The Fire This Time

So, this week turned into a long critique of the self-declared greatness of the free press.  And my hate mail box is full of stuff whining about me being critical of the holy and sacred press,  well actually very little of it goes through a press these days.  I would appear to be doing too much "opinion journalism" for it to be tolerable to the "opinion journalists"

It is complained by the less whiny that what I wrote the past two days is "too soon".   Considering what they are praising Charlie Hebdo for doing, pouring gasoline onto an already raging fire as it was burning actual, living people, that is stinkin' rich.  Considering their instantly found sense of propriety and the sacred, when it comes to them and theirs, as opposed to nameless Muslims and others, that merely shows how those granted privileges, as freedoms granted to media organizations are, often use them to generate hypocrisy in mountains.

In the past fifty years, watching what they do, selling out The People to billionaires, helping to install the servants of the wealthy and powerful into government and the courts, inciting racist, imperial wars that have gotten millions of people killed, I don't respect "the free press".  I might respect some reporters of fact - the kind of journalist who seems to be most in danger of being killed for what they do - I might respect some opinion writers who have a sense of their responsibility to abide by the truth and serve The People with accurate information and the need to stick with their moral obligations in service to individual rights, equally held.   That doesn't include most of what gets called "journalism" these days.  Aside from Bill Moyer and what gets done in some of the liberal ghetto hours on MSNBC, I'm unaware of it happening in the past decade on TV, "public radio" giving far fewer hours even than that to something approaching genuine journalism.  And the electronic media is destroying print journalism, it is what sets the standards for what still gets put on paper.

News organizations are always bemoaning why they are so little trusted, to the extent that it has become a cynical in-joke with them.  One almost as funny as their cynicism about how ignorant the public who must rely on them for information are.  That it is their failure to inform the public of information they need to govern themselves and conduct their lives, the one and only reason for them to have be granted the privileges of "free press" doesn't trouble them at all, and goes unmentioned in their wry reporting of the results of their own failure.

That would be because that is not why they do what they do.  They exist to make money and to have jobs and careers and, among those whose names we know, go to parties and know powerful, rich people.  All of which was true of a segment of the media in the past, but in the past half century it has become the large majority of it.  People don't respect the press because the press doesn't fulfill its responsibility, instead instilling just the sense of cynical regard of everything that the press finds turned on itself.

One of the things flung at me was a post by The Rude Pundit about the greatness of blasphemy.  It was, perhaps, the most puerile of the things I looked at in the past two days, puerile irreverence is his shtick.   Looking at it I realized that he was one of the bloggers I used to look at a couple of times a week, at least, when he was starting out but I've gradually looked at it less and less and, I'm pretty sure, in the past year I haven't looked at it more than once or twice, if that much. I don't even remember what I read there.  Maybe it's the same thing that Sophie Gherardi noted was the response of so many former readers of Charlie Hebdo.   Maybe it's a result of real life having become so grim that we can see that the the merry pranksters who cutely take a crap on everything are, in fact, a big part of the very thing they mock.

I recall once, when the great power of biting, savage satire was being asserted that someone pointed out how the great, biting, savage satire of Berlin in the 1920s and elsewhere in Europe had not prevented the Nazis and fascists taking over and murdering millions and enslaving more.   The biting satire of the 1950s and 60s here did nothing to prevent the destruction of liberalism and bring us to the point we have reached when liberalism is entirely defeated, today.  That satire led to a cynical rejection of the very moral values that comprise liberalism and, again, the moral obligations that ensure the existence of rights.  And the same irreverent attitude was not held as the sole property of the alleged left.  In the hands of the right,  matched with their previous rejection of those same morals and responsibilities, it became obvious that satirical shtick was never comprised of what liberalism needs to succeed.   The form works even better for the right because the right begins by rejecting the morality and moral obligations that cynical, irreverent mockery is in the business of tearing down.

The media relieved of its responsibilities to serve The People and government by The People sees rights all in their own interest and in service to their own goals and ambitions.  That is what "freedom of the press" means to the media.  Which is the way that the far right regard rights, an opportunity for them to get what they want without any wider sense of responsibility.

What we've seen in the Charlie Hebdo incident is the real life results of that happened when those who are the target of the hate the media sells give up moral restraint and a reverence for human life and hit back.   Considering the market for what Charlie Hebdo was selling, what promoting hate can lead to, it's not shocking that some of it got back to them.  That peddling hate is accepted as journalism among Western journalists makes it rather odd that they don't understand that it can come round to them as well as to anyone who they target. By peddling hate, they marked themselves as a target for those they targeted, by tearing down morality, they helped remove any restraint that may have prevented those they ridiculed and denigrated from hitting back.  The media, especially those engaged in what Charlie Hebdo does, fuel the cycle of violence.  It's as if they believe they are immune to the hatred they supply as part of their trade.  The take-home message which will not be taken home is that they're not.  They live in the same pond that they crap in.  The fire they stoke can consume them too.