Book review

I finally got around to reading David Brock's Republican Noise Machine. (I know I'm a little behind the times, but I get most of my books from the library, so I have to wait until they get a new book to read it.) I usually don't review the books I read on here, but this book was pretty good and definitely essential, so I thought I would put some thoughts up about it.

Brock was a member of the VRWC, and his job was to smear reputations. For this, the VRWC paid him quite handsomely, all of which he details in Blinded by the Right, a strangely moving mea culpa. Because his previous work for the VRWC was so opportunistic, so unethical it's difficult for people to trust Brock's motives. The evil, sniveling, predatory Matt Drudge exploited this by trying to make it a mental health issue and revealing that Brock had a nervous breakdown and some serious emotional problems. I think that tactic might have backfired, though. It made me believe Brock all the more that his unethical behavior caused him such profound distress.

Brock does make a couple of cheap shots in this new book, which caused me a lot of discomfort, even though I love taking cheap shots at the whiners and hypocrites on the right, because Brock is obviously trying to rectify his previous pandering to the right by taking the high road now that he works for the left. (Actually, I think his politics are probably what one would deem "moderate"--he is actually pretty good about batting for the left's right to be heard without endorsing liberal positions.) I got over the few minor cheap shots. Considering that Brock originally wrote nothing but cheap shots and considering the many of the people whose careers he is analyzing here used to be personal friends of his that were all too willing to try to discredit him by drawing attention to his mental health issues and his homosexuality, it's actually surprising that he doesn't fire back more often. (The cheapest shot was talking about Andrew Sullivan's sexual behavior in light of his HIV positive status, but even that I decided I could live with considering that Sullivan is surprisingly cold to people with the disease who don't necessarily have the resources he has to fight it.)

The most important thing about the book is that it breaks down the various media sources that help form the conservative tilt of the media. He understands very well that different media affect their audiences in different ways, and he shows how the right has managed to exploit the various strengths of different media to create the illusion of a coherent worldview that modern conservatism doesn't really have. Radio hosts make people feel personally validated, print sources bring authority to them, television makes it exciting, etc. He also gives the entire situation some historical context, showing how the movement to force the media to kowtow to conservative Republicanism started under Nixon and Agnew, specifically a speech that Agnew made where he outright stated that the news media's job was to reflect the "values" of "average" (read: Republican voters) Americans. You know, instead of printing the actual news, that is. You can see the results of this attitude in the rah-rah reporting of the Iraq war. Any journalist who persisted in reporting on the war like a journalist reporting the news instead of a propagandist for the Bush administration was blasted for a lack of patriotism.

I hope it's evident what the problem is with telling people what they want to hear on the news instead of telling the truth, especially in a democracy.

The most important thing about this book and Brock's website Media Matters is that people need to understand that media does in fact matter. It's difficult sometimes to watch something like Fox News and get past thinking, "God only really stupid people must fall for this crap." Brock gets past that simply by existing--he's a smart guy and he fell for it, so we can move on. The truth of the matter is that no matter how smart you are, you cannot know something if you never have an opportunity to learn it. And intelligence and education do not make people immune to having prejudiced or warped beliefs, especially if those beliefs are the prevailing wisdom. And what makes something the prevailing wisdom is usually no more than constantly communicating those beliefs loudly and frequently. A quick glance through history is all it takes for this truth to sink in.