Manufacturing Consent, Updated

I've been reading Glenn Greenwald's blog for a long time, from the days when it was just a lonely, detached site floating in the blogosphere to its present, prominent position on Salon.com. In the old days it was called "Unclaimed Territory," and that's still the general idea. Glenn has found a niche from which to bedevil and harass the Establishment Pundits, and he has a great time doing it.

I would say that he has two central themes. The first is that Beltway Conventional Wisdom, that consensus of elite opinion formed by the politicians and the toadying journalists who "cover" them, often varies to a marked degree from the general consensus of opinion among Ordinary Americans, that irrelevant cohort the politicians nominally represent but ignore completely when it gets in the way of instructions from their corporate lobbyist masters. The second idea Glenn pounds away at is the general sense that the Media-Political Complex has developed a kind of self-protective ethos which refuses to impose any sort of accountability or responsibility on the elites (Media or Political) so long as the act in question is (a) performed by one of them and (b) consistent with the Beltway Conventional Wisdom.

A couple of examples suffice to illustrate the ideas. On the torture question, the Establishment Punditocracy, such as David Broder of the Washington Post, Jonathan Alter of Newsweek or Joe Klein (famous anonymous author of Primary Colors) argue against any sort of investigation or prosecution of Bush officials (including the low-level CIA interrogators who will apparently be the "target" of Eric Holder's Abu Ghraib style whitewash) is a "criminalization of policy differences," "retributive," and altogether Not Done. By and large, Barack Obama has gone along with the Beltway approach, although he hems and haws as if he were seriously considering doing something else (he won't, under the principle that past criminal acts are not the proper subject of present prosecution; only future possible acts should be punished now through preventive detention of those who are not presently guilty but might be if we give them a chance. If you have any doubt that we now live completely in an Orwellian universe, re-read that last part and absorb that it describes present reality).

The torture in question includes waterboarding, but also many other things which have been done to detainees in the Great War on Terror which clearly violate the Geneva Conventions. These are war crimes and felonies under U.S. and international law. There's no serious debate about that anymore. We're not going to do anything about it, however, and thus the Obama Administration has decided to violate the mandatory provisions of the Convention Against Torture (signed by Reagan) which require that we do.

In that last sentence I previewed the trick (I like to think of it as a technique) which Glenn uses over and over to nail the Beltway Blowhards. Glenn's a lawyer turned writer but he has not forgotten a basic technique of cross-examination: the restatement of the effect of words used by the person testifying. Broder, Alter, Klein, et al write in high-minded prose about the pressing needs of the country and echo (or originate) the call to "look forward" which Barack also originated (or now echoes) rather than back at the past, and to excuse the excesses (as they're daintily called) of the Bush Gang to avoid a partisan fight which spoils the happy camaraderie at the cocktail parties in Georgetown the "journalists" and politicians all like to attend together. This stuff sounds good, I guess, but what Glenn does is to restate their position in ways that make these self-regarding "liberals" squirm with discomfort. Greenwald writes that their position is one of "insistence that there be no investigations" and that political elites must never be held to the same standards regarding criminality which apply to all other Americans. This is what Broder/Alter/Klein are actually arguing, but they can't stand the idea of another journalist calling them on their shit so blatantly, so inescapably. So lately (and this is the fun part) Alter (who's writing a book on Obama and doesn't want to mess up his access) and Klein (at least these two) have begun a kind of vendetta against Greenwald to discredit him as "irresponsible" and "untrustworthy." Of course, what else could he be: he's not one of the Insiders.

All of which Greenwald simply reproduces in his own column.

The other theme running through Greenwald's blogs is similar to the first but slightly different. This is the idea that the actual consensus of opinion in the United States is other than what it is, and the difference results from the refraction of reality through the prism of Beltway priorities. Glenn hilariously dissects a recent "round table" on Meet the Press where Tom Friedman (the neocons' darling at the NY Times), Harold Ford Jr., Rudy Giuliani and Tom Brokaw "debate" the Afghanistan war. As Glenn points out, 57% of the American populace now oppose this dumb war but you would never, for a second, deduce this reality from listening to these guys talk. All that is discussed in such a round table are the nuances of how we should continue the war indefinitely. Friedman, in passing and between Serious Pronouncements, made a point of attacking the Internet, and one can imagine why. Before blogging became so dominant, Porn-Stache Tom (h/t: Matt Taiibi) never had his sacred texts challenged by the hoi polloi at large, such as his shameless cheerleading for the Iraq invasion (in which he said that the real purpose of the invasion was to say to the Muslim world: "Suck..On..This"). Thanks to the many in the Blogosphere who have challenged his poorly written screeds, we now know that he's (a) completely inconsistent and (b) a dim bulb who should not be setting policy for the local Rotary Club, let alone Washington, D.C. The incredible damage he has done with his airhead pontificating in favor of Flat World trade policies and unnecessary, ruinously expensive invasions makes one tremble for the country. This guy is an Opinion Maker?

I don't know if Glenn appreciates how much of the theoretical groundwork for his writing was laid by the erratic genius Noam Chomsky, but I think Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent presaged a lot of what Greenwald is doing. Chomsky was ahead of his time and seemed radical in suggesting that the "range" of opinion among a few corporately-held media outlets and the politicians they kowtow to for access would inevitably narrow until, for example, the two choices for Aghanistan become (1) increasing the disaster with more troops and money or (2) maintaining the disaster by simply doing what we're doing ad infinitum. Doing something sane and logical, like packing up and leaving, is not something, as Glenn says archly, that Serious people in the Beltway ever consider. Chomsky's nightmare vision is now our everyday reality. Prophets are rarely honored in their time.

Look How They Massacred My Boy

I took a paternal interest in Hurricane Gustav from the very beginning. I knew him when he was just a lonely tropical depression out there in the Caribbean, trying to make his way in the world of big time weather, trying to attract the kind of attention from Coriolis-bent inrushing winds (sort of like campaign contributions) that build a nascent hurricane into a full-fledged monster storm. I could follow him on the NOAA website of the National Hurricane Center, the Public Advisories he generated, the 3- and 5-day cones of the path ahead. He waxed and waned, ol' Gus did, sometimes a Tropical Storm, sometimes a Hurricane, Cat-1.

He started getting it together after he roughed up Haiti and the Dominican Republic. He knew, of course, that destroying "buildings" on Hispaniola is not the real deal, because construction codes are pretty lax there. Maybe it made him a New Haven star, but Haiti is just not Broadway. After Hispaniola, Gus lost it. His confidence, his mojo, I don't know. He dropped back into Tropical Storm territory as he made the turn and headed north toward Cuba, the extreme western end of the island and the Isla de Juventud. It was there that Gus gave us a preview of coming attractions. Reaching deep into his eye and holding his breath (it's difficult to get these pathetic fallacies spot on when dealing with a hurricane), he lowered his central pressure into the 940 millibar range and the winds screamed as they topped 145 mph. Cat-4, baby, and he pummeled the Isle of Youth like there was no tomorrow. I began to suspect at that point that Gustav was an anti-Castro Republican, but politics seemed out of place when talking about a tropical cyclone of this power.

I'd been following Gustav for about 4 days before he made landfall at CNN and the hyper-excitable Chad Myers, their resident hurricane "expert." As Hurricane Hanna approaches North Florida, you can run the following experiment yourself: just go to the National Hurricane Center website, check the "Public Advisory" updates on the storm, and see if EVERYTHING Chad says, at great length and with a worked-up frenzy, isn't anticipated in the NOAA assessment. Now, there's a reason for this: Chad, or CNN generally, just doesn't have any way of knowing what's going on in the eye of a hurricane without those fearless pilots who fly out over the monster and drop their instruments into the storm to measure air pressure and wind speed. The hurricane tracks which NOAA generates are uncannily accurate; while Gus was still over Cuba, the 5-day cone's central track took it exactly over his point of ultimate landfall. It's hilarious, however, to watch Chad Myers breathlessly "update" us on the hurricane's progress as he reads the NHC's latest advisory on his teleprompter, then turns to his big screen loaded with NOAA satellite pictures (also available on the website) and spells it all out.

Of course, CNN also features reporters who stand in the wind and rain and report that...it's windy and rainy. Everyone's favorite is Anderson Cooper, stationed again in New Orleans. I won't speculate why Anderson likes spending so much time in New Orleans; this one isn't that kind of blog entry. He has perfect Hurricane Hair, and I think that's how he got the job. His thick, brushy gray hair acts as a kind of weathervane of the cyclone's progress. It doesn't swirl around, which would be distracting; it just gets pushed into a mound on one side of his head or the other. If you know that cyclones in the Northern Hemisphere spin counter-clockwise, you can make a first approximation of the hurricane's position by looking at Anderson's hair. If he's facing south on Bourbon Street and the hair has piled up on the right side of his head, then Gustav is just making landfall. The somewhat stupid part of stationing Anderson in New Orleans was that there were no hurricane force winds in NOLA this time around. It was too far away from Gus's center (Cat-1 force winds extended out about 70 miles, something which Chad Myers knew from reading the NOAA website). So what, exactly, was Cooper reporting?

Oh well. Gustav never got back to his Cuban glory, even out in the middle of the "bath tub," as the weather guys call the deep, warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Don't ask me why. He eased up to a Cat-2 when he came ashore. I think he pulled his punches, frankly. The thing is, he and his sibling hurricanes know their records are tainted at this point. Hurricanes Betsy, Donna, even Andrew, operated under the old regime of the "dead ball," before global warming really kicked in. Gus, Hanna, eventually Ike (you'll start hearing about him soon), work with the juice of higher ocean temperatures, and they know they'll never get full respect. If Betsy was a Babe Ruth among classic hurricanes, Gus was Barry Bonds. He's just a Tropical Depression at this point, dropping the rest of the water he picked up over the Gulf, blowing himself out.

The thing is, despite all the false expectations created for him by CNN, by their secret wish he would hit New Orleans head-on as a Category 5 and drown the city, I just want him to know I'm still proud of him. He did the best he could.

Iowa Drowns While the MSM Mourns

It was epic bad timing for Eastern Iowa to disappear beneath the Cedar River around the same time as Tim Russert threw a coronary clot. I mean no disrespect; Mr. Russert seemed like a jolly enough soul, and his death is a tragedy to his family. I did not think he was a particularly great journalist, but increasingly there is no such thing. One would never know this from the nonstop electronic keening which has gone on over the weekend while the Cedar River crested at 31 feet during a 500-year flood.

Tim Russert was part of the mainstream apparatus which "manufactures consent," in the irreplaceable term coined by Noam Chomsky. It was Noam's sharp insight that the media tend to cluster around some median ideological point, wheresoever it is pushed by social and political processes. This point becomes the New Normal, and over the last thirty years in the United States, the New Normal is the New Capitalist Right. Mainstream, respectable journalists cannot stray outside the limits of a tiny bandwidth left or right of this point. So, for example, if the President sets up a regime which disregards the Fourth Amendment rights of American citizens, through felonious spying in contravention of the FISA law; or which breaches the norms of human decency in torturing prisoners in violation of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, TV guys like Tim Russert voice small but carefully inoffensive complaints in the form of "hard-hitting" questions of their Sunday morning guests. These questions are often directed to the miscreants directly responsible for the outrage at issue. Yet at the end of the interview, Big Tim (for years I thought he was Randy Quaid) would smile and thank Karl Rove or Dick Cheney for "comin' on the show," and we all felt better because the issue had been "aired out."

Herr Russert of Das Reich TV: Herr Eichmann, you've taken some real heat for setting up this train system for transporting all these European Jews to the gas chambers. I want to show you a quote from 1943 [shows quote]. Isn't that a little inconsistent with your claim now that you thought they were all headed to banking conventions in Poland?

Herr Eichmann: Tim, we can play these gotcha games all morning, if you want to. Both sides obviously have arguments they can make. At the end of the day, what me and the others in the High Command are all about is doing the work of the German Volk.

Herr Russert: I just wanna thank you, Adolf, for comin' on Das Show.

If Tim Russert had been such a "giant" of the Fourth Estate, why did he casually enable, like the rest of his colleagues in the MSM, the shredding of the United States Constitution and the entanglement of the country in a disastrous war of choice? So what's all this public display of grief about? What I think: it's another show, and it's self-aggrandizement. I would delicately point out that not long after Mr. Russert's heart went into fibrillation, he lost consciousness. From that point forward, he was unaware of anything Tom Brokaw or Barbara Walters or Chris Matthews had to say about him. So what these people were really doing in their orgy of hagiography was reminding us of what important honchos they are, because really, they're just like Tim, and this sort of tasteless, 24/7 oversaturated coverage (like the soils of Iowa) is what they do. They talk up, under and around any topic which comes into their cross-hairs, and they talk it to death. They even talk death to death. And the purpose of their talking is never to have a distinct or subversive point of view, but only to mouth over and over whatever consensus opinion fits within the Chomsky Bandwidth; in this case, that Russert was a Giant, A Unique Voice, The Indispensable Conscience of a Nation.

Probably not. He was a well-paid employee of NBC and MSNBC. He was the host of "Meet the Press." He went along to get along and played the fake controversy game to perfection, shot the breeze with both "sides" which are positioned about two nanometers left and right of the MSNBC midpoint. His family will miss him. The country will move on to the next manufactured hero.