Tom {T'i qifsha trut?} Friedman, "Fuck You"

Thomas Friedman (see preceding post for new editorial policy regarding certain proper names) regarding how it came to pass that he chose to say "Fuck you" to a roomful of people (at the Freedom to Connect Conference) trying to understand journalism:

"I believe passionately in the New York Times, a place I have worked at my whole adult life. Lord knows, it has made its mistakes. Which newspaper or blogger hasn't? But I believe that when it is at its best it plays a vitally important role in our democracy, and flippant, denigrating remarks about it, at a time when it is in economic peril and our country desperately needs serious journalism to sort through this crisis, struck me as deeply unserious. That said, when I'm trying to make a point, especially a heartfelt one, and my choice of words ends up getting in the way of that point — even if for just one person — then I chose the wrong words."

(From David Weinbergers's most recent edition of JOHO, which has much more of interest about new notions of news).

This is Dan {viech d'ase} Ratherism, only rather worse. Mr. {Bousse to la gueule}Friedman has chosen high seriousness and the priestly essence of Journalism to believe in, at a time when what one might wish to do is to look very honestly and dispassionately at the New York {Moor Kwas} Times, the falling industry it clings to, the social crises making it a reasonable question whether, given the current state of social rationality, journalism continues to be what it originally was, or whether it has degenerated, genealogically, into the opposite of its original idea,

social rationality appears to produce normative ideals, however these normative ideals are subject to historical change. Their existence in the present may have little relation to their genesis. That is, what was once normative may have over time come to be instruments of domination. (We can think of a totally administered society or the irrational consequences of rationalization.) Thus, previously normative ideals could lose "the normative kernel" over time. link

and, if so, why.

Stupids 'R' US, says Times Columnist

My fellow Americans, we can’t continue in this mode of “Dumb as we wanna be.”

"we must make certain that every bailout dollar, which we’re borrowing from our kids’ future, is spent wisely."

Except we want to be dumb, and are dumb, right Tommy? So, who exactly is going to provide the wisdom we must have?

You exhort without having found your way to anything resembling an analysis. Failing to locate the cause of national stupidity, you soapbox your rant du jour into submission.

Tommy -- son, brother, monster, frere: get this clue, if you never get any other: it's not that 300 million humans one day decided it liked them well to be stupid.

If they don't have good cell service, it's because they were defrauded. If they don't have decent nourishing food, it's because they were defrauded. If they don't have decent schools, or electric trains, or healthcare, or literacy, it is because they were defrauded.

By whom, you ask? By you, Tommy, for one, because you keep telling them they want to be stupid.

There are reasons why this fraud happens, it is called unconflicted corporate capitalism. That's where corporations become the artists who design the world we have, and the desires we have, and the ignorance we have, all with great zest, for the sake of profit and nothing else. There 'tis. Right there, Tommy boy. Look at it carefully -- not too close or it might chew right through your mustache into your chubby wubby cheeky weeky. 

How stupid would that be?

not cheap nor easy

As people in the US struggle in the murk of the economic disaster, the international malaise, the unending Bush bravado, the inklings of the new administration, it would, one supposes, be up to the "fourth estate" to help it reach some stage of self-understanding - at least a couple of steps on the ladder. 

But alas, the thinking, the perspectives and the conceptual systems that people might now turn to to help gain some awareness of, some insight into the current predicament are not folks that are exactly household names. Look for viewpoints from Naomi Klein, Seymour Hersh, Amy Goodman, Andrew Bacevich, Noam Chomsky and the like and you find precious little in the pages of the major newspapers, let alone amid the radio and broadcast television news outlets. 

It's not that these non-mainstreamy folks are entirely right, or can explain everything. But it's that without their side of the picture, part of the picture remains obscure. Now that we're in deep shit, news organizations are having a difficult time explaining how we got here, because they left the conceptual apparatus behind - at the party where subprime mortgages were the toast of the town.

So when NPR and Bill Keller assume that newspapers "tell people what's happening," I have to beg to differ. They don't because they can't. They can't because they are beholden to advertising and marketing and their own industrial interests; it worked for them to ignore a portion of the spectrum of the thinking out there in presenting the world to their readers. 

It worked because times were good, advertising capitalists were happy without Roubini and Goodman and Chomsky and sundry others. As Mr. Keller says, "Good journalism does n0t come cheap." The inexplicability of "what's happening" was less problematic, because house prices were rising -- at least according to the "lights" of the Times (if Mr. Friedman and Mr. Kristol etc. can be so qualified without teh qualifier enjoying an aneurism). 

That home prices were rising and rising was, in fact, inexplicable. So long as the vector pointed up, that seems not to have perplexed the editors. How do they now imagine they can make this story intelligible?

Hit the lights on your way out, Bill.

It would be ungracious of this blog,

having celebrated Mr. Friedman here on more than one occasion for his stalwart billionaire bravado, his goody two-shoes sadism, his facile one flat suck-on-this world of dyslexic olive oil and so much more not to note the latest in a series of panegyrics honoring his moustachioed meatbath, this, from Greenwald:

Tom Friedman doesn't understand why America is unpopular in the world