books.jpegIf you missed the Book Salon with Susan Faludi (whose book, The Terror Dream, I highly recommend), Christy posed the question:

Susan — I’m curious about the section that you have on the “9/11 widow status” and how that narrative has become shorthand for so many of the folks left behind in the wake of the tragedy. We have seen how several of the widows and widowers have been vilified when they have spoken up to correct the narrative where they think it has gone awry. The Coulter attacks on “The Jersey Girls” spring to mind here.

So many of the media myths build up, at least from what I have seen, due to the sort of herd mentality and in-crowd shorthand that far too many in the media use — due to laziness? Ease? Fitting into what Digby calls “The Heathers”? I dunno. But how do we break through that and get back to critical thinking…and soon.

To which Susan Faludi responded:

Part of the problem is the long-term shift from a working press that gives us the information we need to be educated citizens (the whole point of the founders wanting to guarantee protections to the press)to a “media” that mainly wants and needs to entertain us to attract the maximum number of consumers (who used to be called readers).

I happened to have just finished reading Maureen Dowd’s bitchy, substance-free column on the last debate that did nothing but re-poison the political waters with a fresh batch of Hillary hatred, and compared it to eRiposte’s factual analysis of Russert’s distortions regarding declassification of documents during that same event. No matter what one may think of Hillary Clinton as a potential leader, nothing gets served by this kind of fraudulent, vicious garbage being perpetuated as “reporting.”

Maybe the New York Times and NBC ought to think about paying eRiposte, who is obviously the only one of the three capable of doing an honest day’s work, and stop degrading the political process by giving Russert and Dowd little more than a platform for a high-profile hatchet job?

Just a thought.

Related posts:

  1. The Cost Of Obama’s Beer Fest Failure Is More Tasered Moms
  2. Anti-Choice Men: The Go-To Source for Abortion Opinion
  3. Taibbi Reports on Goldman Swine; Financial Journalists Clutch Pearls
  4. A Line in the Sand Against Beck