The nattering nabobs of negativism for the 21st century

July 5, 2006

Dan Froomkin recently said, “President Bush and his allies have escalated their ongoing battle with the media to nuclear proportions.” In a terrific new piece in for the New Yorker, David Remnick explains this battle is part of a concerted strategy — that goes back to the Nixon years.

Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and others in the Nixon-Agnew-Ford orbit left Washington believing that the imperial Presidency had been disastrously hobbled by a now imperial press. When they reappeared in 2001, under the auspices of George W. Bush, the Nixon-Agnew spirit was resurrected with them — this time without the Joycean wordplay. More than any other White House in history, Bush’s has tried to starve, mock, weaken, bypass, devalue, intimidate, and deceive the press, using tactics far more toxic than any prose devised in the name of Spiro Agnew.

Firm in the belief that the press can be gored for easy political gain, the Bush Administration has set about reducing the status of the media (specifically, what it sees as the left-wing, Eastern-establishment media) to that of a pesky yet manageable interest group, nothing more. As Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff at the time, told this magazine’s Ken Auletta, “They” — the media — “don’t represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. . . . I don’t believe you have a check-and-balance function.”

This philosophy has been apparent for quite a while — pundit payola, Gannon/Guckert, etc. — but Remnick makes a compelling case that it’s getting worse. As journalists expose more serious wrongdoing — secret prisons, secret wiretaps — the pushback and level of heated rhetoric has become considerably more intense. Instead of just an antagonistic attitude, the Bush gang has come to view news outlets as another rival to crush for political gain.

In the era of the Pentagon Papers, a war-weary White House went to the courts to stifle the press. You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.

Check out Remnick’s piece; it’s a good one.

Goebbels would be proud of our Propaganda Ministry.

  • This issue just infuriates me. The willingness to paint with such broad strokes is just laughable if it weren’t so serious and dangerous to our country. The media also includes Rush, Coulter, Fox News, etc. Somehow, they have been able to get this country to a point where speaking the truth to lies is a bad thing. These are truly bad people who are so intoxicated by their own image/power/wealth that the numerous scandals, lies, and general denigration of America’s reputation mean nothing to them. Instead, they wrap themselves in the flag and simply rely on jingoistic, nationalistic fervor and short attention spans of Americans.

    Apparently, the only time that the media should be vilified is when they’re doing something that exposes some new atrocity/scandal, etc. that the administration is involved in (pictures of Rummy’s house notwithstanding). I don’t understand how otherwise intelligent conservatives – and there really are some out there – don’t say Fuh-Q to those who would bash the media WHEN THEY ARE DOING THEIR JOB. America should be the shining beacon on the hill – much like Morbo’s 4th of July post – and anyone finding out that someone is throwing mud on America’s reputation should be rewarded! Instead, they’re perceived as being anti-American when in actuality they are epitomizing what it is to be an American – standing up and being heard about our country and the issues facing it. The administration doing it, I understand – they have to cover their asses and Rove leads that pack. But the rest of the “pundits,” whether conservative or not, where are they? They should be firing back at Bush, etc., and saying we don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on – you can’t keep engaging in this type of conduct – it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

  • I was less happy with the Remnick piece. What I didn’t like was the complete lack of acknowledgement of the elite media’s own culpability for creating the mess they now find themselves in.

    Yes, Melanie Morgan is a talk radio shout-show host. But the elite media were the ones who legitimized talk radio shout-shows as part of the national discourse that had to be taken seriously–it was Jeff Gerth et al.’s reporting at the Times that splashed Rush’s unsubstantiated (and, not for nothing, completely false) claims about the Clintons on A1 above the fold. And Morgan is–although the Remnick declines to mention it–not just a talk radio shout-show host. She’s a regular commentor on MSNBC.

    Yes, Spiro Agnew expressed some very anti-democratic sentiments about the free press. But it was the Times that took the man who actually wrote Agnew’s words and gave him three weekly columns in their newspaper. And even unto the last days of his career, the Times refused to require corrections from him when assertions he made in his columns were directly contradicted by stories widely reported in the Times and other papers. Surely, the legendary “firewall” between a newspaper’s news and opinion sections isn’t supposed to function so as to allow op/ed writers baldy to assert falsehoods. (In fairness to Safire, this past weekend on one of the Sunday shows he responded appropriately to the claim that the Times should be charged with treason.)

    From Rush and Ann Coulter to Assrocket, the elite media has taken *very seriously* the perspectives of people who openly advocate, e.g., jailing reporters who report on bad stuff happening in Iraq. The elite media are the ones who took voices that in the ’70s were on the fringes of extreme conservatism and made them both powerful and mainstream. I’m inclined to think, in my less kind moods, that the elite US media has made its bed, and until they’re willing to start unmaking it, they’re going to have to lie in it.

  • Scott E. makes a very good point about the New York Times and William Safire (former NYT columnist and Nixon speechwriter). For those who don’t know, speechwriter Safire penned phrase “the nattering nabobs of negativism” for VP Spiro Agnew.

  • It is also important to remember that the assault upon the media and open expression has been extended to the internet. The intention to apparently control and censor opinion has probably not ended with the latter. Just give ’em time.

  • Nice to see they’re finally seeing what I saw in the 2004 campaign, having experienced Nixon rolling over McGovern, it wasn’t hard to see the same thing being done by barbarians who made Haldeman and Ehrlichman look like civilized members of mainstream society.

    If I was writing the script, the title would be “The Ultimate Revenge of Tricky Dick.”

    The whole problem stems from people failing to understand that the monster is never really dead until a stake is driven through it – standard horror movie rules. Nixon went down, yes, but the Nixon machine merely turned on its cloaking device and moved over to the far (right) corner.

    As for them going after the press the way they went after the Times in the Pentagon Papers case, they have no need. Just let the boneheads foam at the mouth (as they did this past weekend and continue to do regardless of the “facts”) until some minor orc crawls out of its cave and kills some reporter. And then let the torchlight goosesteppers keep up the beat of “patriotism.”

    Hey, it worked in an advanced society 73 years ago. Remember who the grandson of “Hitler’s Banker” is.

  • Unfortunately the neo cons are extremely good at manipulating public opinion with branding-savvy slogans like: “liberal media”, “tax and spend liberals”, “flip-flopper” and the like. For the troglodytic Nascar masses it’s easier to vote with slogans than with critical thought. It’s how they’re able to ignore the environment, the war machine, federal deficit, etc. “Just a buncha tree-huggin’, draft-dodgin’, tax-‘n’-spend lib’rals, dang it!”

    It’s easy when you know the slogans.

  • ***For the troglodytic Nascar masses it’s easier to vote with slogans than with critical thought.***
    chrenson

    So why not come up with an effective counter-assault; something that brings those “masses” around to the other side of the political spectrum?

    Take, for example, your typical Nascar Man. Play not to his overt strengths, but instead to his covert weaknesses. We’re talking about someone who’s concerned about jobs—so point out all the “job-exporting” that this administration has done over the past five-and-a-half years. We’re talking about someone who had their great uncles and grandfathers fighting and dying to rid the world of Hitler—so point out all the similarities between Adolf and George. Compare the Bush dictatorship to the dictatorships of Stalin. Compare the Bush monarchy to the monarchies of Louis XVI and George III.

    Nascar Man does not like people messing with his wheels—so portray Bush as the boss behind “The United Chop Shop of America”—stripping the nation down to its frame. Nascar Man doe not like people messing with his income—so portray Bush’s economic policies as taking money out of Nascar Man’s pocket to pay for the super-rich guy’s mansions…and sailboats…and expensive vacations.

    If the Democratic Party was willing to “get down and get medieval” on the GOP—a full-fledged offensive assault, instead of constantly trying to fend off the empty rhetoric of Nixon’s rectal offspring—I would imagine that somewhere in the neighborhood of a good half-million “Nascar votes” (maybe closer to a million) would change sides pretty quickly—and bring at least another two or three states into the Dem side of the electoral count. But if the Dems keep playing defense, and keep ignoring this one great opportunity to form a “Grand Coalition” that could bury the GOP deep under its own excrement…then the Democratic Party might as well be on its way down the misty road of history….

  • I especially like “United Chop Shop of America!” Yeah, what we need is a good sloganeer. One idea I’ve heard floated is “Credit Card Conservative,” although this one’s inherent weakness is that the Nascar nation doesn’t seem to crippling debt. Others are “Big Brother Republican.” “Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” “DiscrimiNazis.” “Spend-and-Spend Republicans.” “RichPublicans.” “Grand Oil Party.”

    Meanwhile, we could also use a good ad campaign to de-demonize the word “liberal.” My idea is a serious of tv, print, and radio ads featuring famous people and speeches, people whose greatness cannot be questioned. People like MLK, FDR, JFK, sure, but also maybe that Jesus guy, Einstein, etc. Then add the headline “Just another damned liberal trying to change the world.”

    Of course, the problem with the Nascar Nation is that they don’t see their own hypocracy. These are people who, in the same week, blasted the Dixie Chicks for daring to use their celebrity to push a political message and voted Arnold Schwarzenegger into the gov’s house in California.

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