Mark Crispin Miller

Daniel Pipes is not someone whose words I'd ordinarily send around. In fact, he's someone I'd be picketing right now if I were not so busy battling everything he stands for. And I don't send these words of his around because I think they're terribly astute. Any piece of writing that begins as this one does-"Consistency and predictability are core strengths of George W. Bush"-would seem to be a satire, or a cry for help. Whereas Pipes sees Bush as waffling only on one issue, one could in fact jot down a long, long list of topics Bush has lied about, still lies about, or on which he has stunningly reversed himself, from "free trade" (he's all for it, except when he isn't) and "homeland security" (his "top priority," although he has done literally nothing to improve it), to "corporate crime" (which he keeps making easier, while claiming to be fighting it) and "tax breaks for the middle class" (which don't exist, despite his many boasts about them). And so on, from AIDS to race to women's rights to veterans' benefits to North Korea to education to his smirking pose as a "uniter." In short, Pipes' complaint that Bush is sly and tricky ONLY about Israel is absolutely groundless as a charge against this president-who is, without a doubt, the shiftiest, most brazen bullshitter who ever occupied the Oval Office (including Richard Nixon). And yet this piece of Pipes' is well worth reading. First of all, it demonstrates that Bush is wholly capable of shafting both the Palestinians AND Israel, which latter you would think to be the only state worldwide that he would arm and praise through thick and thin, so ardently does he admire his buddy Ariel Sharon, and so ferocious is the Zionism of his junta. And what this means in turn is that there really is no solidarity, no trust-no principles at work, in fact-on Bush's team, where everyone is fighting everybody else, and there's no "partnership" that isn't based on arm-twisting or bribery or blackmail. With Bush & Co., it's Bush & Co. that comes first (and last), Bush & Co. that gets away with murder, Bush & Co. that does alright, while everybody else-friend, foe, whoever-ends up broke and bleeding. It's very ugly, and it has done untold damage, and certainly will do much more: but nobody, however sly, can pull such stunts forever. So it always has been throughout human history; and so it is again with this colossus, which has already started to collapse-and well before we've even started pushing for impeachment. So Daniel Pipes has, quite unwittingly, reminded us that there's no honor among thieves-and so no future for the bullies in command, whatever tricks they try to play on all of us. Bush on Israel: Heartburn for All by Daniel Pipes New York Post March 4, 2003 http://www.danielpipes.org/article/103 6 http://www.nypost.c om/postopinion/opedcolumnists/69854.htm Consistency and predictability are core strengths of George W. Bush as a politician. Be the issue domestic (taxes, education) or foreign (terrorism, Iraq), once he settles on a policy he sticks with it. There is no ambiguity, no guessing what his real position might be, no despair at interpreting contradictions. Even his detractors never complain about "Tricky George" or "Slick Bush." But there is one exception to this pattern. And - couldn't you have predicted it? - the topic is the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here, Bush not only seems unable to make up his mind, but he oscillates between two quite contrary views. For example, at the height of the Palestinian assault against Israel last April, the president delivered a major address that contained within it a flagrant contradiction. * He began by slamming Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority (PA) for its terrorism against Israelis, and he fingered several groups, one of them (Al-Aqsa Brigades) under Arafat's control, attempting to destroy Israel. In this spirit, not surprisingly, Bush approved of Israeli efforts at self-protection, saying that "America recognizes Israel's right to defend itself from terror." * Then, in concluding the speech, he drew policy conclusions at odds with this analysis. The president asked Palestinian leaders to make some nominal gestures to prove they are "truly on the side of peace," then demanded that Israel's government reciprocate with four giant steps (halt its military efforts, withdraw from areas it had recently occupied, cease civilian construction in the occupied territories and help build a viable Palestinian state). In sum, Bush theoretically backed Israel and condemned Arafat while practically he backed Arafat and punished Israel. All this left most observers stumped. Their puzzlement then grew, specifically about the requirements for a Palestinian state. In June 2002, amid much fanfare, the president unveiled a major initiative making this contingent on significant changes in Palestinian behavior: "When the Palestinian people have new leaders, new institutions and new security arrangements with their neighbors," he said, "the United States of America will support the creation of a Palestinian state." Three months later, the State Department furtively unveiled a contrary initiative, something it called the "concrete, three-phase implementation road map." This road map can plan on a Palestinian state by 2005 by dispensing with Bush's requirements of the PA and instead requesting only token assurances from it. This duality leads to heartburn on all sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as no one can quite figure out U.S. policy. One thesis is that the White House and the State Department have separate plans. That appears to be what Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon thinks and explains why he has ignored the road map and focused on the president's June speech. As though in reply to this, in a major address to the American Enterprise Institute last week, Bush signaled his endorsement of the road map: "It is the commitment of our government - and my personal commitment - to implement the road map," he said. And yet, doubts persist. When a politician acts inconsistently, it usually signals an attempt to please opposed constituencies. In this case, President Bush feels pressure from the Republican voters who put him in office to help Israel protect itself. A Gallup poll last month showed 80 percent of Republicans holding a favorable opinion of Israel, and no politician ignores a number like that. But the pressure for a Palestinian state is no less impressive, coming from a wide range of influential forces, ranging from Secretary of State Colin Powell to the Democrats in Congress and beyond them to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and Arab leaders. Observing these contradictions through two years of the Bush administration leads me to one main conclusion: In key ways - sympathy for Israel's plight, diplomatic support, providing arms - Bush tends to ignore his own Palestinian-state rhetoric and stand solidly with Israel. His statements demanding this from Israel and promising that to the Palestinians appear to be a sop to outside pressure, not operational policy. In short, look at what President Bush does, not what he says, and you'll find his usual consistency, this time hiding under a veneer of apparent indecision. If this is accurate, then the road map is for show, not true policy, and U.S. endorsement of a Palestinian state remains remote. In the Wake of 9-11, the American Press Has Embraced a 'Demented Caesarism'

Just after 9/11, I was one of those who thought, and said out loud, that the catastrophe might knock some sense into the gibbering "culture" of the US media. Now there would be no more prime-time seminars about the likely cruising style of Gary Condit, no more shark watches, and quite a lot more coverage of, and talk about, the wider world. (The term "Afghanistan" had long been used inside the TV news biz as a handy term for all those faraway and over-complicated stories that the advertisers didn't want to see.) And I believed that there would be a lot less dumbbell irony, a lot less potty comedy, and a lot less homicidal stand-up from the right. In short, I thought that Adam Sandler was all through, and that Ann Coulter would soon be forgotten, if not gone, and that the news would finally try to tell us some things that a free and democratic people needs to know.

Boy, was I wrong. Everywhere you look, Ann Coulter's up there on her broomstick, cracking manic jokes about mass murder, and Adam Sandler's said to be involved in seven movies soon to flood the multiplexes. Now I am old and wise enough to know that such bad acts are always with us, so I'm only disappointed - and, on cool reflection, not surprised - that there isn't more stuff out there like "The Simpsons," "The Sopranos," "Lovely & Amazing," Wilco. On the other hand, I find that I am absolutely flabbergasted at the many jumbo helpings of outright crapola that our "free press" has been laying out for us day after day since 9/11. While foreign journalists routinely tell their readers and/or viewers what's going on - inside Afghanistan, Iraq, DC and all throughout this land of ours - our journalists don't tell us anything.

They haven't bothered to report, for instance, that the war against Iraq has already begun. Last week the US and UK together hit the largest air-defense installation in western Iraq - a mission that involved 100 jets. At the same time, "we" began the largest military build-up in that region since the start of Operation Desert Shield twelve years ago. Neither story was reported by a single mainstream news source in this country. "Despite the assurances of President George Bush and Tony Blair that 'no decisions' had been made on how to deal with the threat posed by Saddam Hussein, compelling evidence has emerged in the past week that the US has begun a military build-up not seen since the last Gulf war," reported the Observer, which, along with the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and, in Canada, the National Post, among other foreign press outlets, has duly covered what should be big news, but isn't news at all, in these United States, whose soldiers - and civilians - are the ones who stand to suffer once this war begins.

Instead of learning that the re-invasion of Iraq has started up already, we're hit with frequent payloads of alarmist blather from the president's top dogs - Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and now Powell, too - who carry on that crucial propaganda work with little challenge from the press. The press also facilitates Bush/Cheney's propaganda drive by running the administration's claims as if they were well-documented facts; by breathlessly describing Iraq's desperate measures under fire as sinister offensive moves - and, above all, by letting Bush routinely (and preposterously) call himself "a patient man," who will of course gravely "deliberate," and carefully "consult" with all the world before he makes a move. Beyond our borders, people know that that's a crock, because there is a free press functioning out there, even in some places where they don't have the protection of our First Amendment.

What has happened to the press in the United States? Certainly it wasn't anything to brag about ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, but now its irresponsibility is simply staggering. Why? A proper answer to that question has to be complex, entailing many factors - corporate concentration, radical deregulation under Reagan, Bush and Clinton, TV's touchy-feely influence, the laziness and (yes) conservatism of a corporate press corps grossly overpaid, the fervent, brilliant rightist propaganda drive against "the liberal media," and so on. While all such factors surely have a lot do with it, however, 9/11 clearly made a very sudden difference, turning a bad situation even worse.

Although the press was always marvelously soft on Bush - reveling in his ignorance, saying not a word about his many scandals past, approving his bald theft of the election - after 9/11 such mere protectiveness mutated swiftly into a demented Caesarism, such as one would once have found among the Soviets, or as one finds today in places like Zimbabwe, North Korea, Cuba (and Iraq). At first, this sort of thing was understandable, if nauseating, the fearful pundits and reporters - as usual excessively responsive to the mass hysteria, and at the time also hysterical themselves - exalting Bush into the leader that a stricken nation dearly wished it had. Thus Bush was hailed as "eloquent," "commanding" and "astute," "Churchillian" and "another Roosevelt," etc., although he clearly wasn't ever any of those things. Such rapturous delusion was a sign of the horrific times just after 9/11, and therefore would have been forgivable as a mere human failing - if the reporters had just knocked it off once everyone recovered, more or less, from that first shock.

The fact that they did not, but kept on treating this Bush as a god - even after he began descending in the polls, and notwithstanding the abundant evidence that he was not at all divine but barely human - makes it quite clear that the press was transformed big-time by the shock of 9/11. Although the evidence of our own senses tells us otherwise - after all, he's right there on TV - the press accounts routinely fix his grammar (he said "gooder" several times at one recent event, but that weird goof was not in any transcript), and sometimes even call him "a six-footer," which is very clearly not the case. Such frank cosmetic touches are, to put it mildly, un-American, more reminiscent of the cult of Stalin than of anything in US journalistic history.

And yet such frank improvements of the president's own voice and person are not half as troubling as the journalists' refusal to stay with those major stories that pertain directly to the ugly fix that we are in today: Dick Cheney's criminal involvement in the arming of Iraq (against which brutal nation he now urges us to war); John Ashcroft's kid-gloves treatment of the robber barons at Enron - and that firm's many links to the administration (a scandal from which Gulf War II might help distract the rest of us); the abject failure of the "war on terrorism," as bin Laden walks (or sits) at liberty, along with most of the al Qaeda leadership (a big distraction would help there); and, speaking of the bombing of Afghanistan, the ruinous effect of that impulsive move on our attempts to nab the terrorists. (There's no distraction needed there, because the press has barely mentioned it.) Raining bombs down on (or near) the Taliban was comparable, as one intelligence insider put it, to "hitting a bee-hive with a baseball bat." Despite their clear importance, such expert views are quite unknown to most Americans, because the press, since 9/11, evidently sees it as somehow unpatriotic to report the hard, cold truth.

And then there's 9/11 itself - the day that knocked the US press clean out of its collective mind, and into full-time propaganda mode for this war - hungry president. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate that day's disastrous impact on the pundits and reporters than their mawkish exploitation of this anniversary. As they repackage the catastrophe as tearful patriotic super-spectacle, the journalists persist in not reporting any aspect of the story that might somehow spoil the solemn mood of awesome ceremonial that both the White House and the media's parent companies have planned for us. And so George W. Bush will come and flex his gravitas before the cameras, with certain "heroes of 9/11" at his side - and most of those Americans who watch won't even know, or won't recall, that this same president, abetted by Dick Cheney, has done everything he can to thwart a full inquiry into how and why that worst of crimes occurred.*

Such obstruction is, at best, completely indefensible, since it prevents our grasping what occurred, and how we might best keep such things from happening again. At worst, it indicates that Bush and Cheney must be hiding something - something that we have the right to know. In any case, their interference ought to be sufficient grounds for their immediate impeachment; and yet our journalists have been so dazed by 9/11 that they have failed to call for a commission looking into it - an investigative body of the sort that we have had before, and that the government of any normal country would have organized at once. Over-eager, even now, to help prop up this failing president (and, of course, to keep their ratings high), they display no interest in enlightening us, but are intent on dunking all of us in an immense "emotional bath" (a phrase Tom Brokaw used not long ago, approvingly). They seem to think that such submersion is a patriotic act - but nothing could be further from the truth.

*Nor will they know that Bush just cut the funding to monitor the health of 9/11's rescue workers, all of whom were long and heavily exposed to many toxins.

Miller will be speaking at the UN Protest, September 12, Thursday, 9:30 am to 1:30 pm, New York City

Protest at UN where President Bush is speaking that morning before the General Assembly. Permitted protest area at Dag Hammarskjold Park in Manhattan at 47th Street and First Avenue. Enter from Second Avenue. Start gathering at 9:00 am. Speakers from 9:30 am to 12:00 noon.

Throughout the weeks since 9/11, then since 10/7, when the bombs began to pulverize the remnant of Afghanistan, the state itself has used the "war on terrorism" as a monstrous global ad--or, to put it more accurately, the "war on terrorism" is basically a vast commercial. Most obviously, it has been used to sell this president as statesmanlike, clear-sighted, careful, just, heroically composed, completely in command. (That he still lacks those qualities completely is more evidence of just how ad-like his alleged apotheosis really is.) Also obvious is the way this crisis has been used to sell the U.S. military as almighty and unerring--just as Desert Storm was used a decade back. At base, the familiar exploitation of this conflict by the White House and the Pentagon alike has ultimately less to do with politics per se than with the intake of the nation's major advertisers, since both those institutions are primarily at the service of the corporations--which have, of course, been in command for quite some time, but whose domination has now reached the crisis-point with this regime.

Thus, in trying to fathom the profound commercialism of the state since 9/11, it is not enough to note that Bush et al. have used the terrorist threat to put their team on top. To grasp their deeply mercenary drive, we must read through the news as carefully as we would read the fine print on a pack of Prozac, or in the sales agreement at an auto dealership; for the items that reveal the most are largely covered without fanfare, if at all. Thus the White House used the terrorist attack to argue that the president must now be given "fast-track" authority to negotiate global trade agreements--because U.S. "national security" requires "free trade" (a claim accepted by the Democrats, who mostly voted aye). Likewise, just two days after the attack, the FCC's Republican majority moved like lightning to "review" the last few rules prohibiting the corporate media from merging absolutely--an enormous favor whose unseemly haste was justified by Michael Powell, the top commissioner, on patriotic grounds. ("The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished," he said movingly. "We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely.") Similarly, the GOP used the attack to push for "national missile defense" (which would have posed no threat to the attackers); to legalize oil-drilling in Alaska's pristine wild-life refuge (ostensibly to make us independent of Arabian reserves); to pass still more huge tax cuts for the rich, and retroactive tax cuts for such corporations as GE and IBM (on the argument that such a gift will strengthen our beleaguered nation by "creating jobs"); and to maintain or accelerate deregulation of several other major industries (among them, incredibly, airport security). For their part, the Democrats used 9/11 to petition the FEC for an exemption from the legal limits on "soft money" contributions (their argument was too tortured for quick paraphrase), and voted for the $15 billion bail-out for the airlines (whose lobbying campaign was supervised by Sen. Tom Daschle's wife).

We could go on, and note how much, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, the media corporations have suppressed or muted for their own commercial reasons--the need for special favors from the state requiring that they overlook, say, the close relationship between the Bush and the bin Laden families, or the handsome profits that the Carlyle Group, employer of the president's beloved dad, soon realized from the "war on terrorism," or the business dealings of Dick Cheney's Halliburton with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, or--not least--the truth about the recount of the presidential vote in Florida. Thus the media's corporate interests have been served at our expense--as have the interests of the oil companies, the weapons manufacturers and the airlines, along with all those other mammoth players that, like Enron, always stand to make another bundle from deregulation here at home and all throughout the world.

It is an infuriating situation--not, surely, as infuriating as the crimes of 9/11, but bad enough to anger millions of Americans, whether they supported Gore, Bush, Nader or Buchanan, and even (or especially) if they didn't cast a vote. The gradual post-war transformation of this country into an outright plutocracy is a development that few have failed to notice, and that has no champions other than the few who benefit directly from it. To sit and watch those high insiders always cash out with impunity is pretty galling to the citizens of a democracy, however much they think they've gotten used to it. And to the national multitude of window-shoppers, whether at the mall or watching their TVs, the full-time advertising is another, complementary provocation. Overseas, "they" hate us, we've been told, because "they" envy us all those delectable commodities that "we" have at our fingertips. That supposition surely tells us less about the foreign reputation of Al Qaeda than it does about ourselves: for it is we who always have our noses pressed against the glass. Even those of us who live in comfort are assured eternally that we have nothing yet, that we are nothing yet, without that next great buy, while our have-nots feed on nothing but those images. Judging from its quick resumption after 9/11, that fantastic pitch, it seems, will never end, no matter how compellingly we are distracted from it. Meanwhile, the audience keeps seething, its members hungering for some "closure" in a cinematic stroke of grand revenge against "the evil one" for what he did to us on that horrific day--an act of vengeance that may finally fail to mollify them, if and when it ever does take place.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

For all their economic clout and cultural sway, the ten great multinationals profiled in our latest chart--AOL Time Warner, Disney, General Electric, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, Sony, Bertelsmann, AT&T and Liberty Media--rule the cosmos only at the moment. The media cartel that keeps us fully entertained and permanently half-informed is always growing here and shriveling there, with certain of its members bulking up while others slowly fall apart or get digested whole. But while the players tend to come and go--always with a few exceptions--the overall Leviathan itself keeps getting bigger, louder, brighter, forever taking up more time and space, in every street, in countless homes, in every other head.

The rise of the cartel has been a long time coming (and it still has some way to go). It represents the grand convergence of the previously disparate US culture industries--many of them vertically monopolized already--into one global superindustry providing most of our imaginary "content." The movie business had been largely dominated by the major studios in Hollywood; TV, like radio before it, by the triune axis of the networks headquartered in New York; magazines, primarily by Henry Luce (with many independent others on the scene); and music, from the 1960s, mostly by the major record labels. Now all those separate fields are one, the whole terrain divided up among the giants--which, in league with Barnes & Noble, Borders and the big distributors, also control the book business. (Even with its leading houses, book publishing was once a cottage industry at both the editorial and retail levels.) For all the democratic promise of the Internet, moreover, much of cyberspace has now been occupied, its erstwhile wildernesses swiftly paved and lighted over by the same colossi. The only industry not yet absorbed into this new world order is the newsprint sector of the Fourth Estate--a business that was heavily shadowed to begin with by the likes of Hearst and other, regional grandees, flush with the ill-gotten gains of oil, mining and utilities--and such absorption is, as we shall see, about to happen.

Thus what we have today is not a problem wholly new in kind but rather the disastrous upshot of an evolutionary process whereby that old problem has become considerably larger--and that great quantitative change, with just a few huge players now co-directing all the nation's media, has brought about enormous qualitative changes. For one thing, the cartel's rise has made extremely rare the sort of marvelous exception that has always popped up, unexpectedly, to startle and revivify the culture--the genuine independents among record labels, radio stations, movie theaters, newspapers, book publishers and so on. Those that don't fail nowadays are so remarkable that they inspire not emulation but amazement. Otherwise, the monoculture, endlessly and noisily triumphant, offers, by and large, a lot of nothing, whether packaged as "the news" or "entertainment."

Of all the cartel's dangerous consequences for American society and culture, the worst is its corrosive influence on journalism. Under AOL Time Warner, GE, Viacom et al., the news is, with a few exceptions, yet another version of the entertainment that the cartel also vends nonstop. This is also nothing new--consider the newsreels of yesteryear--but the gigantic scale and thoroughness of the corporate concentration has made a world of difference, and so has made this world a very different place.

Let us start to grasp the situation by comparing this new centerfold with our first outline of the National Entertainment State, published in the spring of 1996. Back then, the national TV news appeared to be a tidy tetrarchy: two network news divisions owned by large appliance makers/weapons manufacturers (CBS by Westinghouse, NBC by General Electric), and the other two bought lately by the nation's top purveyors of Big Fun (ABC by Disney, CNN by Time Warner). Cable was still relatively immature, so that, of its many enterprises, only CNN competed with the broadcast networks' short-staffed newsrooms; and its buccaneering founder, Ted Turner, still seemed to call the shots from his new aerie at Time Warner headquarters.

Today the telejournalistic firmament includes the meteoric Fox News Channel, as well as twenty-six television stations owned outright by Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation (which holds majority ownership in a further seven). Although ultimately thwarted in his bid to buy DirecTV and thereby dominate the US satellite television market, Murdoch wields a pervasive influence on the news--and not just in New York, where he has two TV stations, a major daily (the faltering New York Post) and the Fox News Channel, whose inexhaustible platoons of shouting heads attracts a fierce plurality of cable-viewers. Meanwhile, Time Warner has now merged with AOL--so as to own the cyberworks through which to market its floodtide of movies, ball games, TV shows, rock videos, cartoons, standup routines and (not least) bits from CNN, CNN Headline News, CNNfn (devised to counter GE's CNBC) and CNN/Sports Illustrated (a would-be rival to Disney's ESPN franchise). While busily cloning CNN, the parent company has also taken quiet steps to make it more like Fox, with Walter Isaacson, the new head honcho, even visiting the Capitol to seek advice from certain rightist pols on how, presumably, to make the network even shallower and more obnoxious. (He also courted Rush Himself.) All this has occurred since the abrupt defenestration of Ted Turner, who now belatedly laments the overconcentration of the cable business: "It's sad we're losing so much diversity of thought," he confesses, sounding vaguely like a writer for this magazine.

Whereas five years ago the clueless Westinghouse owned CBS, today the network is a property of the voracious Viacom--matchless cable occupier (UPN, MTV, MTV2, VH1, Nickelodeon, the Movie Channel, TNN, CMT, BET, 50 percent of Comedy Central, etc.), radio colossus (its Infinity Broadcasting--home to Howard Stern and Don Imus--owns 184 stations), movie titan (Paramount Pictures), copious publisher (Simon & Schuster, Free Press, Scribner), a big deal on the web and one of the largest US outdoor advertising firms. Under Viacom, CBS News has been obliged to help sell Viacom's product--in 2000, for example, devoting epic stretches of The Early Show to what lately happened on Survivor (CBS). Of course, such synergistic bilge is commonplace, as is the tendency to dummy up on any topic that the parent company (or any of its advertisers) might want stifled. These journalistic sins have been as frequent under "longtime" owners Disney and GE as under Viacom and Fox [see Janine Jaquet, "The Sins of Synergy," page 20]. They may also abound beneath Vivendi, whose recent purchase of the film and TV units of USA Networks and new stake in the satellite TV giant EchoStar--moves too recent for inclusion in our chart--could soon mean lots of oblique self-promotion on USAM News, in L'Express and L'Expansion, and through whatever other news-machines the parent buys.

Such is the telejournalistic landscape at the moment--and soon it will mutate again, if Bush's FCC delivers for its giant clients. On September 13, when the minds of the American people were on something else, the commission's GOP majority voted to "review" the last few rules preventing perfect oligopoly. They thus prepared the ground for allowing a single outfit to own both a daily paper and a TV station in the same market--an advantage that was outlawed in 1975. (Even then, pre-existing cases of such ownership were grandfathered in, and any would-be owner could get that rule waived.) That furtive FCC "review" also portended the elimination of the cap on the percentage of US households that a single owner might reach through its TV stations. Since the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the limit had been 35 percent. Although that most indulgent bill was dictated by the media giants themselves, its restrictions are too heavy for this FCC, whose chairman, Michael Powell, has called regulation per se "the oppressor."

And so, unless there's some effective opposition, the several-headed vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV, radio, magazines, books, music and web services will soon be selling us our daily papers, too--for the major dailies have, collectively, been lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to make their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt had a sweetening effect on coverage of the Bush Administration). Thus the largest US newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.--will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the way of most US radio stations. America's cities could turn into informational "company towns," with one behemoth owning all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told the FCC to drop its rule preventing any one company from serving more than 30 percent of US cable subscribers; and in December, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) While such a setup may make economic sense, as anticompetitive arrangements tend to do, it has no place in a democracy, where the people have to know more than their masters want to tell them.

That imperative demands reaffirmation at this risky moment, when much of what the media cartel purveys to us is propaganda, commercial or political, while no one in authority makes mention of "the public interest"--except to laugh it off. "I have no idea," Powell cheerily replied at his first press conference as chairman, when asked for his own definition of that crucial concept. "It's an empty vessel in which people pour in whatever their preconceived views or biases are." Such blithe obtuseness has marked all his public musings on the subject. In a speech before the American Bar Association in April 1998, Powell offered an ironic little riff about how thoroughly he doesn't get it: "The night after I was sworn in [as a commissioner], I waited for a visit from the angel of the public interest. I waited all night, but she did not come." On the other hand, Powell has never sounded glib about his sacred obligation to the corporate interest. Of his decision to move forward with the FCC vote just two days after 9/11, Powell spoke as if that sneaky move had been a gesture in the spirit of Patrick Henry: "The flame of the American ideal may flicker, but it will never be extinguished. We will do our small part and press on with our business, solemnly, but resolutely."

Certainly the FCC has never been a democratic force, whichever party has been dominant. Bill Clinton championed the disastrous Telecom Act of 1996 and otherwise did almost nothing to impede the drift toward oligopoly. (As Newsweek reported in 2000, Al Gore was Rupert Murdoch's personal choice for President. The mogul apparently sensed that Gore would happily play ball with him, and also thought--correctly--that the Democrat would win.)

What is unique to Michael Powell, however, is the showy superciliousness with which he treats his civic obligation to address the needs of people other than the very rich. That spirit has shone forth many times--as when the chairman genially compared the "digital divide" between the information haves and have-nots to a "Mercedes divide" between the lucky few who can afford great cars and those (like him) who can't. In the intensity of his pro-business bias, Powell recalls Mark Fowler, head of Reagan's FCC, who famously denied his social obligations by asserting that TV is merely "an appliance," "a toaster with pictures." And yet such Reaganite bons mots, fraught with the anti-Communist fanaticism of the late cold war, evinced a deadly earnestness that's less apparent in General Powell's son. He is a blithe, postmodern sort of ideologue, attuned to the complacent smirk of Bush the Younger--and, of course, just perfect for the cool and snickering culture of TV.

Although such flippancies are hard to take, they're also easy to refute, for there is no rationale for such an attitude. Take "the public interest"--an ideal that really isn't hard to understand. A media system that enlightens us, that tells us everything we need to know pertaining to our lives and liberty and happiness, would be a system dedicated to the public interest. Such a system would not be controlled by a cartel of giant corporations, because those entities are ultimately hostile to the welfare of the people. Whereas we need to know the truth about such corporations, they often have an interest in suppressing it (as do their advertisers). And while it takes much time and money to find out the truth, the parent companies prefer to cut the necessary costs of journalism, much preferring the sort of lurid fare that can drive endless hours of agitated jabbering. (Prior to 9/11, it was Monica, then Survivor and Chandra Levy, whereas, since the fatal day, we have had mostly anthrax, plus much heroic footage from the Pentagon.) The cartel's favored audience, moreover, is that stratum of the population most desirable to advertisers--which has meant the media's complete abandonment of working people and the poor. And while the press must help protect us against those who would abuse the powers of government, the oligopoly is far too cozy with the White House and the Pentagon, whose faults, and crimes, it is unwilling to expose. The media's big bosses want big favors from the state, while the reporters are afraid to risk annoying their best sources. Because of such politeness (and, of course, the current panic in the air), the US coverage of this government is just a bit more edifying than the local newscasts in Riyadh.

Against the daily combination of those corporate tendencies--conflict of interest, endless cutbacks, endless trivial pursuits, class bias, deference to the king and all his men--the public interest doesn't stand a chance. Despite the stubborn fiction of their "liberal" prejudice, the corporate media have helped deliver a stupendous one-two punch to this democracy. (That double whammy followed their uncritical participation in the long, irrelevant jihad against those moderate Republicans, the Clintons.) Last year, they helped subvert the presidential race, first by prematurely calling it for Bush, regardless of the vote--a move begun by Fox, then seconded by NBC, at the personal insistence of Jack Welch, CEO of General Electric. Since the coup, the corporate media have hidden or misrepresented the true story of the theft of that election.

And having justified Bush/Cheney's coup, the media continue to betray American democracy. Media devoted to the public interest would investigate the poor performance by the CIA, the FBI, the FAA and the CDC, so that those agencies might be improved for our protection--but the news teams (just like Congress) haven't bothered to look into it. So, too, in the public interest, should the media report on all the current threats to our security--including those far-rightists targeting abortion clinics and, apparently, conducting bioterrorism; but the telejournalists are unconcerned (just like John Ashcroft). So should the media highlight, not play down, this government's attack on civil liberties--the mass detentions, secret evidence, increased surveillance, suspension of attorney-client privilege, the encouragements to spy, the warnings not to disagree, the censored images, sequestered public papers, unexpected visits from the Secret Service and so on. And so should the media not parrot what the Pentagon says about the current war, because such prettified accounts make us complacent and preserve us in our fatal ignorance of what people really think of us--and why--beyond our borders. And there's much more--about the stunning exploitation of the tragedy, especially by the Republicans; about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families; about the ongoing shenanigans in Florida--that the media would let the people know, if they were not (like Michael Powell) indifferent to the public interest.

In short, the news divisions of the media cartel appear to work against the public interest--and for their parent companies, their advertisers and the Bush Administration. The situation is completely un-American. It is the purpose of the press to help us run the state, and not the other way around. As citizens of a democracy, we have the right and obligation to be well aware of what is happening, both in "the homeland" and the wider world. Without such knowledge we cannot be both secure and free. We therefore must take steps to liberate the media from oligopoly, so as to make the government our own.

What is your Department? It has to be Prevarication going back to Age of Pericles!!!!! You didn't go to Yale with your hero Clinton did you or maybe Harvard with Gore????
--from ERKTHE@aol.com, 6/13/01

I didn't go to Yale with Clinton--who is not my hero--OR with Bush, and I didn't go to Harvard with Gore OR Bush. I went to Northwestern.
Do you have a point to make, or a serious question to ask? Or would you rather just hurl insults? Is that your idea of rational debate?
--from mcm7@pop.nyu.edu, 6/13/01

Any academic who wants to learn about American anti-intellectualism has two ways to go. On the one hand, you can take the pastoral route, and delve into the problem as an intellectual--reading, in the quiet of your armchair, Hofstadter's classic dissertation, say, and/or Dan T. Carter's fine biography of George Wallace, and/or any other such enlightening work. Or you can drop the books, put on your goggles and your rubber boots, and venture forth into the endless shitstorm that is now our civic culture, and in that deluge try to make a reasonable argument. You do that, and you will quickly learn a lot--more, in fact, than you might pick up just by reading, and, perhaps, a lot more than you bargained for.

Although it got much riskier on 9/11, the latter course of study was already pretty harrowing; I'd taken it (and without knowing it) when, in June, I started to promote The Bush Dyslexicon--a dark assessment of George W. Bush, and an indictment of the U.S. major media, based on meticulous analysis both of Bush's off-the-cuff remarks and of their treatment by the stalwarts of the media. Because the book got few reviews (no big surprise), I tried to do as Richard Nixon did in 1952: I "took my case directly to the people"--not, of course, through truculent prime-time asides about my dog, but by doing as much talk radio as possible, to tell the audience what, by studying his utterances, I had discovered deep in the heart of W, and at the top of our defunct democracy.

What I had discovered was not flattering to Bush. Close study of his jabberings not only reconfirms the fact of his supreme unfitness for the presidential job (a fact that even certain of his own supporters grudgingly conceded, prior to 9/11), but also throws into relief that bone-deep nastiness which all the spin about his "likeability" could never quite obscure. His thin skin, his short fuse, his elephantine memory for slights (and quickness to imagine them), and--above all--his perfect lack of empathy shine through in countless of his gaffes, and in most of his jokes. It is (or so I argue in the book) all there in the man's own utterances, which, in cold print, are every bit as edifying as the propaganda drive on his behalf was mystifying.

Once I started to promote the book, I learned that Bush's psychopathic traits exert a strong appeal to his most zealous fans, many of whom took full advantage of the first-strike capabilities of cyber-space to let me know their thoughts. For example, I received this e-mail in mid-August--just after W's big speech on stem cell researchÜwith "THE BUSH DYSLEXICON" written in the subject line:

Mark . . .
I just finished your above-named book (borrowed it, wouldn't buy it) and it confirms my suspicion that you are a typical left-wing jerkoff !!! Did you happen to catch Bush's speech last night. . . . he really put it up your left-wing asshole . . . asshole!
Fred Fittin

To call that message "anti-intellectual" would be a comic understatement. Since it's unlikely that he read the book, or knows anybody who would have a copy, Fred could not be said so much to hate it as to have despised the very thought of it. Any act of critical intelligence, any reasoned effort to see through the mask of power, enrages types like Fred. Such high-strung troops demand a God-like father-figure who will always reassure them that they needn't think, and so they snap into attack mode any time they sense a threat to such authority; and in this case, their fury is especially intense, because their idol is so small a man that even they can see that something's missing. Thus Fred cast that feeble speech of W's, which thrilled no-one, as if it had been one of Hitler's finest--a rafter-rattling diatribe that really put it to, or up, the assholes of the left.

Anyone who flips out at the thought of personal analysis is really asking for it himself. This, of course, is true not only of such big-time analyphobes as Nixon, Bush the Elder ("Please don't put me on the couch!") and George II ( sworn enemy of "psychobabble"), but also of those brownshirt wannabes who pipe up from the cheapest seats, cursing out the critics in mad sympathy with their offended leader. Desublimated as they are, such venters tend to tell us more about themselves than any self-respecting person wants to know. With his fantasy about our Chief Executive's revenge upon the left-wing anus, for example, Fred reveals himself as much less interested in understanding Bush's programs than in bunking with him in a prison cell, where he could dance around and wave a pom-pom every time the president turns out some underweight progressive first offender.

But let us turn away from Fred, despite the interest of his case, and just take note of certain basic features of the anti-intellectual (and anti-social) trend that he personifies. For example, there's the crucial fact that, by and large, such random jeers were not spontaneous eruptions of mass sentiment, but outbursts systematically provoked by a vast media-political complex that profited enormously, and profits still, by playing to the Fred in all of us. Take the above-quoted bit from "ERKTHE." That cyber-shot was fired at me within mere minutes of my brief slam-dance with Bill O'Reilly on the Fox News Channel, the two of us wrangling inconclusively (and, on his side, noisily) about his flagrant pro-Bush bias:

O'Reilly: With us now is the author of the book, Mark Crispin Miller, professor of media studies at New York University. And in the New York Times, Prof. Miller is quoted as saying, "One of the reasons I reproduce such long exchanges with journalists such as Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly is to show their unthinking complicity in putting President Bush across."

MCM: You find that to be an outrageous claim?

O'Reilly: Well, not outrageous. I just think you're misguided, as many, many academics are these days.

That last shot was, of course, the intended subtext of my whole exchange with Bill, who kept on pointedly addressing me, with faint mock-deference, as "Professor"--an epithet synonymous with "jackass" in minds of many in his audience. Indeed, the Fox News Channel has itself long been an enterprise that runs primarily on the bile of its half-educated viewers, as Roger Ailes, the outfit's crusty overseer, concedes: "There's a whole country that elitists will never acknowledge. What people deeply resent out there are those in the 'blue' states thinking they're smarter. There's a touch of that in our news." The same seething "touch" pervades every offering from the GOP's immense semi-official agitprop machine, from multi-millionaire Big Liars like Rush Limbaugh down to all the local yokels fulminating on the air from sea to shining sea.

Those hooked on such propaganda have been well-trained by its authors to scream into the nearest telephone, or pound out a threatening e-mail, at the slightest hint of what they might perceive as "liberal bias" by the corporate media. Thus had my image barely vanished from the screen when ERKTHE grabbed his laptop (these patriots are generally male) to accuse me of "Prevarication." However, while it owes much to top-down exhortation, that grass-roots ever-readiness to fling abuse has also been enabled hugely by e-mail--the postmodern version of old-fashioned hate mail, or rocks with scribbled warnings wrapped around them. Not long ago, such smart technologies were warmly hailed--by Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Ben Wattenberg, George Gilder, Mobil, Texas Instruments, et al.--for their democratizing influence in, say, Manila under Marcos, Moscow under Gorbachev, Beijing under Deng Xiao-Ping, the faxes/e-mails/Internet sites eluding the dead hand of tyranny and helping keep the flame of Liberty alive, etc. While there's some truth to that heroic formulation, it tends to blind us to the anti-democratic uses of such speedy gadgets here on the domestic front. The likes of Fred and ERKTHE hit the keyboards not to broaden the debate but to abort it, taking their wild cyber-shots either to intimidate the heretics or to discourage others from paying attention. Thus, for example, do the goon squads frequently bombard the Amazon and Barnes & Noble sites with hostile fake reviews of books they obviously haven't read, to drive off as many folks as possible. "I have never read another book so full of bullshit." "More blather from the communist left." "Bigotry, Christophobia and left-wing swill. Save your money!" "Save your money and pass on this poorky written political drabble [sic]." "Anyone with an understanding of and respect for the free market system will see that this book is garbage." Those on-line (and, often, one-line) attacks on Alan Dershowitz's Supreme Injustice, Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed exemplify the rightist tendency to use the most advanced communications hardware to shut down all discussion.

Such repressive tactics, we should note, are anti-intellectual in the deepest and most frightening sense--i.e., opposed to any rational attempt to jolt the public out of acquiescence. It is that livid quietism on the right, that militant and gleeful anti-rational animus, which marks this latest surge of anti-intellectualismÜan attitude not necessarily the same as mere old-fashioned anti-academic feeling. Of course, the anti-intellectual attacks do often come in anti-academic garbÜas in one Amazon "review" complaining of Bugliosi's putative embrace by both "the media and leftist academics," or in another that assails The Bush Dyslexicon for dissing "someone with a Harvard Business School degree who has solid common sense values and is not the least bit interested in the liberal academic establishment's opinions." Although they often coincide, however, it is the animus against the active mind itself that really drives such vigilantes, and not a simple class-based beef against the snooty professoriate (the types that, as our president has put it, snack on "Brie and cheese").

This much is clear from the incurable selective blindness of the anti-intellectuals, who can perceive the hated caste of academic privilege only insofar as it includes "the left." Like ERKTHE, they simply cannot see that Bush too went to Yale and Harvard, any more than they can see how his agenda would not only poison but impoverish them (and, latterly, get them blown up in their own neighborhoods). At times the need to reinterpret Bush the drunken Eli as a dedicated populist has led to some absurd inventions. On Amazon, one troubled critic of my book asserted that "Bush was an excellent student at Yale, but many of his tests were graded down at his request to keep him as 'one of the people.'" ("This is never acknowledged by Miller," he observed correctly.) For the most part, however, the attackers don't resort to fabrication, but are content fanatically to tune out any aspect of reality that contradicts their vision of "the liberal academic establishment." In their eyes, Condoleezza Rice is not an arrogant and fuzzy-minded prof, nor is Paul Wolfowitz, despite their full commitment to the crackpot scheme of "national missile defense." Likewise, for all the bloodshed and destruction caused by his simplistic notions, the anti-intellectuals would never think to damn the pompous Henry Kissinger as a "misguided" academic, any more than they would damn, in retrospect, the cohort of distinguished Ivy Leaguers who propelled us into Vietnam.

For reasons too complex for us to hazard here, the anti-intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious. And so they give a pass to those professors who are at the service of such power, while jeering anyone--inside or outside the Academy--who thinks to raise a fuss about how wrong it is. For them, this isn't something to discuss, because discussion is itself suspicious, even dangerous--the sport of jerk-offs and Prevaricators. Thus there is no point in arguing with them--and yet no wisdom in attempting to ignore them. And such is true not only of the Bush regime's most unrestrained supporters, but of the Bush regime itself--a fact that now requires a lot of careful thought, and something more.

And yet it's just such thinking that has all but disappeared since 9/11--as it always disappears in time of war. In bringing down the World Trade Center (a mile from where I sit right now) and ravaging the Pentagon, the terrorists not only murdered thousands, and left tens of thousands more bereft, and devastated lower Manhattan, and sparked the wreckage of the local and the national economy. Through that spectacular atrocity, the killers also managed, at one blow, to knock the brains clean out of countless good Americans. Although those citizens had started out that day with all their wits intact, by dinnertime they sounded way much like Fred--a terroristic consequence a lot less hideous, surely, than what happened in the air and on the ground, and yet even more destructive in the long run. For while we can and will no doubt rebuild beyond the shattered lives and property, the prospects aren't as upbeat for our frail democracy, which cannot function if too many people think like Bill O'Reilly and his fans.

The swift migration of (let's call it) Fred's position from the cyber-fringes into the great neo-liberal mainstream is apparent in all sorts of weird new attitudes among the educated. Where Bush's lifelong callowness and dimness had been obvious, and his incoherence a cause for endless easy ridicule, he is now reverently applauded for his eloquence ("Churchillian"), the rare "nimbleness" of his communications to the public, and, according to The New York Times, his "gravitas"--although his off-the-cuff remarks are just as adolescent, repetitious, empty and illogical as ever. (Go and read them if you don't believe me.) Where Bush/Cheney's rule was widely recognized, except among Republicans, as having been arranged not democratically but through grand theft and fraud, his presidency is now deemed a blessing to us all--and not just by his fellow partisans, but by the Democrats, who all but thank God for the placement of his foot on their collective neck. And where our prior wars had met with just and patriotic skepticism, the hard-won civic legacy of Vietnam, this latest, and in fact most perilous, of our Third World adventures meets with mere assent--edgy resignation if not frank applause--and, all too often, with a nasty allergy to all the rational and necessary questions: e.g., How will all this bombing keep us safe from further terrorist attacks? Won't it only make them even likelier? Why should merely cracking down on terrorism help to stop it, when that method hasn't worked in any other country? Why are we so hated in the Muslim world? What did our government do there to bring this horror home to all those innocent Americans? And why don't we learn anything, from our free press, about the gross ineptitude of our state agencies? about what's really happening in Afghanistan? about the pertinence of Central Asia's huge reserves of oil and natural gas? about the links between the Bush and the bin Laden families?

Ask such questions now, and, while you probably won't get the answers that you're looking for, you're likely to learn something quite important from the current climate--that terror serves to sabotage democracy, by making thought itself seem like a crime against the state. Ask those questions, and you will surely be accused of siding with the enemy--just the sort of answer that Al Qaeda's goons would also give you, if you asked them certain tactless questions. Outside of your armchair, then, there really is no place for intellectuals to hide, in this new world of terrorists both foreign and domestic, and fearful yahoos high and low. posted 11.20.01 from Context, No.9

MEDIA CONTROL: Interview With Mark Crispin Miller

for the industrial strength version...

Bush Watch is a non-advocacy site paid for by Politex, a non-affiliated U.S. citizen.
Editorial Policy: All entries are dated and documented as needed.
Text (c) Politex. Permission of author required for reprinting.
Duration of working link not under our control.
Updated daily at various times.
Send all e-mail to Politex.