I have heard the statements over and over again over the years. They are statements made with such confidence and simple yet powerful conjecture, that to the so many listeners they cannot be disproved
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Ø Liberals want to raise taxes and give money to people who don’t want to work.
Ø Liberals are weak on Defense.
Ø Liberals are purveyors of sexual deviance.
Ø Liberals are pro-abortion
Ø Liberals are anti-Christian
Ø The media is liberally biased.
Ø Climate change is a hoax.
Ø Liberal activist judges.
Ø Tax increases on the wealthy forces the ‘job creators’ to stop creating jobs.
And then the statement that truly transformed America from a country dedicated to strengthening and expanding the middle class to a nation on the verge of becoming run, not by the people and their representatives but by large corporations and Wall Street.
“Government isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.” Ronald Reagan made that statement in January of 1981 at his inaugural. That statement, made by one of the best speakers ever to live in the White House, was pounded home months later when Reagan fired America’s Air Traffic controllers after a two day strike, and thousands of others in the airline industry crossed the picket line in support of the new President.
At that point the conservative movement began winning the war on the working class by winning the war on the Conventional Wisdom: Instead of being champions of working class Americans, unions were now the enemy of economic progress. And by the droves working class Americans bought it.
What conservatives realized at that moment, and what liberals missed by a mile, was that a perfect storm of social movements were converging to open the door for Conservatives to change the very definition of the United States of America.
They realized they could throw out any statement, state it as fact, and that new version of the truth would become the Conventional Wisdom. And fear was always a vital component in that recipie.
Again Reagan delivered the perfect example. He cited the infamous “welfare queen”; a Chicago woman who uses several aliases, social security cards and addresses to collect more than $150,000 in illegal government funds.
What Reagan said on a repeated basis was simply not true. But while some journalists who sought out this alleged Welfare Queen could not find her, the larger media was beginning the process of caving into these types of stereotypical accusations. At the same time a new generation of post civil rights Democrats were showing an inability to answer to these false stereotypes and began to act defensive, instead of bolding backing the truth.
The Perfect Storm: Greedy, Lazy Journalism, Bold Lies and Frightened Liberals
The 80s were also a turning point for journalism; an industry that was turning toward consultants rather than journalistic standards to make decisions on what stories to cover and how to cover them. An example: When I was a TV reporter in the Tampa, Florida market covering Sarasota/Manatee Counties, a brand new $55 million airport was shut down because of a dispute between the two counties. Jobs were about to be lost and the tourism industry ground to a halt. Big story right? Affects a lot of people right?
At the same time some idiot living in a trailer park was arrested for allegedly marrying his daughter. Management at this TV station decided they would make more money on the Incest Marriage story than the story that actually affected the livelihoods of thousands of people. The consultants brought in to help make news more profitable agreed and we covered that incest story for months.
In the 80s these consultants were infesting television stations and showing them how they could make more money by doing less journalism and more entertainment style journalism and those local stations bought it, hook line and sinker. One of my News Directors told me, “Eric I will bring in scantily clad blonde dancing girls if it will get us to number one.”
The result of this growing trend was to spend more news resources on creating what one friend of mine described as “infotainment” instead of reporters covering a beat, developing sources and triple checking facts.
Very early in my journalism career I covered a murder trial being tried by the legendary Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr. In my first report on the trial I opined that the Defense seemed to gain an advantage early on with questioning and testimony.
The next day the prosecutor in the case chewed me up and down; saying I had no business adding my opinion to the story and that I could prejudice the jury by that kind of reporting. He was right of course and in my ten years covering trials I never did that again.
Today?
Today they call trials like sports announcers, giving on-going commentary and criticism while trails are still in progress.
That’s not the worst of it though. The worst of it is that we do not have journalists on a widespread basis delving into stories by source checking, understanding history and of course holding onto journalistic standards.
Examples: When Ken Starr, the special prosecutor brought in to look for dirt on Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater case, leaked to New York Times columnist William Safire that Hillary might be indicted (for what…no one ever could determine) it made headlines across the country.
Yet when word came out that no indictment would be forthcoming the news was splattered all over….well it wasn’t splattered anywhere. It made the back pages of some newspaper sections. No big story of the First Lady’s innocence.
That’s because journalists who repeated Safire’s false story on what I can only assume was an illegal leak by the prosecutor, didn’t have the budget, curiosity or journalistic integrity to give equal credence to Mrs. Clinton’s innocence.
The right wing won this story because of lazy journalism.
The Iraq War and the Truth
This perfect storm of the right wing’s ability to turn the Conventional Wisdom upside-down altering contributed to the outbreak of the horrific war in Iraq; a war in which at least half a million human beings were slaughtered based on a house of cards worth of evidence and outright lies by the Bush/Cheney Administration.
While everyone from CNN to the New York Times and Washington Post were running front page headlines of imminent danger from Weapons of Mass Destruction two journalists from Knight Ridder Newspapers, Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay and 60 Minutes reporter Bob Simon saw this ‘evidence’ as suspect at best.
They filed story after story of senior intelligence officials within the CIA saying there were many misgivings about the WMD claims. These stories, reported in great depth with many credible sources within the Intelligence apparatus, were largely ignored by the allegedly liberal giants like the New York Times and Washington Post and CNN.
In an interview as the war was raging Simon said, “I mean we knew things or suspected things that perhaps the Washington press corps could not suspect. For example, the absurdity of putting up a connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda….Saddam...was a total control freak. To introduce a wild card like Al Qaeda in any sense was just something he would not do. So I just didn't believe it for an instant."
What’s more weapons inspectors found that Sadaam did not have a reconstituted nuclear weapons program as Vice President Cheney regularly asserted.
Ye the mainstream media simply printed, copied and repeated this unchecked information from the administration and Iraqi defectors. Nearly all of it was false.
"From August 2002 until the war was launched in March of 2003 there were about 140 front page pieces in THE WASHINGTON POST making the administration's case for war," says Howard Kurtz, Media Critic for the Washington Post. "But there was only a handful of stories that ran on the front page that made the opposite case. Or, if not making the opposite case, raised questions."
Why did the news media fail in this critical time when good journalism could have prevented this catastrophic war?
This is where these false Conventional Wisdoms really benefitted the Bush/Cheney team:
Left Wing Media Bias:
This stereotype had been pounded into our popular culture since Reagan’s time. Advanced by the extremely talented broadcaster Rush Limbaugh and promoted by a huge number of fake journalists at the burgeoning network Fox News, traditional journalism was running scared.
From the New York Times to the Washington Post to MSNBC and CNN, evidence that there were no WMDs and that it was impossible for Sadaam to have played a role in the September 11th attacks on the United States were either dropped from the front page or published with diminished headlines. An internal memo at MSNBC (before it began to feature liberal oriented talk shows showed the network brass was worried that the Phil Donahue show would be "a home for the liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity."
This fear of being labeled “liberal media” convinced many in the mainstream media to lean to the right and give up asking tough questions or trying to truly corroborate the leaks being sent out by the Bush/Cheney Administration. Without the flag waving, profits were feared to fall faster than Sadaam’s regime.
Today when we hear someone like Michelle Bachman or Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich assert that more debt has been raised by President Obama than any other President in history (Bachman said any other president combined) we usually get this kind of response from the ‘journalist’ asking the question.
“Well how do you propose reducing that debt?”
The journalist takes a statement that is blatently false and, because he or she has no clue whether it’s a true statement acts like they are asking tough questions. But they’re not even dealing with the fact any more. In case you were wondering here’s the truth about debts and our modern American presidents.
US Federal debt increases by U.S Presidents:
Reagan -----186%
Bush I -----54%
Clinton ---41%
Bush II------72%
Obama --23%
Source: Congressional Budget Office
Reagan -----186%
Bush I -----54%
Clinton ---41%
Bush II------72%
Obama --23%
Source: Congressional Budget Office
Unpatriotic Liberals
The other Conventional Wisdom that came into play was this idea that liberals are unpatriotic and conservatives are patriotic. I wrote about this during the July 4th holiday. Dating from the Vietnam era, conservatives have been able to successfully create the false impression that liberals were afraid of a valid fight and were not willing to support our soldiers in time of war.
While we have since found that WMDs did not exist, that Sadaam played no role in the 9-11 attacks and that the GOP collectively slashed programs and benefits for soldiers and their families during the war, Democratic politicians ran scared during the buildup.
The last thing Hillary Clinton or John Kerry or any other leading Democrat wanted to be accused of was ‘not supporting the troops” or “being weak on Defense.” So they voted for the war. They supported the war. Kerry even went so far as to lambaste Howard Dean for saying that defeating Iraq did not make us safer. That’s what ultimately won Kerry the Democratic nomination. Democrats foolishly believed that because he stood down Howard Dean on Iraq the GOP couldn’t refute his military tough readiness.
That’s what happens when you refuse to fight the false Conventional Wisdom. You become part of their narrative.
Once Kerry accepted that the Iraq War was the right thing, despite all the evidence, he was read meat to Karl Rove and his lions. From the Swift Boat Liars to Dick Cheney’s badgering they managed to turn a geniuine war hero into a coward or shot himself to get out of Vietnam and then turned George W. Bush, who was never ever going to see a moment of combat into a war hero. This was made possible by Kerry’s acceptance of the GOP is strong on Defense Conventional Wisdom and the new media giving credence to stories that were blatent lies; lies that could easily be uncovered but for a tragic laziness on the part of the American News Institution.
The Truth
The real truth is directly is confrontation with Conventional Wisdom.
Ø Republicans have not balanced a budget since Eisenhower’s day.
Ø Bill and Hillary Clinton did nothing illegal in the Whitewater affair. Nothing.
Ø Democrats’ support soldiers far more aggressively than Republicans. And we’re much better at catching and killing terrorists.
Ø Corporate journalism is lazy and profitable, not left wing.
Ø Government protects us from: Pollution, disasters, corporate rip offs, Wall Street gambling away our retirement and mortgages, oil spills and criminals. Oh yes and Government builds great institutions of education and learning while keeping our roads, highways, and railways safe and working. Every new highway, every safe road, every new railways opens the door for free market business to thrive.
Ø Oh yes and Barack Obama is actually an American born Christian who is quite patriotic.
Unless leaders in the Democratic Party can begin to effectively assert the truth in the war on Conventional Wisdom and unless journalism can once again follow its most rigid standards, a new generation of Americans will believe that Franklin Roosevelt created the Depression, Newt Gingrich balanced the budget and Ronald Reagan was a small government low tax, debt reducing president.
Oh wait….maybe it’s too late.
