An expert (in bananas) says.....
The Guardian ran yet another media hit-piece against the apparently formidable Sarah Palin. I say formidable because this woman, who is after all just a private citizen and, as everybody knows, a ditzy right wing nutcase, seems to inspire absolute fear in all on the left. Witness the AP assigning no fewer than 11 reporters just to dig up mistakes in her book. That kind of attack is unprecedented, and makes me think there must be something about Sarah that makes her worth keeping around.
Now to the point. The media is very skilled at misleading the reader while often avoiding anything that can be called a flat out lie. Of course, the flat out lies are there too, but they try to be a bit more sophisticated. After all, these are mostly graduates of journalism schools, where 4 years are spent in indoctrination and learning how to write with sophistry. They are part of the reason why there are no more Mark Twains in the media.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/nov/15/michele-bachmann-president-sarah-palin
This article purports to be another balanced and objective look at Republican women. In between a few bits of fatuous praise, the article sprays on the fascist paint. You are meant to walk away believing this stuff. So, let’s look at how to read the Guardian’s non-lies. The boldface is mine.
“a darling of the so-called Tea Party movement, which has campaigned vociferously against healthcare reform”
That’s like saying abortion rights activists campaign against children. Or that a mother who doesn’t want to use her limited funds to buy caviar for her children is against feeding here kids. This takes a very narrow target (the current healthcare bill hastily and secretively being jammed through congress), and calls it something much broader. This is a constant tactic. Though it is tangental to the article, these are sprinkled throughout to paint the broader canvas that supports the Guardian’s ideology. The reader skips right pasts this, but it rests in their subconscious. The next time a tea party story comes along, a little voice in the reader’s head will say “oh, those are the wicked people against reform.”
“frequently appearing on the conservative Fox News channel”
I am still waiting for the day when I hear the words “liberal news channel.” There must be no such thing. This sets the reader up once again, with the subtext that these are not mainstream people.
“notable syndicated commentators such as Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter, whose dislike for liberals has grown ever more shrill in recent months”
Shrill? Ann Coulter. Whatever you think of her, she’s anything but shrill. Again, I never once heard Bush critics called shrill, much less hysterical (which so many of them were).
“All these women express a mood of conservative discontent that is becoming increasingly vocal and, some experts warn, extreme.”
Ooh….danger! Now we get to the meat. These right wing women are promoting extremism. Of course, the author can’t just say that without backing it up. So he uses the word of unnamed and unquoted “experts.” “Experts” are the bogeymen of mass media. Since we are all experts in something, we can all offer similar expert opinions. Of course, experts is what, we don’t know. Not even one was named, much less quoted.
So, when an author claims “some experts say,” they are about to express their own personal opinion without any facts to back it up. Hopefully the reader will swallow that whole as well.
“The (Republican) party is becoming more white and southern”
Oops, they let a lie slip through. Basically, the author wanted to say “racist and ignorant.” He might have used “experts say” before such a slander, but that was already taken up in the preceding paragraph. So instead, he used “white and southern” to say the same thing. It comforts leftists to think of conservatives as all white male rednecks. This is part of the reason they are so hard on female or non-white conservatives. The left’s cartoons portraying Condaleezza Rice were straight out of the Jim Crow era. Now they were racist.
“But out in the crowd the ugly face of some modern conservatives was not hard to find. There were 12 arrests. One protester wore a mask of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with handfuls of bloody foetuses. Another protester held up a picture of piles of Jewish corpses from Dachau concentration camp.”
Funny that they weren’t bothered by 8 years of Nazi imagery used to describe George Bush. Why the sudden attack of delicacy and sensitivity?
“She has said Obama holds socialist views.”
And he doesn’t??
“what makes liberal Americans laugh or cry has got the conservative wing of the Republican party extremely excited.”
And why not “liberal wing of the Democratic party” and “conservative Americans?” Words are chosen to make one view seem isolated and the other seem.. well, American.
Read it yourself, and ask why the words were chosen. In fact, I even wonder about how leftist reactionaries co-opted the term “liberal,” when they are anything but. But that’s for another day.
