culture industry - Ailes edition

1. NYT article on Roger Ailes and his pernicious influence. ("Fox chief at the pinnacle of news and politics") Good Perlstein quote that provides good hook to use in culture war II week.

2. Also, Digby writes about the Post ombudsman finally addressing the paper's outsourcing of content to the right-wing Peterson group Fiscal Times. Opening section:

The Washington Post ombudsman finally responded to the complaints about the paper's inappropriate relationship with Pete Peterson and his new "news" operation the Fiscal Times. He says there's nothing wrong with it because Peterson has hired good reporters and the stories will be edited by the paper's staff.

Dean Baker wonders if he would say the same thing if the paper contacted with the NRAs "Firearms Gazette" or the tobacco industry's "Smoking Today." After all, he seems to think that theFiscal (End) Times can be trusted, with safeguards, to write unbiased copy. But here's the rub:

Can anyone imagine the Peterson Foundation putting a story showing how much the failure of the Fed to combat the housing bubble added to country's debt? How about a piece that showed that the U.S. deficit problem is driven entirely by our broken health care system?

No, these pieces, or many others like them, are not going to run in the Fiscal Times, because that is not what Peter Peterson wants to buy with his millions. And, the very good reporters who have signed up to work for the Fiscal Times know very well what the boss wants, even if he does not intervene directly in their reporting.

Culture industry meets culture war! Good for the last weeks.

3. Glen Greenwald on the new court gossip book that's dominated news the last few days. First two grafs suffice:

No event in recent memory has stimulated the excitment and interest of Washington political reporters like the release of Mark Halperin and John Heilemann's new book,Game Change, and that reaction tells you all you need to know about our press corps. By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is pouring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.

This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent littleVersailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting howintensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.

As he notes in closing: The people who brought you two years of Bill Clinton's penis haven't gone anywhere. They've only gotten stronger.

Remember remember 11 November

LGM argues that 11/11 shouldn't just be a day for veterans, but for WWI. But that will never happen.

Uses the post as an excuse to link Robert Bourne's 1918 essay that gave us the famous quote "War is the health of the state." I had not read that in a long time - would make a fantastic pairing with Weber for week 2 of CP.

The gist: In republics, the state fades - or at least we think that it does. In reality it lies dormant waiting for war to allow it to take over again.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

LGM commentary reminds us of Bourne's own situation when he wrote this - destitute, because he was driven from opinion journalism by the Wilsonian insanity of WWI.