I heard Joe Conason in Berkeley Saturday evening talking about Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth. As one might guess from the title his book is unapologetically liberal and partisan.
However, the book is also proof that a journalist can be both partisan and professional. Conason is one of those I would call a partisan with integrity. Which means Big Lies would also be a good one for conservatives to wrestle with.
In his brief prepared presentation, he discussed the strategy that Bush's political guru Karl Rove announced to Republicans, of stressing national security as the key partisan advantage of the Republicans. And the efforts that flow from it to paint the Democrats as unpatriotic.
Conason is a keen observer of political propaganda. I've been using a term on this Weblog, "stigmatizing dissent," that I picked up from one of his articles, and which he also used Saturday evening. I thought it must have been fun for him to present the book in a setting like Berkeley, where liberals are the more conservative portion of the population. And, sure enough, he took some flak from some in the crowd for being too conservative.
He thinks it's very important for the Democrats to have a tough dove like Wesley Clark or John Kerry on the Presidential ticket in 2004 to counter Republican efforts to define patriotism as a partisan virtue. He also cited with approval an article from last week by Max Cleland, a Vietnam veteran who lost three limbs in the war and lost his Georgia Senate seat in 2002 to a Republican who attacked his patriotism. The Cleland quote to which Conason referred was at the end of an article about how Iraq is starting to look like Vietnam: "Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. Sorry you didn't go when you had the chance."
Conason spent most of his time responding to questions. The thing that impressed me most about his responses was his strong pragmatic streak. Although his book has a Big Concept and deals with national issues and foreign policy, he constantly encouraged people to think about things they could do to advance their views. He told people to focus on things they could do themselves and with people they know, and the larger picture would take care of itself.
I asked him how he thought the BBC would come out in its current confrontations with the Conservative Party and Tony Blair's prowar faction of the Labour Party. He explained some of the background of the controversy and said the current attacks on the BBC were comng from Conservative circles (like the Daily Telegraph) who don't like its independent journalism, and also from media barons who would like to privatize the whole thing.
He mentioned that he listens to the BBC regularly and that its Iraq War coverage was much better than that of most Amerian media outlets. And he also had a suggestion. Since Tony Blair values his popularity in America, he thinks that if Americans wrote letters to Blair telling him it would be a terrible thing to have the BBC suppressed, it might have some positive effect. (See Conason on the BBC here.)
A couple of people in the audience pressed him on the idea that Bush & Co somehow had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. He insisted that he had never seen any evidence for their foreknowledge. But he did talk about how the Bush Administration had been negligent in dealing with the al-Qaeda threat in the months prior to 9/11.
The 9/11 conspiracy-theory folks weren't satisfied. They kept bringing up various things, and even started a little heckling at one point, which fortunately lasted only a few seconds. But he stuck to his position.
At the end, one guy insisted that Conason was wrong in thinking the Democrats' foreign policy would be any better than Bush's and that American adventurism abroad went back 150 years. Conason ended by saying he didn't agree with that viewpoint. "Maybe I should apologize for that, but ... I don't."
He also showed his pragmatic streak in addressing a pessimistic question about the mainstream media by saying that people needed to remember that media outlets are human institutions, and therefore have complicated motives in their approaches. He singled out some good reporting on Bush's deceptions over the Iraq War by the Washington Post, which editorially has been very prowar. He expressed optimism that the Internet (including Weblogs) are giving people more alternatives to access good-quality news about national and international events.
Check out Joe Conason's Weblog on Salon.com, which also has some long excerpts from the book. And then read all of Big Lies. It's very good.
Tags: big lies the right-wing propaganda machine and how it distorts the truth, joe conason
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