Tuesday, July 27, 2010

RW/Media Codependency

E.J. Dionne Jr. at The Washington Post making sense:

The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that "fairness" requires treating extremist rants as "one side of the story."


On the face of it, it's a mystery how we got here... Why do we pretend RW propagandists have a valid case? Why do we dignify the 5th-grade nihilism of the lunatic fringes by taking it so seriously? Why don't we just call bullsh*t en masse and quit letting idiots frame the debate? C'mon people... what the f*ck is wrong with us?

But there is no mystery. Just follow the money... It's the freakin' media-conservative complex.

At this point, I'm not going to launch into some yawn-worthy conspiracy theory that would endow either conservative pols or media nabobs with more smarts than either deserve. Nope. It ain't like that. It's not so much a ruthlessly planned conspiracy, more a faintly pathetic mutual survival pact made between intellectually bankrupt media corporations on the one hand and intellectually bankrupt right wingers on the other. It's a deal between news media that have shed journalistic integrity and devolved into plain money-making enterprises and a political right wing that's similarly devolved into nothing more than a racketeering operation with no pretense of political integrity. Now each completes the other and keeps them afloat despite their patently massive inadequacies. No grand conspiracy, just a miserable form of codependency.

If a fix was not in, how could you explain grown adults with journalism degrees taking Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachman and the various teabag fetishists seriously? It's a conspiracy of money-grubbers manufacturing a reality that's dumb enough to make them look smart. And they've done so well at it that even the non-idiot public and the government itself has been sucked into pretending their reality is the reality.

I'd say Dionne is right on the money. Shame the money is all tied up in stupid right now and the RW/Media codepency system is too profitable to be busted.

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