It was towards the end of a discussion at lunch today that I realized why I haven't been able to expound more on news items or event narratives. Certainly, one scroll downward shows that I've found topics to attach observations to — and without question, sometimes pith strikes far deeper than five paragraphs. Intelligent economy is blogging's greatest gift to writing. Even so, my per-entry volume has seemed to me a little shy and I thought hard about it this morning.
Finishing my sandwich, setting down an interesting but unsurprising batch of headlines on the Wall Street Journal editorial page I thought back to what I'd read today. Before showering, I switched my apartment rig on to check e-mail and gave Kevin O'Brien's fortnightly column a glance. Good, as always; I disagree with what I believe is a peer-pressure/generational non sequitur call for Donald Rumsfeld's resignation, but thoughtful and sharp nonetheless. Ringing up Instapundit, I found myself won back to Bill Safire's dignified wisdom, who pulls no punches today on the topic of sarin and mustard gas, Abu Ghraib and errors in judgment. But in revisiting the two columns, I finally faced the conclusion that had been nagging at me all morning: I've read this before. For goodness' sake, I've written about it before, Safire's nearly point-for-point.
I link almost daily to Glenn Reynolds because he's top dog for a reason: he throws down a lot of words for an efficient writer and most of it is either smack in the middle of the most relevant topics or at the bleeding edge of the next cardinal issue. He's been chiseling away at the mainstream press' news monolith. Oh, they have many — one for every occasion, as fashion is to any society — but the most egregious and mortally consequential party line has been their reporting on the two prominent election issues of America's marketplace and Iraq. Glenn believes that professional respect and authority are quantities as finite as they are elusive, and suspects that in today's information culture elite journalists will tell a story divorced from reality for only so long before they squander their reputation. A collapse of free speech (which he ponders) is less likely than a humbling of the media caste system, prosecuted by Americans with their choice of information source. That's an argument I've made on this weblog several times in two years, yesterday writing to Wretchard the Cat to comment on his own recognition of the political onslaught from television, radio and print: The doubt slowly sown in [that aristocracy] will do much to destroy the pretense of objectivity that sprang up over the last century. If we can't have detached observers, I said, the least we could ask for would be correspondents who disclose their bias and leave judgment up to us.
One look at television ratings shows that information exchanges beyond the charter members — the internet, talk radio and cable news — are gaining popularity. There is no longer a monopoly held by Cronkite's brood, the Gray Lady and the Washingtonite news magazines. Short of statist usurpation or Luddite revolution, there never will be again. But there is yet a controlling interest. As long as a majority of Americans still learn about the world through the same old guard, the old guard will remain the fulcrum, selecting most of the stories and their respective context: building and defending a unitary narrative.
It is this stubborn narrative, I believe, this intellectual corral, that has not only wreaked havoc in terms of lives and public support for the war but forced commentators who wish to be relevant to continually answer the press' assertions that masquerade as reporting. Why is more attention paid — from both the left and the right — to Abu Ghraib than the Blackwater murders or Nick Berg? It could be that Abu Ghraib is more important. But it could also be that Abu Ghraib is the story the public knows better because it's been deluged with it hourly, day after day, for weeks.
Turn the recent discovery of sarin and mustard gas on its head. Pretend that the metric of success in Iraq and the vindication of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and their bipartisan supporters were in Iraq's lack of WMDs. Bush had held a press conference several months ago declaring "Iraq is WMD-free from this day on." Would the press sniff at these stories, shrugging their shoulders that, Hey, it's just two shells, old stuff, it doesn't portend a larger find unless we find more evidence, Bush did his job, let's forget about it? Would they?
If you haven't completely lost your perspective in these thirty-two months, you'll know the answer without a second thought. It's a strange feeling, one of relief cut across frustration, to realize that your debate topics consist of beliefs you thought were implicit, that used to be agreed on by all serious parties; the fundamentals from which debate topics were drawn. One need not make too long a leap of faith to conclude that if the argument were truly one of how to defeat the enemies of civilization, rather than whether or not to actually fight them: not the press' irresponsible reporting, nor the contentious debates, nor the grating and even nationally detrimental politicking would be the currency of our times.
How is a find of sarin gas where it wasn't supposed to be not a red flag the size of, well, California? How is the abuse of prisoners, cruel but anomalous both operationally and culturally, morally equivalent to the salacious killing sprees of terrorists — those with their own states and without? Well, it isn't. And I shouldn't have to defend that statement. No one should.
What O'Brien and Safire wrote is well done. It's also old news. I've had trouble finding energy to write on the world's developments at late because much of it is made up of stories with flimsy prosthetic legs. It's healthy to write and read and speak and listen, again and again and again, those beliefs you hold dear. That's what we call preaching and yes, the usage is complimentary. Care is involved: too much focus on the elements rather than their application to current events is preaching to the choir. Trying to convince loonballs that the sky, goddammit, is blue, is preaching to the devil and his advocate. Neither is productive, both are fatiguing and self-defeating.
I stopped reading the funnies in the newspaper because they stopped being funny. I stopped reading news sections in the newspaper because I was reading news less often than Johnny Journalist's own crusade for postmodernist enlightenment. The internet, though it dips from the same well, offers a broader range of news agencies, some of which do in fact employ reporters who simply report. Information isn't set into permanent ink and the ethical correct and notate their mistakes. Not surprisingly, information moves more swiftly and easily in the ether.
In 1986, Berke Breathed's comic strip Bloom County had reached a wonderful apex of wild and inexplicably connected stories. Breathed managed to injure himself in a skydiving accident and upon his return to the comic, set aside [two] strips as a transition for readers from months of reruns. Milo, Binkley and Opus set about introducing the thrills about to be unleashed. But the delivery wasn't enough for character Opus, who, after failing to direct attention to his own fantasy — an affair with Madonna and death warrant from Sean Penn, Steve Dallas "playing leapfrog with a scantily clad Imelda Marcos" — sulked in his own corner. Asked, in the [second] strip, if he had anything to add, Opus sneered, "Me? I read Garfield."
I'm sure the fiction daily injected into the newspapers and networks is all very compelling but it's not true, not real and not right. The liberation of fifty million people is just that, no matter who accomplished it, and it's not something one is expected to apologize for. There's a world out there, shut out in favor of what "ought to be." In the elite press, stories run in circles, characterizations are cartoonish and more than a little of the lot runs entirely on cheap gags. That's stuff not to be taken seriously. Don't they read Garfield?