MEDIA CRITICISM

ALEX COCKBURN—The narcotizing, humorless properties of the ‘MacNeil/Lehrer Report,’ familiar to anyone who has felt fatigue creep over him at 7:40 Eastern time, are crucial to the show. Tedium is of the essence, since the all-but- conscious design of the program is to project vacuous dithering (‘And now, for another view of Hitler …’) into the mind of the viewers, until they are properly convinced that there is not one answer to ‘the problem,’ but two or even three, and that since two answers are no better than none, they might as well not bother with the problem at all.

PATRICE GREANVILLE—If nothing else I found this episode interesting because it shows how much sharper the mind of a genuine radical is, when compared to that of even a bright semi-establshmentarian liberal, like Taibbi. Let us recall that while Taibbi can be at times a very fine jornalist, he is still politically far more a temperamental rebel, a bourgeois “enfant terrible” than a genuine left social analyst. In that sense he remains ensconced in the old journo illusion that more facts assure a better grasp of the subject, forgetting that this is also a sure formula to miss the forest for the trees, and that context, the historical, cultural and socioeconomic and political contexts of anything being reported is the guarantor of clarity and public mobilisation.

MARGO STILES—When you talk decadence in a world overrun by morally indifferent humans, Bravo’s shows, (an NBC property) nurtured by Andy Cohen, especially the Real Housewives franchises, take the cake. I admit watching them often: they CAN be entertaining. But what bothers me no end is how this bunch of mostly well-off people WASTE their celebrityhood in endless petty bickering punctuated by bouts of outrageous self-pampering. Their egos are so fragile, their vision of life so myopic, that the slightest real or imagined slight is cause for a feud that can last ages.

“Objectivity” is the sacred cow of professional mainstream journalism. All “professional” J-schools stress the importance of filling reportorial and editorial duties with the utmost “objectivity”. The problem is that, when pursued to its ultimate logical conclusions, human objectivity turns out to be a hoax, a fiction that, in expert hands, usually hides precisely the opposite, a very definite worldview which, wittingly or unwittingly, colors all choices, percepts, and opinions. In an environment in which most J-school students are simply indoctrinated to become unquestioning, careerist cogs in the machinery of capitalist media, discussions of this kind may serve as an alarm bell for those wishing to become real journalists, real servants of the public interest, and actors for their own survival.

JIM MILES—What is not said is that the U.S. defense budget is about 3 times larger than China’s without including all the nuclear and security related monies with that.  Also not mentioned are the U.S.’ 800 or so military bases of all kinds scattered around the world, with most of them oriented towards containing China and Russia.  Nothing is mentioned of current U.S. interventions in the Middle East nor the even more current examples of the U.S. openly extolling the desire to get rid of other countries’ governments, regardless of international law.