The magic of the mainstream media changes even the plainest words into face powder

Larry Kummer, Editor

17 years ago

A major theme of this site is America’s broken connection with reality. The late John Boyd (Colonel, USAF) described this connection as our observation-orientation-decision-action-loop (the OODA loop). A key component of the OODA loop for western societies is the mainstream media. As is obvious by now, America’s professional media has decayed durign the past few decades. A large fraction of America (both conservative and liberal) no longer considers it a reliable source of information. Even worse for the professional media’s survival, technological change has destroyed its business model.

This post gives a few excerpts from Lewis Laptham’s Money and Class in America (1988). At the end of this post are links to other posts discussing the media.

We prefer the purity of illusions to untidy facts — page 119

… The vast majority of the American people prefer the purity of illusions. The society chooses to believe that he world’s evil doesn’t reside in men but exists, like the air, in the space between them. Like the late Howard Hughes hiding on a roof of a Las Vegas hotel from the armies of invading bacteria, the innocent nation affects a sensibility grown too refined for the world.

The media cateer to the afflication by their incessant dwelling on the fear of disease, crime, foreigners, drugs, toxins, poverty, and death. urgent bulletins about hese seven ddeadly contagions constitute most of what passes for the news.

Journalists are rewarded for their primary social duty — page 126

If the wisdom of the rich consists in what the rich want to hear and think about themselves, it is not surprising that the rich nation confers its richest rewards on those writers who can preserve the illusions of innocence. Like the bureaucrats who formulate government policy, the artisans of the media make elaborate and cosmetic use of euphemism. They have a talent for blurring and softening the meaning of words, for not calling things by their right names, and the best of them can change even the plainest words into face powder.

Rumors of War — page 193

God knows we try hard enough. We send camera crews to the uttermost ends of the earth, decorate the front pages of our newspapers with foreign names and datelines, endow learned journals and research institutions, dispatch our corporate executives to the Aspen Institute for weeks of earnest briefings — mostly to no avail. The American correspondents don’t get sent to the important posts in Moscow, Tel Aviv or London unless their editors already know their agents will confirm the presumptions already in place.

… In one of his books of memoirs, Harrison Salisbury, the foreign correspondent of the New York Times, describes a comparable incident during his tour of duty in Moscow. The editors in New York somehow had become convinced – possibly because of an important rumor overheard at and important dinner party — that the Soviet Union was about to invade Western Europe. They told Salisbury to count the number of tanks and infantry divisions massed on the Polish and Eat German frontiers.

Salisbury, of course, found neither tanks nor infantry divisions for the simple reason that none wer present. Still the editors in New York preferred the truth of their own revelations. It took Salisbury the better part of a month, filing voluminous cables, telegrams, and dispatches, to persuade them to reluctantly abandon their hope of war.

This anecdote could be told today, as in the rumors of the US naval armada sailing to attack Iran. Both prestigious bloggers and mainstream media reported this as fact. These posts describe the rise and fall of this story.

More rumors of war: our naval armada has sailed to Iran!, 9 August 2008 — Tracing the origin of these rumors.
Update on the rumored armada sailing to Iran, 13 August 2008 — With updates from Stratfor and Debkafile.
A US naval armada is en route to blockade Iran and start WWIII (the story gets better every day), 14 August 2008 — More details from one of the bloggers who shot this story into cyberspace, and an official US denial.
UPI reports on the multi-national armada sailing to Iran, 15 August 2008
Stop the presses: no naval armada has sailed to blockade Iran!, 20 August 2008

Afterword

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