Entries Tagged 'escapism' ↓

Glancing at Memeorandum this morning, these two entries caught my eye:

International Herald Tribune:

U.S. says exercise by Israel seemed directed at Iran  —  WASHINGTON: Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  —  Several American officials …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Buck Naked Politics, Danger Room and Pat Dollard

–

Discussion:

Damozel / Buck Naked Politics:   Is Israel Gearing Up for an Attack Against Iran?

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:   Iran Attack ‘Rehearsal’ in Israeli War Game

Drillanwr / Pat Dollard:   Israel Is Drilling … Its Military … For Someone

ABCNEWS:

EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah Poised to Strike?  —  Officials Say “Sleeper Cells” Activated in Canada  —  Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against “Jewish targets” somewhere outside the Middle East.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Hot Air, The Jawa Report and Counterterrorism Blog

And it underscored the importance of  this point made by Jennifer Rubin [e.a.]:

John McCain amidst the turmoil of Barack Obama’s public financing reversal is trying to make sure voters don’t forget Obama favors habeas corpus rights for Osama bin Laden. Today he put out a statement castigating his opponent for not coming clean on whether he favors executing bin Laden and what type of proceeding he would favor. …

I suspect if McCain is going to make any headway here he will have to make a major communications push, with speeches and ads, to explain why Obama’s position reveals him as unfit on national security. The media is already turning to other issues and is not inclined to spend the time to explain to the American people what parade of horribles will occur now that we have terror suspects flocking to federal courts.

The media is indeed turning to other issues, as is its wont. And we are being anesthetized—or, rather, are choosing to anesthetize ourselves—by a “news” diet that entertains us by constantly giving us new stories (rather than important news) to focus on for a while.

And if you’re Barack Obama, you take this as an opportunity to distract the media (and its easily distracted audience) with a makeover for your wife while you prattle on in an unclear and inconsistent way about national security…emphasizing punishment over crime prevention.

This didn’t get much play, did it?

Rudy Giuliani: Obama Wants USA to Be on Defense Against Terrorism

On a conference call this morning Rudy Giuliani continued his attacks on Barack Obama’s national security policy.

“I describe the difference as one being on offense and the other wanting to be on defense,” former New York City mayor and one-time GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani just said on a conference call with reporters.

It should get a lot of play, because it’s the fundamental issue of our time—how to provide national security while preserving our freedoms and our way of life (as a symbol and model for other nations to emulate).

Don’t be misled: Distractions can be useful for Mr. Obama, as they can for all politicians—including his hard-to-warm-up-to opponent.

One day perhaps the captains of the various media industries (old and new) will understand their vast power to shape public opinion among the ignorant, distraction-loving, and narrative-seeking masses [e.a.].

LONDON (AFP) - Britons are losing their grip on reality, according to a poll out Monday which showed that nearly a quarter think Winston Churchill was a myth while the majority reckon Sherlock Holmes was real

The survey found that 47 percent thought the 12th century English king Richard the Lionheart was a myth.

And 23 percent thought World War II prime minister Churchill was made up. The same percentage thought Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale did not actually exist.

Three percent thought Charles Dickens, one of Britain’s most famous writers, is a work of fiction himself.

It’s always been like that, you say. What does it matter? you ask.

It matters because this ignorance can be easily leveraged through the myriad new forms of political propaganda that the Age of Technology has ushered in and unleashed.

It matters because unless we educate people (in an engaging way, not only in a boring PBS or NPR way) in their common humanity rather than pander to their tribal instincts, we are moving backward, not forward.

It means a new era of wars, not “post-partisan politics.”

————
*** Do I really have to remind you that infotainment rules?

Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopaganda^TMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***

Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.

To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.

I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:

The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.

So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.

Howard Kurtz tried to burst this bubble on Reliable Sources this morning [e.a.]:

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …

KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.

Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.

And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.

KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.

CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.

WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.

HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?

The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).

The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.

Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopaganda^TM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.

The campaign ‘08 Battle of Iconography goes on.

————-

*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.

They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.

Americans may watch a lot of TV, but the news isn’t a big part of their menu. The Pew Research Center tracked the news habits of Americans over the twenty-year period from 1986 to 2006 and concluded that

the average percentage of adult Americans following all stories “very closely” is 26%. …[This] suggests that, at least with respect to most day-to-day reporting, the American news audience is only modestly interested

Of the stories they followed, these were the most popular types:

disasters 39% followed very closely

money 34

conflict 33

political news 22

tabloid news 18

foreign news 17

Of particular interest to those of us interested in news-as-infotainment are this counterintuitive gem (p. 5):

Disaster News rivets audiences. … Tabloid News fails to do the same.

Journalists might well predict and easily accept that disaster stories always “sell.” But journalists might not predict that tabloid reporting sells so poorly. … Skepticism notwithstanding, both of these patterns of news interest have manifested themselves repeatedly during the last three decades: Disaster News engages audiences; Tabloid News, not so much.

This finding is more predictable, to me at least (p. 3):

Conflict News—stories about war, terrorism, and social violence—consistently elicits much more news attention than does Tabloid or even Political News.

Conflict—protagonist vs. antagonist—is the sine qua non of storytelling. TV “news” trafficks in these stories. They boil down complex issues into bite-size pieces. The result is lacking in nutrition, but it’s tasty. And it satisfies our need (a human need—that is to say: nonpartisan) to have easy answers, even (perhaps especially) when there is no easy answer.

These answers—the comfortable certainties of partisans on both sides—are provided both by pop culture (deliberate entertainment) and by infotainment (news served up via entertainment values), which, while serving people’s desire for distraction and need to be entertained, also imparts some information, rallies the faithful, infuriates the opposition, and ensures an audience hungry for more bread and circuses.

I mention this not because it’s the theme of this blog. Not this time anyway. I intend it as a response to Shadi Hamid, who, in response to this post of mine, wonders why liberals can’t educate the electorate rather than respond to it.

I responded in the comments, but I’ve got more to say, if you’ll permit me to equate, even if just for the sake of the argument, the electorate with the news-viewing (or non-news viewing) audience. At the very least, these two groups overlap.

The Pew Center’s study makes one of my points for me: the electorate isn’t looking to get educated—it’s looking to be entertained. At any given time, about 75% of the television audience (many voters, presumably) are not watching the news (which is where we’re likely to be offered the kind of information affecting policy that Hamid wants to get across to people).

When they are watching “news,” mostly they’re mostly interested in rubber-necking the tragedies of others (disasters) or in tracking their finances (or prospects for making or losing money) or in being spectators to some kind of fight (conflict). They just don’t want to know from government policies (much less foreign policy, which is among the categories of least interest to Americans,+++ along with celebrity and political scandals ***).

Louis Menand, in his July 9 New Yorker review of Bryan Caplan’s The Myth of the Rational Voter, makes another point for me.

Caplan rejects the assumption that voters pay no attention to politics and have no real views. He thinks that voters do have views, and that they are, basically, prejudices. He calls these views “irrational,” because, once they are translated into policy, they make everyone worse off. People not only hold irrational views, he thinks; they like their irrational views. In the language of economics, they have “demand for irrationality” curves: they will give up y amount of wealth in order to consume x amount of irrationality. Since voting carries no cost, people are free to be as irrational as they like. They can ignore the consequences, just as the herdsman can ignore the consequences of putting one more cow on the public pasture. “Voting is not a slight variation on shopping,” as Caplan puts it. “Shoppers have incentives to be rational. Voters do not.” [e.a.]

Caplan suspects that voters cherish irrational views on many issues, but he discusses only views relevant to economic policy. The average person, he says, has four biases about economics—four main areas in which he or she differs from the economic expert. The typical noneconomist does not understand or appreciate the way markets work (and thus favors regulation and is suspicious of the profit motive), dislikes foreigners (and thus tends to be protectionist), equates prosperity with employment rather than with production (and thus overvalues the preservation of existing jobs), and usually thinks that economic conditions are getting worse (and thus favors government intervention in the economy). …

The economic biases of the non-economist form a secular world view that people cling to dogmatically, the way they once clung to their religious faith,

I note that Caplan is an economist, and addresses only the economic prejudices of voters. But if Caplan is right about this—and I think he’s on to something—the electorate would be expected to have other prejudices, too. (I recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate on the subject of contemporary prejudices.)

It is some of those prejudices that Rudy Giuliani is appealing to, both in his public image and in the foreign-policy stances outlined in his Foreign Affairs article. Whatever, he’s doing, by the way, it’s working (and note that his strongest opponent is Hillary Clinton, who is the most hawkish among the Democrats).

Hamid’s problem—the problem of all ideologues trying to sway the public this way or that through a cogent debate about the issues—is that people have prejudices. They are not necessarily open to reason; rather, they’re given to emotional responses. To me, Americans seem to be feeling rather more hawkish than dovish—which was where I entered the conversation with Hamid.

—————-

+++ This particular finding is a bee in my bonnet. Americans have always been wrapped up in themselves. But the extent to which they continue to be wrapped up in themselves post-9/11, in the face of all we have learned since then about the dangerous world outside our shores and in the face of all we have to do to engage with that world, is nothing short of astonishing to me.

But then Caplan suggests a reason for that in his book, too. Menand writes:

Even apart from ignorance of the basic facts, most people simply do not think politically. … And, over time, individuals give different answers to the same questions about their political opinions. People simply do not spend much time learning about political issues or thinking through their own positions. They may have opinions—if asked whether they are in favor of capital punishment or free-trade agreements, most people will give an answer—but the opinions are not based on information or derived from a coherent political philosophy. They are largely attitudinal and ad hoc.

[e.a.]

*** It would be interesting to examine what accounts for the amount of interest in the various categories. My guess about the audience’s lack of interest in celebrity and political scandals is that people expect celebrities and politicians to behave badly. We may fawn over them, but when they get in trouble …yawn. It’s dog-bites-man: not news worth following.

Tell me something I don’t know or didn’t expect: that is something I’ll watch.

Add the fear of blaming South Koreans—I kid you not ***—to the brilliant list of the post-Virginia Tech media memes compiled by ETP’s Jason Linkins. Weirdly, none of them attribute guilt (sole guilt or, for that matter, any guilt) to the perpetrator, who was apparently a lone gunman (and a VT student), Cho Seung-Hui.

Linkins’s list:

GUNS, GUNS, GUNS (and a subset of same: THE JIM WEBB COROLLARY)

EVERYONE IN CHARGE FAILED AND SHOULD BE FIRED

“INSTANT PREJUDICE” [I'm not quite sure against whom --ed.]

CREATIVE WRITING AND THE AGONIES OF ARMCHAIR PSYCHOANALYSTS

VIDEOGAMES? REALLY? [the commentary "really?" is Linkins's, not mine]

In a later post, Linkins also remarks on the “English major” meme—which is really a subset of the “creative writing” meme. You can’t trust an English major—and you certainly can’t trust an English major at an institution where he’s surrounded on all sides by engineers. Right?

——-

*** Here’s where Americans are supposedly going to explode in a massive backlash against South Koreans—or so the South Koreans fear:

South Korea expressed its condolences, and said it hoped that the tragedy would not “stir up racial prejudice or confrontation.” “We are in shock beyond description,” said Cho Byung-se, a Foreign Ministry official handling North American affairs.

Today, the WSJ reports more or less everything I posted about Gaza yesterday (which I painstakingly stitched together after five weeks of following this story).

 Uncertain Fate
Of Gaza Reporter
Deepens Concerns

 Fanatical Islamists of the type sowing chaos in Iraq and Afghanistan appear to be operating with increasing impunity in the Gaza Strip, heightening concern about the rising danger posed by al Qaeda-inspired groups or similar violent fringe groups in the Palestinian territories.

An unconfirmed statement on Sunday by a group saying it had killed abducted BBC correspondent Alan Johnston has added to these fears. Even if that claim turns out to be false, the kidnapping marks a low point for the already troubled Gaza Strip. Palestinian human-rights groups are documenting an increasing number of firebombings and other attacks against targets such as Internet cafes, libraries and cultural centers.

Concerns about such violence come amid an overall state of lawlessness that has prompted even the United Nations to keep nearly all of its foreign staffers out of Gaza. The convoy of a lead official for the world body was shot at last month, despite the use of clearly marked U.N. vehicles. Foreign charitable organizations working in Gaza are similarly concerned.

So I’ve been saying for quite a while now.

I’m not bragging—I’m noting the lag between the time an energetic amateur like me notices a straw in the wind (in this case the Johnston kidnapping, which I’ve been writing about for five weeks) and the time it takes for the MSM to use its megaphone to luanch the story into the news cycle.

Truth be told, despite its huge impact on journalists and on journalism—and despite its ramifications for the rest of us, who depend on journalists to report those things that we cannot see or hear for ourselves—this story may never make it into the news cycle. The WSJ doesn’t have much of a megaphone.

Much will depend on what happens to Johnston (and the kidnappers are hoping to hook us with that ongoing soap opera, to grab our attention with it, as kidnappers are wont to do [[see this June 2006 post, "kidnapping makes for good television," for a link to a study about how kidnapping is an excellent headline-grabbing narrative for terrorists who are looking to make their mark, or their point, in a shrug-it-off world.]] ).

But let’s not forget that Johnston’s kidnappers are competing with what’s  being called the ”deadliest shooting rampage in American history“. Those kidnappers don’t stand a chance. Because we’re now going to feast on this orgy for weeks and weeks and weeks.

How is Newsweek magazine like the coverage of the Olympics? Let me count the ways. It’s all about America, America, America. All the time. Nobody else matters. Ever. And then they wonder why everyone hates us. (Hint: because we don’t care whether or not anyone else exists. Yes, we’re that self-involved.)

Eat the Press is on Newsweek’s case, though, and good for them. Here are the four covers:

Here is Newsweek’s lame, lame, lame explanation of why Tony Blair isn’t good enough to grace the cover of the American edition of the magazine:

Newsweek spokeswoman Jan Angilella pointed out that Newsweek addresses issues of domestic and international importance, and noted that here, the difference was split: “Tony Blair is an international figure and he’s an international story. Hence we put him on the cover of all of our overseas issues.”

Oh, I see now. International issues are only of interest to international readers. Because America ends at the shores of the Atlantic and the Pacific and on the borders with Canada and Mexico. We are not interested in anyone or anything “out there.” Right.

Eat the Press reminds us why it is a bad idea to choose to be so isolated from the rest of the world.

However, when every edition of Newsweek ’round the world is different from the one at home, it’s worth at least wondering why. It may not be be a desexualized celebrity photographer supplanting a scary growing jihad in Afghanistan, but still, it sets the U.S. apart from the rest of the world and draws a distinction between U.S. readers and their growing counterparts.

I’ll say.

And what’s all this about the Olympics? Well, once upon a time, before the era of “Up Close and Personal” gauzy biopics of American athletes and their triumphant overcoming of unbelievable obstacles just to be able to afford ice skates or whatever, coverage of the Olympics was what you think sports coverage ought to be: in other words, if they were showing, say, the long jump, they would cover the entire event, from start to finish, sequentially. Even if no American was in the race.

Olympics coverage was not an orgy of jingoism. Can you imagine that? No, I didn’t think so. Because we are all participating in an orgy of the same kind of jingoism every day that we fail to inform ourselves about our place in the world of nations.