Stray Shot

I’ve been watching the debate develop around the Muslim community center in New York.  It’s two blocks from where the towers went down, and so, because the guys who did it were Muslim, there’s an argument that to build it that close is sacrilege or an insult to the dead.  Besides the obvious contradiction around insulting the dead, there’s the usual battle between religious and secular forces.

We have freedom of religion, the property is private and for sale.  If some Muslims want to buy it they can buy it.  To argue against that on the grounds that the terrorists who hit the towers were Muslim puts every Starbucks and McDonald’s in Japan in jeopardy because Curtis LeMay was Christian.  A quote from LeMay:  ”I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. However, the public opinion in this country and throughout the world throw up their hands in horror when you mention nuclear weapons, just because of the propaganda that’s been fed to them.”

I remember taking a class in civics in my first semester at college, and reading that most people have a tough time aligning an abstract belief — even one they profess to hold dear —  to an actual event.  So you can ask somebody if they believe in freedom of the press and they say they do.  But  ask them if they agree with the statement that a book which is evil should be banned, and they will most likely agree.  They have learned that they believe in freedom of the press like they’ve learned that we probably shouldn’t have killed all the buffalo and carrier pigeons.  But the application of the abstract eludes them and they escape to the safety of conformity.

“I’m with you fellers, and I don’t like evil books.”

“You’ll join us at the bonfire, then, brother?”

The Bill of Rights specified freedom of religion only because it was big enough to specify that.  If any religion had been bigger than the Bill of Rights we would not have a Bill of Rights, we would have dietary restrictions and special underwear.

The radical Muslims scare me.  But so does Utah, Israel, and the Texas School Board.  The Bill of Rights is bigger than the lot of them, and that’s a good thing.

FOX news produces pro or anti-government propaganda and protests (depending on who is in power) the way William Randolph Hearst produced the Spanish American war. When artist Frederick Remington famously wired Hearst, by whom he had been employed to go cover war breaking out in Cuba, that there was no war, he received the reply:  “You furnish the pictures; I’ll furnish the war.”

And he did furnish the war.  By starting out with a desired result and then finding evidence to make it happen, Hearst became a master of yellow journalism as well as a connoisseur of rosebud.   In a state of emotional turmoil, people tend to just fall in line behind a leader until the threat subsides.  It’s dangerous to even question motives or the rightness of what the leader is doing when the public is emotionally aroused.   It’s a mob mentality, like at Ox Bow.

The  Mexican American War was started deliberately when Polk sent  American troops into Mexican territory to ride around until they were attacked as foreign troops, which they were.  The news was put out that they were attacked on American soil without provocation, which provided an excuse for expanding American territory in line with the newly minted theory of Manifest Destiny.

The methods of shaping  public policy through yellow journalism and by creating news and then reporting on it  is well known, but it was corrected to some extent through the Fairness Doctrine, which was instituted in 1949, but abolished by the FCC in 1987, the year after FOX Broadcasting Company was launched.   The destruction of any regulation of broadcasting under Reagan appointee Mark Fowler had similar results to the destruction of regulation of the financial industry.  It took the referees out of the game.

Because a major U.S. news network was now under foreign ownership (Newscorp) it was investigated in 1995 by the FCC as against American law,  but the commission ruled that Murdoch’s ownership was in America’s best interest. Keep in mind that these were public airwaves leased out with a requirement of providing news in the public interest, not for broadcasters to use as a profit stream.   The following year, Fox News Channel, the 24 hour cable news channel, was launched.  Newscorp later bought Dow Jones, publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Newscorp executives can now drive  political  debate in a manner reminiscent of when Dick Cheney planted a story in the Times which he then used as a source on the Sunday morning talk shows.

FOX is not gathering the facts and from them distilling a fair and balanced analysis. The Fair and Balanced slogan is classically Orwellian. FOX is beginning with an ideological position,   and then gathering evidence which supports it.  Or,  it is instigating a riot, and then covering it as news.   And behind it there is an old man who, like Hearst, can furnish the war, be it foreign or domestic.