Channel-surfing, I just came upon the propaganda film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West on Fox.

This is the point at which I start to sound a little wobbly about propaganda. Or, more precisely, counter-propaganda. ‘Cause that’s what it is. A very strong dose.

Blech.

Yesterday I wrote about CNN, Glenn Beck, and the power of infotainment.

Beck, on Paula Zahn’s show to promote his “special” about Islamic extremism, referred to himself as a “rodeo clown” (not a journalist).

Americans seem to love a rodeo:

Beck #1 In Demo On Cable News Wed.
Headline News host Glenn Beck delivered his best ratings ever on Wednesday night, with 547,000 demo viewers at 7pm and 384,000 demo viewers at 9. ‘Glenn Beck’ was the #1 cable show in the demo for the night.
Among total viewers, Beck averaged 1,026,000 at 7 and 970,000 at 9. That’s more than double Beck’s previous high.

The ratings spike is thanks in large part to a major ad campaign for Beck’s special report, titled “Exposed: The Extremist Agenda…”

(via TVNewser)

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of The New Republic, is the latest public intellectual to examine both the situation in Iraq and his conscience. Like the rest of us supporters of the overthrow of Saddam—”liberal hawks,” I suppose—he is torn about what we should do. He concludes that we should do anything and everything that might work.

But not before looking at the roots of the present problem. After finding fault with the neoconservatives whose ideas caught fire with Bush as they had with Cheney before him, and after damning the non-planning Unholy Trio (Bush, Rumsfeld, and Cheney), Wieseltier makes a brave and controversial statement:

It seems increasingly clear to me that the blame for the violence in Iraq, and for its frenzied recoil from what Fouad Ajami hopefully called “the foreigner’s gift,” belongs to the Iraqis. Gifts must not be only given, they must also be received. I say this without condescension. Quite the contrary: the denial of the historical agency of the people of Iraq is the real condescension. For three-and-a-half years, the Iraqis have been a free people. What have they done with their freedom?

As terrorized and intimidated as the Iraqi people are—and I want to make clear that I am sickened by the violence and by our seeming inability to stop it, and that the level of violence makes life in that country unacceptable by even the lowest standards that we would tolerate in the West—I have to agree that they are free—free of the totalitarian nightmare of Saddam and the Baath party. And this is not a matter of semantics. Nor are American “chickenhawks” the only ones talking about it.

In August, I quoted Mohammed at Iraq the Model, who wrote about his visit to Egypt (which we in the West consider “free,” if “authoritarian”) [emphasis mine]:

It may sound a bit odd but that’s really what I felt in Egypt that I don’t feel in my war-torn city; for the first time in 3 years I felt the restrains of government…I told one of my colleagues I feel safe in Baghdad despite the dangers, I may feel afraid of terrorists or random violence but I never fear the government and that’s not only how I feel, Iraqis are not afraid of expressing their differences with the authority because we in Iraq have more or les became part of that authority the day we elected our representatives while terrorists and militias are nothing more than temporary phenomenon that unlike constitution and elections have no solid foundations.

Mohammed paints a picture of Iraqis who are willing to fight for their freedom:

Of course our democratic foundations need a lot of work to meet our aspirations but we are walking this road and none of us is willing to go back and maybe the three thousands that were murdered last month tell that Iraqis are ready to pay the price and fight to preserve and improve our achievements. The magnitude of the change explains the confusion in some of our steps but we have not given up and we’re not ready to surrender, not yet.

In the absence of evidence about Iraqi freedom fighters such as Mohammed describes, people like me—who honor the freedom fighters we knew because we are the beneficiaries of their sacrifices—are left with grave doubts about Iraqis. Such as I expressed here.

This does not remove one iota of the responsibility we bear for our own terrible failures—of commission and omission—in Iraq. Nevertheless: Iraqis do have two of the freedoms—freedom of expression and freedom of the press—that constitute political freedom. And it is not only condescending but destructive to deprive them the dignity of human agency (and, yes, responsibility for their agency, or non-agency) which makes them responsible for the blood they spill, too, and for making a better life for their children.

Seriously, folks. Reuters is reporting that Israel is using nanotechnology to fight terrorism—in an unusual way:

Israel is using nanotechnology to try to create a robot no bigger than a hornet that would be able to chase, photograph and kill its targets, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday.

The flying robot, nicknamed the “bionic hornet”, would be able to navigate its way down narrow alleyways to target otherwise unreachable enemies such as rocket launchers, the daily Yedioth Ahronoth said.

It is one of several weapons being developed by scientists to combat militants, it said. Others include super gloves that would give the user the strength of a “bionic man” and miniature sensors to detect suicide bombers.

Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres delivers his opinion matter-of-factly, as usual.

“The war in Lebanon proved that we need smaller weaponry. It’s illogical to send a plane worth $100 million against a suicidal terrorist. So we are building futuristic weapons,” Peres said.

Is it true or is it disinformation?
Never can tell!
That’s our new world, and welcome to it.

(via the indispensable Memeorandum)

On Reliable Sources this past Sunday (five days ago) Howard Kurtz asked his colleague Candy Crowley if the media wasn’t looking forward to having someone else to bash (Democrats instead of the usual Republicans) for a change. (She was noncommittal, though she finally agreed that the press loves a good story.) The next day, he followed it up with a piece in the Washington Post, for those who hadn’t seen his program. (I wrote about it here.)

A mere three days later (yesterday), in the wake of the humiliating hammering Nancy Pelosi received at the hands of her caucus, who voted for their choice for Majority Leader over her “choice,” Digby wrote:

Man are these catty little MSNBC snots enjoying their full-on Demo bitch fest. They are partying like it’s 1999. Norah O’Donnell, Lawrence O’Donnell, Mary Ann Akers and some other person I don’t know have just spent half an hour discussing the fact that Nancy Pelosi ruined her own honeymoon and now it is really quesionable whether she can lead. Meanwhile, the dirty netroots and Howard Dean must have done something wrong because James Carville is hanging out all the Democratic dirty laundry (while his wife cackles with glee, no doubt) and he wouldn’t do that unless there was something to it.

After a thorough discussion of how hapless the Democratic nerds have already proven to be, Mary Ann Akers whispers that reporters all over town are “loving” this story. …

The spite girls are back in town.

Well, yeah. But this time they have another girl in their sights. Bill Clinton may soon discover that he got off easy.

That’s infotainment!

I must be living in a bubble, ’cause O. J.’s “confession,” which is causing such worries in the book trade and such hand-wringing on the editorial pages elicits a mere shrug from the Cool Kids.

Here’s Brian Doherty at Hit and Run:

This New York Daily News story covers the basics of booksellers’ impotent rage, Judith Regan’s beaten-girlfriend-motivated, totally public-service-based desire to publish the girlfriend-slashing confessions/fantasies of OJ, and the interesting detail that she sold it as a pig in a poke to many booksellers, who were apparently relatively eager to purchase “Untitled by Anonymous” when it comes from ReganBooks (owned by Rupert Murdoch, for what it’s worth.)

That’s a pretty interesting take: he doesn’t even pretend to pay lip service to the families of the victims.

This is one cruel culture we’re living in. No wonder infotainment rules: it’s the new bread-and-circuses.

This morning I said that everyone who works in the media is interested in his/her career much more than in his/her audience. Clever, successful, edgy, reprehensible Judith Regan—responsible for allowing O. J. Simpson to throw his steaming piles of blood-soaked feces into the maws of the spectators at the New Circus Maximus—doesn’t call that into question so much as underscore the extraordinary tension that can exist between those two poles.***

Michael Cader of PublishersMarketplace (and PublishersLunch) gives all the inside scoop, with links, as he does the parsing [subscription only].

If You Can Believe It
Judith Regan’s bizarre 2,200-word statement should be read in full rather than through newspaper excerpts. The gist, as you probably know, is that she’s publishing the book because her ex-husband abused her. That and: “I made the decision to publish this book, and to sit face to face with the killer, because I wanted him, and the men who broke my heart and your hearts, to tell the truth, to confess their sins, to do penance and to amend their lives.”

If She Really Wanted to Get the Message Out
Why did Regan’s statement go semi-exclusively first to the Drudge Report, and then run exclusively in full in today’s Murdoch Post to help sell papers?
Drudge
Post

If He Confessed
Regan acknowledges that Simpson doesn’t say he committed the murders, and the hypothetical positioning of the text could be read as a denial rather than admission. Rather, she’s relying on ex-CIA agent Phil Houston, who says, “When killers confess, the way they often do it is by creating a hypothetical.”

If He Wrote It
I wonder how many of those killers hire “an uncredited ghostwriter” (NYT) to write their hypothetical confessions for them?

Simpson didn’t write the book.

He didn’t sign the contract for the book.

He didn’t own the rights to the book.

We really don’t know how the book came about and who is responsible for it. Former Simpson attorney F. Lee Bailey tells Newsweek, “In essence, people pushed He adds: “So supposedly they came up with a book that says, ‘I’m innocent because if I had done it, I would have done it this way’.”

If She Meant It
“What I wanted was closure, not money,” says Regan.

Great. So why isn’t the publisher giving all the proceeds to charity or the victimized families? You won’t find that in her statement.

Regan says: “What I do know is I didn’t pay him. I contracted through a third party who owns the rights, and I was told the money would go to his children.” Translation: she doesn’t actually know where the money is going.

If She Didn’t Report to Someone Else
Of course maybe Regan doesn’t have the authority to give the net receipts to charity or the victims. This isn’t just about Judith. Officially, she reports to Jane Friedman. (And if she doesn’t, now is the time to make clear to whom she does report.) Regan is part of HarperCollins, which finances, sells, and collects the receipts for the book. As the Boston Globe editorial page says today, “this supposed tell-all degrades the publishing business and calls into question the integrity of everyone responsible for putting it into print.”

So who is responsible? And where is Jane? So far Friedman and HarperCollins have declined requests to comment publicly. But Friedman has the power to do the closest thing left to making this right.

If They Sell It
Some booksellers have been clear that they won’t interfere with customers’ choice, but they don’t want any part of these proceeds either. Vroman’s of Pasadena announced yesterday that it “has chosen not to profit from this title and will therefore be donating all proceeds from its sale to The Nicole Brown Foundation.” That was easy.

Nancy Olson of Quail Ridge Books & Music tells Shelf Awareness she’ll give all proceeds to “a nonprofit here that shelters battered women and children” and Green Apple Books in San Francisco tells them they will do the same.

More FYIs
Wal-mart issued a statement saying they will carry the book to satisfy customer’s perceived interest. While the publisher has not announced a first printing, we’re told the initial planned cap of a 300,000-copy laydown was exceeded, perhaps by as much as another 100,000 copies. These numbers are essentially confirmed by Harper Canada CEO David Kent in the Toronto Star.

———
*** Although it’s being argued that Regan is only giving the audience what it wants and that the book will be a runaway bestseller. Which is probably true. Panem et circensis and all that.

She is also making news—the very best way to garner publicity for herself and her enterprise (the book business, which, these days, only generates big sales when it makes a big splash).

Clever, that.
Disgusting. But it works.

update: to read much more about this subject—and about the book biz—be sure to check out GalleyCat.

I haven’t been following the troubled newspaper business—I have enough to follow—but this quote in a piece by Cathy Seipp caught my eye:

This, in a nutshell, is the essential problem with the L.A. Times: Those who work there care a great deal about their careers and very little about their readers.

I would say that this is one of the problems in every media business. Why is this new? or news?