Screeds
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Big Dirt
April 29, 2003
“Give us dirty laundry,” Don Henley wrote, speaking of the news media, and he spoke true. Nothing so energizes the media as a nice, big, juicy scandal.
Or does it?
The print and television news media, hence to be called the Old Media, have been surprisingly delicate about some scandalous doings, while playing the hell out of some others. We don’t have to go back to the Clinton Interregnum for examples, either.
Ever since George W. Bush took the Oval Office, Bill Clinton has been unstinting in his public condemnations of the policies and actions of the Bush Administration. Recently, so has Jimmy Carter. The column-inches awarded to these two former presidents have been copious—but the articles on their (mostly well paid) utterances have failed to mention something rather significant: This is the first time in living memory that former presidents have criticized a sitting president, risking the national unity, at a time of war, no less, for the satisfaction from venting their partisan spleen. It’s simply not done… until now.
Nor have the Old Media had much to say about the many prophecies of doom by high-profile anti-war celebrities, all of which have proved wrong. Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, these celebrities received gala coverage; today, the Old Media would rather not discuss the subject.
Remember “It’s all about the oil”—? Jean Chretien, Prime Minister of Canada and a major anti-war spokesman, turns out to be father-in-law to a major stockholder in TotalFinaElf, the French company that controlled the Iraqi oil sold under the United Nations’ vastly corrupt Oil For Food program. You wouldn’t have learned about that if not for the Internet; the Old Media didn’t cover it.
On the other hand, with regard to the reconstruction of Iraq, Halliburton, of which Vice President Dick Cheney was once the Chief Executive, is getting an awful lot of air time. Not because the company is uniquely well qualified for the job of recovering and reconstructing Iraq’s oil production, and not because Mr. Cheney owns even one share of stock in Halliburton any more.
Sex is always good for a headline, isn’t it? Well, the Old Media didn’t think so during the Clinton-Lewinski sex scandals. But now that Republican activist Richard Delgaudio has taken a plea in a child-pronography accusation, they can’t get enough of it. Delgaudio’s Republican affiliation was apparently what made “it’s only sex” vanish from the stage in favor of “this is news!”
(Incidentally, if you like a good irony, the girl whom Delgaudio photographed was 16 years old. The legal age of sexual consent in Maryland, where the “offense” took place, is 16. But the federal child-porn statute under which he was indicted puts the threshold age at 18. So he could legally have sex with her, but not record the event on film. Magic numbers, anyone?)
Hey, did you know that the United States Armed Forces are a major target of the environmental movement? All that ordnance is bad for nature, don’t y’know. That was the original basis of the campaign to expel the Navy from its practice grounds on Vieques Island. A little before that, a group of Green Bigots was trying to prevent the Army from expanding its practice grounds near Fort Knox, for the same reason.
However, it turns out that one of the largest wetlands in Iraq, indeed in the world, was utterly destroyed, pretty much made into a desert, by Saddam Hussein. And the Old Media, and their partners in the enviro-nazi ranks, have been utterly silent about it.
But surely scandals over Freedom of Speech and Journalistic Ethics would get some air time, don’t you think? I mean, what would the press take more seriously than that?
Well, it depends. Eason Jordan, news bureau chief of CNN, who has explicitly admitted to bending to pressure from Saddam Hussein so that his reporters would be permitted to stay in Iraq and… do what?… has not been the subject of even one critical examination by the Old Media. Peter Arnett, whose unabashedly pro-Saddam coverage during the opening days of the war got him fired by NBC for its outright mendacity, hasn’t been a focus of Old Media attention either.
Wherever you look in Old Media-land, there’s an unwillingness to examine the sins of the Left, including the Media Left, that’s so pronounced it’s almost palpable. But let a Republican or a conservative put a foot wrong, and the announcements practically scream from the pages. It’s a textbook illustration of Neal Stephenson’s hypothesis about the elevation of hypocrisy to the monarchy of the sins.
And Eric Alterman wants us to believe that there’s a right-wing bias in the Old Media.
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