Xarker Manifesto: The Press and The Media

On the press and the media

1. Americans want to be comforted by the news.
2. Major news organizations are for-profit ventures that naturally seek to give the customer what he or she wants.
3. The "mainstream media" is not liberal. It is, instead, a pathetic outsider desperately seeking an invitation to the party, and it has become hopelessly compromised by wealth, ego, power and envy. It has failed to heed I.F. Stone's warning: "To be regarded as nonrespectable, to be a pariah, to be an outsider, this is really the way to do it. To sit in your tub and not want anything. As soon as you want something, they’ve got you!"
4. While examples of liberal media bias exist, systematic and partisan Liberal Media Bias is a deliberate invention of the American Right.
5. The goal of the Liberal Media Bias meme is something professor Jay Rosen of NYU calls "de-certification." To wit: Because the media is liberal, it will dishonestly seek to discredit its partisan conservative enemies. Therefore, anything in the media that challenges conservative orthodoxy may be rejected out of hand without closer examination.
6. Watergate taught American conservatives that they did not control the press. The lesson they learned: Don't let it happen again. Their well-funded, decades-long assault on the media is detailed in the 2004 book Republican Noise Machine by David Brock, who now runs the fact-checking web site Media Matters for America.
7. The neo-cons use the media as a battleground, and their most effective weapon is  FUD: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. With FUD, a coherent political program is not necessary so long as all contradictory facts can be undermined and obscured.
8. Newspapers are doomed, but they won't change because the act of slowly dying is proving to be so profitable. Plus, the people who run most modern American newspapers tend to be complete fucking morons.
9. Journalism is to politics as art is to culture.
10. Journalism cannot fix what is wrong within a culture. It simply chronicles and catalogs the pathology as it winds down to death. To heal and correct requires art, and if art is unavailable to regular people, any healing will be incomplete.
11. The only people who benefit from the elimination of anonymous sources in the media are liars in positions of power. Guess who wants to get rid of anonymous sources?
12. Advertising creates more unhappiness in America than drug addiction does, but you never hear anybody talk about launching a "War on Advertising."

Editor's Note: The original Xarker Manifesto was published on this site on June 29, 2005. Subsequent changes and additions appear with a date attached.

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