The move is still in progress, but it means I'll be driving a lot. Yesterday I caught most of NPR's The 1A, and I noticed something again that had been lurking in my mind for a while. The 1A's anchor asked one his pundit-guests if Donald Trump was going to follow through on something -- the rumored $15 billion for Iran, or the ban on flavored vaping, something like that. I don't remember the answer, because it occurred to me what a stupid question it was, that it would have been stupid even before Trump became Oligarch-in-Chief, and that a lot of time is wasted on such questions in the news media.
In Trump's case it's always a tossup whether he'll remember to do what he says he will anyway, so it seems especially useless to ask such a question about him. But the trouble is bigger than one senescent, blustering buffoon. The mission of news coverage, it seems to me is to report what has happened, not to "predict" what might. That's not just because media fortunetelling is usually wrong, remarkably so since there are a lot of pundits out there and one or two of them ought to come up with an accurate prediction just by accident. There's also no accountability for their predictions. Indeed, elite media get very pissy if anyone questions them about spectacular failures, like those involving the financial crash of 2008 or the 2003 invasion of Iraq or Hillary Clinton's 2016 electoral defeat.
I'm sure this sort of pointless prediction is nothing new, and I don't know whether it's more common than it used to be, but I have no doubt that it's a waste of time, especially when the standard of actual news coverage is so low. The worst examples turn up in discussion of our endless election season, but as the question about Trump shows, it's not limited to electoral politics, and it's most wasteful when the question is basically unanswerable, as most predictive questions are. I wonder what would happen to a pundit-guest who declined to answer such a question and declared it useless; I suppose such a person would not be invited to return, but then such a person would probably not be invited on in the first place.
As a side note, former US Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power paid The 1A a visit earlier this week. Power is a vile opportunist, of course, and an apologist for the crimes of the US and its clients, which is why The 1A billed her as an "idealist." I haven't listened to the segment but will try to.
Showing posts with label the 1a. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the 1a. Show all posts
Saturday, September 14, 2019
Friday, July 5, 2019
The Political Correctness of the Center
I hate-listened to The 1A on the road to northern Indiana this morning, which at least kept me alert during the three-hour drive.
Today being Friday, the program covered the week's news in summary, which may account for the rushed, breathless pace at which the commentators had to work. As usual, today's commentators were from the corporate media and the Beltway. They weren't stupid, but neither did they have anything to say that you wouldn't be able to hear on CNN or MSNBC. (On the other hand, I heard that the historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's been correcting right-wing historical discussion to great effect on Twitter, appeared on The 1A earlier this week; I'll have to listen to that segment.)
The dominant topic during the domestic segment was immigration. I don't intend to dissect the discussion in any detail. It stayed well within the bounds of the mainstream, framing the issues in terms set by the Republicans: if you want to "decriminalize" crossing the border, for instance, you're in favor of "open borders." The commentators were, I think, aware that this is a false dichotomy, but they didn't have time to explain why, so they just quoted it. Noam Chomsky's strictures on concision were confirmed once again: if you aren't given time to explain complex issues, soundbytes and slogans are all the audience will get, and then you can dismiss the masses as brainwashed sheeple incapable of understanding, unworthy of having input.
I noticed that the people being held in our concentration camps were almost always referred to as "migrants." One of the commentators called them "asylum-seekers" once, but returned to "migrants" after that. I realize that journalists seeking the phantasm of objectivity have a difficult time with terminology, and I suppose that "migrants" is the best our corporate media can do. It seems to have become the word of choice all over the media, from what I can tell, so it would be surprising if The 1A strayed from the consensus.
But "migrant" isn't the right word for people who are fleeing from intense economic and political misery. True, many such people do migrate in search of work and/or safety; the first Mexicans I encountered in Indiana were migrant farm workers who came north in the summers and returned south, even back to Mexico, when the work was done. (It's worth remembering that most Mexicans who came north returned home periodically until undocumented crossing was criminalized during the George W. Bush administration: that had the effect, not of keeping them out, but of keeping them in.) There have also been American migrants, most famously the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s (see Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), and African Americans who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow to the north at around the same time. Internal migrants, as both those precedents remind us, are not more welcome, or treated better, than refugees from abroad.
"Asylum-seekers" is more specific and accurate for the people who are crowding the US/Mexico border now, but "refugees" is also specific and accurate, and I don't believe it was used once today. (Nor do I recall encountering it often in most respectable media coverage these days.) "Refugee" has emotional connotations and might generate sympathy, so of course objective journalists shy away from it, but the disinclination to use it is also a choice -- what could and should be called the Political Correctness of the Center.
Once I noticed this, it was easier to notice that "migrant" was the word of choice by a different batch of commentators in today's international segment for refugees from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe. I believe "refugee" was used more often for such people before, during the Obama administration; why "migrant" has replaced it, I don't know, but it does seem to have happened.
Among numerous other matters that annoyed me was the discussion of the power-sharing agreement that has just been reached in the Sudan between the military junta currently in charge there and the civilian opposition. The main question for The 1A's team was whether it would last. It's a pointless question, because no one can answer it -- certainly none of them really tried. So why waste time on it? Because it's the kind of question that such people love to chuckle over.
At that, The 1A wasn't as bad as a BBC segment I heard earlier this morning: the newscaster interviewed one of the civilian negotiators, and tried repeatedly to badger him into saying on the air that he didn't trust the military to hold up their end of the agreement. The negotiator did his best to evade the question, but even to ask it was irresponsible; I could hear the smirk in the newscaster's voice as he pressed for the answer he wanted, which would have been a handy excuse for the military to accuse the civilians of bad faith, and even put the negotiator in danger. We're talking here about a country struggling to emerge from decades of one-man rule, in which the military has killed over a hundred civilians recently to, um, "restore order" I think the term is. Whatever happens, it won't happen to James Copnall.
Today being Friday, the program covered the week's news in summary, which may account for the rushed, breathless pace at which the commentators had to work. As usual, today's commentators were from the corporate media and the Beltway. They weren't stupid, but neither did they have anything to say that you wouldn't be able to hear on CNN or MSNBC. (On the other hand, I heard that the historian Kevin M. Kruse, who's been correcting right-wing historical discussion to great effect on Twitter, appeared on The 1A earlier this week; I'll have to listen to that segment.)
The dominant topic during the domestic segment was immigration. I don't intend to dissect the discussion in any detail. It stayed well within the bounds of the mainstream, framing the issues in terms set by the Republicans: if you want to "decriminalize" crossing the border, for instance, you're in favor of "open borders." The commentators were, I think, aware that this is a false dichotomy, but they didn't have time to explain why, so they just quoted it. Noam Chomsky's strictures on concision were confirmed once again: if you aren't given time to explain complex issues, soundbytes and slogans are all the audience will get, and then you can dismiss the masses as brainwashed sheeple incapable of understanding, unworthy of having input.
I noticed that the people being held in our concentration camps were almost always referred to as "migrants." One of the commentators called them "asylum-seekers" once, but returned to "migrants" after that. I realize that journalists seeking the phantasm of objectivity have a difficult time with terminology, and I suppose that "migrants" is the best our corporate media can do. It seems to have become the word of choice all over the media, from what I can tell, so it would be surprising if The 1A strayed from the consensus.
But "migrant" isn't the right word for people who are fleeing from intense economic and political misery. True, many such people do migrate in search of work and/or safety; the first Mexicans I encountered in Indiana were migrant farm workers who came north in the summers and returned south, even back to Mexico, when the work was done. (It's worth remembering that most Mexicans who came north returned home periodically until undocumented crossing was criminalized during the George W. Bush administration: that had the effect, not of keeping them out, but of keeping them in.) There have also been American migrants, most famously the Okies who fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s (see Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath), and African Americans who fled southern poverty and Jim Crow to the north at around the same time. Internal migrants, as both those precedents remind us, are not more welcome, or treated better, than refugees from abroad.
"Asylum-seekers" is more specific and accurate for the people who are crowding the US/Mexico border now, but "refugees" is also specific and accurate, and I don't believe it was used once today. (Nor do I recall encountering it often in most respectable media coverage these days.) "Refugee" has emotional connotations and might generate sympathy, so of course objective journalists shy away from it, but the disinclination to use it is also a choice -- what could and should be called the Political Correctness of the Center.
Once I noticed this, it was easier to notice that "migrant" was the word of choice by a different batch of commentators in today's international segment for refugees from Africa and the Middle East trying to reach Europe. I believe "refugee" was used more often for such people before, during the Obama administration; why "migrant" has replaced it, I don't know, but it does seem to have happened.
Among numerous other matters that annoyed me was the discussion of the power-sharing agreement that has just been reached in the Sudan between the military junta currently in charge there and the civilian opposition. The main question for The 1A's team was whether it would last. It's a pointless question, because no one can answer it -- certainly none of them really tried. So why waste time on it? Because it's the kind of question that such people love to chuckle over.
At that, The 1A wasn't as bad as a BBC segment I heard earlier this morning: the newscaster interviewed one of the civilian negotiators, and tried repeatedly to badger him into saying on the air that he didn't trust the military to hold up their end of the agreement. The negotiator did his best to evade the question, but even to ask it was irresponsible; I could hear the smirk in the newscaster's voice as he pressed for the answer he wanted, which would have been a handy excuse for the military to accuse the civilians of bad faith, and even put the negotiator in danger. We're talking here about a country struggling to emerge from decades of one-man rule, in which the military has killed over a hundred civilians recently to, um, "restore order" I think the term is. Whatever happens, it won't happen to James Copnall.
Saturday, August 19, 2017
The Hedge Fund Manager Shall Lie Down with the Miner
I generally only listen to NPR when I'm driving, and since I only drive when I rent a car to travel, that's not all that often. Yesterday was one of those times, and I was reminded why.
A fund-raising spot on the Indianapolis affiliate I was tuned to featured a young woman (some managerial person at some other station) who gushed that NPR includes everybody, hedge-fund managers and miners! It reminds us that we're all in this together! ... A laudable sentiment, but how often do miners appear on NPR? Not very often. NPR has at least one program devoted to "business," but none, as far as I know, to Labor. That would be showing favoritism to special interests, I suppose.
It was easy for me to think of this, because I'd been listening for more than an hour to one of NPR's main morning news programs, 1A, which I'd heard before on other trips. Not only were no miners on hand for the discussion, all of the discussants were from commercial media: the New York Times was well-represented, and one was a former Olympic Gold Medalist who's now an "ESPN analyst." I always thought that one purpose of public broadcasting was to provide an alternative to the Usual Media Suspects; instead the corporate media have been colonizing the alternative. FAIR has documented this repeatedly over the years. News sources like Democracy Now and The Intercept aren't perfect, but they do provide alternative viewpoints and voices, with DN especially hosting people who'd never be given space on NPR.
1A let me know from its opening seconds that Charlottesville would be discussed, but aside from the Times reporter, who'd actually been present at the violence, no one had much of substance to say about it. One guy, an NPR White House correspondent named Geoff Bennett, was the only person who addressed the historical issue, that the Confederate memorials were erected as part of a campaign to rewrite the history of the war and as propaganda for white supremacy after Reconstruction. There was no followup to his remarks, though: mostly the discussion was about how the controversy would affect President Trump. There was a brief bit about Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, and her denunciation of Trump. Good for Trump? Bad for Trump? You decide.
A surprising amount of time was devoted to the two police pilots who died when their helicopter crashed as they returned to headquarters after the rally. According to one report, the helicopter had been damaged years before, and this was thought to have some bearing on its failure. There doesn't seem to be any connection beyond the chronological between the Nazi rally and the policemen's deaths, but the framing seemed to be intended to cast them, along with Heather Heyer, as victims of white nationalism. Typical journalistic balance, I guess. But while their deaths were tragic for themselves, their families, and their colleagues, the pilots were not martyrs, except perhaps to cost-cutting measures.
The second, international, hour of 1A was more of the same. It was the morning after the terrorist attack in Barcelona, which also involved driving a vehicle into a crowd, so that was the lead story. Once again the aim seemed to be to fill time, with relatively little substance, and the substance revealed the usual tunnel vision. The Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Arabiya rightly spoke of the horror of families being targeted while they were just out enjoying a summer evening. It wouldn't have done, I suppose, to notice parallels to families in other parts of the world being killed by US missiles and drones while they were celebrating a wedding, or children killed by drones while they gathered firewood on a cold day. It's one thing to compare the Barcelona attack to the Charlottesville attack, and quite another to notice that killing innocent families living their day-to-day lives is standard operating procedure for the American imperium and its allies and clients.
There was also a disapproving reference to Trump's fondness for dictators. There was no acknowledgment of President Obama's fondness for dictators and military coups, let alone the long history of Washington's fondness for dictators and military coups. It wouldn't do to notice that; NPR never has.
A fund-raising spot on the Indianapolis affiliate I was tuned to featured a young woman (some managerial person at some other station) who gushed that NPR includes everybody, hedge-fund managers and miners! It reminds us that we're all in this together! ... A laudable sentiment, but how often do miners appear on NPR? Not very often. NPR has at least one program devoted to "business," but none, as far as I know, to Labor. That would be showing favoritism to special interests, I suppose.
It was easy for me to think of this, because I'd been listening for more than an hour to one of NPR's main morning news programs, 1A, which I'd heard before on other trips. Not only were no miners on hand for the discussion, all of the discussants were from commercial media: the New York Times was well-represented, and one was a former Olympic Gold Medalist who's now an "ESPN analyst." I always thought that one purpose of public broadcasting was to provide an alternative to the Usual Media Suspects; instead the corporate media have been colonizing the alternative. FAIR has documented this repeatedly over the years. News sources like Democracy Now and The Intercept aren't perfect, but they do provide alternative viewpoints and voices, with DN especially hosting people who'd never be given space on NPR.
1A let me know from its opening seconds that Charlottesville would be discussed, but aside from the Times reporter, who'd actually been present at the violence, no one had much of substance to say about it. One guy, an NPR White House correspondent named Geoff Bennett, was the only person who addressed the historical issue, that the Confederate memorials were erected as part of a campaign to rewrite the history of the war and as propaganda for white supremacy after Reconstruction. There was no followup to his remarks, though: mostly the discussion was about how the controversy would affect President Trump. There was a brief bit about Heather Heyer's mother, Susan Bro, and her denunciation of Trump. Good for Trump? Bad for Trump? You decide.
A surprising amount of time was devoted to the two police pilots who died when their helicopter crashed as they returned to headquarters after the rally. According to one report, the helicopter had been damaged years before, and this was thought to have some bearing on its failure. There doesn't seem to be any connection beyond the chronological between the Nazi rally and the policemen's deaths, but the framing seemed to be intended to cast them, along with Heather Heyer, as victims of white nationalism. Typical journalistic balance, I guess. But while their deaths were tragic for themselves, their families, and their colleagues, the pilots were not martyrs, except perhaps to cost-cutting measures.
The second, international, hour of 1A was more of the same. It was the morning after the terrorist attack in Barcelona, which also involved driving a vehicle into a crowd, so that was the lead story. Once again the aim seemed to be to fill time, with relatively little substance, and the substance revealed the usual tunnel vision. The Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Arabiya rightly spoke of the horror of families being targeted while they were just out enjoying a summer evening. It wouldn't have done, I suppose, to notice parallels to families in other parts of the world being killed by US missiles and drones while they were celebrating a wedding, or children killed by drones while they gathered firewood on a cold day. It's one thing to compare the Barcelona attack to the Charlottesville attack, and quite another to notice that killing innocent families living their day-to-day lives is standard operating procedure for the American imperium and its allies and clients.
There was also a disapproving reference to Trump's fondness for dictators. There was no acknowledgment of President Obama's fondness for dictators and military coups, let alone the long history of Washington's fondness for dictators and military coups. It wouldn't do to notice that; NPR never has.
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