I have a confession to make. I am not a blog virgin. My first blog was with a site called True/ Slant. I was one of a handful of people who helped start a site that was considered by many to be “ground-breaking” both in the diversity of voices presented and the freedom given to writers to say what they wanted in a way that they wanted.
True/Slant was eventually successful in terms of attracting readers and advertisers. But its biggest success happened this past summer when Forbes bought it. Apparently Forbes has an aging audience of readers and so they thought they’d blog-i-fy themselves since nothing says “old” like journalism and nothing says “young” like blogs.
All seemed like a match made in heaven. Forbes even offered many of us True/Slanters a chance to blog for them. And True/Slant bloggers offered Forbes content that was a lot less stodgy.
But then something went wrong. Forbes decided to publish a cover story by uber-conservative Dinesh D’Souza, and the story has put Forbes and the True/Slant folks into the middle of a firestorm that brings into focus the difficulty of maintaining any claim to “objective reporting” in an age when many journalists are willing to wear their opinions on their sleeve.
D’Souza’s piece was a paranoid polemic that accused President Obama of being an enemy to the free-market because of anti-colonial beliefs inherited from his decidedly foreign father. According to D’Souza:
“It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet. …
Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son. The son makes it happen, but he candidly admits he is only living out his father’s dream. The invisible father provides the inspiration, and the son dutifully gets the job done. America today is governed by a ghost.”
Newt Gingrich described the piece as “incredibly insightful” but over at the Columbia Journalism Review it was ranked “the worst kind of smear journalism.”
But what is most interesting to me as a blogger is this piece is being blamed by mainstream media on the True/Slant folks, even though it was not a blog piece, but a front-page story and thus went through the usual channels of journalistic editorial review.
Why would journalists blame bloggers for “smear journalism”? The answer is simple. Because American journalism (unlike much of journalism elsewhere) has long tried to claim that it is just reporting the facts in as objective a manner as possible. This 20th-century corrective to the “yellow journalism” of the 19th century is the real problem, not blogs.
If D’Souza wasn’t supposed to be representing the facts without a point of view, then his piece could have been read for what it is: neo-conservative and neo-liberal anxieties over the collapse of the American market. D’Souza’s “facts” may have been accurate or inaccurate, but the story he constructed from them was anything but objective. And the truth is, no stories are objective. Just the very act of deciding to write about certain things and not others is the result of ideological and editorial and corporate decisions about what matters and what doesn’t and what will sell and what won’t.
The “problem” with American journalism is not the blogs nor the bloggers, but the claim by many journalists that they write the truth and nothing but the truth. D’Souza’s theories are not the truth, but rather the truth of Neoliberalism’s insecurity. Despite what post-publication fact-checking might reveal, there is no way to fact check an ideological claim (that Obama is motivated by anti-colonialism).
But even if D’Souza’s ideological claim wasn’t as obvious, even it were “just” a report on “drugs’ or “crime” or “gay marriage,” all stories represent a world view. The sooner we know the world view of the people we’re reading, the sooner something like information exchange among engaged citizens can happen.
14 Responses to Firestorm at ‘Forbes’
trendisnotdestiny - September 25, 2010 at 3:58 pm
Laurie,This is the exact kind of article that I read CHE for! As someone who has spent a great deal of time on true/slant ‘s blogsite (Matt Taibbi’s blog), I really appreciate your insight as well as addressing the supposed neutrality of mainstream press! All stories have bias, the best ones reveal their bias for you so you do not have to wonder what else do I not know….At a time where Stephen Colbert is causing a mainstream backlash for his congressional testimony on migrant workers, I find it really interesting that their reactions to Colbert have been so dismissive or irritated (Chuck Todd, David Corn etc)… I feel that case exemplifies your point.
mavprof - September 25, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Ms Essig, I followed your recommendation to “know the world view of the people we’re reading” by scanning your last “Class Warfare” piece on “True / Slant” entitled “The world we have won?” as well as your linked short biography. Regardless of the merit of the admittedly speculative piece by D’Souza, one can see how your world view (as a Marxist sociologist, albeit teaching at an exclusive, expensive private college and albeit your railing at “elite institutions at a cost of $50,000 a year”–add a few K and one might just afford the undergrad tuition for the institution at which you teach) should affect your opinion that he’s an “uber-conservative” who’s written a “paranoid polemic” that reveals “the truth of Neoliberalism’s insecurity.”Your last “True / Slant” piece touches familiar ideological bases, from Bush’s “two illegal imperialistic wars” to how we are “screwed by Neoliberal capitalism,” even as “half the country flirts with fascism,” etc. The solutions to our national plight are there as well–anger, class action, resistance, strikes, walk-outs, sabotage . . . oh, and locavorism.Perhaps one point of D’Souza’s thesis about President Obama’s alleged anti-colonialism that particularly rankles radicals and Marxists like yourself is that he and his fawning allies, the main stream media journalistas, aren’t sufficiently anti-colonialist enough to extirpate root and branch what you call the “American Empire.” It seems this task must be left to the bloggers, and especially those occupying faculty-lounge wing chairs in soc departments.
trendisnotdestiny - September 25, 2010 at 11:00 pm
@ mavprov,QUOTE”Perhaps one point of D’Souza’s thesis about President Obama’s alleged anti-colonialism that particularly rankles radicals and Marxists like yourself is that he and his fawning allies, the main stream media journalistas, aren’t sufficiently anti-colonialist enough to extirpate root and branch what you call the “American Empire.” It seems this task must be left to the bloggers, and especially those occupying faculty-lounge wing chairs in soc departments.”First, what Obama sells to the public (his brand) is very different from his actions: hiring Geithner, Summers; a watered down financial reform, no public option for healthcare etc….Second, the point you make is that the majority of Americans do not agree with anti-colonialism…. There is so little information about anti-colonialist perspective in the midst of this neoliberal culture beyond critical thinkers and academic departments…. The fact that the US populace has opinions does not make them educated ones. In fact these opinions (polls) are often constructed around the interests of power are used to jam the divide and conquer approach to resistance (from left and right).The overall point being here that is that blogs, sociology departments and neoliberal capitalism critiques are not topics familiar, common or encouraged any place else. Mavprof, the major point that you miss in the center right political environment is that any movement away from the status quo gets labelled marxist, socialist, communist… If finding a balance forces us to go more left to get centered, then so be it.If Reagan and Nixon were running on their platforms now, the Republican Party would not elect them: these are two of your most visible brands…..
mavprof - September 26, 2010 at 11:05 am
Well, trendisnotdestiny, I’m not sure what the results of your posting #5 lucubrations have yielded us on D’Souza’s thesis about the President’s patrimonial socialism and anti-colonialism beyond sharing Ms Essig’s evident disappointment that “his brand” of socialist, redistributionist, statist, or anti-colonialist rhetoric doesn’t translate into sufficiently radical actions. Perhaps were he not so constrained by American laws, institutions, traditional liberties and the like, he would be free to cast off more of the neo-liberal baggage of capitalism and help transform our nation into something more desirable to Marxist anti-colonials. Admittedly, that’d be a formidable task even for a president-for-life or Politburo chieftan, given your correct observation about the majority of unenlightened, uncritical Americans at present who might find that transformation somewhat inconvenient or even objectionable.However, I’m not as pessimistic as you as to claim that critiques of neo-liberal capitalism and colonialism are restricted to leftist blog sites and soc departments (musn’t forget the left-advocacy influence of campus lit-critters or the ethno-gender bloc, where Howard Zinn’s radical-propaganda-as-history and Edward Said’s anti-colonialist personal and professional prevarications are classiques de rigueur). In addition to these ornaments of campus culture, there are other places that can provide sensible and enlightened correctives to the prevailing political environment you speak of so regretfully: college town cafes that harbor specialists in “truther”-Haliburton-Cheney-Wall Street conspiracy theories, co-op groceries where locavores debate whether we’ve a right to eat (or even smoke) a plant, “red” bookstores run by garrulous and usually superannuated relics still grumbling over the withering away of Marxist regimes in Eastern Europe, occasional streetcorner protest gaggles whose signs urge us to give fair and balanced attention to the wholesale destruction of the imperialist, genocidal Israeli menace, etc. You see, trendisnotdestiny, there’s more out there to accommodate your political tastes than left blog sites and soc departments. . . .Your last short paragraph on labelling and centering seems itself not very “centered,” but perhaps I erred in suggesting your agreement with Ms Essig’s opinions in her “Brainstorm” piece included agreement her quite openly Marxist views. Although in her “Class Warfare” posting on “True / Slant” she eschews “abstract knowlege” in agreeing with Marx that the point “isn’t just to describe the world, but to change it,” one is tempted to descibe this sort of Marxism as “Platonic,” that is, of the Western academic or hothouse variety that only thrives apart from the toxic atmosphere of actual Marxist regimes where, in contrast to Foucault’s post-struck spin on the term, “death of the author” means quite a different thing.
mavprof - September 26, 2010 at 12:53 pm
typo corrections, para. 3: “. . . agreement with her . . .” and “describe”
macheath - September 28, 2010 at 10:33 am
mavprof says:”Regardless of the merit of the admittedly speculative piece by D’Souza…”"Umm—that would be the article where D’Souza says (this is a direct quote, I’m not creative enough to make this stuff up):”…the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist..”.”And Mavprof says this is “”admittedly speculative?” How about downright nuts, inflammatory, and idiotic? And Mavprof then proceeds with a flame thrower assault on Essig? I certainly don’t agree with some of Essig’s writing, but the idea that D’Souza and Newt Gingrich, who endorsed D’Souza’s ravings, are being “smeared” is ludicrous. As is Mavprof’s characterization of those ravings as “admittedly speculative.”Right wing ideologues are not interested in serious or sincere dialogues. Gingrich has been their leader in this type of smear campaign since his days in the House of Representatives in the 1990s, and it has poisoned American politics and discourse.
mavprof - September 28, 2010 at 1:31 pm
In my first posting I characterized D’Souza’s whole article as speculative, as it is, but it’s obvious my first address was more to the use Ms Essig made of the article, her evident dissatisfaction with President Obama’s failure to promote truly Marxist goals, and her own privileged standing as Marxist of the college lecture hall and faculty lounge wing chair. I could have characterized D’Souza’s article as “downright nuts, inflammatory, and idiotic” or as “ravings,” or my chiding of Ms Essig as a supposed “flame thrower [sic] assault,” or Newt Gingrich as political smearer and poisoner, but left hyperventilating such sophomoric verbiage to M macheath. OK, macheath: Ready! . . . Set! . . . Rave!
macheath - September 29, 2010 at 4:14 am
In the 1980s, conservative thinkers correctly criticized some people on the left for rending false “moral equivlance” between the USA and the Soviet Union. That is–when the USSR was criticized as a dictatorship that also hurt people around the world, some leftists would point out the USA’s failing, implying (or saying) that both countries were the same. The conservatives correctly IMHO pointed out that, whatever the failings of the USA, it was not the same as the much more venal USSR.It seems to me that Mavprof and other conservatives have forgotten this lesson, and now have their own sort of “moral equivalance” going on–to wit, that some postings like Laurie Essig’s are roughly the same as the much more harmful, divisive, and outright foolish things that are routinely put forth by people like D’Souza, Gingrich, Fox News, etc. In our current time period, the occasional stumbles, misstatement, or even outright foolish things said by leftist commentators are in no way as routinely crazy or divisive or influential as the nonsense daily peddled by the right wing. Witness Mavprof’s ducking away from criticizing D’Souza and Gingrich as they deserve in favor of tired screeds about Marxist professors.
mavprof - September 29, 2010 at 10:06 am
macheath, thanks for your considerably less incendiary posting in setting forth your moral equivalency examples. But again, I find your impatience with anything but strident soapbox denunciations of D’Souza’s article (or D’Souza or Gingrich in general, or–well, why not toss in the whole political right and Fox News to boot?) a moot point based on tendentious general assertions about the right (“harmful, divisive, and outright foolish”) that leave out refutation of D’Souza’s points linking the President’s allegedly anti-business, anti-colonialist attitudes to his formative sources as chronicled in his autobiographical books. Instead you chose only a snippet from D’Souza’s conclusion as a “See! . . . See!” example and demanded all denounce D’Souza and the whole political right as well on that flimsy prop. Well, the article is speculative (and factual to a degree, as Ms Essig acknowledges), and though I remain skeptical about D’Souza’s thesis, I’ll wait till I look over his forthcoming book on which the article is based to decide.Now to say that Marxist views expressed in a blog site like “Brainstorm” or “True / Slant” have less influence (for good or ill) than the wider audience that D’Souza, Gingrich, and Fox News have for theirs is merely to state the obvious. And an acknowlegment as well that overt Marxism is rightly viewed by most Americans as considerably more extreme than conservatism, however more skewed to the left academics’ political attitudes may be. And I suspect in your political milieu, you’re more likely to encounter “tired screeds” “by” Marxist professors than “about” them.
trendisnotdestiny - September 29, 2010 at 11:33 am
@ MavprofImagine a pendulum going back and forth with each of the poles an extreme: state led marxism and neoliberal capitalism.Now imagine a culture where the central tenets have changed over fourty years: individualism, hyper-religious work ethic, and commercialization of intimate life (Hochschild, 2005)1) saving versus spending/consumption (cultural mandates)2) indebtedness is a sin versus (good/bad or deductible) debt3) competence versus efficiency/productivity (work ethic)4) process versus bottom-line outcomes (market logic)5) manufacturing versus service/financial (GDP Engines)6) pay to play business modelAnd consider that the cultural message being sent to a busy, commercially saturated and increasingly indebted workforce:1) greed is good (The first salvo of the Me Generation)2) Work longer, better, more efficiently through financialization3) People who choose not to work like this are lazy4) I don’t want my tax dollars paying for this group__________5) government is the problem not the solution (Reagan, 1982)6) political, governmental, and corporate corruption7) de-regulation, privatization and global armed conflict8) outsourcing, offshoring and massive layoffs Now, I consider myself a capitalist in the big picture continum of the pendulum offered above, but my point here is that by moving in the direction of state-led marxism, we do not necessarily become Marxists. What about those people who advocate for a balance between state and corporate interests? What about those people who want there to be checks and balances versus a gutting of the checks and permanent right center bias associated with neoliberal globalization? What about those people who fought for the New Deal policies and were derided for decades even though those policies led to one of the greatest exponential growth rates (The Golden Period of Economics 1947 to 1972) in world history? Could you please explain why moving to towards the center of the pendulum is a bad idea given that we have tried keeping the arm of the pendulum fixed on one pole (neoliberal economics)? The last ten years has been proof that does not work for the majority of us? Could you please explain how I am a Marxist (or Laurie), when most of what we are seeking is a balance. Also, many of us have accepted the movement of the pendulum over the decades to be a natural ebb and flow of economic contexts and political realities? Why is it that you (the conservative or libertarians)cannot allow these ideas into the public bloodstream without first yelling “red” socialist fire…. Could you please address these questions so that our screeds do not become so tiresome and that we are fully understood by those who are not so invested in maintaining the status quo?
mavprof - September 29, 2010 at 1:20 pm
trendisnotdestiny: It’s difficult to know what to make of your jumble of economic cum political opinions and assertions or of your shorthand schematics like “indebtedness is a sin versus (good/bad or deductible) debt” or “de-regulation, privatization, and armed global conflict.” Likewise your tendentiously-pitched questions (“What about . . . ?”) or your false dichotomy between Marxism and a caricatured notion of some fancied global empire of “neo-liberal capitalism” as extremes for which some equally-fancied “balance” is the cure. Trying to avoid “kitchen sink” expressions (leaving no grievance untouched, however undeveloped in the argument) and cliched notions of others’ assertions may help. At any rate, trying to answer your last poorly-focused posting may be like trying to stab a fog to death. I’m afraid correction is too ponderous a task. . . .
trendisnotdestiny - September 29, 2010 at 3:31 pm
@ mavprof,QUOTE:”It’s difficult to know what to make of your jumble of economic cum political opinions and assertions or of your shorthand schematics like “indebtedness is a sin versus (good/bad or deductible) debt” or “de-regulation, privatization, and armed global conflict.”It not just my jumbled political opinions, but rather a whole host of authors: Juliet Schor (Harvard): spending and saving dynamicsYves Smith (Econned): patterns of consumption/ going from the greatest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation (Reagan).Arlie Hochschild (Cal-Berkeley): IndividualismHenry Giroux (Penn State): Privatization in Higher EducationThere are so many more, but I do not want to complicate things for your sharp mind (but I find that you actually do have use for the kitchen sink as a place to wash your hands of conversations now that they are uncomfortable or conveniently too abstract? QUOTE”your false dichotomy between Marxism and a caricatured notion of some fancied global empire of “neo-liberal capitalism” as extremes for which some equally-fancied “balance” is the cure.”Let me be clear here, oh sanctimonious one. The spectrum of state/private/public leadership styles is definitely polymorphic. The only dichotomy that I offer is an initial one as a means to challenge your staggeringly uninformed rhetoric about any movement towards the center as being labelled Marxists in the current neoliberal state. Also, it is not false dichotomy, in that, there are hierarchies: state-led hierarchies and corporate-led ones with the public sphere usually left out (as Bernays & Lippman would suggest…. “the wandering herd”). What this means is that our commercialized culture embedds not-so-subtle messages of what an American is supposed to be: patriotic, unquestioning, increasingly violent and angry about the tyranny of government; as if the state had more power than corporations in this culture (I have references for this if need be)…Mavprov, I do not know you nor have I made any final conclusions about your views, life or what you have to offer readers (I assume very much). However, when someone asks you a legitmate question as to why moving to the (political or economic) center is so abhorrent after decades of right/center-right rule; well you go blank and pass.Every US president during the last forty years has either been a neoliberal or had staff pushing him in that direction: Nixon, Ford, Carter (Z Brezinzski), Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Our senate has been handpicked (funded) by industry for decades and our economic system reflects those characteristics that are mostly neoliberal: privatize, commodify, de-regulate and protect profits….. Why not use a model that has worked previously during a depression; instead of more of the same? Lastly, you can play nice, be contentious and standoffish or we could have a productive dialogue, but I have gone to great lengths to make my questions clear, evocative and to the point. My posts require neither your corrections nor you voice, however I would prefer it since you seem to be insightful enough to challenge my positionality (and my references).
mavprof - September 29, 2010 at 4:35 pm
Well, trendisnotdestiny, as this initial posting and comments upon it slip off the main page, thanks at least for mentioning more than one mere surname from those whom you claim as your sources, for otherwise I should have had to divine them. Yet simply listing them with one or a few words hinting at a topic hardly constitute adequate short reference to their theses, let alone corroboration for your repeated assertions (at least that much seems clear) that what this country needs is a state-controlled command economy. Perhaps we’ll exchange views on another thread soon, but I think you’d be well advised to focus more on coherence of argument and proper introduction of evidence.
trendisnotdestiny - September 29, 2010 at 6:33 pm
@ mavprof,Comments noted!Mavprof, you’d be well advised to answer the criticism of your comments before offering up an acidic, haughty and unsolicited piece of advice pertaining to my “coherence” and “proper” introduction of evidence. Unless you have nothing real to offer readers other than a secretarial spirit and dogmatic labels….