Media Complicity

Roger Simon has a superb post on the media's deafening silence when their time came to defend Salman Rushdie against what Simon calls "enemies of the Enlightenment." Simon refers to a quote from Glenn Reynolds that bothered me in the same and a different way. Over the weekend Professor Reynolds said:

"Frankly, I think the best argument for electing a Democrat as President is that as long as a Republican is in office the media powers-that-be will refuse to condemn even the worst atrocities on the part of Islamists, for fear of helping the real enemy in the White House."

That upset Simon and me as lovers of freedom -- and further upset me as a partisan hack. Must we really put Senator Obama in the White House to nationalize medicine in the name of freedom? That's a level of Pragmatism I'm not ready to try.

Simon continues to darkly -- but not unconvincingly -- claim that the Iraq War was doomed because of media bias, exacerbated by administration partisanship.

The same prejudices that Rutten describes in his Rushdie article are the ones that have seriously undermined the possibility of victory for democracy in Iraq. A media that could call obvious fascists and religious fascists "insurgents" (a term once reserved for Pancho Villa) in the interest of "objectivity" encouraged a specious atmosphere of moral equivalence to democracy from the start. Whether this was conscious or unconscious is beside the point. Whatever it was, our enemies, the enemies of the Enlightenment, seized on it for propaganda purposes and continue to do so. (Note that in the new Daniel Pearl movie, Pearl's beheading is not even shown - that was praised as tasteful by Roger Ebert.) And, as everyone knows, the playing field of asymmetrical war is the media, far more than the battlefield. Only in the world of public opinion can we be defeated.

Dark days. Simon quotes Arthur Miller and it's not out of place.

Media and Blogging Posted by jk at June 25, 2007 11:55 AM