Goodman - Ellen Goodman's latest

Goodman - Ellen Goodman's latest column from the Boston Glob is a keeper.

For all the wrong reasons, of course.

In this column, she covers new territory - attacking conservativetalkradio. The funniest quote of the lot is at the end:

We go into this war carrying the casualties of the prewar season: a kitbag of half-truths. What medium is now black and white and yellow all over? Stay tuned.

That, of course, after this column:

BOSTON -- This is how I spent the week before the war. Driving across the Florida landscape, locked in the alternate universe of talk radio.

I tuned in as an act of professional penance, and I'm sorry now that I didn't take my hands off the wheel to make notes.

Some straight lines are just. Too. Easy.

But I took away lasting memories of propaganda, a souvenir list of fact-free opinions delivered by a cast of angry baritones.

But since Ellen didn't take notes, we don't know what facts they lacked, or indeed what voices they were. We'll just have to take her word for it.

Somewhere between Orlando and Tampa, a host spent the morning touting the discovery of an Iraqi drone as the smoking gun in the case against Iraq. Reporters on the scene would describe this drone as a "weed whacker with wings."

Ellen Goodman's world is much like ours except that conservative stances never have any context.

There was another host, somewhere between Tampa and Fort Myers, who took antiwar women's groups angrily to task on the grounds that the women of Iraq were bitterly oppressed. He didn't seem to know that Iraq -- which surely oppresses both genders -- is a secular state where women are more equal than among our friends the Saudis.

Good thing I'm not driving.

That's right, Ms. Goodman - within the context of a society that has killed a million of its own citizens, imprisons political prisoners by the tens of thousands,where the secret police feed dissidents into plastic shredders as their families look on in mute horror, where wives and daughters are systematically raped by the secret police as their husbands and fathers are forced to watch (and as all wait to be murdered), where the government starves the peasantry to pay for rebuilding the military he squandered in 1991 - yes, Ellen, within that context, women are equal. In the same manner that men and women on a deflating life raft are equal.

On the last lap between Fort Myers and Naples, there was the assertion, repeated again and again, that Saddam was somewhere behind the terrorism of Sept. 11. Never mind that the CIA disagrees.

Never mind that it's irrelevant.

I am normally protected from talk radio by my day job, but it was no surprise that the hosts were all right-wing. That is, by now, a given. Some venture capitalists are trying to start a left-leaning network, but today it's as if one medium has been thoroughly ceded to the right, and in this case pro-war, wing.

Why is it that the left never analyses that fact beyond its most facile level? Why has an entire subdivision of the American media swung to the right?

It's worth a whole 'nother post to explain to the likes of Ellen Goodman why conservative voices came to revitalize an entirely moribund band of the radio dial; it'll take me hours to write up all the reasons. But one big one is this: to have a place free of Ellen Goodman!.

And her ilk, of course.

Remember reading about the Spanish-American War in 1898? Publishers like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer built a war constituency and circulation in symbiotic frenzy with headlines like "The Country Thrilled with War Fever." According to legend, William Randolph Hearst sent a telegram to his reporter that said, "You supply the pictures and I'll supply the war."

EXACTLY, Ellen Goodman!

The news media of 100 years ago was intrinsically biased, in the pockets of a small number of influential interests. They were unchecked by any independen media - even an opposing, equally-yellow one.

Had they had a "liberal talk-broadsheet" 100 years ago, perhaps the influence of the Hearsts and Pulitzers would have been ameliorated!

Today newspapers fret over ethics and hire ombudsmen and run correction boxes. The New York Post may blast the French and Germans with the headline "Axis of Weasel." But most of us have a "one hand" and "the other hand" and often wring them.

And after a day of hand-wringing and ombudsing, the mainstream media still considers Nina Totenberg and the New York Times "objective" and "mainstream", but labels John Stossel and Fox News "conservative".

See the problem, here?

I am not saying that this is Talk Radio's War. It's not. It's this administration's war and will be, like it or not, this country's war. There has been enough reason for knowledgeable people with strong moral sensibilities to disagree about the short-term and long-run gains, about the risks of war and the risks of delay.

But talk radio has followed the leader. That leader, George W. Bush, has openly rejected nuance, embraced simplicity, applied spin when facts were enough. He has stayed "on message," unembarrassed to tell us that "I don't see many shades of gray in this world." So too talk radio, a medium that is equally black and white, us and them, good and evil. Talk radio has become the Bush National Radio Network, a support system for the pro-war movement.

Absent, of course, is that the mainstream media were unabashedly pro-Clinton, when he was in office. Absent, of course, the vacuous illogic the "mainstream" media tossed at Ronald Reagan - unsuccessfully - during his presidency.

Present, however, is all of the numbing arrogance that led to the rise of conservativetalkradio in the first place.

Posted by Mitch at March 21, 2003 08:39 AM