Categorical Aperitif

Anyone checking in with Today's Papers this morning will get a nice object lesson in scripting—the mainstream media's obliging adherence to convenient narratives that hide inconvenient facts. First, there's this tidbit:

Rounding out the Campaign '08 analysis-dominated lineup, the Los Angeles Times breaks down the Republican candidates' relationship with President Bush's foreign policy legacy. All four major candidates are edging away from administration's democracy-promotion agenda, but have hesitated to strongly criticize specific policies for fear of antagonizing Bush loyalists.

This is a decent summary of the LAT article, but—democracy-promotion agenda? How exactly does that description fit with the Bush Administration's record? Let's see: unjustified, illegal invasion of Iraq followed by societal breakdown there; active attempt to overthrow democratically elected government of Venezuela in 2002 (which fits nicely with actual overthrows of democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973, etc., though at least the Bush people can't be blamed for those); scant murmurings about Musharraf dictatorship in Pakistan; scant murmurings about hideous authoritarian government in Burma; embrace of torture; rejection of habeas corpus protections; embrace of illegal wiretapping; wow. You can see how democracy has been on the march during the Bush years. But hey, what's a totally misleading euphemism when you're trying to save space?

Second, Today's Papers points us toward a WaPo story about a guy who holds both U.S. and Venezuelan passports and who was stopped at an airport in Argentina a few months back with a suitcase holding $800,000 in undeclared cash. The U.S. claims that he was working for Hugo Chavez and that Chavez was trying to influence Argentine elections; others suspect that he was working for the U.S. and that the U.S. is trying to "meddle in the affairs of the region." Ya gotta love the last sentence here:

The United States "encouraged a nefarious intelligence operation which had the direct consequence of denigrating the presidency of our nation," stated a resolution passed by Argentina's Congress last week.

The idea of a U.S.-backed plot to influence regional politics plays well in a region where some conspiracy theories -- such as U.S. support of military dictatorships in the 1970s -- have proved true over time.

Wow. Even in a sentence that basically admits "U.S. support of military dictatorships," the WaPo manages to place the emphasis on "conspiracy theories." How many incautious readers will come away thinking "Oh, those wacky Latin Americans" rather than "Hmm, maybe they have good reason for being suspicious of U.S. involvement"? Mission accomplished!

I know that wingnut types often think that when people like me complain about things like this, it's because we think the worst of America—and we want the media to reflect that. But that's not it at all. (But then a lot of wingnut thinking seems to be driven by the following false dichotomy: Either you say only nice things about the United States or you HATE AMERICA. The massive wrongness of this assumption ought to be apparent to anyone who has the ability and the inclination to think critically for two seconds.) I remember back in the 80s; I had a right-wing college friend who routinely referred to the Washington Post as the Washington Pravda. This was his clever way (probably borrowed from Brent Bozell or somesuch rube-runner) of suggesting that the WaPo was part of the disreputable "liberal media" and was anti-American, working for the other side—Pravda, of course, was the house organ of the Soviet Communist Party in those days. A house organ, of course, specializes in telling the people what The Party wants them to hear—and hiding inconvenient facts that get in the way of the ruling elite's version of the truth. It was only years later that I came to see that there was more truth in my friend's nasty little troglodyte joke than either of us realized. The anti-American part was always stupid—the WaPo occasionally published critical information about Republicans and the Reagan Administration; that's really what made him mad—but the house organ part was spot-on. Decades later, this supposedly anti-American paper can scarcely bring itself to acknowledge that the U.S. has, at times, actively undermined democratic governments and championed repressive dictatorships. The reason people like me complain about the mainstream media is that we don't want our news outlets to be Pravdas: we don't want them to just obligingly pass along ridiculous spin like "democracy-promotion agenda" and to hide inconvenient facts about past U.S. actions inside tortured sentences designed to preserve some childish myth of American purity. We don't hate America; far from it. (If America isn't perfect, it has imperfection in common with, oh, everything else made by human hands.) We hate the fact that in this, the world's richest, most powerful democracy, the media still often functions like the propaganda arm of a corrupt, dishonest elite.

I guess that the Sunday before Christmas is as good a time as any to be reminded of some unpleasant truths about the world we've made, huh?