Demosophia

The Four Pillars of Anti-War Wisdom

In response to Gerard's comment: under The Daily Depress:

There will be a state of press censorship in the United States before this is over. The problem is that the cost of this will be one American city.

and in partial response to Rusty's lengthy post on press censorship:

Given the political realities I fear that will be the price, yes. I'm having trouble conceptualizing the impact of press censorship, except to speculate that it would raise the stock of internet news and editorial sources. Censorship on the internet would pretty much have to be like quality control in a factory, or random reinforcement. All violators couldn't be prosecuted, and the job of monitoring all sources other than the largest would be astronomical. And we might well see some new methods for hopping out of the reach of censors. Tactics would probably adopt the Napster squelching approach. So there's a sort of precedent, I guess. Clearly some big holes though. And what about satellite TV? I had planned to subscribe to Al Jazeera as I learn Arabic, just to monitor what they're saying.

Right now I'd just settle for an untwisted media, but have come to think of that is well nigh impossible.

I'm thinking that the source of the massive distortion we're seeing is a result of the enormous power of big media as much as it's bias. It's almost a given that it would develop a herd mentality. The effect of major media censorship would be to slow down the propagation of a highly distorted news pattern, and it's the very weight that we give "big media" that provides that power to distort. There would clearly be huge holes in any censorship barrier, and, as I said, the mere attempt at censorship would raise the stock of internet news and editorial sources. But there's potentially a huge advantage in that. The Internet provides a far more level playing field than exists in the major media realm right now. There is also some evidence that the very fact of a level of parity and constant competition creates a self-correcting environment. Big errors tend to persist in major media out of pure dumb inertia. They don't last long in the blogosphere.

I agree something has to be done. The enemy seems more or less unfettered in their ability to bombard us with phony images that find willing eyes, and with lies that find willing ears and hearts. The growth and impermeability of the "four great memes" of the Iraq War testifies to the fact that we are up against something entirely new, that challenges our ability to perceive reality accurately. Those memes are, as briefly outlined by James Safire:

1. No WMD in Iraq. This means no WMD, and no future threat of WMD either. Was it true?

2. No Saddam/Qaeda connection. We now know to a high degree of certainty that such a connection existed. We don't know the details of it, though.

3. No human rights high ground can be claimed by the coalition, a perspective that by implication equates "sleep deprivation with life deprivation and humiliation with mass murder." How is this even remotely coherent?

4. No Arab nation is culturally prepared for political freedom. Why doesn't this deserve a committed test?

These are the four pillars of the anti-war movement's "wisdom." Who would be foolish enough to stake their life on any one of them being true, let alone the lot? And yet they are all accepted as axiomatic by the majority of Americans now. Clearly a kind of press censorship and propaganda campaign has already been imposed, from the editing room. What we need is a media that pushes from the bottom up, rather than filters from the top down. And perhaps some form of censorship is just the ticket.

Update. Wretchard's recent post suggests that the internet may have further advantages

One of the challenges facing intellectuals at a time when the political and cultural dimensions of war have grown in relation to the purely military is how to make sense of information acquired through the public intelligence system: the news media. Because modern American warfare now involves only a very small percentage of the population it has become a kind of spectator sport where the plays are actually called from the stands. One would hope on good information. Yet a news industry whose techniques were adequate to cover traffic accidents, murders or cumbrous wars in which armies moved a few hundred yards a day must now must cover events whose complexion can alter in hours. The difference is that this time there is no low-tech acetate overlay, maps, or timeline in battalion notebook. Battlefield events are still reported like isolated traffic accidents, conveying no sense of spatial location, temporal development or continuity. -- Wretchard. Read the rest.

More relevant thoughts on runaway domestic masochism in the absence of negative feedback, from Drumwaster (Hat tip: USS Clueless)

Posted by Demosophist at May 20, 2004 09:03 PM | TrackBack