Things I Wish I’d Written, Seymour Hersh edition
“Every time I watch a network news show, I feel like I?m watching a Jon Stewart parody”
Hersh, out for an appearance at UCLA this Thursday, didn’t write it, but he with the LA Weekly’s Scott Thill, about the way our press fell all over General Petraeus:
Do you think the administration learned from the Vietnam War that their first priority was to co-opt the press?
Oh yeah, but I think co-opt is a weak word. I think it was more than that. The ability of this administration to spin the press is unbelievable. Just look at the surge, how the press was atwitter about the report from General Petraeus ? or King David, as they call him. I mean, he?s a Ph.D. from Princeton and he likes himself. The White House and its press decided that this report would be some mystifying document that is somehow going to save the world. Well, guess what? You can spin it all you want, but we?re taking a pasting. Iraq is an unmitigated disaster, and the Bush administration is going to leave it for the Democrats to clean up. The point is that the White House must be ecstatic over its ability to spin the press so easily. Every time I watch a network news show, I feel like I?m watching a Jon Stewart parody.
His point about Petraeus is one I made earlier, and in perhaps more clumsy fashion:
Flash ahead a few years, and Petraeus has undergone a metamorphosis, from being a capable military commander who did a capable job in a difficult situation, to being ? at least in the minds of the Bush Administration and the war?s supporters ? an infallible oracle, an irrefutable authority on the direction which our nation must take in Iraq.
The new Petraeus, the Petraeic Oracle, is endowed with supernatural powers of judgment or cognition. No longer a mere mortal, he is the unchallenged seer who can peer into the future of Iraq.
King David, indeed.
The rest of the interview talks about journalism, and the administration’s plans for Iran. A good short read, so .
“The ability of this administration to spin the press is unbelievable.”
This is dead wrong. The Bush administration is no better at this than they are at anything else.
The mainstream press is not Bush’s dupe, it is his collaborator. Reagan saw to it that the press would fall into the hands of the super rich, and it now does their bidding, which primarily involves supporting Republicans, no matter how much long term damage they do. That is the whole story. Under these conditions, my Corgi dog could get great treatment from the press if only he came to his senses and registered as a Republican.