Yesterday, I
pointedly disagreed with Franklin Foer's critique of the Left Blogosphere criticisms of the Media, as did
atrios. Foer
responds:
THE MSB STRIKES BACK:
Atrios and Armando have taken the bait and responded to my critique of the MSB. This is the nub of Atrios's response: "The Left wants to the press to do a better job, the Right wants to undercut their credibility." In theory, he might be right. But in practice... well, let's just examine other posts on Atrios's site yesterday. He says, "Our media elite are so goddamn clueless. Or liars. I can't even tell." In another post, he adds, "2005 was the year the president declared he was the law, and few of our elite opinion makers and shapers bothered to notice, or care."
For the record, I agree with much of his brief. The press was slow to comprehend the radicalism of the Bush administration. It was lazy in pointing out its lies, especially in the Bush economic agenda. But, here's the thing. Atrios's splenetic rhetoric about the press is so sweeping, so over-the-top that it does "undercut" the media's credibility--and his own intellectual bona fides. With that kind of imprecise populism, I frankly have a hard time separating Atrios from Bernie Goldberg.
Wow Franklin! How about the fact that atrios is right, as you concede, and Bernie Goldberg is wrong. Does THAT not matter? Sheesh. The empty heads of the Media, like the new WaPo "ombudsman", could not have made the same false equivalence better.
More on the other side.
Take for example
my critique of Newsweek. I excoriate Evan Thomas and Daniel Klaidman for missing and misstating the central problem with Bush illegal domestic surveillance scheme, as they surely have. I stand by my post completely. I am firm in believing my critique is accurate. I also believe that Newsweek has, on the whole, done a poor job covering Bush. Foer apparently agrees. So a harsh, fact based critique is the equivalent of say,
this attack on Newsweek by Dean Esmay:
September 29, 2003
Over-The-Top Silliness Exposed
In reading this exceedingly silly editorial by John Barry and Evan Thomas in Newsweek, I was impressed with just how lacking in introspection most critics of our efforts in Iraq really are. I mean, aside from Barry and Thomas' obvious mixing of rumor, opinion, and fact, without clear separation, the piece has already been proven by countless sources to be extremely lopsided at best. Even as news report after news report in the last couple of weeks have begun to show us that all the gloom and doom from Iraq has been over the top and irresponsible, here they are writing a partisan smear piece that parrots the rabid Bush-hating party line of the last few months.
Maybe we should cut them some slack, though. Barry and Thomas probably went to print on their smear piece before they were able to read much of what's come out in the last week that makes them look so much like first-year journalism students at a backwater community college.
What did Newsweek write?:
Rumsfeld (like his boss, President Bush) continues to be unapologetic. Last week, on The Washington Post's op-ed page, he wrote of the "solid progress" being made in Iraq--building a 56,000-man Iraqi defense force, steps toward self-government--and suggested strongly that the critics would be proved wrong. Maybe. But almost six months after their "liberation," the Iraqis are still short of power (both electrical and electoral) and jobs, and the guerrilla war continues to claim an American soldier or two on almost a daily basis. Inside and outside the U.S. government, knowledgeable experts worry that Iraq is nearing a tipping point--that rising terrorism and resentment of America could bring real chaos or civil war.
How did we get in this mess? NEWSWEEK interviews with top government officials involved in the planning and execution of the reconstruction of Iraq point to a "perfect storm" of mistakes and bad luck: wrongheaded assumptions, ideological blinders, weak intelligence and poor coordination by White House national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice. Much of the damage was done at the outset--in the first days after the war, when political infighting and wishful thinking prevented the United States from taking control of a bad situation that was turning worse.
This is a perfect example of Right Wing critiques of the Media. In a word - bullshit. For Frank Foer to compare atrios to Bernie Goldberg is to demonstrate a level of obtuseness that rivals Bernie Goldberg's. I thought Foer was better than that. I guess I was wrong.