Forgive me for getting excited at the thought of Derek Smalls laying the smackdown on the Mainstream Media.
Comedian Harry Shearer, perhaps best known as the bassist for the faux metal band Spinal Tap, spoke at the National Press Club March 14 to critique the assembled scribes and their profession. He’s promoting a new film, “The Big Uneasy,” which lambastes media coverage of Hurricane Katrina.
The liberal comic said media groupthink and false narratives permeate the MSM. He’s right, of course, but just how far would Shearer go? I read on, fingers double crossed that he would leap over the ideological divide to slam the press for its biased Tea Party coverage. Or, better yet, cry out against the media’s devotion to the “new civility” which ended when the Left started getting violent.
Nope.
Here he is tackling a question about media bias, or as he might describe it, media laziness:
“Most journalists are vaguely liberal; most media owners are not so vaguely conservative,” he said. “The far more pervasive biases, I suggest, those of logistics of parachuting in and asking cab drivers, ‘what’s the mood here?’”
Nice try, Harry. You certainly started a conversation that needs to be had, but it’s clear your biases won’t let you finish it.
I was there at the Press Club event. You are correct that Harry was observing that false narratives permeate the MSM, and I am pretty darn certain he was not blaming media bias either conservative or liberal. The statement quoted here is a passing observation, and his opinion, but his main point was Big Media’s tenacity to cling to original scripts despite the later appearance of conflicting data from experts. Harry called them “templates.”
Sandy Rosenthal, wife, mom, Who dat and founder of Levees.org
Nice try yourself, sir. You did very well at a mainstream media specialty, listening to twenty minutes of densely written remarks and picking out the one sentence that confirms your prejudice. For the record, in my comedy life, I’m a satirist which, last time I looked, means I make fun of whoever’s got control of the big white house down the street from where i’m sitting right now. If that makes me a “liberal”, go for it. But, as Sandy indicated above, I was analyzing the failure of the media to correctly tell two big stories–the toppling of Saddam’s statue and the flooding of New Orleans–because editors and producers in New York, based on a first dusting of the facts, got a narrative fixed in their minds which allowed no later-arriving facts to enter. See, it’s not that hard to summarize twenty minutes in a sentence. If that’s what your goal is.