My Scar Tingles Slightly

It's been several months since the fall of He Who Shall Not Be Named, but there's the slightest of signs that he might be attempting to reinvent himself and get back onto the scene.

He has published columns in the conservative mag Human Events on the budgeting process (basically a recycled rehash of a some stale "Point" commentaries) and (wait for it!) the Fairness Doctrine ! BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

While you're enjoying a chuckle over that, you'll also be amused to hear that he also popped up recently as an interview subject in a story posted on the right-wing news site CNSNews.com.

The topic of the story? Editorial political bias in the news media! BARHARHARHARHAR!!

Needless to say, if my scar starts burning, HWSNBN will be dealt with over at my new digs at Unfrozen Caveman Rhetorician, and if, God forbid, the campaign season lures him out into the light of day, we'll take The Counterpoint out of mothballs and break him over our rhetorical knee.

The Counterpoint 2.0

Just wanted to leave a note here at The Counterpoint that I've got new blog with a somewhat broader scope (but hopefully some of the same spirit) now up and running. It's very much in a "beta" version at this point, but I'm working on getting it up to speed.

Hope to see you there!

The Rhetoric Garage
http://rhetoricgarage.blogspot.com

Cheers,

ted

And That's The Counterpoint

And so “The Point” is done, going out with a whimper rather than a bang.

Hyman’s last commentary took one last Parthian shot at John Kerry, repeating the canard that in Vietnam, Kerry shot a “wounded soldier fleeing the field of battle” (stop hating the troops, Mark!). We also have a mention of the many “major awards” garnered by “The Point,” (no mention of the fact that the awards the segment won were “pay-for-praise” awards in which virtually anyone who submits the required paperwork and meets a minimal standard of quality gets an award).

I’d love to provide a link to the commentary, but almost as soon as Hyman delivered his final “Point,” the Newscentral.tv website took everything connected with “The Point” segment down.

Ultimately, what Hyman said in his last final bit of blathering isn’t as important as the fact that he’s off the air. While one shouldn’t make too much of this one small victory, it’s important to acknowledge the symbolic importance of Hyman’s ignominious departure.

The communication theorist Jurgen Habermas writes that the role of the public sphere in a democracy is, ideally, to be an open forum where people engage in rational discourse that acknowledges differences and attempts to forge consensus. Part of this public sphere is the media, whose main purpose is to scrutinize those in power and report accurately the facts necessary for an informed public discussion of the issues of the day.

As Habermas has noted, the situation today is far from this ideal, particularly in regard to the media, who increasingly operate to protect the private interests of their owners rather than acting as a public corrective on private interests of those in power.

I have a hard time imagining a better example of this degeneration of the public sphere than Sinclair Broadcasting and Mark Hyman. Sinclair’s tactics involve gutting local news organizations and replacing them with pre-packaged, one-size-fits-all “news” to maximize corporate profits. In the process, they strip away an important part of the public sphere in the communities in which they set up shop.

It would be bad enough if Sinclair simply took away from the public sphere in this way in pursuit of economic interests, but they distort the public sphere through their unashamed lobbying for their own narrow political interests (which are, of course, connected to an extent with their economic interests).

We have the owners of Sinclair giving tens of thousands of dollars almost exclusively to Republican candidates. They’ve created their own corporate PAC, which also gives money almost exclusively to Republican candidates. We know that Sinclair executives have used their journalistic resources to support candidates of their choice in elections. We also know they’ve given illegal “gifts in kind” to candidates they support (in the form of free helicopter rides). And they’ve engaged in quid pro quo relationships with the now-lame duck governor of Maryland.

We know that they’ve made major decisions on what to cover and how based on the political interests of the owners. Sinclair refused to provide its viewers with network programming when that programming was deemed (inexplicably) to be politically biased (i.e., the refusal to air ABC’s “The Fallen”). Yet, they chose to air large chunks of a propaganda film that attacked a candidate with whom they disagreed and labeled it “news” in an attempt to influence an election (i.e., the Stolen Honor fiasco).

And then, of course, we have Hyman himself, whose personal soapbox, “The Point,” often took up more broadcast time than the lead story on the news had. That would be bad enough, but Sinclair forced its stations to carry Hyman, regardless of the local community’s desires and needs. Rather than free and open discourse, “The Point” gave us a closed, monopolistic, and self-interested monologue.

Rationality? You didn’t find it on “The Point,” which regularly engaged in ad hominem attacks, deck stacking, appeals to fear, and a nearly endless number of other stock propaganda techniques.

Acknowledging differences and forging consensus? Again, “The Point” did the opposite. Hyman regularly dehumanized and smeared any who disagreed with him, saying that they weren’t simply mistaken or wrong, but were bad people who hated their country and fellow citizens. He wasn’t even above suggesting that people he considered antagonists were criminals or traitors.

All this would be bad enough, but it was all done not simply through the media, but through the publicly owned airwaves—airwaves owned by the people of the United States as a means of creating a thoroughly public sphere. Sinclair and Hyman appropriated these airwaves to advance their own private economic and political agenda, and did so in a way that demonstrably impoverished the public sphere.

The disappearance of “The Point” is only a small move back toward a more humane, civil, and productive public sphere. There is still much to be done in terms of rehabilitating this crucial part of our social existence, including making mainstream journalism more accountable to the truth than to its corporate interests, holding public officials to higher standards in their own public discourse, keeping alternative forms of media (such as the Internet) truly free and open to all, reinstating the fairness doctrine for broadcast media, and turning back the tide of media consolidation and conglomeration.

But we’ll take our victories where we can get them, and this is a welcome and wonderful first step, no matter how small it might be.

In closing, I just want to thank all of you out there who’ve read and contributed to this blog. It’s been a wonderfully affirming and exciting experience to have this little hobbyhorse of mine become something that has brought me in contact with so many thoughtful, insightful people.

Thanks in particular to those of you who’ve left comments and emailed me—you’ve kept me honest and kept me motivated. Special thanks to my friends at Iowans for Better Local Television (IBLTV) in Iowa City for their early and continued support, and their tireless efforts to make real changes on a local level. Thanks also to regular commentators and readers, some of whom I know in real life, and some of whom I know only via this blog. Special shout outs to Todd and John H. in Iowa City (buckle down!), Bradley, Hyman’s Turtle, and that tireless poster, “Anonymous.” And Mike B., I think I’ll miss you most of all! We busted Hyman!

Some of you have asked about the future of this blog. For now, it will go on sabbatical, ready to swing back into action if/when Sinclair-related news comes up or Hyman reappears. In the meantime, I’ll likely start up a blog that casts at least a slightly wider net but which has essentially the same purpose: being a watchdog keeping an eye on certain aspects of public discourse. I doubt I’ll start that before the end of the year, but probably not long after that, I’ll be getting the itch to take up my mouse and keyboard and blog anew.

If you want to reach me directly, you can email me at treming930@hotmail.com. If you like, I’ll send you an email whenever I get my next blog up and running. I’d love to have you stop by. Also, please let me know if you have any tips or info related to Sinclair or Mark Hyman. Let us be ever vigilant!

Thanks again everyone!

And that’s been The Counterpoint.

A P.S. to An Open Letter to Mark Hyman

Almost everything important to say about “The Point” is captured in the statement in your penultimate commentary:

No doubt the most enduring foreign policy comment associated with
The Point is when the French were referred to as "cheese eating surrender
monkeys."

Indeed. What does it say about the impoverished nature of your editorials when *that* is your claim to talking-head fame?

Well, among other things, it serves as a microcosm of what “The Point” has so often been: infantile, mean spirited, unoriginal, and wrong.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the phrase you point to as the enduring legacy of your commentaries is a phrase cribbed from a cartoon, and which wasn’t even first used in a political context by you, but rather a fellow conservative pundit, Jonah Goldberg long before you uttered it. (Given your high standards when it comes to plagiarism, I assume citing the original source simply slipped your mind.)

While we’re at it, let’s take a whack at a few other items you’ve kindly teed up for me.
You talk about “checking in on the terrorist detainees” at Guantanamo Bay. I’m just wondering: how did you know all of the detainees were terrorists? Apparently, not even the government itself can be sure, since a number of people held there have since been released. And while you were “inspecting their cells” and “examining their medical care,” did you also give waterboarding a try?

You brag about going to Iraq, but oddly, in a commentary devoted to patting yourself on the back for your foreign policy insights, you don’t tout your support of the war in Iraq itself. Perhaps now that even those who were architects of the war are running for cover and disavowing responsibility for the disastrous policies there, you want to keep your cheerleading for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et. al, on the down low. Understandable. Not terribly forthcoming or honest, but understandable.

You talk about being threatened by viewer mail, but you don’t say anything about your own defamation of people like George Soros, who’ve you told outright lies about, or people like John Kerry, Peter Jennings, Ted Koppel, etc. who you have said hate the troops and support the terrorists.

You claim that the boycott organized against Sinclair after the Stolen Honor debacle “failed,” but you don’t mention that Sinclair’s stock plummeted, advertisers pulled ads from the broadcast of your propaganda piece as well as from Sinclair’s newscasts, and that the incident shone a bright light on the seamy underbelly of Sinclair’s business practices.

You also claim vindication in being allowed to show political propaganda as “news,” although you cynically refer to it as your “free speech position.” I can’t help but wonder: why does the Sinclair passion for “free speech” not extend to its own offices? When Jon Lieberman, your lead political reporter, argued that it was a mistake to air propaganda and label it news, you didn’t simply offer a thoughtful rebuttal in the spirit of open and free debate; you fired him. So much for Sinclair’s valuing of honest debate.

You say, "All in all, The Point has made an impression and a difference.”
Perhaps it would be better to say “The Point” has left a bad taste in America’s collective mouth.

As for a difference, I must admit that you have. Sinclair, and your commentaries in particular, have been the single best example of the dangers of media consolidation. Those who might have dismissed concerns about relaxed ownership regulations as unfounded have come to see that the threat is very real, and there’s been a groundswell of activism in the fight to take back the public’s airwaves. You’ve single-handedly advanced the cause of a more democratic media, despite the fact that this was the very last thing you wanted to do.

And for that, America *does* owe you its thanks.

And that’s The Counterpoint.

An Open Letter to Mark Hyman

An Open Letter to Mark Hyman:

In your recent commentary in which you reflect on your tenure doing “The Point,” you make a number of claims about your role as a public voice that simply aren’t true. Specifically, you claim your commentaries have been thoughtful, that you’ve served regular Americans by giving them a voice, and that you honored servicemen who deserved to be heard.

All of these claims are at best disingenuous mischaracterizations, and at worst out and out lies.

In fact, virtually none of your commentaries have been “thoughtful.” Thoughtfulness means considering both sides of an issue, acknowledging complexity and subtlety in issues, and engaging in self-reflection.

Not only have your comments rarely shown any of these qualities, but they’ve provided vivid examples of their opposites. You not only don’t consider the opposing side of an argument, but suggest anyone who disagrees with you is morally or ethically bankrupt. Your arguments reduce complex issues into dumbed down “I’m right; you’re wrong” contests. And you have never shown any willingness or ability to recognize that your opinions are just that: your opinions.

You talk about your trips around the country and lambaste “cultural elitists” who you claim see people who don’t live in Manhattan, LA, or DC as “white trash,” “hillbillies,” and “red necks.”

Who are these “cultural elitists?” Can you name anyone who has said anything of the sort?

Moreover, I can’t help but notice that all of the derogatory categories you list as terms “cultural elitists” use for regular Americans refer specifically to white people. Are people who suggest that Hispanics are lazy and shiftless, as you have done, not elitists?

And what could be more elitist than the attitude you and your fellow Sinclair executives have toward your audience? Your big contribution to journalism, “Newscentral TV,” is based on the premise that those of us who live in smaller media markets don’t deserve to have our own local reporters doing stories about what happens in our communities. Sinclair regularly fires a majority of local journalists, many of whom have worked in the community for years, and replaces them with one-size-fits-all prefabricated news you create in your big city studios and pipe out to the rest of the country. What could be more elitist than that?

Well, maybe your commentaries themselves. In your self-satisfaction, you demand that stations across the country run your two minutes of blather, a length of time usually greater than the amount of airtime devoted to the lead story on the local newscast. You packaged yourself as simply a commentator, not revealing that you were a Sinclair executive, that you had no journalistic background, or even that you weren’t a local figure. Not until you outed yourself through your plans to run propaganda as “news” during the 2004 campaign did most viewers learn who you were.

You take time away from the newscasts that reach regular Americans, forcing yourself onto their publicly owned airwaves so that you can spout your particular opinions, rather than allowing local voices to be heard. You don’t even allow viewers to respond to your editorials—something that all legitimate journalistic enterprises do. And then you actually have the nerve to present yourself as the champion of middle America (or at least the white portion thereof). That isn’t just chutzpah; that’s arrogance.

And it’s this arrogance that led you to throw any pretension of journalistic ethics out the window when you chose to run political propaganda as “news.” Not that showing large chunks of Stolen Honor was your first foray into trying to affect elections under the guise of journalism. Those of us who’ve looked into your past found out about your attempts to help out Republican friends and allies, such as the recently-ousted Governor Bob Ehrlich, by running hit pieces on their Democratic opponents.

Using vague and wishy-washy language, you say of the Stolen Honor fiasco:

Our viewpoints have gained widespread attention. No one had more
earned their right to speak out regarding their experiences in Vietnam than the
hundreds of Americans held prisoners of war. We spoke up when the news
gatekeepers snubbed them.

Ah, yes! Those poor snubbed anti-Kerry vets. They didn’t get any airtime did they? Only so much that many people suggest that the smear campaign launched by the Swifties torpedoed the Kerry campaign.

And as you made this limp excuse for your running propaganda as news, you showed a montage of some of the men interviewed in Stolen Honor, including a man who had illegally worked with both the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth [sic] and the Republican party at the same time. Is this the sort of honest person who has “earned his right” to slander a fellow vet for political reasons?

Of course, truth telling isn’t a trait you put much value on, is it? More than a month after the group behind Stolen Honor and the notorious Swifties had signed a pact formally connecting their groups, you went on national television and denied that there were any connections between the folks behind Stolen Honor and the Swifties.

But most damning of all is your attempt in this defense of your actions to hide behind people who serve in the military. You couch your explanation in terms of recognizing the rights of servicemen who served and were captured in Vietnam. But the truth is that here, as in so many of your commentaries, you mock the very idea of honoring military service by deciding who should and shouldn’t be honored based on your political whims.

You desecrate the record of a war hero, John Kerry, because you don’t happen to support his political views today. You mock a mother who lost her son, even going so far as to imply she didn’t truly love him, because her views on foreign policy differ from yours. When a news program decided to offer a silent and apolitical tribute to servicemen and women who gave the last full measure of devotion in service to their country, you banned it from your stations because you thought it might make people question the policies of a president you’re a fan of.

And all the while, you claim that anyone who doesn’t agree with you hates the troops and the country. You don’t have the guts to stand on your own and argue your positions on their merits. You hide behind the sanctity we place on service to our country in times of war. You hide behind the esteem we have for those that put their lives on the line. You steal their honor for your political use.

There’s a word for someone like that: a coward.

And that’s The Counterpoint.

Counting the Days to VH-Day

A post Turkey Day short takes catch up, as we count down the final days to VH Day: Victory Over Hyman!

Mark Hyman recently repeated the canard about Kerry calling U.S. troops “stupid” in the context of an attack on Charles Pinning, a novelist and author of an essay that Hyman misidentifies as an “editorial” for a Rhode Island newspaper. In the piece, Pinning says many enlistees in today’s Army, as they were in Vietnam, are young people with few options because of the lack of financial and scholastic options.

Hyman predictably accuses him of hating the troops and patriotism, and says the high school graduation rates in the Army are higher than the national average and that “66% come from middle or upper” income homes.

Now, I think Pinning’s rhetoric is overheated and goes too far, but Hyman is simply dishonest when he suggests that lack of options doesn’t play a role in recruiting. No, our soldiers are certainly no dummies. Despite the recent relaxing of recruitment standards, a high school degree has long been a baseline educational level for recruits, so certainly a higher percentage of soldiers have degrees than the general population. But that doesn’t mean that the general educational level in the military is at or above the national average.

Not that this is a slam on the IQ of soldiers. You can’t be Rainman and drive an M1 Abrams tank. But a large percentage of soldiers *do* join because they don’t have the finances to pursue higher education on their own. Heck, that’s been one of the major recruiting carrots held out to potential recruits: money for college. That 66% figure? It sounds good, until you realize two things: saying that 2/3 of our troops come from middle OR upper income families doesn’t say anything about how many sons and daughters of the wealthy are serving. By combining these categories, Hyman distorts the numbers. Secondly, we still have a full third of our troops coming from lower income families.

Mark, it’s not a slam on our troops to say that their numbers are not representative of the entire socio-economic spectrum. It’s a slam on the policies that send a disproportionate number of working class kids to fight wars dreamt up by wealthy men.

In another editorial, Hyman mentions that in the recent “hubbub” (one of Hyman’s favorite words) about the election, the investigation into four member of the voter registration group ACORN in Missouri went unnoticed. They are suspected of filing false voter registration forms. He labels ACORN as a union-friendly group.

What he *doesn’t* tell you is that ACORN’s raison d’etre is registering poor and/or minority voters. He also doesn’t tell you that ACORN itself identified the fishy registrations and has supported the FBI investigation. He also doesn’t mention that the GOP in Missouri sent intimidating letters to those first time voters signed up by ACORN to try to keep them from voting.

He also doesn’t have anything to say about the shenanigans perpetrated in Maryland by his former boss, the defeated incumbent governor Bob Ehrlich, who along with GOP Senate candidate Michael Steele bussed in unemployed African Americans from around the D.C. area, put them in Ehrlich T-shirts, and had them pass around misleading sample ballots in Maryland that suggested that Ehrlich and Steele were Democrats and had been endorsed by prominent African Americans.

Speaking of the elections, in his Thanksgiving Day commentary, Hyman lamely tries to spin the Blue Wave that swept the country by saying that voters simply expressed “their unhappiness with about three dozen incumbents in Congress.”

Right. And the American Revolution was just an expression of unhappiness about the price of tea.

We have a farewell edition of the Mailbag segment, in which Hyman predictably quoted widely from letters that praised him, and quoted only a few contrary emails, all of which were picked and edited to make the writers seem unhinged or unfair (e.g., including a letter in which an expletive had to be deleted).

And finally, Hyman uses the “c” word about himself. In a commentary praising legislation putting limits on Congressional earmarks, Hyman labels himself a conservative.

Thanks for the news flash, Mark.

And those are the catch-up Counterpoints.

Who Knew Idaho Was a Blue State?

There’s not much to be said about the latest of Hyman’s many, many returns to the Kelo case and the issue of eminent domain. This time, he’s mentioning that some states in the recent election voted to strengthen protections against seizure of lands, while other didn’t. He comically attributes the defeat of such measures to mobilization of urban voters, which might make sense if one of the states where eminent domain initiatives went down to defeat wasn’t Idaho (that bastion of big city, big government liberalism).

Actually, the key to Hyman’s comments comes when he mentions that environmental groups lobbied strongly against further limiting eminent domain.
The reason for this is simple. While people like Hyman portray eminent domain as an issue of protecting individual family homes, the much larger goal is to limit government regulation of land use, including restrictions on pollution. He wants to appeal to our fear of Big Brother taking our house away in order to protect private corporations from having limitations placed on their ability to befoul the air, water, and land on which they stand—air, water, and land that act as conduits for whatever pestilence they unload into it, bringing it to our own front door.

That’s all I’ll say on that for now. I’d refer you to this well-written article on the true motivations and sources of the eminent domain legislation initiatives that populated state ballots. It’s what Hyman doesn’t want you to know.

And that’s The Counterpoint.

Careening Toward Irrelevancy

The wheels continue to come off as Mark Hyman careens toward the end of his career as a media figure. He’s abandoned any attempt to make a sensible argument—or to make sense at all.

The latest example is the series of wild rhetorical haymakers he throws at the entity he refers to as “Hollywood.”

The commentary, which is apropos of nothing, imagines what a Hollywood treatment of Saddam Hussein’s life would be like.

For reasons known only to him, Hyman thinks Hollywood would create a loving ode to the former dictator. He imagines that . . .

The movie would tout his classrooms, in which textbooks referred to
Jews as pigs and gorillas, as the model for an educational system.

Well, only if Mel Gibson was directing. Actually, I’m sure Hyman’s right. After all, there aren’t many Jewish people in Hollywood in positions of power. It’s quite the hotbed of anti-Semitism.

Hyman’s other musings are just as nonsensical:

It would view his ambitions to invade Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and to
bomb Israel as statesman like.

No doubt it would characterize U.S. servicemen and women as criminal
terrorist thugs, the killers of women and children.

He ends with a gratuitous and ugly attack on Ted Kennedy:

After all, Hollywood is where Ted Kennedy is viewed as the conscience of
America and he left a woman to drown in the back of his sedan in 1969.

Unfortunately, Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment.

Classy.

Life’s too short to bother with such drivel. This isn’t simply pandering to the right wing, but to the most woolly-headed, dunderheaded of far right wackos, and I’m not sure how many of them would actually buy it.


This is simply a ritualistic display of a right wing tenet: those who create the media are against us. This tenet flies in the face of all evidence, including the corporate ownership of so much major media outlets and the need for commercial media to appeal to a wide audience to succeed.

Precisely because of its absurdity, it’s a tenet that must be invoked on a regular basis. It’s part of the conservative creed. It’s not intended to actually persuade anyone; it’s meant to invoke a sense of community among those who already believe it.

After all, the only people thickheaded enough to buy Hyman’s assertions in the first place are already right-wingers.

And that’s The Counterpoint.