Media kind of Matters I guess

I remember following Media Matters’ 2004 coverage of the era-defining intellectual clash between John Kerry’s vehement defense of civil liberties and social justice, his insistence on drastically shrinking the military-industrial complex (warning, famously, that we must “avoid the necessity of those overgrown military establishments which, under any form of government, are inauspicious to liberty and which are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty”) and bringing an end to the absurdly racist drug wars on the one hand, and George W. Bush’s concise articulation of the ethical foundations of a healthy society, on the other. Or maybe my memories of the experience are so painful that George Washington’s Farewell Address got inadvertently jumbled up with a bunch of Hollywood bullshit, obvious facts, and modified Enlightenment principles in an intoxicating cocktail my mind self-administered to numb the pain of…the Swift Boat diversion.

Media Matters flew right into that storm, using a delicate rational cotton swab to attend to Kerry’s shit-bespeckled face. They countered accusations by printing them verbatim, then systematically debunking them. It didn’t matter. After the media was finished validating Swift claims with their incessant “maybe it’s not true but (in a subtle whisper) maybe…it is” routine, only Kerry’s frighteningly white teeth could be seen. And who’s gonna vote for that?

After a 3 year break from politics/thinking, I revisited the Media Matters site again only recently. How are they doing? They’re still great compilers of the most egregious quotes by the Right’s defenders of the Christian virtues of peace, love, and putting your poor brown neighbor in jails, ghettos, and Guantanamos. I do have a few concerns, however:

1. Their aim is to get the Limbaughs to apologize and shut up (the Al Sharpton approach). Sounds like a worthwhile goal, of course, but the Limbaughs never mean their apologies, obviously, and the issues are rarely addressed, only buried. Political discourse becomes even more restricted. Populism needs to breathe. If you’re going to restrict its airways, you better have a good tactical reason. Is there such a reason?

There’s a risk, and I’m just speculating here, that even if you can bury the Limbaughs, the corporate media will simply resurrect them in a less patently obnoxious form — corporate reps who will support the same fucked up policies while more tactfully concealing their elitist motivations. In a sick Darwinian twist, increasingly more deceptive facades may evolve, at which point we’ll have to deal with Limbaugh 2.0.

Limbaugh is already a toned down version of himself. He doesn’t say “I hate black people. They all need to go to jail.” He says, “We need to put the rapists, murderers, and drug dealers behind bars.” He knows he means black people (or non-white, more accurately), his listeners know it, Media Matters knows it, but he doesn’t say it. When he slips up and makes statements that more or less give away his hand, Media Matters is waiting to catch him, which is comforting and troubling at once.

Is Media Matters further constricting democracy’s trachea? Are they whacking the less evolved corporate moles? Quite possibly.

2. They defend their candidates and their supporters to a fault. Here’s an example:

In a 60 minutes interview, Michelle Obama says, “I don’t lose sleep over [Barack possibly getting assassinated], because the realities are that, you know, as a black man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas station, you know. So, you know, you can’t — you know, you can’t make decisions based on fear and the possibility of what might happen. We just weren’t raised that way.” Uber-racist Shelby Steele, discussing the interview in her book, writes, “[Obama] is telling the larger truth of black victimization in America. She is facilitating her race’s manipulation of the American mainstream.”

First of all, if black people are manipulating the mainstream, they’re doing a pretty shitty job.

Secondly, Obama’s comment, while not offensive, isn’t something that should be defended. Was Barack ever at real risk of getting shot at a gas station because of his brown skin? Comparing Barack’s situation to the very real threat of violence in troubled inner city black communities is disingenuous.

Media Matters would acknowledge as much if they weren’t knee-deep in America’s nastified political sludge, as likely to point out Democratic candidates’ flaws and deceptions as the candidates’ handlers.

Media Matters doesn’t lie. They’re consistently careful and technically correct (though they ignore context, when convenient, in favor of literalism). I’m glad to have them on my side and no one really knows the net effects of their efforts, which I’d guess favor the people.  They also have fine columnists, who work outside the basic “shut up, Matthews!” paradigm, to whom the above analysis doesn’t apply.  With W out of the picture, however, and the candidates all uncannily resembling each other, sacrificing honesty to the political gods no longer seems warranted.