May 1 at 9:55AM
Jon Stewart Skewers Cable News on Obama's First 100 Days
As Jon Stewart illustrated on last night's Daily Show, the big three cable news networks' coverage of President Obama's first 100 days in office was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Fox was too cartoonishly critical, while MSNBC was too whorishly sycophantic. Logically, CNN should be just right, but in this version of the story, baby bear ate a lot of lead paint as an infant.
The Daily Show airs Monday through Thursday at 11pm / 10c.
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The best discussion I've seen about the use of torture was on Bill Moyer's Journal with Bruce Fein and Mark Danner.
If Obama pardons Bush and Cheney then we can start the process of independent investigation (David Souter). If he doesn't pardon first then he opens them up to prosecution which with the complicity of the Democrats would not likely allow them to support an investigation.
If he doesn't issue a pardon and tries to sweep it under the rug by just denouncing the torture program then any future attack could be used to say that he was to soft and that the program was working.
While I don't always agree with Mr. Pilger's conclusions, his reputation for adherence to the facts at hand is exemplary and shouldn't be dismissed lightly. Unlike many journalists in the mainstream media, he is not beholden to the polite euphemisms that so often prevent us from seeing the truth (and the consequences) of the actions of our leaders.
Hume:
Massacre: noun. The unnecessary, indiscriminate killing of a large number of human beings or animals, as in barbarous warfare or persecution or for revenge or plunder.
War crime: noun. Crimes committed against an enemy, prisoners of war, or subjects in wartime that violate international agreements or, as in the case of genocide, are offenses against humanity.
You're right on one count though: Iraq is not a river of blood.
Cheers.
John Pilger isn't a freshman at a state college. He's a somewhat well-known (or notorious perhaps?) Australian journalist. (In his defense, I would imagine that AMC's Mad Med is rebroadcast by the BBC in his part of the world.) I had the opportunity to see one of his films concerning Israel while I was in college.
That film of course told me everything I needed to know about Mr. Pilger. He very well might be presenting a lot of well-hidden facts that need to be heard, but he's such an entrenched ideologue that I simply cannot take him seriously. Massacre in Gaza? Kissinger a war criminal? Iraq a river of blood? Please.
Pilger probably believes he is a knight in the cause of truth and justice against the forces of evil behind the scenes, battling against the cronies and sellouts at Fox, MSNBC, and CNN. But he is no less an ideologue than any of their anchors, and he unabashedly uses the same techniques of sensationalism to sell his message.
I would take him and his ilk a lot more seriously if they dispassionately and objectively presented facts (and there ARE some legitimate tidbits in his "essay"), rather than cloaking agendas and editorial pieces in the guise of news reports.
Weak. I love the Daily Show, but I wouldn't consider this clip particularly clever. Certainly not "skewering".
Marcus,
Nice straw man…
Mad Men is shown on the BBC and the AMC, ignoramus. Plus, Pilger didn't say anything about which network "made" Mad Men.
You FAIL.
……………………….
Mike Lee,
Pilger's article was excellent. Your post was pointless and entirely useless.
Thanks for nothing, loser.
Ahh John….
It's kinda cute that you wrote an "essay" to prove to us how much you think you know about the world, but seriously…save that stuff for school, no one cares enough to read through a boring essay.
Try to learn something from your marketing ideology(which you seem to be so passioante about), if you want people to read your comment, make it more appealing…
Let me guess, Freshmen in some state college? Trying hard to prove to the world that you are not dumb?….ha ha…but cute nonetheless:)
Hey there John,
You seem like a pretty passionate dude and I would love to read your 9 paragraph essay on a comedy site about Obama.
However,
A quick google search would have told you that Mad Men is not made by BBC, but by AMC.
Your ignorance was sealed immediately.
The BBC's American television soap Mad Men offers a rare glimpse of the power of corporate advertising. The promotion of smoking half a century ago by the “smart” people of Madison Avenue, who knew the truth, led to countless deaths. Advertising and its twin, public relations, became a way of deceiving dreamt up by those who had read Freud and applied mass psychology to anything from cigarettes to politics. Just as Marlboro Man was virility itself, so politicians could be branded, packaged and sold.
It is more than 100 days since Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. The “Obama brand” has been named “Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008”, easily beating Apple computers. David Fenton of MoveOn.org describes Obama’s election campaign as “an institutionalised mass-level automated technological community organising that has never existed before and is a very, very powerful force”. Deploying the internet and a slogan plagiarised from the Latino union organiser César Chávez – “Sí, se puede!” or “Yes, we can” – the mass-level automated technological community marketed its brand to victory in a country desperate to be rid of George W Bush.
No one knew what the new brand actually stood for. So accomplished was the advertising (a record $75m was spent on television commercials alone) that many Americans actually believed Obama shared their opposition to Bush’s wars. In fact, he had repeatedly backed Bush’s warmongering and its congressional funding. Many Americans also believed he was the heir to Martin Luther King’s legacy of anti-colonialism. Yet if Obama had a theme at all, apart from the vacuous “Change you can believe in”, it was the renewal of America as a dominant, avaricious bully. “We will be the most powerful,” he often declared.
Perhaps the Obama brand’s most effective advertising was supplied free of charge by those journalists who, as courtiers of a rapacious system, promote shining knights. They depoliticised him, spinning his platitudinous speeches as “adroit literary creations, rich, like those Doric columns, with allusion…” (Charlotte Higgins in the Guardian). The San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford wrote: “Many spiritually advanced people I know… identify Obama as a Lightworker, that rare kind of attuned being who… can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”
In his first 100 days, Obama has excused torture, opposed habeas corpus and demanded more secret government. He has kept Bush’s gulag intact and at least 17,000 prisoners beyond the reach of justice. On 24 April, his lawyers won an appeal that ruled Guantanamo Bay prisoners were not “persons”, and therefore had no right not to be tortured. His national intelligence director, Admiral Dennis Blair, says he believes torture works. One of his senior US intelligence officials in Latin America is accused of covering up the torture of an American nun in Guatemala in 1989; another is a Pinochet apologist. As Daniel Ellsberg has pointed out, the US experienced a military coup under Bush, whose secretary of “defence”, Robert Gates, along with the same warmaking officials, has been retained by Obama.
All over the world, America’s violent assault on innocent people, directly or by agents, has been stepped up. During the recent massacre in Gaza, reports Seymour Hersh, “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” and being used to slaughter mostly women and children. In Pakistan, the number of civilians killed by US missiles called drones has more than doubled since Obama took office.
In Afghanistan, the US “strategy” of killing Pashtun tribespeople (the “Taliban”) has been extended by Obama to give the Pentagon time to build a series of permanent bases right across the devastated country where, says Secretary Gates, the US military will remain indefinitely. Obama’s policy, one unchanged since the Cold War, is to intimidate Russia and China, now an imperial rival. He is proceeding with Bush’s provocation of placing missiles on Russia’s western border, justifying it as a counter to Iran, which he accuses, absurdly, of posing “a real threat” to Europe and the US. On 5 April in Prague, he made a speech reported as “anti-nuclear”. It was nothing of the kind. Under the Pentagon’s Reliable Replacement Warhead programme, the US is building new “tactical” nuclear weapons designed to blur the distinction between nuclear and conventional war.
Perhaps the biggest lie – the equivalent of smoking is good for you – is Obama’s announcement that the US is leaving Iraq, the country it has reduced to a river of blood. According to unabashed US army planners, as many as 70,000 troops will remain “for the next 15 to 20 years”. On 25 April, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, alluded to this. It is not surprising that the polls are showing that a growing number of Americans believe they have been suckered – especially as the nation’s economy has been entrusted to the same fraudsters who destroyed it. Lawrence Summers, Obama’s principal economic adviser, is throwing $3trn at the same banks that paid him more than $8m last year, including $135,000 for one speech. Change you can believe in.
Much of the American establishment loathed Bush and Cheney for exposing, and threatening, the onward march of America’s “grand design”, as Henry Kissinger, war criminal and now Obama adviser, calls it. In advertising terms, Bush was a “brand collapse” whereas Obama, with his toothpaste advertisement smile and righteous clichés, is a godsend. At a stroke, he has seen off serious domestic dissent to war, and he brings tears to the eyes, from Washington to Whitehall. He is the BBC’s man, and CNN’s man, and Murdoch’s man, and Wall Street’s man, and the CIA’s man. The Madmen did well.