Here.
New comics came out yesterday, and I picked up the latest issue of DMZ, which was, of course, terrific as usual. The arc is being called "Blood in the Game," and it follows Matty (our intrepid journalist/protagonist) as he covers the mayoral race in the NYC demilitarized zone. He's become attached to one candidate in particular, and he's considering becoming their propagandist. This is what I have to say about that:
Seriously, though, this arc is certainly giving Matty some more depth. He's being pulled in one direction by his role as The Journalist of the DMZ and pulled in the other by Delgado, the charismatic, populist (and possibly terrorist) candidate for mayor. Delgado says:
I've seen journalists before, Matty. They came in early on, sort of strutting around like they're above it all. That notion of objectivity or whatever... it's a fucking coping mechanism... It helps them cope with not giving a shit.
Journalists are the luckiest motherfuckers... they have a built-in excuse to do what everyone else wises they could just go and do--see people suffering and not feel bad about it.
We got to see this theme at play earlier on, when Matty's lover, friend, and fellow journalist got in some hot water for taking a picture of a dying child instead of helping her. What is the role of journalists? of journalism? Is Delgado correct? He tells Matty:
Shit like ethics and impartiality and neutrality... all that shit just goes out the window when the bombs start falling. ... People start blowing up, people start getting shot and dying right in front of you, and you pick a side. period.
In his words, I hear President Bush's administration encouraging war cheerleading from America's journalists. In his words, I hear the angry and tired communists I hung out with in high school. In his words I hear that old relativistic bullshit that should have no place in our media today.
Either we believe that ethics are ethics, or we don't. Wartime isn't a carte blanche. Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghaib and My Lai and Dresden and Hiroshima and--hell, pick your military atrocity--aren't magically justified in wartime. It isn't justified to lose one's journalistic integrity either.
None of this is to say that the news actually is objective. Rather, it is the duty of journalists to have some degree of impartiality. To report what they see, and do their best to (1) remain objective and, failing that (2) acknowledge their partiality.
This brings me to my second point: last night's presidential debate. I didn't watch it, as I was holed up, copy editing for The Grape, Oberlin's "alternative" student newspaper (read: they publish porn, drink in their office, and implicate professors in drug use scandals).
I have had the opportunity to peruse some of the more... um... interesting questions, and, suffice it to say, I'm disappointed, but not that surprised. Bitter-gate, lapel-flag-gate, tuzla-gate--it was like being run over, very slowly, by a traveling freak show of our favorite asinine media narratives (to paraphrase Stoppard).
Talk about an aborted sense of the role of the media. Obama has a pretty good, if somewhat catty, response, which might actually turn this Bitter-gate bullshit into an our-media-is-fucked-up-gate. I like that. Here's what he said:
Hunter, over at Dailykos, has yet another terrific post up on the subject. He writes:
It says something truly impressive about the press that a few statements by a presidential candidate's preacher bear far more weight to the future of our nation than the challenges of terrorism or war. It is truly a celebration of our own national collapse into idiocracy that we can furrow our brows and question the patriotism of a candidate, deeply probe their patriotism based on whether or not they regularly don a made-in-China American flag pin, but a substantive discussion of energy policy, or healthcare, or the deficit, or the housing crisis, or global climate change, or the government approval of torture, or trade issues, or the plight of one-industry small American towns, or the fight over domestic espionage and FISA, or the makeup of the Supreme Court -- those were of no significance, in comparison.
If a media organization set out to intentionally demonstrate themselves to be self absorbed and ignorant, they could not have accomplished it better. It was not just a tabloid debate, but the tittering of political kindergardeners making and lobbing mud pies. It was politics as game show. The moderators demonstrated that to them and their supposed "news" organization, the presidency of the United States of America is about the trivialities of politics, which were obsessed over ravenously, not about the challenges of American governance, which were fully ignored. [emphasis his]
Glenn Greenwald, as usual, has something pretty remarkable to say as well. He writes:
Last night was a perfect microcosm of how our political process works. The Right creates stupid, petty personality-based attacks to ensure that our elections aren't decided on issues (where they have a decisive disadvantage). Media stars -- some due to sloth, some due to ideology, some due to an eagerness to please the Right and convince them how Good and Fair they are -- eat up the shallow trash they're fed and then spew it out relentlessly, ensuring that our political discourse is overwhelmed by it, our elections dictated by it. That happens over and over. It's how our media and our elections function. Last night was just an unusually transparent and particularly ugly expression of it.
I'll add my own two cents, if you don't mind. This is from an upcoming article in The Wilder Voice:
[The meida] only produces absurd coverage when it is fed absurd values. Unfortunately, the media has digested something poisonous, something that causes stories about Obama’s bowling score and Edwards’s metrosexuality to spew forth. What’s more, our self-aggrandizing, narcissistic media is too busy fetishizing its own objectivity to notice its spurting, infectious diarrhea.
I'm still looking for a title, so if anyone has any bright ideas, let me know. Something about narrative bias in the news... I don't know. You let that stew. At any rate, I'm not going to say anything more on the ABC debate, you'll have to go check it out yourself, if you think you can stomach it. And, I must say, I've been doing my best to be happy with Senator Clinton, but I found her parroting of Republican talking points rather ridiculous. Ayers? c'mon. Farrakhan? please. Wright? sweet mother of god, Senator Clinton. Okay. I'm done for real.
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