Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Dear Progressive Blogosphere,

I realize it’s enjoyable to make fun of Fred Hiatt, the editorial page editor of the Washington Post, for publishing this column by Kathleen “Less Crazy Than Jeffrey Dahmer!” Parker. (If you haven’t seen it already, Parker is arguing that we should make “common cause” with Iran’s Ahmadinejad in keeping ladies out of the military.) And indeed, I’ve engaged in similar activity many times myself.

Still, we’re in danger of missing what’s important here. And what’s important is not Fred Hiatt. Hiatt has his job because Donald Graham, the Post’s publisher, likes what Hiatt does. If Hiatt woke up one day and suddenly decided to stop publishing the insane, it wouldn’t be long before he was out of work, replaced by someone who was eager to run columns by lunatics.

In other words, the problem with the US media isn’t all the non-reality-based editors and producers who hire the Kathleen Parkers and Tim Russerts and Sean Hannitys. It’s the right-wing billionaires who hire those editors and producers. (Or if you really want to depart from acceptable discussion, the problem is an economic system that allows only right-wing billionaires to own newspapers and TV networks.)

So I come before you today with this plea: let’s focus less on the sock puppets, and more on the hands.

There’s some good stuff in Mr. Gerber’s newsbreaks this week. For instance:

More here.

1. TomDispatch, featuring Noam Chomsky on “What if Iran Had Invaded Mexico?: Putting the Iran Crises in Context” and Elizabeth de la Vega on “Doin’ the Karl Rove Dance”

2. Matt “Secret Jesus” Taibbi interviewing Seymour Hersh:

TAIBBI: Did America learn anything from Vietnam? Was there a lesson in the way that war ended that could have prevented this war from starting?

HERSH: You mean learn from the past? America?

3. Dennis Perrin with an honest perspective on nice liberals and the Weathermen.

Tony Karon on “Condi’s Free Ride: The Fantasy of American Diplomacy in the Middle East”

Chip Ward on “What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School: The Public Library as an Asylum for the Homeless”

Mike Davis on “Have the Car-bombers Already Defeated the Surge?: The Weapon No One Can Stop”

Aaron Swartz came across an extremely interesting talk at MIT by John Hockenberry about his experience at NBC in the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. Here’s some of what Hockenberry said:

I was very happily employed at NBC. I wasn’t like, running around, trying to stuff toilet paper into the plumbing and sabotage the place. […] But I was interested, because we had a lot of meetings at NBC about, you know, if you’re doing a story and the person you’re doing the story about offers to buy you a drink, you’ve gotta say no. If you’re doing a story and they send you, after they see the story, some napkin rings — silver napkin rings that are monogrammed “Thank you, Jon, for the story,” you’ve got not only to return those, you’ve got to report those to the standards people at NBC because there’s a whole ethics and conflict-of-interest thing.

So at one of these ethics meetings — I called them the return-the-napkin-ring kinds of meetings — I raised my hand and said “You know, isn’t it a problem that the contract that GE has with the Coalition Provisional Authority […] to rebuild the power generation system in Iraq [is] about the size of the entire budget of NBC? Is that kind of like the napkin rings thing?” And the standards people said “Huh. That’s interesting. No one’s brought that up before.”…[T]he fact that it drew a complete blank among the NBC standards people was interesting to me.

And there’s more.