Frank Rich's Critiques the Government and Media in The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina
cn | 25 September, 2006 11:22
I was just listening to The Diane Rehm Show on NPR this morning and cauth an interview with Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times, who has a new book out entitled The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Decline and Fall of Truth from 9/11 to Katrina. It sounds like quite an critical examination of the media and administration and the relationship between the two and topics of conversation on the interview ranged from specific policies and statments from the White House to the Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Here's a review from Amazon.com about his book:
This blistering j'accuse has vitriol to spare for George Bush—calling him a "spoiled brat" and "blowhard"—and his policies, but its main target is the PR machinery that promoted those policies to the American people. New York Times columnist Rich revisits nearly every Bush administration publicity gambit, including Iraqi WMD claims, Bush's "Mission Accomplished" triumph, the Swift-boating of John Kerry and the writing of fake prowar letters-to-the-editor from soldiers. He uncovers nothing new, but his meticulously researched recap-cum-debunking—complete with appended 80-page time line comparing administration spin to actual events—builds a comprehensive picture of a White House propaganda campaign to bamboozle the public, smear critics, camouflage policy disasters and win the 2002 and 2004 elections through trumped-up security anxieties. Along the way, he pillories a sycophantic media (Bob Woodward gets spanked hard), spineless Democrats and an infotainment culture that happily accommodates the Bush administration's erasure of the line between reality and fiction. Sometimes Rich's critique of Republican politics as cynical image-manipulation goes overboard, as in his "wag the dog" theory of the Iraq war as a Karl Rove electoral maneuver; more often, though, it's on target. The result is a caustic, hard-hitting indictment of the Bush administration, timed to make a splash in the upcoming election campaign. (Sept. 19)
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You can probably hear the interview in the archives on the Diane Rehm Show website pretty soon here.
Amazon listing here.
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Masterpiece Theater Host Alistair Cooke Dies and Seems to Create Massive Confusion
cn | 19 September, 2006 15:15
From CNN.com:
After "Masterpiece Theatre" host Alistair Cooke died, errors in the medical records accompanying his body fell through the cracks, one by one.
His name was misspelled. His birthdate was off by 10 years. His Social Security number wasn't even close. The name of his doctor, contact information for a relative, the time and cause of his death: all wrong.
None of that prevented the removal and sale of the 95-year-old's arms and legs. The fate of his pelvis and other tissue remains a mystery.
The article itself examines the 'cadaver tissue industry', but also brings into question how easy it might perhaps be to manipulate the system for someone such as Ken Lay, who supposedly died this past July and was immediately creamated.
For someone with deep and opaque connections to the Bush administration, deep pockets, a questionable ethical foundation, and an upcoming prision term which he would most likely die before finishing I've been quite surprised that no major media source has probed deeper.
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The Threat of Terrorism
ben | 18 September, 2006 14:47
From BoingBoing.net:
Ryan Singel at Wired News has produced an insightful little chart that compares the odds of dying from a terrorist attack to other causes of death in the United States. According to this data, Americans are more likely to be killed by a policeman than by a toothpaste-wielding foreign jihadist.
This to me brings up the questions of who benefits from everyone being terrorized by a publicized threat of terrorism AND what is being done to address the thousands of other things that are statistically more likely to kill me than terrorism.
See the chart with links to the places they got the data from at Wired.com here.
Original boingboing.net post here.
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