updated with a link and a footnote

Frank Rich wrote a long cry of anguish *** about how the Bushies sold us the war in Iraq under false pretenses—and I sympathize with his feelings of betrayal. Sort of.

If Rich were less an anti-Bush partisan and more an honest critic of the marketing culture of all of public life, he would turn his eye to other snow jobs, like the ony so ably described by Debra Burlingame in today’s WSJ:

In numerous published articles and interviews, Mr. Levick has laid out the essence of the entire Kuwaiti PR campaign. The strategy sought to accomplish two things: put a sympathetic “human face” on the detainees and convince the public that it had a stake in their plight. In other words, the militant Islamists who traveled to Afghanistan to become a part of al Qaeda’s jihad on America had to be reinvented as innocent charity workers swept up in the war after 9/11. The committed Islamist who admitted firing an AK-47 in a Taliban training camp became a “teacher on vacation” who went to Afghanistan in 2001 “to help refugees.” The member of an Islamist street gang who opened three al-Wafa offices with Suliman Abu Ghaith (Osama Bin Laden’s chief spokesman) to raise al Qaeda funds became a charity worker whose eight children were left destitute in his absence. All 12 Kuwaitis became the innocent victims of “bounty hunters.”

A Montreal-based marketing firm was hired to create the families’ full-service Web site which fed propaganda–unsourced, unrebutted and uninvestigated by the media–aimed at the media all over the world. Creating what Mr. Levick calls a “war of pictures,” the site is replete with images meant to appeal to Americans: smiling Kuwaiti families wearing T-shirts and baseball caps, cute children passing out yellow ribbons.

No matter how much you loathe its success and no matter how clever you are in exposing the details of it later, there is no arguing with a successful PR campaign.

Just as the remedy for speech you don’t like is more speech, the remedy for a successful PR campaign for the other side is an even more successful PR campaign for your side. All’s fair in love and the culture war.

That’s all she wrote.

———

*** Interestingly, Oprah had Rich on her show to talk about the book even though she doesn’t usually do political books. For what it’s worth, she was lukewarm. She likes Rich and liked the book, but she was disappointed that it was a “rant.” Also: she questioned Rich about whether the Bushies had lied—had deliberately led us into war for bad reasons—or whether they just got “bad information.”

She wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt. I would consider her view the mainstream view, and I would consider Rich’s accusation of deliberate lying by the Bushies (i.e., with its innuendo of evil intent) a non-mainstream and thus off-putting point of view.
But what do I know?

Who’s afraid of big, bad Fox? Garance Francke-Ruta at TAPPED, that’s who. She dimwittedly believed (with the encouragement of Moveon.org) that John Edwards was actually going to take a moral stand against Fox News and shot from the lip and heaped praise on him before actually doing any reporting … or even thinking about it. Excuse me while I laugh myself silly:

A BOLD MOVE. John Edwards is the first Democratic presidential candidate to pull out of the Fox News sponsored Democratic presidential primary debate scheduled to take place in Nevada later this year, and kudos to him for doing so. None of the Democrats will get a fair hearing on that channel as it currently exists, and freezing Fox out of the loop early is a good way to make a play for fairer coverage later in the campaign season, as well as for fair treatment of the eventual nominee. Fox is biased, but it’s still enough of a news organization that a lack of access will sting mightily and could lead to newsroom reforms.

Oops! A few hours later, she realized the, um, error in her, um, judgment:

A POTENTIALLY AWKWARD MOVE. I’d like to revise and extend my remarks on John Edwards and the Nevada Fox News debate, as I’ve just received new information that casts Edwards’ decision in a rather different light.

That “new information”? Why, it’s that the

Congressional Black Caucus [CBC] Political Education and Leadership Institute plans to announce two debates in concert with Fox News,

and that the CBC has previously worked with Fox News, in 2003.

So I guess Fox News is okay now. ‘Cause the it’s okay with the CBC. And we don’t want any “intra-party” fighting now, do we?

The New York Times assess the real fallout from the Libby trial, now that the minor satisfaction of seeing Bush and Cheney get whomped eye has worn off:

The investigation and trial of I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, will have many legacies and lessons — for government officials, for supporters and critics of special prosecutors and for historians of the events leading to the war in Iraq.

But the institution most transformed by the prosecution, and the one that took the most collateral damage from Patrick J. Fitzgerald’s relentless pursuit of obstruction and perjury charges against Mr. Libby, may have been the press, forced in the end to play a major role in his trial.

After Mr. Libby’s conviction Tuesday, it is possible to start assessing that damage to the legal protections available to the news organizations, to relationships between journalists and their sources and to the informal but longstanding understanding in Washington, now shattered, that leak investigations should be pressed only so hard.

Ten out of 19 of the witnesses in Mr. Libby’s trial were journalists, a spectacle that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago.

Even more unusual, three of them played a central role in securing the conviction of Mr. Libby, their former source, by testifying about conversations they had once fought to keep secret by invoking the majesty of the First Amendment and the crucial role that confidential informers play in informing citizens in a free society.

“Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a media lawyer who represented Time magazine and one of its reporters in their unsuccessful efforts to fight subpoenas from Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Libby case.

Here’s the bottom line:

In the 35 years since the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters have no right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions from a grand jury, press protections against Justice Department subpoenas have existed largely as a matter of prosecutorial grace. That is over.

“We had this truce for a generation since Branzburg,” said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University. “Nobody really pushed it. The virginity is lost now.

For more information about Branzburg, go here. For more about Frontline’s series News War, the substance of which (namely, Branzburg) has barely been addressed in the blogosphere, go here.

I hesitate to write about this for fear that I will jinx what looks like a growing trend of … seriousness … in our culture, but I’m ready to pass on to you some good news for once and I don’t want to lose the opportunity.

First, a recent poll indicated that, unusually, Americans are following the 2008 presidential campaign even though they will have to continue following it for another 20 months in order to find out what happens.

[[Yes, that's how Americans are following the campaign: as a horse race, or a grand sporting event, or a soap opera---in installments. Don't laugh, but John F. Kennedy, Jr., never got the credit he deserved for reaching this insight before almost anyone else: that his generation can be made to follow politics (which they were notoriously uninterested in during the go-go Clinton years) if you present it to them as the greatest show on earth. That was the animating idea (in 1995) behind his magazine, George. ***]]

Now there is even more evidence that our population might be more attentive than it has been credit for. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that the reports of the demise of reading may have been greatly exaggerated:

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades

New ‘golden age of young adult literature’ declared

…

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

The piece underscores that the teenagers’ interest in books has surged as the books themselves widen their scope to include serious (”adult”) themes and issues:

Fantasy and graphic novels are especially hot, and adventure, romance, humor and gritty coming-of-age tales remain perennial favorites. In addition, racy series such as “The Gossip Girls” — often likened to a teen “Sex and the City” — have created a buzz.

More notably, though, there’s a new strain of sophistication and literary heft as publishers cater to the older end of the spectrum with books that straddle teen and adult markets.

King County librarian Holly Koelling has been tracking these trends as she writes an upcoming edition of “Best Books for Young Adults,” an American Library Association reference book.

“There has been an increase in the age of the protagonist, the complexity of the plotting and the content — the gravity of the content,” Koelling said. “I think it may be a reflection of a more sophisticated teenage population.” [e.a. See also Steven Johnson's Everything That's Bad Is Good for You, in which he similarly argues that audiences who eagerly follow the complex plots and multiple storylines of TV series like, say, The Sopranos are indicative of a smart, attentive audience, not a "dumb and dumber" one.]

The trend may also reflect more sophisticated parents, and a more “sophisticated”–not to mention more realistic—society: one in which there’s no such thing as forbidden books, ideas, and subjects, even if they are controversial.

(Or perhaps especially if they’re controversial. Because controversy sparks thinking and debate. And a democratic society needs thinking people and healthy debate in order to remain democratic. And it’s never too early to get people to start thinking.)

So let’s follow this “trend” together: Has the “dumb” and “dumber” trend reached a plateau? Is America becoming “smart and smarter”?

———-

*** In 1999, after JFK Jr.’s death, Anthony York wrote in Salon:

The four-year-old political mag is Kennedy’s legacy. After a well-publicized wrestling match with the New York State Bar exam, and a brief stint as a Manhattan prosecutor, Kennedy left his law career behind to found George, and he gave it the tagline, “not politics as usual.” When asked about its mission, he often riffed that politics was the greatest show on earth, and he wanted a magazine that covered politics the way Sports Illustrated covered sports.

George covered politics, Kennedy-style, with a heavy dose of glamor and celebrity. It made sense for a man born in the public eye, whose every developmental stage, since birth, has been captured by the cameras. The fusion of celebrity and politics defined George, from the first issue which featured Cindy Crawford cross-dressed as a midriff-baring George Washington (the magazine’s namesake)on the cover, to the most recent, dated August 1999, the political humor issue, featuring actor Ben Stiller.

“Clearly, he was not editing this magazine for people who knew a lot about politics,” said Edward Klein, former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and author of several best-selling Kennedy biographies. “It was an effort to reach audiences who needed politics to be sugar-coated with pop culture — and he being the greatest pop culture figure of them all.”

You can tell that the Republicans have been in power for too long. The ongoing cluelessness about the MSM’s process never fails to surprise me. File under when it happens to one of yours, you notice:

The Times reporter, in short, saw something that did arguably raise questions. He looked into it. He found nothing. Then rather than printing nothing — since, after all, that’s what he found — he instead went to press with a story that “raises questions” — a formulation that simply amounts to a presumption of guilt. It raises the question of when America’s newspapers just threw in the towel and decided they had no real obligations to inform their readers rather than mislead them.

From such observations is a potential media skeptic made.

Also from such observations can a fair-minded person reach (eventually) the conclusion that media bias, such as it is, is not so much a political slant (because it’s not constantly one-sided) but rather a bias toward storytelling (creating dramatic tension), the better to engage the readers’ passions … and interest.

Maybe it’s a problem, maybe it’s not a problem. We human beings are “narrative seekers.” We love a good story. We love to get lost in the ongoing passions of fascinating protagonists and antagonists. We love to get caught up in the stakes. We love to root for our team. We love closure. We seek catharsis.
Which is why, particularly in a 24/7 Feiler Faster “mass of niches” culture, infotainment—the never-ending cycle of “questions” raised (and, conveniently, never answered)—rules.

A nobody by the name of Neely Tucker, writing for one of our country’s leading newspapers, the Washington Post, disgraces him/herself (sorry: I don’t know the sex of this “journalist” named Neely) and the reputation of his/her newspaper—not to mention his/her profession—by doing a grotesque hit job on Ayaan Hirsi Ali:

So now, ladies and gentlemen, live from Somalia and the Netherlands! Give it up for new-to-Washington Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Muslim heretic, self-proclaimed “Infidel,” whose memoir by that name is at No. 7 on the New York Times bestseller list!

It’s a popping good story, fascinating, with lots of forward lean to the narrative. She’s got guts, brains, looks, talent. She’s called the prophet Muhammad a pervert. She says, “Islam is a culture that has been outlived.” She has lost her faith, ditched two husbands and been disowned by her family.

I would be erring on the side of tolerance and indulgence if I said that of course it’s understandable that the WaPo’s Neely Tucker doesn’t get Hirsi Ali. Tucker, after all, is just your typical American—born, bred, and marinated in the knowledge that the things Hirsi Ali describes in her memoir could never happen to someone he/she knows. And also used to judging books by their cover and never peeking inside.

But I would be wrong to indulge Neely Tucker, because Neely Tucker is a journalist, whose job requires that s/he look deeper into the subjects he/she examines, in order to explain to his/her readers something that they don’t know. None of that here, of course. To Tucker, Hirsi Ali is just another provocative celebrity author who needs to be taken down a peg or two.

For example: Why not pretend that (instead of being the worldly and well traveled intellectual she is) Hirsi Ali just landed from Mars?

you know, you have to wonder how idealized a concept she has of this country. You wonder what she’ll make of the cultural incoherency: 50 Cent, Rosie O’Donnell, Jerry Falwell, Don DeLillo, the death penalty, the state of Idaho, college football, the gun lobby. She seems as if she’d be perfectly at home at a Georgetown reception as the only black person in the room and perfectly lost at a Harlem dinner party. She wouldn’t rate an invitation to the Dearborn, Mich., Arab American dinner.

So the smearing of Ayaan Hirsi Ali continues apace. And I note once again that this disgraceful, shameful trend is being fueled by noted “progressive” Western elites and intellectuals.