While both projects are noble, not to mention occasionally earnest, they are always at a disadvantage, as the August Town Halls proved. While it is important to siphon the crap out of our public discourse as much as possible, the root problem is not one of ideology or even class cohesion (it seems that Somerby's point at the Howler). Rather, it is our cultural desire for spectacle and the shift from "truth" to "credibility" as a test of reliability.
We no longer live in a time when "truth" and "falsehood", at least as tests of factual accuracy, have any currency. All that one needs is "credibility". If you don't believe me, ask Christopher Lasch (from pp. 74-75):
[T]he rise of mass media makes the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evalusation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information.
. . . President Nixon's press sexretary, Ron Ziegler, admitted that his previous statements on Watergate had become "inoperative". Many commentators assumed that Ziegler was groping for a euphemistic way of saying that he had lied. What he meant, however, was that his earlier statements were no longer believable. Not their falsity but their inability to command assent rendered them "inoperative." The question of whether they were true or not was beside the point.
Related to this notion of "credibility" as a test of public statements - a notion that clarifies the infuriating stupidity of journalists from Judith Miller's multiple stories in the New York Times in the run-up to the Iraq War sourced to a single individual whose worth was always in question by his official handlers to Tim Russert's being played by the Bush White House because of his publicly-admitted deference and willingness to extend the benefit of the doubt to them - is the whole concept of what Daniel Boorstin refers to as the "pseudo-event", which Lasch expands under the heading, "Politics as Spectacle". He says of Nixon that "the politics of spectacle reached a tragicomic climax" during his Administration; fortunately for him, Lasch died before the full flowering of the Bush Administration. From p.78:
Systems analysts and "social accountant" take it as an article of faith that "with the growth of the complexity of society," as one of them, Albert Biderman, once put it, "immediate experience with its events play an increasingly smaller role as a source of information and basis of judgment in contrast to symbolically mediated information about these events." But the substitution of symbolically mediated information for immediate experience - of pseudo-events for real events - has not made government more rational and efficient, as both the technocrats and their critics assume. On the contrary, it has given rise to a pervasive air of unreality, which ultimately befuddles the decision makers themselves. The contagion of unintelligibility spreads through all levels of government. It is not merely that propagandists fall victim to their own propaganda; the problem foes deeper. When politicians and administrators have no other aim than to sell their leadership to the public, they deprive themselves of intelligible standards by which to define the goals of specific policies or to evaluate success or failure.
So, it doesn't matter that thousands of Americans died afterward; when President Bush landed on a carrier and gave a speech saying that the war in Iraq was over, with a banner hanging behind him proclaiming "Mission Accomplished", that was all that was needed. Pointing out the facts of the matter were and still are irrelevant. All that really mattered were those images, so reminiscent of bad Hollywood films, giving the President an air of authority and even hyper-masculinity that all Presidents should have. This combination of "credibility" and the pseudo-event is indeed poisonous to our politics, yet there seems to be no way to combat it as long as we continue to allow these fake non-events to be considered worthy of coverage. Were ours not a pathological society, no news bureau would cover such a stage-managed piece of crap as a United States President pretending he's Tom Cruise in Top Gun. Were we part of a healthy society, Sarah Palin wouldn't have made it out of Wasilia, let alone to the VP spot on the national Republican ticket.
I would like to repeat that it is important to hold the media accountable for the many misrepresentations and falsehoods they offer the public; yet, it would seem that the target is misplaced. The source of the problem lies in our willingness to tolerate "credibility" as a test of worthiness.
