How far through the looking glass are we? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I thought I would live to see a lot of things.<\/p>
One of them was never \u201cMatt Taibb as a principled dissenter from the main stream media is narrative\u201d.<\/p><\/p>\n\n\n\n
And yet, here we are<\/a>. In this case, discussing his collection of Cold War Soviet newspapers:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Reality in Soviet news was 100% binary, with all people either heroes or villains, and the villains all in league with one another (an SR was no better than a fascist or a \u201cRight-Trotskyite Bandit,\u201d a kind of proto-horseshoe theory). Other ideas were not represented, except to be attacked and deconstructed. Also, since anything good was all good, politicians were not described as people at all but paragons of limitless virtue \u2014 95% of most issues of Pravda <\/em>or Izvestia <\/em>were just names of party leaders surrounded by lists of applause-words, like \u201cglittering,\u201d \u201cfull-hearted,\u201d \u201cwise,\u201d \u201cmighty,\u201d \u201ccourageous,\u201d \u201cin complete moral-political union with the people,\u201d etc. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Some of the headlines in the U.S. press lately sound suspiciously like this kind of work:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Biden stimulus showers money on Americans, sharply cutting poverty <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Champion of the middle class comes to the aid of the poor<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n \u2014 Biden’s historic victory for America <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n The most Soviet of the recent efforts didn\u2019t have a classically Soviet headline. \u201cComedians are struggling to parody Biden. Let\u2019s hope this doesn\u2019t last<\/a>,\u201d read the Washington Post <\/em>opinion piece by Richard Zoglin, arguing that Biden is the first president in generations who might be \u201cimpervious to impressionists.\u201d Zoglin contended Biden is \u201cimpregnable\u201d to parody, his voice being too \u201cdevoid of obvious quirks,\u201d his manner too \u201cmuted and self-effacing\u201d to offer comedians much to work with. He was talking about this person<\/a>. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Forget that the \u201cimpregnable to parody\u201d pol spent the last campaign year jamming fingers in the sternums of voters, challenging them to pushup contests, calling them \u201clying dog-faced pony soldiers,\u201d and forgetting what state he was in. Biden, on the day Zoglin ran his piece, couldn\u2019t remember the name of his Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, and referred to the Department of Defense as \u201cthat outfit over there\u201d:<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n The whole thing is worth a read, unless you want to cling to any illusions that the “elite” media is anything like what you were taught in Journalism 101. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How far through the looking glass are we? I thought I would live to see a lot of things. One of them was never \u201cMatt Taibb as a principled dissenter from the main stream media is narrative\u201d. And yet, here we are. In this case, discussing his collection of Cold War Soviet newspapers: Reality in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-78379","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-tc-media-bias"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78379","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=78379"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78379\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":78388,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/78379\/revisions\/78388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=78379"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=78379"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=78379"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}