Eric AltermanBesprekingen

12/4/22

The author says “This book is a detailed examination of four key presidential lies: Franklin Roosevelt and the Yalta accords, John Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Lyndon Johnson and the second Gulf of Tonkin incident, and Ronald Reagan and Central America in the 1980s.” He’s right, it is detailed. No, it does not address the undisputed king (45) of lying while president, that’s in another book, nor general lies (again, another book). He does cover some of Bush 43 and the problems around Iraq in his conclusion, and skips Nixon. This is an assessment of four hugely impactful events and the deceptions surrounding them. Well, Teflon Ronnie’s should have been a lot more impactful. I have been alive for three of the four related here. Too young for the Cuban crisis, I nevertheless was in a Navy family and we talked about the events more than once. Johnson’s Viet Nam weighed heavy, though as a pre-teen, my awareness was tertiary. Reagan’s treachery is one that angers me still. But not as much as his canonization, nor as much as his creating the beginning of the political divide we endure today.

Well composed, researched, and cited, the only people who would have a problem with Alterman’s observations will probably be adherents of the subject presidents. Well done. I need to finish a few before I get to that other book, but I will soon.

Some selected sound bites. These are all quoted, and I’m not formatting them as such, so my comments, if any, are in [brackets]

Roosevelt

In a few of these instances, Roosevelt had perfectly defensible reasons to say less than he knew to be true. Lying about peaceful negotiations during wartime is a categorically different act than lying about warlike acts in peace-time, and far less trouble. [I agree, and Roosevelt’s lies about Yalta only became trouble as the concessions of Eastern Europe with Stalin became known.]

The intellectually acrobatic Averell Harriman later criticized Truman for overreacting to the very advice that he himself had proffered, identifying this meeting [Yalta] as the precise moment the Cold War began.

The terminal illness of Arthur Vandenberg and the surprising defeat of John Foster Dulles in a special New York Senate election helped to push the party even further into the arms of the militants. [As far back as 1948!]

Kennedy

Interestingly, much of official Washington was outraged when Costner and Oliver Stone offered up their spurious version of the Kennedy assassination in Stone’s 1991 film, JFK. No one wanted to see Stone’s conspiratorial take on the assassination and the Vietnam War replace the official version. Yet when a film funded by O’Donnell’s own family sought to rewrite the historical record in such a way as to flatter the original mythmakers, it was met with approval and appreciation. Thirteen Days was screened at the White House and largely praised by pundits and historians alike, albeit with reservations.

Johnson

The Johnson presidency, as [Robert] Caro, one of his most severe critics, admits, marked the “high-water mark of the tides of social justice” in the twentieth century.

Unfortunately for his ability to choose between competing alternatives, Johnson interpreted almost all dissent as disloyalty, and he was famously a politician to whom personal loyalty was all. [Enter 45...]

Reagan

Ronald Reagan’s relationship to the truth has always been a problematic issue for historians, just as it had been for journalists; this is particularly true for people who wish to maintain a dutiful respect for the office he occupied for eight years, and for the voters who put him there. His own official biographer Edmund Morris called him “an apparent airhead.” [And yet, a genius compared to the jeenyus 45]

The documentary history of the Reagan presidency remains under lock and key at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, due, in large measure, to a presidential order signed by President George H. W. Bush overturning previous law, by executive fiat. But thanks to the careful re-construction of these events of the period by historians including Walter LaFeber, Cynthia Arnson, and William LeoGrande, coupled with the tireless declassification efforts by the invaluable National Security Archive in Washington, we now have a portrait of how the media eagerly helped the Reagan administration create its fictional Central America.

With an acquiescent news media and a paralyzed Democratic Party, the Reagan administration was given a virtual free hand to construct its Central American policies on the basis of a wholly self-constructed version of reality— one that adhered to the ideological and political contours of debate inside Washington, but otherwise floated untethered to reality.

Under the dictatorship of General Efrain Rios Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian, the [Guatemalan] army massacred as many as fifteen thousand Indians on the suspicion that they had cooperated with, or might offer aid to, antigovernment guerrillas. Entire villages were leveled and countless peasants were forcibly relocated to aid the counterin- surgency. At one point, when as many as forty thousand survivors tried to find refuge in Mexico, army helicopters strafed the camps.24 It was at this pro- pitious moment that President Reagan took the opportunity to congratulate Rios Montt for his dedication to democracy, adding that he had been get- ting “a bum rap” from U.S. liberals in Congress and the media. [Ah, Saint Ronnie]

Of the 143 human remains discovered in the sacristy of the Mozote church, 136 were judged to be children or adolescents, of whom the average age was six. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy.86 When all the forensics had been uncovered, the commission revealed at least twenty-four people had participated in the shooting and that every cartridge but one had come from a U.S.-manufactured and -supplied M-16 rifle. Of these, “184 had discernible head-stamps, identifying the ammunition as having been manufactured for the United States Government at Lake City, Missouri.” No one has ever been officially charged or tried for any crimes associated with the actions taken in El Mozote, which were deemed by Danner to be “the largest massacre in modern Latin American history.” For this bit of good fortune, the murderers may be grateful for the lies of the Reagan administra- tion and the men and women who willingly told them.

Lying about Nicaragua became such a prominent part of the Reagan administration Central American policy that a special office almost exclusively for this purpose, called the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), was set up by a presidential directive. Its separation from the CIA itself was necessary because the 1947 National Security Act specifically enjoins the spy agency from engaging in domestic activities, as did President Reagan’s Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the agency from participating in any actions “intended to in- fluence United States political processes, public opinion . . . or media.” […] It booked advocates for 1,570 lecture and talk-show engagements; in a single week during March 1985, the OPD officers bragged in a memo of having fooled the editors of The Wall Street Journal into publishing an op-ed allegedly penned by an unknown professor, guided an NBC news story on the Con- tras, written and edited op-ed articles to be signed by Contra spokesmen, and planted lies in the home media about the experiences of a congressman who visited Nicaragua. Otto Reich boasted of his ability to convince editors and executives to replace reporters he did not like with those he did and warned those reporters who did not cooperate that he would be watching them in the future, a threat that proved effective against National Public Radio, which Reich termed “Moscow on the Potomac.”

Those who had done the lying were not personally discredited, merely temporarily inconvenienced. [Still angering. But look at 45’s cabal and what they get. It’s worse.]

From the Conclusion, Bush II

As president, George W. Bush has appeared remarkably unconcerned with the question of whether he even appeared to be speaking truthfully. As the liberal commentator Michael Kinsley would observe early in the administration’s tenure, “Bush II administration lies are often so laughably obvious that you wonder why they bother. Until you realize: They haven’t bothered. If telling the truth was less bother, they’d try that, too. The characteristic Bush II form of dishonesty is to construct an alternative reality on some topic and to regard anyone who objects to it as a sniveling dweeb obsessed with ‘nuance,’ which the president of this class, I mean of the United States, has more important things to do than worry about.”

Why do American presidents feel compelled to deceive Congress, the media, and their country about their most significant decisions? [and then there is the pathological case of 45 in which it was everything, though oddly enough the “significant” events that should have been kept quiet for a while for security, he blurted]

Whether this situation is remediable depends on one of two possibilities: either future presidents become convinced that the long-term cost of decep- tion outweighs its short-term benefits, or the public matures to the point of seeking to educate itself about the need for complicated arrangements in in- ternational politics that do not comport with the nation’s caricatured notion of itself as a force for innocence and benevolence the world over. The obvious solution would be to convince U.S. presidents of the value of substituting a long-term strategic vision in place of their present-minded, short-term tactical views. But “Nothing in politics is more difficult than taking the long view,” notes the reporter Ronald Brownstein. “For politicians, distant gain is rarely a persuasive reason to endure immediate pain. Political scientists would say the system has a bias toward the present over the future. Parents might say politicians behave like perpetual teenagers. The problem, for politicians as much as teenagers, is that the future has a pesky habit of arriving.”

Great book for all fans of the Boss!

This book was an interesting history of liberalism from FDR to Obama. However, it was a very dry read and the author has a habit of going off on to random historical tangents that have little to nothing to do with the main narrative. He also skipped over things thst should have been better addressed (for instance, the Bush Years) while giving far too much time to things that were on the whole rather irrelvant. I also feel that the book should have been a little heavier on analysis as this is exactly the sort of book where understanding the 'whys' is more important than understanding the 'whats' and 'whens'.

Still, it was an informative book and well worth the read.

***UPDATE 3/3/13: This book loses more of my esteem after reading Noam Chomsky's [b:Necessary Illusions|848628|Necessary Illusions Thought Control in Democratic Societies|Noam Chomsky|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348036055s/848628.jpg|865795], which makes Alterman's whole Liberal/Conservative dichotomy seem downright trivial, criticizing the constraints by which the entire liberal-conservative paradigm (and thus Alterman's book) exists. It's really a rather glorious proposition, and much more professionally and convincingly argued, albeit quite a bit drier. It honestly makes me wonder how Alterman could have written this book without even addressing the game-changing argument that Chomsky made almost 15 years prior. Basically, Chomsky makes Alterman's entire book seem facile. Please go there for a real book on media criticism.***

The valuable content saves the irritating writing from two-star status. Alterman makes a convincing argument, a necessary one as well (perhaps not as timely 10 years after the fact, but the general premise holds and is absolutely relevant today since the same "liberal media" charges continue to be constantly tossed around). The chapters on Gore were particularly illuminating for me since I was just coming into my political awareness at the time and was still not paying very close attention to the facts of the 2000 election. Additionally, his general theme of "working the refs," how the conservative establishment has shifted the center of American politics drastically to the right, is extremely important and well-taken. Reminds me of Coach K at Duke (there I go revealing my alma mater).

That said, there are some problems with the writing, most of them minor issues that just added up to sort of a sour taste over the course of the book, the chief offense being that it was occasionally clunky. I hesitate to call it "bad" just because that implies a level of expertise that I certainly don't have. However the word "bad" did keep occurring to me, so I'll just use "clunky" as a surrogate. A good example from the end of the book:

With an advisory board featuring Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol, and Chester Finn, the organization presents itself as a champion of "intellectual renewal" and "academic standards" in the face of their perceived decline at the hands of leftist academics and fashionable post-modern theories that blur the verities of our time behind a facade of impenetrable professional vernacular. 251

Um, excuse me? I'm sure that sentence means something, but I'm equally sure that I'm not going to spend the time to figure out what. And it's not just me being dumb, I swear. [a:Hannah Arendt|12806|Hannah Arendt|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1222711954p2/12806.jpg] is one of my favorite writers ever. Go and check out [b:The Human Condition|127227|The Human Condition|Hannah Arendt|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328874274s/127227.jpg|462889]. Long sentences, really confusing. And totally awesome. This guy, not so much.

The book was strangely in need of some editing as well, which may have just been an issue in the 1st edition hardback that I had. Here's a prime example of the combination of these two problems of bad editing and too much info in one sentence:

For instance, his assertion that that [sic] the hope for welfare payments was the main source of illegitimacy among black teenagers posited no evidence for this claim and failed to explain why the rate of illegitimacy rose for everyone -- and not just welfare recipients -- after 1972, while the constant-dollar value of those welfare benefits declined by 20 percent. 90

So there was this tendency to try and cram too much information into a sentence, which is sort of a microcosm of Alterman's tendency to try and cram too much information into the book. The depth and breadth of his research definitely came across, but it seemed like overkill at times. He made very salient points and then kept making them over and over again, with many more examples than I needed or wanted. I think "pedantic" is the word for this particular offense. The most glaring example is how he spends 4 pages on Rush Limbaugh, whose douchebaggery should already have been exceedingly familiar to any reader.

Perhaps, as with my first quote above, I'm just being dense. However I can't help but opine that with a title like What Liberal Media?, this is not meant to be a strictly academic work, requiring seven citations when two or three will do. Indeed, his informal tone through most of the book gives the same impression (speaking of which, I'm still trying to come up with any conceivable need for his mentioning on p.244 that Charles Krauthammer is partially paralyzed).

The last issue is more major, unfortunately: the book is overwhelmingly anecdotal. For an author who spends pages in an early chapter blasting [a:Charles Murray|44279|Charles Murray|http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1314507470p2/44279.jpg] for his misuse (and lack) of statistics in [b:Losing Ground|170512|Losing Ground American Social Policy, 1950-1980|Charles Murray|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347712025s/170512.jpg|164652] and [b:The Bell Curve|223556|The Bell Curve Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life |Richard J. Herrnstein|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1348155395s/223556.jpg|216508], it seems hypocritical for Alterman himself to largely eschew the use of statistics throughout the book.

This became more apparent as the book went on and I started thinking, Well, I can see all these examples of conservatives in the media but surely there must have been liberal viewpoints as well. Why isn't he telling me about those at all, or even mentioning them? The lack of mention made me suspicious, like he was trying to hide them to bolster his point. Of course all my suspicions would have been moot if he had just backed up his claims with a NEXIS search or some other statistical analysis (which, coincidentally, could have helped him trim his citations as well).

The cherry on top of this sundae of unprofessionalism occurs in the Clinton chapter when he armchair psychologizes journalists to explain how they incessantly attacked Clinton out of envy, "with the vengeance of a lover scorned." This could, of course, very well be the case, but Alterman makes a laughably weak case in the one jarring paragraph he dedicates to the outlandish claim.

All in all, I'm glad I read the book. I am now better equipped to counter the false claims of liberal media bias. I'm not sure I can really recommend it to others due to the writing problems outlined above. What I would recommend, however, is to find a liberal who has read it and can tell you about the main arguments, so that you'll be equipped as well, and without having wasted many hours on what would be a very slow and somewhat tedious read.

As a Springsteen biography, Alterman delivers but doesn’t really get into the personal details. There were also parts that really seemed contradictory, and fell flat as I read it. An interesting read, but not one I’d return to.

definitely a book to read if you are looking for insight into our 21st c. politics. key points: foundations of democracy are being threatened by manipulated information, no unbiased sources for news, disengagement by the public. nothing simple, no one wishing to sort through complicated. change will take more than one person, one politician, one president.

Kabuki Democracy - more to see behind the painted screens

This book is a must read for everyone. We all need to know the details of the rigging of this system we are told everyday is a democracy. We need to memorize these details so we spot them tomorrow in action, and so we stop blaming Obama for not getting done the work we thought we put him there to do.

Alterman sees the phenomenon exceptionally well. He explains why this government can move forward to cut taxes on the rich, spend ever increasing borrowed money on war contractors, and declare war on little countries under any pretense on any side of the world. That agenda is freely advanced, while progress for the Middle Class and working families is routinely and mysteriously thwarted despite Super Majorities in Congress and our man finally in the White House. His view is from the very center of an elaborate chessboard that's been constructed over decades to block legislation before the cameras and our very eyes. He sees every move into the distance up and down the rows and on the diagonals.

The details of the various systems are all things we all need to know to see through this fog of class warfare: senate rules to avoid having a Bill in the first place. Then there are the pinch hits, the last minute additions and deletions that escape press detection sneaked in to gut the Bill's intent. If that has to fail for the cameras, exemptions are the consolation prize. Enforcement is anyway a non-starter since by now for a few decades regulatory agencies have been stacked with "kill the beast" appointees converted into permanent government employees. Agency rules can be suspended anyway by small separate bills nobody notices or has to talk about. The details are myriad and extend as far as the eye can see up and down the chessboard in every direction. I'll leave the rest of the best for the reader to discover.

We need to talk more about the conditions that give rise to this phenomenon, however, while giving him five stars for focusing the conversation. He speaks about the power of culture to seduce and blind. Just like the personal writings of enlightenment thinkers Capernicus or Spinoza are riddled with metaphors for sin and god, desperately searching for words to reach out of the linguistic fog of their times, Alterman's own scrupulous and dutiful "inside progressive media" knowledge doesn't allow him to see behind the painted screens on the sidelines of the kabuki stage. He mentions David Koch and the Koch Brothers as behind so much of the nasty deception. He cites Buckley vs Valeo which most neglect as the quantum attractor factor in all this mess even though that ruling enabled in the first place all this deception of voters, taxpayers, property owners, and retirement savers starting in the 1970s. Most of his peers leave that detail out despite their ad nauseum writings and railings about deception and its results across the heartland all the time.

Beginning to peer behind the painted screens, he cites the TWO taxpayers behind "Concerned Taxpayers of America", and the ONE behind "Taxpayers Against Earmarks". He cites these same types behind Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution, American Crossroads, American Action Network, etc. in their game to dominate the political debate "with the demands of the exclusively super-rich". He cites the complicity of the Supreme Court in all of this duplicity since Burger, Rehnquist, Stevens, and Roberts despite Marbury vs Madison and their obligation to overturn anything disproportionate and imbalanced passed by congress that prevents all of us from protecting equally our property against the whims of these Tax-Cutters and Bubble Makers (who do always profit in both cases!). But, isn't Buckley vs Valeo and all these other chessboard moves invented and put in place since the 1970s simply a new rigging to preserve the long-held grip by these families or their predecessors over America that was slipping after the labor movement against FDR (over which he caved but gave them WWI war ships in Pearl Harbor and provocations against Japan) and the Civil Rights movement against Johnston (over which he caved and gave them more Vietnam, but anyway paid with one term)? Somehow an argument about protecting property rights from the capricious redistributing whims of a labor union unified mass democracy merited this ruling in this case brought for his social class by WF Buckley now known as "money as speech".* The minds of dynastic litigators can come up with this stuff. Now they have Roberts!

"When 'free-market' Republicans vote to support milk subsidies or sugar tariffs, or when 'pro-consumer' Democrats vote to exempt used car dealers from consumer financial protection legislation, it is easy to understand the mistrust and hard to believe that the influence of money hasn't weakened the ability of members to serve the principles, or even the interests, they were elected to represent."

What else is hard to believe here? Other writers who study declassified State Department and CIA papers call this phenomenon Alterman so well begins to deconstruct 'permanent government': an assortment of banking, academic, and clandestine alphabet agency operatives working the revolving agency doors in plain view on the chessboard squares no matter which party is "in power", and behind the scenes in clandestine operations to advance the interests of this small group of hidden super-rich. They are always in place to make their moves once all the front of screen Kabuki theater chessboard moves have been exhausted.

Anyone with any knowledge of any of these families and their money can see that sanctions against Cuba are now clearly linked to New York and New England banking interests who owned sugar plantations in that country for 300 years. Add to them expatriated dynastic land-owning Cuban families, who were always their peers and collaborators, perhaps suffering from the Stockholm Syndrome common in colonized countries. The sanctions against Iran are clearly linked to the losses of Rockefeller Chase Bank interests, designed as sanctions are, to undermine the 'respectable elements' and push an economically degraded and desperate populace of common people toward a belligerent reactionary right-wing with which we and our other puppet allies can more easily pick fights for the cameras, and for more right-wing votes here and everywhere. Add to that the money and property interests of powerful collaborator Iranians now expatriated across the USA. They are playing on all our post Powell political chessboards. And of all religions, they are active even in AIPAC. All these conflicts are called something else of course for public consumption, aided by media details Alterman covers superbly, but also Buckley vs Valeo, and now Citizens United. That something else sells to a gullible and misled American people whose property and wages are being systematically redistributed upward advancing only the interests of the super-rich. The real details of the sordid back-story behind those painted screens evades even the writers inside progressive media.

Despite mounting evidence like the Loyd Jowers civil case won by the Martin Luther King Jr Family in Memphis and other investigations into scandals like Watergate, Iran-Contra, War on Drugs, and 9/11, independently funded, independently acting 'permanent government' to advance interests of the chessboard and outside the Kabuki theater is an idea Alterman mentions not at all. Nor is the idea of clandestine operations against American people committed right here in sovereign territory. But, one step at a time is good. Whistle-blowers are increasingly coming forward to talk about it.

Alterman closes the books as if new awareness of the Kabuki moves and new self-organization by people like us alone can unite Americans to withstand this phenomenon once enough of us know about it. He can suggest this only perhaps because he doesn't know what other writers covered about CIA study programs starting in the 1970s that deconstructed the genesis of labor and civil rights movements with Phd students using complexity theory, so they could be permanently blocked. Deconstructing the Kabuki theater notwithstanding, the questions remain unanswered: blocking moves authorized by whom? paid for by whom? in the interests of whom?

Alterman's book is a great start. From the mere category of 'interesting if true', committed readers should now revisit the inconclusive conclusions of Church and Warren commissions to fully understand the extent to the rigging of this government off the chessboard of legislating, and behind the painted screens on the sidelines out-of-view of audiences and media insiders. Evidence without a doubt will be hard to come by because clandestine operatives are trained to avoid detection and arrest. Is Alterman's culture of peer review at university or inside progressive media a barrier to investigating such 'interesting if true' leads? Is the power of culture in academia and progressive media so severe, is the object lesson of others like Pierre Salinger who ventured in too far, or an anthrax package at ABC News, too much of a specter?

"The problem, moreover, can only worsen, as the big American banks become increasingly global in their orientation and thereby put the entire world economic system at risk with their irresponsible investments, undertaken outside the authority of any US or even West European regulatory agency."

Irresponsible for whom? It only takes knowledge and insight of the whys and wherefores of the players in the Napoleonic Era to know just how lucrative is putting the "entire world economic system at risk." Bankers in that era made their fortunes seducing Kings and their Courtesans into costly expansionary war, borrowing money, blowing up nations in asset bubble and debt crises, and then enforcing austerity on the working families while cleaning up in "distressed asset" markets. Distressed by whom? Such good fortune became the basis for "Dialogues in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu" and reused again in "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in the next century. When another King and his entourage of money men and war industrialists needed a cover-up, his secret police and conservative media tools of a different era obliged!

"Lewis Powell laid out the ambitions of the wealthy conservatives in a now infamous 1971 memo to director of the US Chamber of Commerce to use their financial power to transform American political culture into one in which wealth and power could be unleashed upon the rest of us without the need for stealth or even explanation. Powell...identified the enemy...sought to undermine the 'respectable elements of society' whom he intended to replace with people like themselves." Those respectable elements of society are clearly the decent hard working honest Middle Class families who were always the majority here.

ACORN, Sherrod, covered by Alterman, and now Arizona are all "first strikes". It doesn't matter what happens afterward with a criminal charge let's say against Sarah Palin for speech to incite violence. The useful damage is already done. The Tipping Point toward destabilization is one more step toward reached. First strikes show not only to us but to the perpetrators themselves the power they possess over us at each turn where they are not stopped by States Attorneys or Courts. They already know their power over the chessboard and all the players on it so aptly defined by Alterman. That they designed themselves. They already know what their other powers are behind the painted screens to undermine 'respectable elements'. That is what we now need to know!

The construction of the elaborate chessboard of blocking moves would only be required in society that must keep up the appearance of a constitutional democracy. Only as the public grew in education and money making skill did it learn to challenge long held authority and become a threat. This is the same story for a rising French Protestant Middle Class in a similar gambit started against them 500 years ago. Reading between the lines and into the future we see how the system distorts and manipulates our minds, but also how it easily advanced "no child left behind" with the aim of enforcing multiple choice tests in place of critical thinking.

Preferences of one centralized Board of Education in one state of Texas can easily purge the nation's textbooks of any heroic references to the struggle for democracy, or even the European or Athenian Enlightenments. They can easily find a way to redact Thomas Paine to suit them. No need for enlightenment in Texas. Profits are good and the desperate workers from an "economic system put at risk" are coming despite the lowest % for healthcare coverage, lowest % of college education, and highest % of illegal NAFTA refugees(speaking of economic systems south of the border put at risk) to keep wages preternaturally low. They'll have more pawns on our chessboard soon. With the systematic dumbing down of Americans, even this expensive elaborate chessboard constructed since the 1970s will soon be obsolete! We'll be back as they always wished it had remained, in the 1880s!

It lets software billionaires decide that small class size (and therefore higher unit cost and tax assessment) doesn't matter, "good teachers do". But, that is nothing new. JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie formed education foundations to re-design education systems and shape the American mind the way they wanted it shaped. Rockefeller very successfully introduced petrochemicals into medicine with a philanthropy in medical education program that "unleashed wealth and power without the need for stealth or explanation". That is old hat around here that Powell only wanted to re-up. Being a law firm partner, he was always well paid to advance his secretive clients' interests as agent.

This book is an excellent start to a story that has to continue, get bolder, and step out of insider cultures and comfort zones! In "power of culture", we also need to identify the Stockholm Syndrome that keeps this whole system going. It replenishes the ranks every generation, decade, and mid-term election with dutiful tools to undermine the 'respectable elements'. They are the people who are not us, will never be us, will never marry our daughters, but who do want to be us! It can even keep the respectable elements themselves in line, evidently! Great book to spread around!

*In light of the lengthy discussion in the book about this SCOTUS genetic predisposition toward advancing Corporate personhood and "money as speech", since Corporations are people, effectively serving the same unifying function for unearned income dividend earners as labor unions once did for wage earning working families, can't the case be made on the same property protection precedent that labor unions should now be people too? To give working families the equal collective protection corporate shareholders get disproportionately to protect their property from redistribution? Redistribution up or down should be irrelevant. The property of the masses has clearly been disproportionately pillaged from Bubble Bust and Deficit Spending whims of those over-protected by the Supreme Court, and who are really in power. We'd better hurry to get the cases up, before Roberts guts the precedent for use of statistical evidence to show systemic injustice! He's working on it, according to Fortune this week!

I really enjoyed this book. Half Springesteen biography and half analysis, it's a very insightful look at the Boss's life and work.

Decent read but there are probably better Springsteen biographies out there.

Alterman, a media critic more recently known for "What Liberal Media?," here dissects what he calls the "punditocracy:" The high-profile columnists and commentators who, he argues, wield far too much opinion-making power in Washington and other centers of power. The problem with pundits, Alterman argues, is that they peddle a kind of pseudo-journalism: Opinion, ideological cant, and outright speculation clothed in rhetorical garments that imply a solid factual basis and an unassailable level of certainty. Their pronouncements may be entertaining, he admits, but we mistake them for reality at our peril. Alterman traces the rise of the punditocracy from Walter Lippman in the 1930s to the likes of George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Safire, and others in the early 1990s. His principal concern, however, is to show that the emperor has no clothes. He does this by dissecting the prejudices, ideological hobby-horses, journalistic skills, and track record of a dozen or so key members of the punditocracy--skewering them with scrupulously cited quotations from their own work. This approach reaches its zenith in the final chapters, where he analyzes conservative pundits' steadfast refusal to come to grips with the fall of the USSR, and lambastes pundits of all political persuasions for mindlessly beating the drums of war after the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

The fact that the first edition of the book (the one I read) ends on those notes reflects the extent to which the now-available revised edition had become necessary. When Alternan first wrote, conservative talk radio had just begun its ascendancy, Bill Clinton was unimpeached, George W. Bush was a marginally well-known governor, and the Twin Towers still stood. We've come a long way since 1993, yet (to judge by the undiminished power of the punditocracy) we've come no way at all.

A primer of the liberal view in politics in America, Eric Alterman does a fairly decent job of providing a nice summary of liberal ideals. Before I get into a discussion of the books content, an idiosyncratic point about the cover …

I hate it! I realize that Alterman probably had nothing to do with it’s design, but it is a clutter of cartoonish images of “liberals.” Although I am certain that these individuals are liberals in the truest sense of the word, the hodge-podge smattering of barely recognizable figures saps the intellectual vigor that this book could possess. It is clear the work is directed toward the choir, and the subtitle “A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America” only reinforces this impression.

As the core of thesis seems to be the notion that America is actually a liberal nation, rather than a conservative one … I would have called the book “We’re All Liberals” and had an image of a blue-colored American map.

Regardless, Alterman does a fantastic job of describing liberalism in the text and clearly argues for the merits of the liberal approach to politics as not only more effective than conservativism, but also as the very nature of the American way of life.

The first part of the book answers the question “What is this thing called Liberal?” in four chapters. The second part, the meat of the book, discusses the maligning of the Liberal viewpoint by conservatives. Although a great series of chapters that respond point-for-point to the charges leveled against liberals by the right, at times the book falls into the trap of simply repeating the oft-heard complaints against the Bush white house and the neo-conservatives. In other words, at times Alterman offers very little aside from the notion that Liberals are simply “not conservatives.”

And, as most political pundits, he offers no real solutions to the issues. Given that the subtitle suggests the books is some sort of handbook, it completely lacks any actual advice.

This is a book, as usual, that preaches to the choir. It is unfortunate that the vast majority of people who actually need to read this book, those being consistently duped by the right wing media, are unlikely to ever pick it up.

Don’t believe the conservative talking points!

Even though it was published in 2004, Eric Alterman’s WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA?: THE TRUTH ABOUT BIAS AND THE NEWS is just as relevant and insightful today, as the 2008 election cycle begins to heat up. From the mainstream media’s misogynist slurs against Hillary Clinton to their love affair with presumptive Republican nominee John McCain (note to Chris Matthews: the media isn’t supposed to be ANY candidate’s “base”), the total lack of a liberal bias, even among ostensibly moderate-to-lefty journalists, is painfully evident.

Alterman debunks the myth of the liberal media from a number of angles. From the rise of right-wing pundits and well-funded conservative “think tanks” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), to the political leanings of and corporate pressures faced by individual journalists, Alterman illustrates how the Republican Party seized control of the mainstream media, all the while decrying its supposed bias in favor of liberal causes.

Especially timely is his discussion of how the media has treated George W. Bush with kid gloves, previously having eviscerated (sometimes, rightfully so) Bill Clinton for lesser evils. Yes, Bill Clinton deserves scorn for taking advantage of an awe-struck intern (power disparity, anyone?); but a BJ pales in comparison to an unjust war. (Mind bogglingly, the media’s slant has only veered further to the right in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.) Shortly after the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq passed 4,000, Dick Cheney declared “It places a special burden obviously on the families, and we recognize, I think — it's a reminder of the extent to which we are blessed with families who've sacrificed as they have. The president carries the biggest burden, obviously.” Bush himself said – with no hint of irony, compassion, or remorse - that he’s found his presidency “joyful” and he sleeps “a lot better than people would assume.” And the MSM didn’t even blink.

*head desk*

Seriously, WHAT liberal media!?

As the primaries drag on, it’s a whole lotta history repeating.

While WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? probably won’t sway any hardcore conservatives, it is a useful tool for liberals who wish to quash the myth of the liberal media, and might help to educate misinformed moderates and independents. Generally speaking, it’s a good read and a persuasive argument, but I wish Alterman had included more hard statistics and fewer anecdotes. Then again, there seems to be a dearth of research in this area; perhaps WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? can serve as a starting point for some enterprising young journalism or social science students looking to study the issue further. An update for 2008 would be a welcome addition as well; Alterman has four more years of dubya’s shenanigans to document, not to mention the farcical 2008 primaries.

To the content of the book, I bequeath four stars. To the format, which was for me an audiobook, one lonely star. I’m normally a huge fan of audiobooks, since they allow me to “read” 2-3 times as many books as I might otherwise. Yet Alterman narrated WHAT LIBERAL MEDIA? himself, and the result is almost un-listenable. It’s truly awful. (His Bill O’Reilly impression is spot on, though. Hey, credit where credit’s due.) And this comes from someone who has a high tolerance for non-professional narration; I usually prefer that authors record the audio versions of their own books, since it lends an added authenticity to the reading. I loved listening to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s INFIDEL and Christopher Hitchens’ GOD IS NOT GREAT, both of which were read by the respective authors, thick accents and all. But Alterman’s publisher really should have shelled out the extra money for a pro.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2008/04/03/what-liberal-media-by-eric-alterman/

superficial election year book -- makes comments on conservative's comments but doesn't spend enough time developing his own arguments -- good columnist -- this can be skipped

This kind of book is right up my alley: informative, detailed, and written engagingly enough that descriptions of cabinet meetings didn't put me to sleep. As a raving left-winger Alterman's book just added more fire to my "politicians are evil" fire, but aside from that I loved the amount of detail about the four historical instances he covers that I previously knew little about. Alterman reveals, long after the fact, the back-door machinations and manipulations that went on surrounding the Yalta Accords, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, and the Iran Contra Scandals, and carefully builds his facts to show you, in the end, how these situations all got us to exactly where we are now.
Eye-opening, and a bit painful, this is the kind of stuff we should learn in history classes, in the hope that someday we can get some people in office who aren't corrupt and lying liars.

Five stars may be a tad heavy, but this book is extremely important in countering the absurdities coming out of the Right about an alledged left-wing bias.

It's hard for me to work up the strength to read a book devoted to Bush. I'm glad to have it as a resource, though.

One of the most important books in my political development.

I learned a lot of history in general when reading this book and also that being a politician really means learning to lie with panache (unless you're Jimmy Carter)½

The reader should remember that Alterman wrote "Bush's useful idiot" about Nader in Nation magazine, 2004.½