Narrative Conspiracy

Here we go again.

Nothing too surprising but.... here it is.

What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.

If the right forces us all to either defend [him] or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they’ve put upon us. Instead[...] call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.

Contrary to your initial guess Spencer Ackerman is not talking about
Obama (the reluctance to defend should be a big clue), and he's not talking about calling Tea Partiers racist.

Oh no, this is about Jeremiah Wright and how the Media spun the
narrative to defend Obama and get him elected.

For the greater good

None of the participants are all that shocking, but the explicitness
of their effort to ensure that Jeremiah Wright was considered
off-limits for future discussion is pretty eye-opening. The petition
that grew out of the discussion can be found here; like I said, none
of the participants is all that surprising.

Having said that, if you’ve ever felt like left-wing journalists
colluded to call people “racist”… well, Spencer Ackerman called for
just that.

And here's where Jim Geraghty quotes the Ackerman passage (in his
version the identity of who the media are defending and who they are
attacking is not obscured).


But you can trust them when they tell you that this other group of
administration critics are racist.

Yeah, who cares who we destroy?

And you can bet that whatever replaced Ezra Klein’s JournoList is now brimming with the same sinister plotting against the Tea Party. You can bet that when J. Christian Adams blew the whistle about ongoing and systemic discrimination at the Department of Justice, whatever the new JournoList is sent out the marching orders to Politico and the like to spike the story and throw off some chaff with yet another meme
about how the Tea Party is racist.

Enter the NAACP.

What is surprising about today’s revelations is that these JournoListers have somehow deluded themselves into thinking they’re doing good. I was always under the impression that the wicked knew they were wicked, and yet we’ve caught them cold in their little online coven and they honestly seem to believe that group tackling the truth — a legitimate story — with bullying, peer pressure, outright lies and character assassination is some sort of righteous cause:

This isn’t about defending Obama. This is about how the [mainstream media] kills any chance of discourse that actually serves the people.”

Otherwise the questions in October will be exactly like this. This is just a disease.

…a revolting descent into tabloid journalism and a gross disservice to Americans concerned about the great issues facing the nation and the
world.

It has everything to do with the attempts of the right to maintain control of the country.

Considering Weigel’s talk of setting Matt Drudge on fire, Ezra Klein’s off-color recommendation for Tim Russert, and now Ackerman fantasizing about putting conservatives through plate glass windows, there is a bizarre addiction to lurid, violent, threatening language – not just among the commenters of liberal blogs, but among the folks who we are told represent their best and brightest. It’s disturbing, and the fact that it doesn’t bother more people is disturbing.

Emphasis added. And time to repost the two quotes I put in the comments yesterday

"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."
— Robert A. Heinlein

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-C. S. Lewis

Sound familiar?

Yeah... it's for your own good, the greater good




Andrew Breitbart

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open
political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double
down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy.

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the
John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here.

Roger L Simon has his own thoughts, and what is truely lacking.

But forget the paucity of imagination and style, what about the group think? These are the independent minds that seek to mold our culture and political lives? Nowhere to be found is an original thought – unless you count accusing Karl Rove of racism as a brainstorm.

Well, we have had the generation gap and tons of other gaps. Now Journolist reveals we have an “elitism gap.” Gone are the days of the Algonquin Round Table to be replaced by a cabal of humdrum mediocrities on a listservr plotting how to justify the racist ravings of a reactionary theocrat.

Nowhere in evidence, at least in Strong’s article, is the single question any rational mind would ask re: Obama-Wright at the height of a political campaign. Just why did Barack Obama remain in the pew of this reverend for twenty years? But enough of rationality. Journolist clearly isn’t about truth. It’s about winning. What it gives us, inadvertently or not, is the profession of journalism unmasked. And what we see is, alas, what we already knew. And it ain’t pretty.

And another bit of deja vu

Remember in the mid-'90s when Bill Clinton, with the willing cooperation of the media, successfully tied the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building to the rising tide of discontent with the .gov, hanging it like an albatross around the neck of the popular backlash that had triggered the "Republican Revolution" in Congress the previous November?

Tam ends with:

The commercials for the local TeeWee station's Special Investigative Report showed, not fringe extremists, but stock footage of Ma and Pa Kettle waving their Tea Party signs on the statehouse lawn, which is practically the same as plotting to target "police officers and judges and Governors," after all. "

I wonder if there's any... organization on the part of the media do
to all this? Nah.

And I had to include this post from one of Tam's comments
Ritchie said: "As metalworkers will recognize, at some point, bending becomes fabrication."

Rand Simberg thinks on how... superfluous it seemed.

For a long time, while the bias in the media has always been obvious,
I’ve always assumed that it was something in the water around the media coolers — that these people all lived in a self-reinforcing cocoon, marinating in confirmation bias, in which the correct attitudes were subtly rewarded and the incorrect ones not-so-subtly punished. If someone had told me that they actively conspired to drive the message, trumpet and even make up stories that served their narrative, and suppress those that didn’t, or undermined it, I would have said that it was both unnecessary and that even they weren’t that stupid.

But now, even without Breitbart having to pay the hundred Gs, the contents of the JournoList are starting to dribble out, and it’s not a pretty picture.

During the campaign, it almost looked as though there were a media conspiracy to avoid discussion of Jeremiah Wright. Well, now we know why. Simply put, there literally was.

Oh joy.

Minimize, Marginalize, and drop it down the memory hole.

And how it all worked.