How much blame does the media bear for the koran burner?

rimrocker · Sep 10, 2010

Now, every wingnut cult of personality holy man with 20 "friends" on his Facebook page will try this and expect a national audience along with a call from the Secretary of Defense.

Anyway, here's Greenwald, who writes well...

The pastor and cheap, selective concern for "blood-spilling"
By Glenn Greenwald
(updated below)

After WikiLeaks published the Afghanistan war logs, political and media figures fell all over themselves to publicly condemn the group for having "blood on its hands," despite the fact that (1) there is, as Wired noted just yesterday, "no evidence to date . . . that anyone has suffered actual harm due to the documents" and (2) many of the people most vocally condemning WikiLeaks have enormous amounts of blood on their own hands from the endless wars, bombing campaigns, occupations, and detention regime they supported and still support. But condemning WikiLeaks offers an opportunity for cheap, self-glorifying moralizing; the group has very little power or prestige in Washington and is thus an easy target for royal court journalists. Media figures who treat actual blood-spillers with great reverence thus suddenly found within themselves oh-so-profound concern over "blood-spilling." Along those lines, contrast the well-deserved contempt Tony Blair is facing as he tries to peddle his self-justifying book with the media red carpet rolled out for every pro-war Washington official -- and the treatment George Bush will receive from the U.S. media when he releases his book -- who spilled gigantic amounts of blood in Iraq and other places in the Muslim world.

The media circus surrounding the Koran-burning pastor illustrates this cowardly dynamic even more extremely. Media figures who would never dream of treating with hostility Respected Political Officials who start wars of aggression are competing with one another over who can most flamboyantly express contempt for this inconsequential, powerless joke of a figure on the ground that he risks "spilling blood." Just watch this 4-minute segment from Morning Joe this morning, one of the most cringe-inducing displays of cheap, cost-free self-righteousness you'll ever see, as a panel that includes Jon Meacham, Mika Brzezinski, and Dan Senor parade the Pastor in front of everyone -- without letting him speak -- so they can voice their profound contempt for him, while Meacham urges him, in the name of Jesus, to refrain from burning the Korans so as to avoid spilling blood:

(I'm at work, so I can't link to the video... if you want to watch it, follow the link at the bottom... rr)
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Do you think that the establishment-serving, power-worshipping Jon Meacham would ever in a million years use language like that to condemn American officials who have actually spilled enormous amounts of blood? An extensive search this morning revealed no instance where Meacham ever condemned or publicly appealed in the name of Jesus to the architects of the attack on Iraq, which resulted in the blood-spilling of hundreds of thousands of human beings.

In November, 2003, Meacham appeared on Fox News with Bill O'Reilly and said this of the leaders who were responsible for that blood-spilling aggression: "Roosevelt and Churchill wrote the parts and first acted the parts that George Bush and Tony Blair are playing." When the Iraq war began, Meacham interviewed George Bush 41 for Newsweek and asked him such probing questions as "How does it feel to be a president sending soldiers into harm's way?" and "Do you talk to your son about how to handle the pressures of war?" And in 2009, Meacham joined the Washington consensus by demanding that Bush and Cheney be protected from prosecution for their torture and other war crimes, arguing: "to pursue criminal charges against officials at the highest levels -- including the former president and the former vice president -- would set a terrible precedent." That's the standard Washington media maven: as subservient as possible to people with actual power, while showing tough-guy adversarial rage only against the inconsequential and the powerless, like this clownish Florida pastor.

Note, too, as part of that Morning Joe discussion, the ironic demand that the Muslim world recognize that the Koran-burners are only a tiny part of the American population and not representative of the country generally. On Twitter yesterday, Marc Ambinder raised the same point, noting the inability of Americans to make clear to the Muslim world that the Pastor is not representative of Americans generally. That inability is hardly surprising, given that (1) Muslims have encountered the same difficulty with getting Americans to see that Al Qaeda is not representative of Muslims generally (hence the polls showing high levels of anti-Muslim bigotry in the population and the widespread appeal of the anti-mosque movement), and (2) the countless American policies over the last decade that are perceived as a War on Muslims and thus a close cousin of the Koran burning.

On that last point -- the reason much of the Muslim world sees the Pastor's Koran burning as something other than an aberration in American political culture -- there is a truly superb Op-Ed in The Washington Post today by, of all people, Ted Koppel, who argues that the U.S. Government has done more to help Al Qaeda with our post-9/11 aggression than anything Al Qaeda could have done for itself:

The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. . . .

While President Obama has, only recently, declared America's combat role in Iraq over, he glossed over the likelihood that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will have to remain there, possibly for several years to come, because Iraq lacks the military capability to protect itself against external (read: Iranian) aggression. . . .

As for the 100,000 U.S. troops in or headed for Afghanistan, many of them will be there for years to come, too -- not because of America's commitment to a functioning democracy there; even less because of what would happen to Afghan girls and women if the Taliban were to regain control. . . .

Again, this dilemma is partly of our own making. America's war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam. Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, "black sites," extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military so overstretched that one of the few growth industries in our battered economy is the firms that provide private contractors, for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence.

We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.

If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. . . . Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.
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When the Jon Meachams and Mika Brzezinskis work up the courage to condemn the people who have done and are continuing to do this for the "blood they have on their hands," then their purported outrage and beliefs can be viewed as sincere. But they don't do that and won't do that. Righteous anger at those who spill blood is reserved only for hated foreigners (Osama bin Laden) and for the marginalized and powerless who haven't actually spilled any blood (the Koran-burning Pastor and WikiLeaks). That's why this Pastor circus has received so much media attention: it's a cheap, petty and easy way for people with enormous amounts of blood on their own hands to show what Good, Caring People they are by pretending that they hate those who cause it to be spilled.

* * * * *

On a related note: I find the reflexive, intense condemnation of speech on the ground that it will "harm the troops" to be quite creepy and dangerous. Obviously, the calls one heard in that above MSNBC video from Pat Buchanan and others for the "Commander-in-Chief" to forcibly prevent the Pastor's speech is pure authoritarianism, but even the reactions that fall short of that -- including the decision of the web hosting company to cease hosting the Church's website -- are quite disturbing. This "endanger-the-Troops" theme has been used to justify everything from demonizing war opposition as vaguely Treasonous to re-writing FOIA to suppress torture photos. We're frequently told that what our Troops fight for is our core freedoms, so demanding that those freedoms be curtailed in the name of the Troops -- either forcibly or through self-censorship -- makes little sense. What actually endangers the Troops by spawning anti-American hatred is what Ted Koppel described: sending them to invade other countries, dropping bombs on civilians with robots from the sky, imprisoning the invaded populations without due process and torturing them, etc. etc. Those who claim to be so concerned by the welfare of Our Troops would be well advised to oppose those policies rather than demanding that American citizens refrain from expressing their views on U.S. soil. Burning Korans is a repellent thing to do because of how bigoted and hateful it is, not because it harms our war efforts.

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/
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I totally agree with the last bolded part. The guy's a nutcase, his followers are idiotic, but if they want to burn a book, as an American, I have to support their right to do so, hoping that the ideas I believe in will win out.

ima_drummer2k · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

The media is no better than a forum troll. They only have the power we allow them to have. If people were smart enough to ignore it, or find better info sources, then it would go away... or the topic would change, at least.
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I might have agreed with this 10 years ago, but IMO with all the 24-hour news channels, talk radio, online blogs and forums, twitter, facebook, etc. etc. etc. I think it's literally impossible to ignore stuff like this these days unless you live under a rock.

SamFisher · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

The media is no better than a forum troll. They only have the power we allow them to have. If people were smart enough to ignore it, or find better info sources, then it would go away... or the topic would change, at least.
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I disagree with that, I think the whole thing is what would be called reflexive, the media gives people what they want, which affects what people want, so it's what the media ends up giving them. A terrible job of explaining it, I know, but it's sort of like the Heisenberg principle/Observer effect ifthat makes even less sense.

bnb · Sep 10, 2010

too many easy talking points to ignore:

islam bashing and christian bashing
bookburning and freedom
nutters, nutter follower, nutter baiters
quick and easy affirmation that our political opponents are loons

and if you don't get hooked on those....then there's always the 'why are we even talking about this?' angle.

it's just the comic page of the news.

(as an aside -- can just anyone declare a national day of something or is there a process to go through. I've a few ideas I wouldn't mind scheduling).

rimrocker · Sep 10, 2010

Rick Perlstein is also a good writer...

A Broader Media Problem
Rick Perlstein
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebat...e-figure-becomes-news/a-broader-media-problem

The problem is not the Web. Anti-JFK rallies "revealing" to every school child in Orange County, California that Communists planned to colonize the United States by the year 1970 drew bigger crowds than Tea Parties today, with nary a blogger among them.

The problem is that elite media gatekeepers have abandoned their moral mandate to stigmatize uncivil discourse. Instead, too many outlets reward it. In fact, it is an ironic token of the ideological confusions of our age that they do so in the service of upholding what they understand to be a cornerstone of civility: the notion that every public question must be framed in terms of two equal and opposite positions, the "liberal" one and the "conservative" one, each to be afforded equal dignity, respect — and (the more crucial currency) equal space. This has made the most mainstream of media outlets comically easy marks for those actively working to push public discourse to extremes.

Don't blame the minister and his bait-and-switch bonfire either. Once upon a time anticommunist book burnings and threats of book burnings were not unheard of. The difference is that Associated Press reporters did not feel obliged to show up. That shift in news values, not the rise of the Internet, is the most profound way that times have changed.

In 1961 Time magazine called these "Ultras" alien and strange, and pronounced, "Wherever [they] arise, they cause domestic acrimony," and judged they should be "wooed back into normal channels of political expression." That last clause was perhaps a bit too much editorializing.

But by 1995, however, any hint of stigma had devolved into slack perplexity: "Is Rush Limbaugh Good for America?" was a cover headline that year. Fifteen years later a bedazzled Time dropped the skepticism, crowning Glenn Beck as "the hottest thing in the political-rant racket….A gifted entrepreneur of angst….tireless, funny, self-deprecating," who "has lit up the 5PM slot in a way never thought possible by industry watchers." Such treatment of people who distort things for a living cannot but push the bounds of permissible ideological performance art in ever more extreme directions.

There are responsible news stories to be written about people like this. On February 24, 2009, President Obama delivered the speech unveiling his economic stimulus package, renewing his promise for middle class tax cuts. The next day Rush Limbaugh reviewed it, introducing his now-frequent proposition that whatever the president says he "means the opposite in most cases." Rush Limbaugh has 20 million listeners every day, many of whom call themselves Limbaugh's "dittoheads." He teaches one of every 10 adult Americans to automatically disbelieve anything their nation's chief Constitutional officer says, as an axiom. This is news, maybe front page news.

Likewise, just the other day, talker Steve Malzberg of WOR — a 50,000 watt heritage station with a weekly program hosted by Mayor Bloomberg — carried out a sympathetic interview with the book-burning pastor himself, with callers chiming in with approval for the spirit of his proposed act. That broadcast in itself is more newsworthy than whatever it is the minister's 50 followers did or didn't end up doing down in Gainesville — even if presented, as the AP promised to its client papers, "in a clear and balanced context."

The coverage is already the context -- and was a priori unbalanced. The genie is of course already out of the bottle; after a certain point, news is news. Editors should reflect, though, for the future. "We're sick and tired of being ignored," a Beck follower was quoted in a cover story in Time magazine. Yet a Time/CNN poll found only 5 percent of a nationwide sample had participated in Tea Party events. This is not balanced coverage. It is coverage distorted grotesquely beyond measure.
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bnb · Sep 10, 2010

The elite media gatekeepers used to package the news into a one hour newscast which competed against a handful of other one hour newscasts. It isn't that they've necessarily lost their moral compass but rather the gates have been blown off their hinges.

An obscure pastor of a small, unaffiliated florida congregation would be hardpressed to earn a spot on that newscast. Even if he really worked the fax machine. It's different now. Easy to get the word out. Some things go viral. 24 hour commentators need something to comment on. Even if its only what the other 24 hour news commentators are commenting on. And once everyone is commenting on it -- it's news. So it now warrants a mention -- though a very brief one.

But even back in the days of Iran 1.0, flag burnings always made the cut. It's emotional, photogenic, often scheduled, easy to understand and judge, and...thus..interesting. This isn't that different. Only magnified.

thumbs · Sep 10, 2010

SamFisher said:

This wackjob crackpot sh-thead of no consequence from a pissant group of nobodies in florida has gotten more unmerited press lately than Bristol Palin. Honestly how much culpability does the news media have in making this into a matter of national import and doing exactly what this idiot wanted? Are we really at the stage where any nobody can promise to pull off any asinine stunt and make it into a national story?

MEDIA: POLICE YOUR OWN
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2012 and the end of the world must be near. I agree completely with SamFisher.

AroundTheWorld · Sep 10, 2010

Am I the only one who initially wondered "what the heck is the "media bear"?"

I guess I am the only one .

Rocket River · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

If people didn't care (read: if people weren't stupid), then the media wouldn't cover it.
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sometimes the Media goes above and beyond to MAKE PEOPLE CARE.
The media has moved from reporting the news
to Making it . . . via picking and chosing what is important

Rocket River
Propaganda

basso · Sep 10, 2010

man, screw the muslim world. when they have our freedoms, they can b**** and moan about what we do with those freedoms. until then:

MUSLIMS: Police your own.

AroundTheWorld · Sep 10, 2010

basso said:

man, screw the muslim world. when they have our freedoms, they can b**** and moan about what we do with those freedoms. until then:

MUSLIMS: Police your own.
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That's the thing, why do they have the energy to stage protests and be outraged over some lunatic in Florida, but...where are the demonstrations and the outrage against the regime in Saudi-Arabia, against atrocities in Jemen, etc. etc.?

SamFisher · Sep 10, 2010

bnb said:

it's just the comic page of the news.
).
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Unfortunately now that page is the front page now.

DonnyMost · Sep 10, 2010

SamFisher said:

I disagree with that.
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K.

SamFisher said:

the media gives people what they want.
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Errr... doesn't that make my argument for me? If we didn't want to hear about redneck bumpkin koran burnin' preachers and justin bieber's latest haircut, they wouldn't tell us about it.

DonnyMost · Sep 10, 2010

Rocket River said:

sometimes the Media goes above and beyond to MAKE PEOPLE CARE.
The media has moved from reporting the news
to Making it . . . via picking and chosing what is important

Rocket River
Propaganda
Click to expand...

Doesn't change the fact that if people didn't want it, we wouldn't receive it.

Sure it's not cool to lie about and intentionally distort the news, but obviously we're the determining factor in whether or not these guys stay in business, and apparently we want to be lied to.

DonnyMost · Sep 10, 2010

ima_drummer2k said:

I might have agreed with this 10 years ago, but IMO with all the 24-hour news channels, talk radio, online blogs and forums, twitter, facebook, etc. etc. etc. I think it's literally impossible to ignore stuff like this these days unless you live under a rock.
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It's not about ignoring it, sure you're going to hear about it, but actually taking part in it, i.e. giving them ad revenue and viewership, is a different thing altogether. It's our fault. Our society is stupid and sucks, the media is a reflection of society, not the other way around.

SamFisher · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

K.

Errr... doesn't that make my argument for me? If we didn't want to hear about redneck bumpkin koran burnin' preachers and justin bieber's latest haircut, they wouldn't tell us about it.
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Not really, I should have been more clear. The media gives the people what it perceives they want. But, in giving people what it perceives they want (even if that perception is correct, and it is indeed what people want) it materially alters what people want in the future.

So since this loop works backward, there's really, at least in the contemporary age, no clear pure defitition of "what people want" other than what they are conditioned to want based on what they have been given.

DonnyMost · Sep 10, 2010

SamFisher said:

Not really, I should have been more clear. The media gives the people what it perceives they want. But, in giving people what it perceives they want (even if that perception is correct, and it is indeed what people want) it materially alters what people want in the future.

So since this loop works backward, there's really, at least in the contemporary age, no clear pure defitition of "what people want" other than what they are conditioned to want based on what they have been given.
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Either way, it still means we're blithering idiots who can't think for ourselves, thus, it's our fault.

SamFisher · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

Doesn't change the fact that if people didn't want it, we wouldn't receive it.
.
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I think you're assuming an efficiency that doesn't exist - in the information arena particularly, we are bombarded with unsolicited information, 24/7, because the marginal cost of delivering one piece of information over another is incredibly low (and further, if you just repeat the same information/pre-built narrative over and over again, practically zero).

Either way, it still means we're blithering idiots who can't think for ourselves, thus, it's our fault.
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There's a very good argument though that technology has accelerated this and made it possible by making physiological changes.

Invisible Fan · Sep 10, 2010

DonnyMost said:

It's not about ignoring it, sure you're going to hear about it, but actually taking part in it, i.e. giving them ad revenue and viewership, is a different thing altogether. It's our fault. Our society is stupid and sucks, the media is a reflection of society, not the other way around.
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Society has always been this way.

It's just we know how to pull those reactionary levers from people better or more efficiently. Pretty much a science.

Sure, we should know better, but I don't think there's a better living "standard" to compare against.

Well, at the very least, we lay off celebrating mediocrity, notoriety and know-nothing-ism.

BetterThanI · Sep 10, 2010

To answer the OP's question: the media deserves the lion's share of the blame for the Qur'an burner. By reporting it so frequently, they've basically given him a stage upon which to spout his hatred. I liken it to the coverage of the Ku Klux Klan. Their message hasn't changed for 80+ years, but the media seems to have agreed to not give the KKK a voice within their ranks. This Qur'an-burning guy is no different.

What bothers me more is the way Obama and Petraeus handled it. The correct way to deal with this, when asked, is: "There are numbskulls everywhere. Unfortunately, being an idiot is not illegal. Next question." You don't get into a debate with someone who is acting illogically. It's really no use.

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