Myth making tricks

Glenn Greenwald is on a roll today. He takes us through the process of how a lazy, disengaged media turns fiction into facts. Taking for example the current distasteful business with James Carville stabbing Howard Dean in the back. That snake Carville, who has no right to call himself a Democrat after he betrayed his party in 04, makes one idle remark. It gets repeated like a game of telephone across the usual channels and the media starts reporting it as if it's a major movement within the party to oust Dean.

The eternally irrelevant Jonah Goldberg produces an anonymous email from someone who allegedly was present at Jim Webb's victory speech and claims the audience was hostile to Webb's remarks about the troops, among other things. This, for all we know invented, anonymous email has already been picked up by the 101st Scream Team, who are reporting it as fact and it will eventually filter to the talking heads on the wingnut programs. Ultimately it be used as "proof" Democrats are anti-American hooligans who don't want to fight terrorists.

This is how media myths are made. The 101st Screaming Extremists have assimilated themselves into the MSM Borg. They figured out they could say anything, and if they repeated each other incessantly enough, their fantasies could be made real. They become common "knowledge." That provides a cover for so-called journalists, who are more interested in their social calendar on Capitol Hill than they are in investigating the news, to simply repeat the talking points without having to do any -- you know -- work.

As Glenn points out in an earlier post, our job is to expose these dissemblers and regulate them back to the fringes of society where they belong.