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Saturday, September 13, 2008

Snake Talk Express

A brief summary, as of yesterday, of mainstream corporate media sources starting to call the McCain campaign on its egregious lies. Examples are proliferating. This appears to be a real turn, a media narrative that is actually harmful to McCain that is catching on among the Villagers, at least for this brief moment. No doubt it will evaporate soon enough, but I expect it will register at the level of the polling that seems to panic the too-easily spooked (too-hurt too-often) folks supporting the Obama campaign and the idea of an America that isn't literally criminally insane and just plain too stoopid to bear.

It is hard to know what is driving this welcome shift away from the phony "objectivity" of a "balanced" stenographic megaphoning of lies and truths as though they are equivalent simply because people in power are saying them both to something like actually demanding accountability. Imagine a space for such push-back existing in any kind of sustained way during the brain obliterating idiocy of the Clinton impeachment or through the long nightmare skid of madness that was the cheerleading run-up to the War in Iraq.

Perhaps corporate media is registering the forceful push-back of proliferating, enormously popular, and ever better organized Netroots information-gatherers and fact-checkers. Not only are a growing number of p2p-mediated editorialists and journalists grabbing more eyeballs than most of their corporate broadcast-mediated counterparts, but crowdsource reportage and blogracking is doing a hell of a lot of scouting and gruntwork for the professionals these days. Perhaps the corporate media are reacting to the rising popularity of the few pundits consistently offering up legibly progressive narratives and perspectives among them (as well as to the falling numbers and stigmatizing stink of disrespect clinging to the Clown College at Fox News and yes men and Heathers more generally). Perhaps they feel betrayed by the "Maverick" they have loved so long -- and whose love he has so meticulously cultivated all these years -- as the dirty-tricks team of Rovian Cleaners commandeered McCain's dead-in-the-water campaign and redirected it onto a more disdainful, deceptive, secretive, controlled operation of culture-war divisiveness and character-assassination over any discussion of issues and thereby mobilized the Mega-Church death-cult archipelago and massive voter-disenfranchising "legal arm" of the Republican Party to counteract Obama's vast popular citizen-based ground-game.

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