Marble Composition

It's The Storyline, Not The Story

You Dummy. Peter Daou over at Salon wrote a great piece today about what we're up against. Here's a slice:

...And a single storyline delivered by a “neutral” reporter is a hundred times more dangerous than a storyline delivered by an avowed partisan. Rightwingers can attack the media for criticizing Bush, can slam the New York Times for being liberal, but when the Times and the Post and CNN and MSNBC echo the ‘Bush stands firm’ mantra, it adds one more brick to a powerful pro-Bush edifice.

These narratives are woven so deeply into the fabric of news coverage that they have become second nature and have permeated the public psyche and are regurgitated in polls. (The polls are then used to strengthen the narratives.) They are delivered as affirmative statements, interrogatives, hypotheticals; they are discussed as fact and accepted as conventional wisdom; they are twisted, turned, shaped, reshaped, and fed to the American public in millions of little soundbites, captions, articles, editorials, news stories, and opinion pieces. They are inserted into the national dialogue as contagious memes that imprint the idea of Bush=strong/Dems=weak. And they are false.

Peter was the man that ran Kerry's Internet efforts, so he's definitely in-the-know. It's a short piece that's well worth reading. You have to click through an ad, but go check it out.

I'd like to add an observation by opening up the lens. Josh Marshall has noted the rightward shift in American politics since the late '60's (albeit with a hiccup after Watergate):

..."Watergate ushered in a generation of Democratic politicians with little in the way of ideological commitment other than honesty. Not long after Watergate we got the Reagan revolution."

I'm not sure that's it precisely, though. Or perhaps the disagreement is one of cause and effect. A more economical answer, I think, is that the country was in the midst of a broad shift toward the right. The scandals surrounding Watergate upended the political dynamic in the country but not the ideological one. And as soon as those implicated in Watergate left the scene the broad pattern reasserted itself.

To catch an accurate view, that cogent point needs to be coupled with the unrelenting crusade by operatives on the Right to cow the media into operating under the precept that there truly is a "liberal bias" in the media. Thanks be to the Good Professor we know that's utter Bullshit. Digby adds some of the more recent right-wing boo-hooing, here. Bruce Miller had enough material to write a book about it.

To modern Republicans, Ronald Reagan is a God. He's their enduring God, the man that always gives their movement justification and force. He embodied this rightward shift, and to neuvo GOP types, he's the Gold Standard. After Ronnie slayed the Commie dragon, there was only one place for Conservatives to turn their hatred: inward.

Who else was there left to destroy except the Left? With Reagan came the advent of Rush Limbaugh, and he in turn spawned many mini-Limbaughs, most notably Sean Hannity. The other two modern day hyenas that come to mind are Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. These people have one purpose in life: bashing liberals and Democrats without end. After years of what Dr. Alterman has called working the refs, the mainstream media has now internalized the falacy that Democrats and liberals are lilly-livered, weak-kneed, whimps with no ideas and no agenda, and that's the platform from which they now operate. Troubling times in this new century, no?

posted by FuzzFinger @ 1/25/2006 07:42:00 PM