Fantastic Media Criticism Piece - "Taking One for the Tribe"

[NashVegas]

But after reading my thousandth critique of how the New York Times’ coverage missed this or overlooked that, I got the feeling that that there was something very flawed with the left’s media approach. First, that the reporters at the Times must have, at least once, confronted a complaint against their reporting that exposed them as bad reporters, or perhaps even liars. And yet, without apology, they kept going. Second, regardless of that point, this technique of media criticism did absolutely nothing to stop bad reporters or bad reporting. Therefore it was illuminating only to the disaffected news reader who, like me, craved a tonic for the disgraceful media that abounds. But I still lacked a framework that would give a better understanding of why reporters got their facts wrong. This is where I think most lefties are with the problem of the press.

...

This is a very different kind of lying, and I think it can only be explained that these people are writing on behalf of The Tribe. These lies aren’t there to be evil; these are conscientious favors to the rest of the people who share the same mentality as the reporters; sweeping our mistakes under the rug to keep the tribe’s sense of dominance intact and its psyche clean. That’s why the Times, or political opposition leaders will never say anything tougher about the lying top leader than “appeared to mislead”—don’t expect them to.

Because the tribe can never do wrong. For the editors and journalists who knew better, finding a way to explain that the thousands of primitive IED attacks and primitive ambushes were the work of bin Laden’s minions—not the collective effort of a population that was supposed to greet us as liberators—took extraordinary psychic sacrifice on behalf of the tribe, and it was they who have to go bed and digest these lies on behalf of the tribe, not us, so that in the morning, the tribe is still right.

The New York Times and a few other newspapers are a lot of things at once, but most of all, they are the extraordinarily complicated recording mechanisms for the most incredible tribe on earth. While this tribe’s recording tools are light years beyond the primitive cannibal stories they sing around the fire in Papua New Guinea, the laws that govern them are the same. And the most important law of them is that the tribe is never wrong, and can not fuck up, ever.

http://buffalobeast.com/113/monkey.htm

[papau]

1. As in 1984 - the Tribe is led by the media, and the media is led by the Tribe &truth isn't important

n/t