The Rally From Nowhere, continued.

Jon Stewart recently sat down with Rachel Maddow in order to defend himself against criticisms from all over the left, including here, that the Rally to Restore Sanity essentially served as a huge banner of false equivalence. Particularly stinging was Bill Maher's criticism, saying "If you’re going to have a rally where hundreds of thousands of people show up, you might as well go ahead and make it about something."

Jay Rosen posted his own commentary about the interview in YouTube form, along with the full interview, Bill Maher's clip, and an old Daily Show takedown of CNN's false equivalence here. All the videos are well worth watching. I just wanted to highlight two points that Jay found very interesting which relate back to a lot of what I love about his own work: 1) Jon felt the need to come and defend himself because he wants a news system that focuses not on the left/right, Dem/GOP, blue/red fight, but the conflict between, as Jay put it, corruption and virtue. 2) Jon stresses to Rachel over and over that he is on the sidelines and is thus different from Rachel, and she fights him on it.

Restoring Sanity to "Both Sides"

By now, most of you will have heard about Jon Stewart's "Rally to Restore Sanity", which coupled with Stephen Colbert's "March to Keep Fear Alive," will give Glenn Beck's rally the sound mocking it deserves. I just wanted to write a quick note about it right now. A more thorough post on the genesis of this event and what that means generally for media will be coming soon.

Basically, Jon Stewart is great, and I'm a huge fan, but when he announced this rally he did something I believe deeply destructive and have written about before - false equivalences. Glenn Greenwald, however, just wrote the post that I wanted to write, so I'm just going pass it on, quoting him:

I think Jon Stewart is one of the most incisive and effective commentators in the country, and he reaches an audience that would otherwise be politically disengaged. I don't have any objection if he really wants to hold a rally in favor of rhetorical moderation, and it's also fine if, as seems to be the case, he's eager to target rhetorical excesses on both the left and right in order to demonstrate his non-ideological centrism. But the example he chose to prove that the left is guilty, too -- the proposition that Bush is a "war criminal" -- is an extremely poor one given that the General in charge of formally investigating detainee abuse (not exactly someone with a history of Leftist advocacy) has declared this to be the case, and core Nuremberg principles compel the same conclusion.

"Both Sides" Journalism and the Role of Media's Subservience To Government

I'm a little late on this, but I wanted to mention something about the study that came out of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government a couple weeks ago, regarding newspapers' use of the word torture. Specifically, I want to use it to put in context my assertion that unfortunately, the potentially bad results of government funding of journalism are already here, with none of the benefits.

The study documents a "significant and sudden shift in how newspapers characterized waterboarding." Basically, in the last 100 years, the newspapers discussed waterboarding occasionally and unequivocally called it torture, right up until the government began asserting that it was not torture.Glenn Greenwald sums up the implications well:

We don't need a state-run media because our media outlets volunteer for the task: once the U.S. Government decrees that a technique is no longer torture, U.S. media outlets dutifully cease using the term. That compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary.

What it also does is make the bogeyman specter of government control irrelevant to the discussion because for better or worse (obviously worse) it's already here.

Obama Contributes to the Noise (Part II - The Not So Good)

This is the second half of the review of President Obama's commencement address at the University of Michigan this past Saturday. The first half is here, and the text of the speech is here.

Ok, so I still think that on the whole Obama's speech was fantastic, but there are two glaring flaws, one of which I'd like to just note - his hypocrisy on our democracy, and the other of which this post is primarily about - the false equivalence between right and left. After that, there's one more side point I'd like to address - the lack of even a mention of other problems with the media - particularly with respect to race.

Saving CNN Should be About News, Not Business

(updated below)

Let's look at two different proposals for how CNN can and should fix itself.

A couple weeks ago, Ross Douthat wrote a column for the NYT about how to save CNN, that was fundamentally flawed. The basic problem with his column was that while he identified the core of CNN's problem: its vapid, empty version of non-partisan journalism that basically says nothing at all and is thus just boring, he proposes an inherently problematic solution, essentially merely calling on them to bring more "debate" into the news room.