This post needs an indentation vigilante.
He has posted an "update" including fairly lengthy commentary by Jill Abramson. Apparently she's an organizational reputation vigilante.
This thread is clearly going to need a vigilante vigilante.
1: I'm resisting the urge, because I'm not sure if that would be rude.
4: It's kind of the blog equivalent of unilateral grinding.
"Is it possible to be objective and fair when the reporter is choosing to correct one fact over another?" [quote from the piece]
What's the difference between this sentence and one that replaces "correct...fact" with "print...quote"?
5,6: I think teo just called LB some kind of slut.
8: You say that like it's a bad thing.
9: You apparently heard it like I said it like it's a bad thing.
In any case, some sort of vigilante seems to have come grinding by.
This is some masterful trolling by the times, I must say.
2:I will have to read that later.
Jill Abramson is the one I saw on a panel take the categorical position that it is never the job of the press to determine truth, but only to report the different sides.
It was a matter of principle to her, and an easy call.
I may get into this later, it is not that easy a call for me.
If I were to report last week's econblog discussions about monetary policy,deficits, fiscal stimulus, I think the best I could do was to detail the various conflicting positions. BdL thinks he has truth, but so does Scott Sumner, and Brad's commenters have questions about Brad's formulation. It's kinda their jobs to take firm positions, not mine.
Is "Shape of Earth Differs" different in principle, or can I just quote two astronomers of my choosing?
You see what I mean? A reporter doesn't have to take an overt position, but just choose who to quote. I think tat might be Abramson's understanding of the limits of her ethical task.
I saw that, the question from the public editor guy, and thought it must be a question designed to get that answer. Like, he's got an internal fight going with the other editors and as part of a strategic move, said "well, let's not decide now, but we can ask the readers and see how they view our role" and then went to press asking if the moon comes up in the east. Since the question answers itself, I thought he must be fishing for the answer just by asking publicly.
the moon comes up in the east
Satellite-ist.
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I need a sleep vigilante to bust me smartly over the temple with a night light or something. WTF, me? I am apparently wholly unable to get onto a sleep schedule that allows me to go through the day functionally non-tired. Here it is 1 am and I'm fidgety and slightly restlessly legged. I wish I knew some maxims by La Rochefoucauld at least.
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... if the reporter or editor knows that something said in a story is false, you should report that as well rather than passively quoting the uncorrected lie. ...
So every time someone refers to God, the Times should note that God does not exist? I don't think this is as easy as you think.
A reporter doesn't have to take an overt position, but just choose who to quote.
But, as I've argued before, choosing who to quote, and how and where, is taking an overt position.
I saw that, the question from the public editor guy, and thought it must be a question designed to get that answer. Like, he's got an internal fight going with the other editors and as part of a strategic move, said "well, let's not decide now, but we can ask the readers and see how they view our role" and then went to press asking if the moon comes up in the east. Since the question answers itself, I thought he must be fishing for the answer just by asking publicly.
I'd have more confidence in that if it weren't for the fact that nearly every public pronouncement on the role of journalism by NYT bosses and staffers in recent years has been along exactly the same lines. It's clearly deeply ingrained in the culture. The very idea that "fact checking" should be a separate thing from "reporting" boggles my mind.
Brisbane seems to have carefully chosen his examples to look like factual questions that could be looked up and verified, but that (absent further revelations/reporting) shade into interpretation and argument. We don't know exactly what Thomas did with the disclosure (though we can speculate) and Romney isn't literally saying Obama was apologizing. It's different than claiming death panels or reporting on ACORN.
When I first saw Brisbane's name, I thought they might have exhumed the Hearst newspaper guy, but it turns out he's just a descendent.
With regards to Thomas, and situations like it, the problem isn't so much that the spokeswoman's statement isn't challenged, it's that the NYT and other US papers have a tendency to quote the shill, quote a partisan opponent, and then wash their hands of the matter, leaving their readers no better off than before. The point of doing a story isn't to find out what "newsmakers" say about things, it's to find out what's true.
I also think the way he words his examples is telling:
If so, then perhaps the next time Mr. Romney says the president has a habit of apologizing for his country, the reporter should insert a paragraph saying, more or less:
"The president has never used the word 'apologize' in a speech about U.S. policy or history. Any assertion that he has apologized for U.S. actions rests on a misleading interpretation of the president's words."
To me, this bespeaks a typically formalistic approach to fact-checking which has no bearing on whether the charge is true. For God's sake, whether or not the president uses the word "apologise", he still could be apologising. Is "I'm sorry" not apologising? And if you are going to take such an approach, don't just say it "rests on a misleading interpretation of the president's words". Say what the words are. If Romney's accusation is important enough to be in the story in the first place, it's important enough to investigate and present the results to the reader.
Brisbane seems to think there's a strict dichotomy with"fair, objective" stenography on the one side and over-the-top journalistic authority on the other. There is a middle ground - try to find out what's true and tell your readers what you can confirm.
Further, why would it necessarily be wrong to apologise? Tony Blair apologised for so much stuff (that he hadn't actually done) that it got annoying.
Speaking as an actual professional fact-checker, "Gingrich was born on the moon" is really not the same kind of statement as "God is love", and demands a rather different approach.
In situations where the reporter is a non-specialist telling the story of an argument between specialists -- let's say re the usefulness of string theory -- the "he said/she said" is a fair summary of how far said reporter, a non-insider, is able to pursue the matter, provided said reporter is not claiming to know more than they do... it's actually a valuable service to the specialists to know that outsiders are not able to follow their debates, and to acknowledge that this will have institutional implications. With certain specialist tribes -- though I hesitate to mention economists while dsquared is flourishing that shiv -- the artful manipulation of the insider-outsider line has very much been to the flummoxing and fleecing of the outsider... the solution is of course more robustly impatient ("interested" rather than "objective") outsider-reporting.
There is in any case no possibility of "being objective" -- it's a stupid preening way to think about, even for philosophers. A reporter's job is to find out what happened and say so: and -- also -- say when they don't know how to find this out, and what they think is stopping them. This is not -- as Shearer says -- particularly easy, sometimes. The world is full of liars: no discourse can formally banish the ability to delude.
Why would anybody expect the six or so companies that own almost all of the media in the USA to be interested in keeping you informed?
If media companies are so wicked and corrupt, why are we so eager to delegate our judgment to them?
27: Similar with Catholic priests and politicians. They can't be as evil as some folks say, or people wouldn't give them money and trust.
Well, there's two aspects to being informed: you want to know what's actually true in the world (at least as it affects you) and you want to know what everyone else believes is true in the world. Big media does actually supply the second, more or less.
So every time someone refers to God, the Times should note that God does not exist? I don't think this is as easy as you think.
I think that's basically correct. The media aren't in the business of telling the truth; they are in the business of pleasing readers and advertisers.
However, some readers really are interested in getting good information, and Brisbane has performed a useful service by giving such readers an opportunity to sound off. The media's professional ethics don't require truth-telling, but they do require pretending to be interested in truth-telling, and activist readers could make them offer a more plausible-looking pretense.
16 is some pretty desperate contrarian trolling.
It was a matter of principle to her, and an easy call.
Mark Halperin and Chuck Todd have very aggressively argued similar positions.
The point here is that we're dealing with an interpretation of professionalism, not incompetence. The malefactors are firmly convinced that they're doing the right thing. They believe that their critics are the equivalent of laymen who try to kibitz brain surgeons and particle physicists. Krugman, DeLong, and Baker may be expert economists, but they don't understand journalism, which is an entirely different specialization.
It's all crap, though. The neutrality-objectivity ideal was dubious from the beginning, and in its contemporary form it's worse than dubious.
25: Dsquared denies being an economist and is not admiring of economists.
31:Damn it, John, I'm a Marxist.
The Capitalists and their organs absolutely cannot understand my truth, which follows different rules of evidence and logic than the ones they use. I agree about the neutrality-objectivity, but I am not crazy enough to expect them to get dialectical and change their class.
And Krugman, DeLong, and Baker are not on my side, and don't have my truth either.
The dialectic requires Capitalist bullshit so that the workers can attain a different consciousness. It's universalism that will forestall revolution.
You are still too much a liberal, even after all you've seen.
Bob, I've seen Marxists. They're groups of 10 or 20 people who sit a room arguing for four hours and then form schisms. No more.
Ideally, the Times would just step out of the fucking way, and report, additionally, what Chomsky, David Harvey, and Naomi Klein (etc) have to say, without comment or qualification.
No, I do not want the press to decide "which has the truth" between Democrats and Republicans. They do it way too much already.
I agree with 27. If you already distrust the journalistic establishment, why would you want them to be the ones to decide which claims are true and which are false?
Unless you think that the right-thinking people actually would have more power relative to the wrong-thinking people, were they not restrained by the journalistic ethic.
One problem is that the NYT, WaPo, etc. do fact-check, or they think they do. But there are at least four problems with how they do it: they do it in separate features, after time has passed to be judicious and really, really sure about it, and a lot of their fact-checking phrased so diplomatically that a reader could be forgiven for thinking no one is ever wrong, and focuses on such tendentious bullshit that it rarely matters. For examples of the last two problems, hell, the very first two examples in their very most recent post.
Mr. Santorum delivered an anodyne response to a question on gay rights during the debate -- an issue that has prompted him in the past to make some of his most provocative and controversial remarks... But Mr. Santorum has been asked that question before, and he gave a very different answer then. In a 2003 interview with GQ, he was asked what he would tell a son who admitted to having an attraction to men. He essentially said his son should remain celibate.
When Mr. Romney listed the criticisms of Mr. Gingrich mentioned in an ad by a pro-Romney super PAC, he mentioned that Mr. Gingrich had been ousted as Speaker. Mr. Gingrich, at the side of the screen, said, "That's not true."... It is perhaps more accurate to say that Mr. Gingrich was driven from office. He had no choice but to quit.
Treating that as fact-checking trivializes the idea of fact-checking.
As for the other first two problems - doing fact-checking separately from initial reporting - that's because of the continuous news cycle business model, but it's still a problem. I guess the simplest solution would be to not treat quotes as newsworthy. The whole problem people are complaining about is how the media amplifies politicians' misleading statements, so stop amplifying them, don't just pass them on and then fact check them in a brief bullet point no one will notice. Use them for color and illustration and stuff only; don't quote statements with truth values unless you've evaluated that truth value. Not sure how practical that is though.
Also, the update linked in 2 is so holier-than-thou, passive-aggressive and disingenuous (sorry, I shouldn't say that it "is" that stuff, I should say "seems to me"! Sorry! It's not like I can get inside his head, right?) that I'm not inclined to give him much benefit of the doubt about good motives in the original post. He, or at least his boss, clearly really is unsure whether being a "truth vigilante" is good.
Bob, I've seen Marxists (merely exploring a theme introduced by apo).
There's obviously a real problem trusting any conceivable journalistic establishment to arbitrate truth and falsehood. For example.
But in the end, humans need to transmit information to each other on a mass scale. The people who perform that task need to be encouraged to do so reliably.
An alternative I've proposed is developing an alternative set of non-commercial political media. That's what pretty much every successful political movement has done. There's been very little interest or effort, and the attempts that have been made (Air America or even, weakly, the Guardian) tend to be sneered at.
The internet works as a pretty good media watchdog and there are non-mainstream source there, but the political internet must reach about 1% of the population (3 million people sounds about right to me).
The alternate media would not be neutral and objective. Hopefully it would't be simple party-line hackery either.
But in the absence of an alternative, you try to pressure the actually existing media. We're at the point where just a substantive debate between mainstream positions would eb a big improvement.
A non-neutral media which called both the Democrats and the Republicans into question wouldn't have to be very far left to have a positive effect. Reducing the nonsense content would be a positive even without an ideological change.
40:That isn't the right model.
1) The mass media will always serve the assholes.
2) People will get radicalized and seek out (absolutely essential) alternative sources only when what they are told does not match the lived reality.
3) How did it work for you?
Damn it, John, I'm a Marxist.
Imagining this being said by Hugh Laurie is cracking me up right now.
I agree with 27. If you already distrust the journalistic establishment, why would you want them to be the ones to decide which claims are true and which are false?
Because they already do, just behind the curtain. Writing a news story is inherently a process of deciding what is true and noteworthy and getting rid of what isn't. And besides, the point isn't about trusting "the journalistic establishment" to decide what's true. It's about a norm that the point of journalism is to try to find out what is true. And, furthermore, the norm undermines the idea of a journalistic establishment, because if you have a bunch of people coming from different perspectives each trying to find out the truth, you're going to get more plurality of voices and evidence than in a truly establishment world where everyone operates on the same bullshit norm of "objectivity and fairness" while in practice routinely excluding a swathe of voices and arguments from the discourse. Clearly, this needs to be supported by a wider framework of ethics and professionalism, or you get things like Fox or the News of the World.
There's obviously a real problem trusting any conceivable journalistic establishment to arbitrate truth and falsehood. For example.
As discussed above, things like that are a symptom of treating fact-checking as something separate from reporting (here I'm not talking about fact-checking reporters). Politifact's entire raison d'etre is to be the arbiter of truth of random political statements. That's not what I'm saying newspapers should be doing.
40: I suppose it's a little late in the day to get all Internet triumphalist, but I think the influence of the internet watchdog exceeds the number of people it reaches.
In the old media environment, I suspect that Judith Miller would have gotten away with her transgressions with little or no blowback. Did I.F. Stone ever bring down somebody with her credentials?
There's still a lot of work to be done, but I think the Internet provides a legitimate vehicle to get that work done. Miller now exists as a cautionary example to other frauds, as well as to journalists who would otherwise uncritically accept "journalistic ethics" at face value. Even someone as obviously clueless as Brisbane is starting to wonder if there isn't maybe a better way of doing things.
Imagining this being said by Hugh Laurie is cracking me up right now.
I was thinking DeForest Kelley.
42: How did it work for you?
Bob, when have any of your approaches ever had anything to do with working? Are you waiting for revolutionary forces and the wave of history to automatically do their work? Is it your method to critique inferior political strategies until the superior one reveals itself? I get your belief in the vast superiority of your method to all others. But you haven't really said what your method is.
Besides the embarrassments deriving from every form of actually existing Marxism ever, all the Marxism I've ever seen in my life has boiled down to bunches of people sitting in a room speaking in tones of authority and an air of vast superiority. Specific thing Marx or Marxists said about individual topics are still relevant, but why screw with "Marxism"?
all the Marxism I've ever seen in my life has boiled down to bunches of people sitting in a room speaking in tones of authority and an air of vast superiority.
Marxists are Steeler fans?
I just saw that most people now agree that the recession is because of the housing bubble, which was because of Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, which is just one more disastrous instance of government interference with the free market, and for the benefit of the darker races to boot.
So I just don't see that waiting for people to perceive the truth in their own lives will work.
Not to go all Godwin or anything, but I've just been reading Defying Hitler, first-person observations of the rise of Hitler by a centrist rank and file opponent. An enormous failure of, among other things, Marxism.
The update is funny. Brisbane is clearly drawing a sharp distinction between verifiable fact claims that should be clarified, and matters of opinion or state of mind that can't possibly be, and saying that of course the NYT fact-checks the first, and of course it would be irresponsible and tendentious of them to to pretend to correct the second. You'd think the response he got would have tipped him off that people think the Times is doing a bad job on things in the first category.
Brisbane stacked the cards by naming two very borderline cases.
Whatever, John, but I am not wasting my time getting my panties in a twist over what Abramson, Brisbane, and the NYT say.
You might possibly profit by paying attention to OWS and their allies and what they say and do.
But you are still a liberal and probably a Democrat.
49:Did your guy get a nice quiet position in the Third Reich or split, abandoning those who couldn't? We know what happened to the communists.
Whatever yourself, Bob. You waste time on all kinds of extraordinarily lame bullshit. But not that. OK.
I guess I'm a liberal until I see something else that comes along that looks like it amounts to something. I put in my time in the 2% and the discussion groups and convinced myself that that wasn't it. Whatever the alternative is you're offering doesn't look like it either.
OWS is the best thing I've seen in a long time.
My guy in Germany split. We know what happened to the Communists. They were the Maginot Line against fascism, a heroic speed bump and an example to us all.
But you are still a liberal and probably a Democrat.
Ouch. That's harsh.
Ahh. Haffner split. Early.
I get enough of these kind of stories from Japan.
Haffner split in 1938, hardly early. I wasn't proposing him as a hero. He described what he saw. Whatever the non-Nazi Germans were doing, including the Marxists, was amazingly ineffective. A model of what not to do.
53:Marxist, Marxian, syndicalist, anarchist, whatever.
Try reading "Call" below in Stanley's "Occupied" thread for a sense of where at least some European varieties of OWS are coming from.
But at the least I am not going to sit in the stands watching whatever show the two teams are putting on the field for me today, and bitching about the bad calls by the referees.
We know what happened to the communists.
Yes, we do. For three years they did their best to undermine the Allied war effort against Hitler by calling for Britain to abandon its allies and by supporting strikes in war-related industries. Then they turned on a sixpence in June 1941 as soon as they were told to do so.
Not a glorious record at all.
Bob, you're in a obscure blog's comment section. You haven't even made it to the stadium.
Not the stadium as we understand it, that is.
As for the reigning order, everyone knows what it consists in: that a dying social system has no other lustification to its arbitrary nature but its absurd determination - its senile determination - to simply linger on;
No, everyone does not know that. Very few people know that. It's possible that no one knows that. Especially in the US. Probably better things are happening outside the US, but I live here. The US also has an outsize footprint. US-centrism isn't a silly form of ethnocentrism.
How many people has OWS reached? I don't know. The most recent message people have gotten is its college students complaining about tuition. A valid issue, but not resonant. A realtor around here told me that half the homeowners around here are under water. What percentage of them understand why? As low as zero.
But at the least I am not going to sit in the stands watching whatever show the two teams are putting on the field for me today, and bitching about the bad calls by the referees.
Some of us are, you know, doing journalism the way we bitch about it not being in the NYT.
58 is selective, ignoring some other history, like Lenin and Rosenberg versus Bernstein, Weber etc ca 1914-15
We also had a lot of intense strikes in the US during WWII.
63: Ah, but the real, deeper truth is that the last journalist should be strangled with the entrails of the last Democrat. Anyone who has chosen the profession of journalism is necessarily incapable of grasping, much less transmitting, this truth.
27: If media companies are so wicked and corrupt, why are we so eager to delegate our judgment to them?
Mammals have only 4 base emotions, and running the world is not one of them. Ambition, if it exists as an emotion, is rather rare.
Mammals have only 4 base emotions, and running the world is not one of them.
So... the people running the world... aren't mammals! It's Eight O'Clock In The Morning, people! Rise up and kill the lizard people!
The issue in the OP is "nicely" illustrated in this Snopes entry on the Bushco's lame attempt to blame everything Katrina on the Louisiana governor.
From a WaPo article.
Louisiana did not reach out to a multi-state mutual aid compact for assistance until Wednesday [31 August], three state and federal officials said. As of Saturday, Blanco still had not declared a state of emergency, the senior Bush official said.Snopes' commentary:
In fact, Governo Blanco had already declared a state of emergency for the state of Louisiana eight days earlier The Washington Post later issued a correction to their article, noting that "A Sept. 4 article on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina incorrectly said that Louisiana Gov. Kathleen Babineaux Blanco (D) had not declared a state of emergency. She declared an emergency on Aug. 26.It was easily disprovable BS. The only story that should have been written was the attempt by the "senior Bushco official" (probably Karl Rove--recall that he was put in charge of Katrina "response" at some point) to pass on the BS. That was the story (and it was part of an obvious pattern of similar BS at the time).
Besides the embarrassments deriving from every form of actually existing Marxism ever
btw, I love the way that in the eyes of my many socialist friends, I am on the hook for whatever Goldman Sachs did in subprime CDOs, but as soon as the question of Soviet Communism comes up it's all "well actually that didn't have anything to do with me or my particular strand of Marxism! you can't just dismiss the whole of Marxism because of bad things that other people did, even if the consequences were really bad!"
If nothing else, the update clearly disproves Megan's theory in 17. And it makes me very sad, in the way the original question didn't.
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More shit/fan:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/13/euro-credit-rating-france-downgrade
>
Re the argument between John and Bob about Marxism: one of the better takes I've seen on Marxism is that it's 'capitalism's most sophisticated understanding of itself'. That captures the acuteness of Marxism's take on certain dimensions of capitalism that are certainly not captured in neoclassical economics. I don't know how you go about working for social change in a capitalist society without insights drawn from or inspired by Marxism. In some ways those insights appear on the right too. Certainly business has a very keen sense of its collective class interests *as capitalists* and speak with a reliably united voice on that, even when it might conflict with some short-term interests. If the employee class (the 99 percent, if you like) had a similar sense of unified class interests and consciousness we would be a very different society.
IMO a lot of the problems chalked up to Marxism are in fact associated with Leninism and its particular attachment to violent revolution. (Which you may peg Bob for). The Democratic party got completely captured by capitalist ideology in the 1990s and must be recaptured for a broader left vision. Certainly insights that are at least related to / inspired by Marx will be part of that (capitalism's inherent instability, labor solidarity and interests, etc.).
Also, as a side note -- OWS has had a huge impact politically, including within the system. It basically opened up the discourse to inequality and the systemic problems with our version of capitalism. That had a big and immediate practical impact. And it was done by a consciously disruptive outside-liberalism movement.
More shit/fan:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jan/13/euro-credit-rating-france-downgrade
Rather hilariously, this story is being leaked by EU government officials. After they introduced new laws requiring rating agencies to tell them about sovereign downgrades ahead of time and banning them from leaking ratings actions (which they are already banned from doing under market abuse rules).
67: I'm with you, but the base emotions are not the only emotions. There are also mid-level emotions, and also there are probably some hormonal effects on all of the emotions, but I'll be damned if I'm gonna open that can of worms. Not this time.
I am not a committed liberal and can go on at length about the problems with corporate pluralist administrative liberalism. It's correct to say that I haven't found an alternative. Elements of Marxism, e.g. the fundamental instability of capitalism, or the reality of class, strike me as valid. Other elements seem superseded or always wrong. I've had a long-term engagement with Marxism through a close friend which culminated in a break about 10 years ago. I got tired of having everything I ever said checked against Althusser, Poulantzas, Balibar, Zizek or whoever else the flavor of the decade was, as if there were no thought outside Marxism. And many of the Marxists I've encountered have seemed utopian, with the critical theorists' aggressive, principled indifference to actual politics.
76: I wouldn't say I'm a Marxist, because of lack of interest in slogging through more arcane texts if nothing else. There are many things in Keynes, the post-Keynsian economists, Minsky, the labor movement, etc. that are alternative sources of the same kinds of insights I associate with Marxism. And they are expressed in a clearer way that obviously when compared to Marx is way more informed by economic history since the 19th century. I just think it can be dangerous to trash Marxism because that view is associated with so many naive takes on capitalism. I'm an anti-anti-Marxist you might say.
72:I don't know how you go about working for social change in a capitalist society without insights drawn from or inspired by Marxism. In some ways those insights appear on the right too.
Oh, I think institutional economics (Veblen, Galbraith, old progressivism) and Historical School/National System are possible alternatives though we might not like the social changes they bring about.
Post-, paleo-, and social Keynesianisms are ok, but the fucking New Keynesians have just sucked up all the air and space and they just can't get a base or foothold.
(Elinor Ostrom, Sen? some woman I can't remember? people doing empirical, local work may be coming up with something new, something "meso-")
And that's part of my story, is the history, all the myriad schools of economic (and social, whatever happened to Dewey Addams Gandhi Pareto Eddy Watsuji etc) thought and method, pretty viable and useful, that existed around 1900 that have largely collapsed into New Keynesianism/Neo-Liberalism in the name of "scientific progress" that fucking crashed the world economy again.
For me, Marxism makes sense of that historical and social process. As capitals concentrate, the viable ideologies narrow.
There seems to be a very clear left-right divide on the whole "Should the NYT tell the truth" question. Like the lefties, the right understands what this issue is about, and is predictably coming down on the pro-bullshit side.
Hell, how could I forget analytic philosophy compared to what we had around 1900.
The hegemony is obvious, and it ain't because we are that much smarter.
To me the collapse was after WWII and was connected with the colonization of the university by government and the military.
Reisch, How the Cold War Transformed Philosophy of Science.
Schmitt, Disciplined Minds.
Redman, Economics and the Philosophy of Science.
Mirowski, Machine Dreams.
And Hargittai, The Martians of Science.
82:Well, my impression is that you are some kind of institutionalist, and as I said, I respect that. Sort of.
Good luck with changing institutions, and creating new ones.
80:As usual, liberals are handing the rope to the right that the right will use to hang the far left DFHs and intimidate the middle.
I have been hearing this useless complaining since the "Five O'Clock Follies."
Jay Rosen on Brisbane
What do I really think? Well, what is the difference between the reporters embedded at Normandy Beach and the reporters embedded in the invasion of Iraq? They were both bullshitting, putting on "the show"
The difference is that in WWII were bullshitting to fight fascism, and in Iraq the reporters were putting on the show for the sake of the show. And the whole fucking Iraq war was a show for its own sake.
When commodification rationalizes everything of course various "shows" are re-enacted to make us pretend we are still subjects. Like wars. Like elections.
And complaining about the press is also part of the show, a self-conscious re-enactment, a simulacrum.
The question is not only can we go back, but is anything else other than the simulacrum available within Late Capitalism?
No. Without the simulacrum it all will collapse.