This is something I want to explore in more posts. But if you are looking at most leading bloggers and media spokespeople of the Right, you are looking at Bush culties, not conservatives.

Update: Do Bush supporters hate America?

One of the ignorant nimrods who regularly write to this paper to call me a Marxist argues that those who disagree with the president are delighted to see America fail, that people like me take pleasure in anything that gives comfort to our enemies. He argues that people who question the reckless use of the military are “pacifist military haters.” There is no truth to such baseless and childish nonsense, but he seems to think it sounds persuasive, or perhaps he thinks it’s a kind of logical argument.

That’s one of the reasons it’s difficult not to think some of these Bush supporters are just willfully stupid.

These people grow more tiresome as they have less and less with which to argue. Their recourse, it seems, is to tag people they disagree with by calling them “leftists” and “liberals,” as if those words cancel out all arguments.

The Vegetable Speaks

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David Brooks says that liberal blogs maintain a “Stalinist line of discipline.” Think Progress has the transcript from today’s Chris Matthews Show — think Dumb and Dumber:

DAVID BROOKS: Whoever the Democratic candidate, that is the weakness of the Democratic party, they’ve got the blogs and the netroots who are semi-nuts and they insist on a Stalinist line of discipline.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: I love your objectivity.

DAVID BROOKS: It’s objectively true. I did a psychoanalytic test.

I read that, and it occurred to me that it’s been awhile since I’ve posted Brooks’s picture. So there ’tis.

The truth is, it’s the Right that marches in Stalinist discipline. Hell, the Right is more like the Borg Collective than a political movement. See (via Avedon) “The Democrats’ Tiny Megaphone” by Robert Parry:

Wealthy progressives and liberal foundations can match up almost dollar for dollar with conservative funders. But the American Left has adopted largely a laissez-faire attitude toward media infrastructure, while the Right has applied almost socialistic values to sustain even unprofitable media ventures.

Indeed, the Right’s subsidizing of media may be the most under-reported money-in-politics story in modern American history. Many good-government organizations track the millions of dollars contributed to candidates, but much less attention is paid to the billions of unregulated dollars poured into media.

This imbalanced attention continues even though the conservative media is arguably the most important weapon in the Republican arsenal.

And all the while they do this they scream that the “media” is infested with “liberal bias.” Strangely, the only news program this liberal can stand to sit through any more is Keith Olbermann’s “Countdown” on MSNBC. The rest of them on all channels are mostly far-Right propaganda. I swear, if MSNBC ever messes with Olbermann I will call up the Mighty Maha Army (all six of us) and march on Rockefeller Plaza.

Back to Parry:

Political “propaganda themes” – often coordinated with GOP leaders – are distributed instantaneously across the country, reaching into both rural and urban America with a repetition that gives these messages a corroborative ring of truth.

The messages echo from talk radio to cable news to conservative columnists who appear in the mostly pro-Republican local newspapers. The themes then are reinforced in magazine articles and in books that dominate the shelves of many American bookstores.

Over the past two decades, Republicans have exploited this media capability with great deftness in consolidating power across large swaths of the country, especially where there is little media diversity (i.e. the Red States).

And the Right Blogosphere is an integral part of the Republican Noise Machine.

In essence, the right-wing media – a vertically integrated machine reaching from books, magazines and newspapers to radio, television and the Internet – has the power to make almost any ludicrous notion seem real and threatening to millions of Americans.

If Karl Rove wants people to believe John Kerry faked his war injuries, in spite of documentation and eyewitness accounts to the contrary, all he has to do is whistle. The Machine will be sure that’s the story the public hears, nonsense or not. If Karl wants to tweak the paranoia of the Christian Right, he yanks the chains and, suddenly, the Machine is spewing out nonsense about a war on Christmas. Smooth as butter. In comparison, the Left can barely coordinate its socks.

Along these same lines: If you haven’t already, be sure to read Peter Daou’s “THE TRIANGLE: Matthews, Moore, Murtha, and the Media,” “THE (Broken) TRIANGLE: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness” and “Scandal Fatigue, Catnip, and the ‘Angry’ Left.”

Catching Up

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By now you don’t need me to tell you that THE story today is by Murray Waas, National Journal: “Cheney ‘Authorized’ Libby to Leak Classified Information.”

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been “authorized” by Cheney and other White House “superiors” in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein’s purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald. …

… Libby testified to the grand jury that he had been authorized to share parts of the NIE with journalists in the summer of 2003 as part of an effort to rebut charges then being made by former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson that the Bush administration had misrepresented intelligence information to make a public case for war.

Jane Hamsher comments:

Whether it was legal for Cheney to declassify these documents or not for purely propaganda purposes is for legal experts preferably not named Victoria Toensig to debate. Given the fact that Cheney and Libby knew as of June 17, 2003 that the Niger uranium claims were bunk and Libby began this crusade with Judy Miller anyway on June 23, the service to which these documents were put remain safely outside of “ethical” territory.

Steve Soto:

Keep in mind this revelation comes days after Libby’s “faulty memory” defense was neutered when it was revealed that Cheney and Libby were aware in mid-June 2003 that the CIA had discredited the Niger claim, weeks before Libby began talking to reporters. Both of these taken together indicate what we have suspected all along: Cheney and Libby, as well as others in the White House, engaged in a payback campaign to destroy Joe Wilson and his wife in July 2003, even after they knew weeks before that the Niger story was about to unravel, and Congress had been told of such.

Andrew Sullivan:

So some intelligence matters are so important that the administration will not divulge them even to critical members of Congress. But others are leaked to journalists to win a political war. This is a pointed reminder that when the administration says it is withholding information to protect national security, a hefty dose of skepticism is in order. The same goes for their assurance that their wire-tapping has never been abused. Remind me again: at this point, why should we trust them?

Well, hell if I know, Andrew.

In other news, the President today reminded us how scared we’re supposed to be of terrorists by revealing details of a 2002 al Qaeda plot to slam an airplane into a Los Angeles tower. This is, I believe item #1 on the official White House list of foiled terrorist plots released last October. Certain details given by the President — the use of shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door, for example — have met with some skepticism. But, hey, if some guy could take apart the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch without anyone noticing, then why not shoe bombs?

Finally, this Associated Press story — “Reid Aided Abramoff Clients, Records Show” has been hailed on the Right Blogosphere as the Missing Link between Democrats and Jack Abramoff that they all fervently believed would be found. But Scott Shields at MyDD smells a smear:

The first clue was that Senator Reid has a long history of protecting gambling in Nevada from outside competition. He does, after all, represent Las Vegas. So the fact that he sought to keep Indian casinos from expanding off of their reservations, while I may not necessarily agree, makes sense. He didn’t need lobbyists telling him what to do on the issue, as he’d held that position long before they’d ever come knocking. But still… the article’s a long one. I wasn’t quite ready to dismiss it.

However,

The story totally lost credibility for me when it got to mentioning the Marianas Islands. By now, you’re probably aware of the fact that one of Abramoff’s pet projects was maintaining a low minimum wage in U.S. territories not subject to the federal minimum wage. This was of interest to the Republicans because manufacturers could exploit the territories’ low wages to essentially create a sweatshop environment without completely having to leave America. This AP story tries to imply that Reid was complicit in this plot.

But the AP story, as Josh Marshall notes, leaves out an important detail — there was no quid quo pro. No indication that Reid took any action to support Abramoff’s position. So Abramoff lobbying partners may indeed have billed hours for phone calls and meetings with Reid’s office, but it didn’t get ’em anything from Reid.

Of course, this detail will be lost on the Right Blogosphere. In the next few days they’ll persuade themselves that Senator Reid was Abramoff’s chief accomplice.

More great moments in journalism: MSNBC ran a headline “Top Democrat Reid Met Often With Abramoff” over this same AP story, which makes no claim Reid and Abramoff ever met at all.

Media Star Maha

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I’ve been invited to appear on C-SPAN tomorrow, live, on the Washington Journal program, beginning at 8 a.m. EST. I anticipate spending the rest of today hiding under furniture and muttering to myself. If I manage to pull myself together I may blog about something later.

Update: I understand I’m to appear by myself (and with the interviewer) and there will be call in questions. So please have your questions ready (suggestion: “What is your favorite color?”) and call, and be nice. Don’t let the righties bite me!

A Free Speech Question

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I’m doing some “thinking out loud” today, or more accurately, “thinking on blog.” Forgive me if I wander a bit.

Righties are up in arms about cartoons lately. On the one hand, some righties are angry that the Washington Post published this cartoon by Tom Toles that ridicules Don Rumsfeld. On the other hand, other righties are angry that a major American newspaper won’t publish these cartoons, which ridicule the Prophet Mohammad.

Michelle Malkin argues that righties are not, in fact, being inconsistent. Those opposed to the Tom Toles cartoon (including the Joint Chiefs of Staff) are not issuing death threats or rioting in the streets the way some Muslims are about the Mohammad cartoons. The Toles objectors are just speaking out, writing letters to the editor, and otherwise exercising free speech. John at AMERICAblog reveals that the people objecting to the cartoon aren’t making any sense, but Malkin has a point — so far I haven’t seen any of them threatening violence. Anger at the publication of the Mohammad cartoons, however, has set off violence throughout the Muslim world.

(On the other hand, as a commenter to AMERICAblog points out, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff send a formal objection on official letterhead objecting to the political content of a newspaper, the newspaper editors might feel a bit intimidated. See also comments from Editor & Publisher.)

The Mohammad cartoon crisis began on September 30, when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the 12 cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad. When angered Muslims threatened the newspaper and Denmark with various reprisals, including a boycott of Danish products, several European newspapers reprinted the cartoons as an act of solidarity with the right to free speech. Since then violence has escalated — Palestinian gunmen shut down a European Union office in Gaza City. Protesters besieged the Danish embassy in Indonesia. And so on.

Malkin and others on the Right are unhinged over the fact that American news outlets are refraining from publishing the cartoons, which are all over the web (link above).

I understand the urge to express solidarity for free speech. I remember when the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini — a really disgusting guy in my book — condemned Salman Rusdie to death after publication of The Satanic Verses. Americans flocked to bookstores to buy the book just to show the Ayatollah he can’t tell us what to read. That was noble. So why aren’t American newspapers showing Muslims they can’t tell us what to publish? Is this not giving in to the terrorists?

I’ll come back to that question in a minute. The other argument righties present for publishing the cartoons is based that old, bedrock conservative moral principle — they do it too. Specifically, other people make fun of Jesus, so why can’t we make fun of Mohammed? Malkin has more “they do it too” examples here.

Seems to me Jesus already explained that the “they do it too” defense doesn’t hold water.

But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. … Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

I interpret that to mean “just because somebody does something that pisses you off doesn’t make it OK for you to do the same thing.” I’m dismissing the “they do it too” argument as typical rightie hypocritical whining.

So let’s go back to the “free speech” argument. Are U.S. news outlets refusing to publish the cartoons because they are spineless cowards, or could there be another principle involved?

Earlier today, the U.S. State Department took sides with the Muslims:

While recognizing the importance of freedom of the press and expression, State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus said these rights must be coupled with press responsibility.

“Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable,” Hironimus said. “We call for tolerance and respect for all communities and for their religious beliefs and practices.”

Malkin argues that the State Department is betraying the principle of free speech. On the other hand, as I recall we’ve got this little “ending tyranny in our world” project going on in Iraq, and it seems to me that if we are serious about that program (a debatable point, I know) we need to be careful that our words and actions regarding the Muslim world support the program. Encouraging newspapers to publish the cartoons might feel gratifying, but in the long run it could make anything resembling “success” in Iraq more difficult to achieve. And if we’re trying to persuade Muslims that the western way of doing things is superior, showing them that we are free to ridicule the Prophet may not be the best argument. I’m just sayin’.

I have one other argument against publishing the cartoons — they’re stupid cartoons. They’re crude. You may disagree, but IMO their only point is that Mohammad (and Muslims) are bad. They remind me of old war cartoons depicting “the enemy” in a way that makes us a tad squeamish when we look at them now.

This set me to thinking about what makes a good political cartoon. I’ve heard it said that a good political cartoon exaggerates to reveal an underlying truth. If the “truth” is a common bias or prejudice, where’s the revelation? IMO a good cartoon should have an eye-opening quality, like a mini-kensho; they should make you slap your head and say, wow, that’s right. I see it now. On the other hand, cartoons that serve only to reinforce bigotry are propaganda.

For that reason, I can’t get worked up into a pitch of free-speech righteousness about publishing these cartoons. I can imagine a cartoon I might support — say, something that reveals an ugly truth about bin Laden or Zarqawi, for example. No problem with that. But these particular cartoons are not worth going to the mattresses over, I say.

What do you think?

Update: More about what distinguishes a good political cartoon from the master, Herblock.

Update update: Andrew Sullivan writes, “The cartoons were not designed to “incite religious or ethnic hatreds.” They were designed to protest such incitement – and we have the corpses of Theo van Gogh and Pim Fortuyn as useful proof.” Oh good; protest religious and ethnic hatred with more religious and ethnic hatred. Yes, children, another variation of “they do it too!”

Occasions of hatred are certainly never settled by hatred. They are settled by freedom from hatred. This is the eternal law.

Others may not understand that we must practice self-control, but quarrelling dies away in those who understand this fact. — The Buddha (the Dhammapada, Pairs 3-6)


Update update update: I think this editorial in The Guardian gets it right.

Enablers

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Finally, someone in the “MSM” gets the Abramoff/”bipartian” scandal story straight. It’s Paul Krugman, behind the New York Times subscription firewall. Fortunately you can read the column on True Blue Liberal. It begins:

“How does one report the facts,” asked Rob Corddry on “The Daily Show,” “when the facts themselves are biased?” He explained to Jon Stewart, who played straight man, that “facts in Iraq have an anti-Bush agenda,” and therefore can’t be reported.

Mr. Corddry’s parody of journalists who believe they must be “balanced” even when the truth isn’t balanced continues, alas, to ring true. The most recent example is the peculiar determination of some news organizations to cast the scandal surrounding Jack Abramoff as “bipartisan.”

Krugman goes on to explain that Abramoff is a long-time “movement conservative” who gave money only to Republicans. “There’s nothing bipartisan about this tale, which is all about the use and abuse of Republican connections.”

What about the claim that Abramoff “directed” tribes to give money to Democrats?

… the tribes were already giving money to Democrats before Mr. Abramoff entered the picture; he persuaded them to reduce those Democratic donations, while giving much more money to Republicans. A study commissioned by The American Prospect shows that the tribes’ donations to Democrats fell by 9 percent after they hired Mr. Abramoff, while their contributions to Republicans more than doubled. So in any normal sense of the word “directed,” Mr. Abramoff directed funds away from Democrats, not toward them.

True, some Democrats who received tribal donations before Mr. Abramoff’s entrance continued to receive donations after his arrival. How, exactly, does this implicate them in Mr. Abramoff’s machinations? [emphasis added]

Abramoff’s “guidance” caused his tribal clients to loosen long-time ties to Democrats. Yet “journalists” like Katie Couric and WaPo Deborah Howell report that the Abramoff scandal is “bipartisan,” and the fact that Abramoff gave money only to Republicans is just a small, unimportant technical detail.

Why does the insistence of some journalists on calling this one-party scandal bipartisan matter? For one thing, the public is led to believe that the Abramoff affair is just Washington business as usual, which it isn’t. The scale of the scandals now coming to light, of which the Abramoff affair is just a part, dwarfs anything in living memory.

More important, this kind of misreporting makes the public feel helpless. Voters who are told, falsely, that both parties were drawn into Mr. Abramoff’s web are likely to become passive and shrug their shoulders instead of demanding reform.

So the reluctance of some journalists to report facts that, in this case, happen to have an anti-Republican agenda is a serious matter. It’s not a stretch to say that these journalists are acting as enablers for the rampant corruption that has emerged in Washington over the last decade. [emphasis added]

And, once again, that’s why I blog.