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      in US Politics

      The week in audio: The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq; The Heist – review

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      The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq | PodcastThe Heist | The Center for Public Integrity A couple of enlightening shows this week about how American and British politics work. The first, The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq, concerns itself with the politics of the fairly recent past: the 18 months between 9/11 and the 2003 Iraq war. Or: how Tony Blair and George W Bush fell in love.Hosted by David Dimbleby, whose podcast on the rise of Rupert Murdoch, The Sun King, was such a success last year, The Fault Line, produced by Somethin’ Else, is a clear and classy listen. Informative, too: Dimbers, as ex-host of Question Time, has an enviable contact list, and we hear from many important behind-the-scenesters. In last week’s episode, the first, we met Bill Murray (not that one), a US spy who repeatedly informed the White House that his intelligence indicated that Saddam Hussein did not have any weapons of mass destruction. This week, we’ll hear from Christopher Meyer, the British ambassador who says he was told to “get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. Dimbleby gives us little portraits of each. Murray: “quite a conspicuous person … he sticks out in a crowd”; Meyer: “slightly maverick, freewheeling”. He has an exemplary presenting style: honest without being trashy, measured without being boring.I’m not sure what I expected from this podcast. I think I thought I knew the story, so worried that I might be bored. I was very wrong: the show reminds you of those months before the invasion, but also gives context, unpicks relationships, underpins everything with insider info.Plus, The Fault Line has something else on its mind. Dimbleby asserts that this particular time, this particular US-UK love affair, laid the foundations for the current breakdown of trust between the electorate and our politicians. The podcast has not quite got there yet (an interview with Blair is promised, as well as Alastair Campbell.Until then, enjoy such little gems as the time that Dimbleby interviewed the then US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and Rumsfeld’s PR, after the interview, said, faintly: “Well, I think that’s lost me my job.” Or, in the second episode, when Lorna Fitzsimons, voted in as Rochdale’s MP in the 1997 election, recalls campaigning for New Labour: “It was wave after wave after wave of possibility and excitement. And people got involved: fourth-generation single parents, Asian women who had never been in politics before.”Enough of the good ol’ days: let’s tackle the now. The Heist, from the US’s Center for Public Integrity, has just released its third episode. It’s been getting a lot of attention in the US, not least because of Trump’s recent tax “revelations”. The Heist also talks Trump and taxes and – amazingly – makes this interesting.In the first episode, we learn about tax cutting. The Orange One was elected in 2016, partly because he promised to reform US taxes. When that didn’t happen, many Republican donors were upset. And in an unexpected move, one of these donors, Doug Deason from Dallas, decided to withdraw any financial help to Republican senators until the promised tax reform was passed. What’s more, he got in touch with a lot of other donors and urged them to stop coughing up too. He got them to turn off the money tap; the “Dallas piggy bank”, he calls it.A sensible straight-shooter, Deason’s job is to invest his family’s wealth, and he chooses to do this by investing in politicians. (There are different schemes to do this: the most disturbing is called dark money, as the show explains.) When Sarah Kleiner, from the Center for Public Integrity, asks him why, Deason is clear: he does it because he expects the politicians in whom he invests to do what he wants. “Obviously, you sort of buy access,” he says. “It’s no secret.”And the next episode, about Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary, is just as jaw-droppingly clear. A sometime banker and film producer, Mnuchin “is who he needs to be at any given moment”, says Sally Herships, The Heist’s host. Mnuchin’s most personally exciting Treasury moment appears to have been getting his signature printed on dollar bills.The Heist is a revelatory show, easy to understand and very listenable. So listen, understand, throw something in frustration, and then have a cup of tea to calm down.Three interesting shows about family (sort of)AppearancesThis is a fiction podcast that’s so close to the truth that I thought it was real for the whole of the first episode. Sharon Mashihi is Melanie Barzadeh, an Iranian-American on the verge of having a baby with her on-off older boyfriend. Melanie is in a mid-30s funk: messed up by her personal history and cultural expectations, as well as her own whither-my-life Brooklynite navel-gazing, she genuinely doesn’t know what to do in order to create the family life she craves. Produced by The Heart’s Kaitlin Prest, simultaneously irritating, moving, insightful and captivating, Appearances is unlike anything else out there.One of the Family With Nicky CampbellMention family and Nicky Campbell, and you’ll probably think of ITV’s Long Lost Family, which he’s co-hosted for years. But this show is about the brilliance of dogs. Campbell pulls in high profile guests – Ricky Gervais, Rebecca Front, Chris Packham – who relax, completely, when talking about their pets, revealing a softer side that we rarely witness. There is a little bit in the show about how best to look after dogs, but really this is just a chat between dog people about how great each other’s dogs are. Start with Gary Lineker and Nihal Arthanayake talking (separately) about the grief they felt when their dogs died.Newsbeat: Coronavirus and StudentsWhen you leave home to go to university, you begin to create your own, new family. So what happens when you have to lock down for 14 days? On Monday, Radio 1’s Newsbeat had the bright idea of asking student radio stations to report in. “We’ve been four days without food,” said one student at Manchester. A Nottingham student described his first experience of university as “a different version of socialising… fear and loneliness is accentuated in our year”. “Everyone feels isolated,” said a guy from Aberystwyth. “I’m quite homesick at the minute,” said a girl at Glasgow. Poor kids. More

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      in US Politics

      'It's up to people to change the system': the artists using stamps as resistance

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      In 2020, artists making political statements have typically done so on the streets, with murals, protest placards or by knocking down old monuments.But much overlooked is the envelope as a place for art. Since a stamp symbolizes the mail-in vote, it has come to represent a form of resistance, a form of direct action. The New York non-profit TRANS > has created a stamp project called These Times. The project, which will premiere both online and in sticker format, features 50 artists and institutions who stress the urgency of voting.“The post office is at the helm of democracy,” says the New York-based curator, Sandra Antelo-Suarez. “It’s our civic duty to vote.“It’s about creating grassroots structures that, along with museums, artists and art galleries, create an economy of response,” she adds.It all started in March when the pandemic hit. Antelo-Suarez found herself frustrated. “I wanted to create a response, thinking about how culture and the art world could respond.” She began asking artists to participate in a grassroots project, one that would bring art to people’s homes. “I thought: stamps.“I asked 50 artists in my personal network to make a gesture in an artwork that’s a tribute to our culture, which is being lost.” More

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      in World Politics

      The Extinct Race of “Reasonable Viewers” in the US

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      Reporting on a defamation trial brought against Fox News host Tucker Carlson, Business Insider notes a rare but significant crack in the facade of contemporary media that could, if we were to pay attention, help to deconstruct the reigning hyperreality that has in recent decades overwhelmed public discourse in the US.

      To maintain its control not just of our lives but of our perception of the environment and culture in which we live, the political class as a whole, in connivance with the media, has created the illusion that when people speak in public — and especially on TV or radio — they are essentially engaged in delivering their sincere opinion and sharing their understanding of the world. They may be mistaken or even wrong about what they claim, but the public has been taught to give any articulate American credit for standing up for what they believe.

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      We have been told that this respect for public personalities’ freedom of expression serves a democratic purpose. It allows for productive debate to develop, as different interpretations vie and eventually converge to establish a truth that legitimately supports variable faces and facets. Though they generally try to avoid it, when Americans happen to hear the opinion or the analysis of a person they don’t agree with, they may simply oppose that point of view rather than listen to it, but they also tend to feel sorry for that person’s inability to construe reality correctly.

      In other words, the default position concerning freedom of speech has traditionally maintained that a person’s discourse may be wrong, biased or misinformed, but only in exceptional cases should the sincerity of the speaker be called into question. For this very reason, US President Donald Trump’s supporters may think that many of the things he says could be erroneous, but they assume that their hero is at least being sincere. They even consider that when his ravings contradict the science or reasoning of other informed voices, his insistence is proof of his sincerity. They admire him for it.

      In contrast, Trump’s enemies want us to believe he is unique and the opposite of the truthtellers on their side. But Trump is far from alone. He just pushes the trend of exaggerating the truth and developing unfounded arguments further than his opponents or even his friends. And because he shakes off all challenges, his fans see him as that much more authentic and sincere than everyone else.

      And so the hyperreal system maintains itself without the need of resorting to objective reality. That may explain why the ruling of the judge in favor of Carlson seems to jar with the rules of the hyperreal game. A former Playboy model accused Carlson of defamation. Here is how Business Insider framed the case: “A federal judge on Wednesday [September 23] dismissed a lawsuit against Fox News after lawyers for the network argued that no ‘reasonable viewer’ takes the primetime host Tucker Carlson seriously.” In the judge’s words, “given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.”

      Here is today’s 3D definition:

      Reasonable viewer:

      An imaginary human being considered to be capable of critical thinking when sitting in front of an American news broadcast on television, contradicting all empirical evidence that shows no such person has ever existed

      Contextual Note

      The idea of a “reasonable viewer” is similar to the equally nonexistent “homo economicus,” a concept dear to economists who want the public to believe that markets represent the ultimate expression of human rationality. They imagine a world in which all people do nothing other than pursue their enlightened and informed self-interest.

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      The judge in the Carlson case is one of those rare Americans who understand that all the news — and Fox News par excellence — is entertainment. But what he fails to acknowledge is that broadcast “news” has become a consciously tendentious form of entertainment that privileges emotion over reason and has an insidious impact on people’s civic behavior. 

      Whether it’s Fox News, MSNBC or CNN, no complex story exists that cannot be reduced to the kind of binary conflict its viewers expect to hear about and resonate to. That means nothing could be more unreasonable than to believe there is such a thing as a “reasonable viewer,” especially one who refuses to take Carlson “seriously.”

      In other words, the judge is right to highlight the fundamental triviality — or, worse, the hyperreal character of most TV news and Carlson in particular — but wrong to think it appeals to “reasonable” viewers or that reasonable viewers, if they exist at all, are even aware of it.

      Historical Note

      Throughout the history of the US in the 20th century, media fluctuated between a sense of vocation in reporting fundamentally factual stories and one of serving the needs of propaganda either of the government or of political parties. There has long been a distinction between “liberal” and “conservative” newspapers, though throughout the 20th century, the distinction applied more to the editorial pages in which columnists had the liberty to express their particular bias than to reporting of the news itself.

      Quentin Fottrell, in an article for Market Watch published in 2019, described the process by which, in his words, “U.S. news has shifted to opinion-based content that appeals to emotion.” He sums up the findings of a study by the Rand Corporation in these terms: “Journalism in the U.S. has become more subjective and consists less of the detailed event- or context-based reporting that used to characterize news coverage.”

      Significantly, the Rand study found that the very language used in reporting had evolved: “Before 2000, broadcast news segments were more likely to include relatively complex academic and precise language, as well as complex reasoning.” This points to the core issue in the shift that has taken place. Over the past 20 years, “broadcast news became more focused on-air personalities and talking heads debating the news.” This indicates a deliberate intention of news media to appeal to emotion rather than reason, even to the exclusion of any form of critical thinking.

      Fottrell notes the significance of the year 2000, a moment at which “ratings of all three major cable networks in the U.S. began to increase dramatically.” When the focus turns to ratings — the unique key to corporate income — the traditional vocation of informing the public takes a back seat. He quotes a patent attorney who studied media bias and found that the “extreme sources play on people’s worst instincts, like fear and tribalism, and take advantage of people’s confirmation biases.”

      The “worst instincts” are also known as the lowest common denominator. According to the logic of monopoly that guides all big corporations in the US, the standard strategy for a news outlet is to identify a broad target audience and then seek to develop a message that stretches from the high-profile minority who have an economic or professional interest in the political agenda to the dimmest and least discerning of a consumer public who are moved by “fear and tribalism.”

      It’s a winning formula because the elite segment of the target audience, a tiny minority of interested parties who are capable of understanding the issues and the stakes, willingly participate in the dumbing down of the news with the goal of using emotion to attract the least discerning to the causes they identify with and profit from economically and politically. 

      Just as the average Fox News viewer has no objective interest in Donald Trump’s tax cuts for the rich or his permanent campaign to gut health care but will be easily incited to see the president as the champion of their lifestyle, the average MSNBC viewer will endorse the Wall Street bias of establishment Democrats always intent on eschewing serious reforms, citing the fact that they are too expensive. They do so only because MSNBC has excited their emotions against the arch-villain Trump.

      It isn’t as if reasonable viewers didn’t exist. The news networks have banished them to pursue their interests on the internet or simply replaced anything that resembles reason by pure emotion.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More