We have a winner (so to speak) in today's Seattle P-I letters section. The fact that he is using Paul Krugman as an arbiter of the truth speaks volumes in and of itself.
Thank you Paul Krugman (June 4) for confirming what has been obvious to many who get their news outside television and beyond newspaper headlines (further homogenized by the Federal Communications Commission in its recent decision).
But I would argue that the "spin as lie" started well before Bush II, and is endemic to the neoconservative wing of Republican Party. At least since the 1980s when national media could not mouth the words incompetent or impeachable with President Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair, the neocons have learned to wave the flag and talk religion in order to demonize, cower and shout down anything Democrat (or, God forbid, liberal).
They continued to get away with ever more brazenly convoluted logic through the slander campaign against Anita Hill (and Hillary Clinton), the two-bit Whitewater affair, the Clinton impeachment (turning an embarrassing, laughable sex tryst into a constitutional crisis) to denying the "will of the people" while creating the Bush II selection (as in Krugman's column, the straight scoop again came from British media).
President Lincoln said, "You cannot fool all of the people all of the time," but watching years of this garbage coming out of the Republican Party, I came to believe that, while corporate-induced media control the airways, this saying was a falsehood. Perhaps Krugman's column will help prove me wrong and will prove that Lincoln's statement still holds true -- although the process now takes longer and far too much damage has already been done.
Daniel B. Wilson
Seattle
Let's see, do we have all of the usual tropes?
-Reagan and Iran/Contra? (check)
-FCC destroying diversity in news? (check)
-the 2000 election? (check)
-silencing the left? (check)
-Sainthood for Anita Hill? (check)
-Whitewater as a frameup? (check)
-Clinton's impeachment "just about sex"? (check)
-corporate control of the media? (check)
We're missing something about Ashcroft and maybe an abortion rant, but most of the usual suspects are in just four paragraphs.
I find two of his points amusing. The first is his defense of Anita Hill (and presumably distate of Clarence Thomas) and his simultaneous dismissal of the whole Bill and Monica show. I guess that sexual harassment only matters when you are a conservative supreme court nominee, and not a liberal president.
The second is his sniveling about the "corporate-induced media control", when he is quoting a columnist in a Hearst Corp. owned newspaper; Hearst Corporation owns 12 daily newspapers, 27 US magazine titles, 27 TV stations, 2 radio stations, and investments in 25 internet technology companies. The writer he praises works for for the New York Times Company, owner of 19 newspapers, eight TV stations, 2 radio stations, and 40 websites. Apparently when it comes to media consolidation, evil is in the eye of the beholder.
posted on June 15, 2003 01:54 PM
