Media Ethics

[philunderwood]

www.qando.net/?tag=journalistic-ethics

Another reason we’re in the mess we’re in: The media has failed in its job

Published February 8, 2013. | By Bruce McQuain.

Here, we’ve all wondered - for years – why journalists are so willing to toss their credibility in the waste bin and go “all in” for this guy Obama. It doesn’t take a particularly bright individual to note how totally nonresponsive they are to stories that, had the perpertrator been on the right or, God forbid, George Bush, how differently they would have responded. To say they’ve sold their collective “journalistic ethical” souls is, frankly, a huge understatement. They are, or have become, a propaganda arm of this administration (well, all except the hated FOX, which keeps pointing out the emperor has no clothes).

Nick Gillespie at Reason explores all of this in his recent article. A snippet:


It’s sad, though never unexpected, when leaders such as Obama flip flop like a fish on the sand once they ascend power. Cromwell did it, the French revolutionaries did it, Castro did it, the Sandanistas did it, and on and on. It’s one of the oldest plots in history and infinitely adaptable to new conditions. How else to explain, as Jacob Sullumn notes, that candidate Obama rejected the Bush adminstration’s position that it could detain U.S. citizens as enemy combatants without pressing charges while President Obama claims the right to kill U.S. citizens without laying charges? The guy may not be able to pass a budget but christ, give him credit for ingenuity and brass balls.

But Obama is a politician – what do you expect? Politicians are not just the bottom of the barrel – they’re what’s under the bottom of the barrel, right?

So what then explains the contortions that journalists fold themselves into like so many carnival sideshow rubber-men in defending their hero? Mike Riggs points to comments by rising liberal MSNBC pundit Toure that suggest just how far explicitly pro-Obama liberals are willing to go in excusing the president’s declaring himself and his crew judge, jury, and executioner. As Riggs explains, it seems pretty clear that Toure isn’t up to speed on specifics, especially when it comes to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son:


When his co-hosts continue to press him on the consequences of a small group of individuals determing who deserves to die without a shred of oversight, Touré dismisses them by saying, “Al Qaeda attacked this nation. We are attacking al Qaeda back.” On Twitter Touré simply said, “He’s the Commander in Chief.”

Al Qaeda is the new Communism, dig?

Or something. Yesterday we had Chris Rock claim that we should all obey Obama because, he’s “our boss”. Un, no Chris, he’s not our boss.

He’s our freakin’ employee. He works for us. He was hired by the people (much to my chagrin) and he has to follow the law just like everyone else. He’s not the “boss” or our “Dad”.

But Rock’s BS points to the difference between the left (and their apparent desire for strong authoritarianism) and the right who still, at least in small pockets, see government as a dangerous but necessary evil to be controlled by the people. It also shows why to them, politics isn’t just a system, but it is a cult, a religion, their way of transforming a nation and the world in an image they imagine will be better.

Yet history shows us that no matter how wonderful the fantasy that drives groups like this to collectively use force to social engineer a population toward their utopia, it never, ever ends well.

And now we have journalists engaged in precisely the work that propaganda arms of totalitarian governments have always done. If once, their job was to question government, keep it accountable and investigate anything that smelled at all fishy, they’ve abdicated that in favor of selective blindness, cheerleading, advocacy and pure unadulterated fantasy.

It is the usual path a nation takes towards it’s demise.

And we’re well down that path, folks.

~McQ

[philunderwood]

neoneocon.com/2013/02/08/the-press-and-propaganda-and-evil/


The press and propaganda—and evil

Found yesterday in the comments section of the Wall Street Journal:


“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.” – Joseph Goebbels

Goebbels, of course, was a genius. An evil genius, but a genius nonetheless. Here are some more of his observations. When you read them, you’ll see why I consider them so apropos these days:


“It would not be impossible to prove with sufficient repetition and a psychological understanding of the people concerned that a square is in fact a circle. They are mere words, and words can be molded until they clothe ideas and disguise.”

“That propaganda is good which leads to success, and that is bad which fails to achieve the desired result. It is not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.”

And of course there’s the quote more universally known:


“If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth. ”

In addition to these statements about the craft and use of propaganda, which was Goebbels’ field of special expertise, he had this to say about Nazi Germany. It shows remarkable and chilling prescience:


“If the day should ever come when we must go, if some day we are compelled to leave the scene of history, we will slam the door so hard that the universe will shake and mankind will stand back in stupefaction.”

Indeed.

Long-time readers may remember that many years ago I wrote a 2-part series of posts about Goebbels’ wife Magda (here and here). As part of my research, I read a biography of Magda that also had quite a bit to say about her husband. Here’s an excerpt describing Goebbels and his motivation. If you don’t know much about the man, it may surprise you, because it’s somewhat counter-intuitive:


As far as one could tell, Goebbels had no beliefs at all. People still living [the book was written in 1980], who were part of his immediate circle or his household, agree absolutely about this. To him all human existence was nothing but chaos. He considered himself one of the very few intellects capable of surveying it and mastering it.

In the post, I added:


In fact, it may be that Goebbels didn’t even particularly hate Jews, at least no more than he hated the entire human race. His interest was in power, self-promotion, and persuasion, and he was a rare genius at all three, willing to do literally anything to further those causes. A short and unattractive man with a crippled leg, he—like Hitler—was a mesmerizing speaker.

Unlike most of the other Nazi leaders, Goebbels was a highly educated man with a doctorate in philosophy and literature—and in those days, a doctorate from a German university was nothing to sneeze. He almost certainly was a sociopath, however. Virtually any photo of the man conveys an ice-cold visage that emanates almost pure evil.

And evil—well, I’ll repeat a section of a post of mine on that subject:


But one of the most fundamental errors people make when judging evil is to think we understand it, when we don’t. The fact that Hitler [or Goebbels, for that matter] was most definitely a human being leads us to think that if we knew enough facts about him, we could explain the etiology of his evil…

The other fundamental error people make when judging evil is thinking it is less evil than it actually is, and more amenable to persuasion, argument, or kindness. Because those who do evil are human, we think they are subject to the same fears and doubts, loves and anxieties, concerns and scruples, as the rest of us. Perhaps when they were children they were, although in the cases of sociopaths and psychopaths the notion is that they were born lacking something we tend to call a conscience. At any rate, by the time we know about them, something quite unusual seems to be going on in their psyches.

I think of the example of Stalin who said, on hearing that his son had tried to commit suicide but had only managed to shoot himself in the stomach and live, “He can’t even shoot straight.”

People such as Stalin or Hitler or Ahmadinejad or Saddam Hussein are about power. That is the coin of their realm, and power is their mother tongue, even though they can learn to speak secondary languages in order to give the appearance of reasonableness. Do not forget that it is a facade, and do not believe that you know them.