Monday, December 13, 2004

Different storytellers makes for a different story....

"On March 24,2003, the fourth day of the war in Iraq, [Dan] Rather opened his newscast with this upbeat description of the American-led military campaign: “Barreling toward Baghdad. Fast-moving U.S. ground forces fight their way to within miles of the capital. Up above, air raids try to cut up and cut off Iraqi divisions. Iraq insists Saddam is alive, well, and in control.”

But over at ABC, Peter Jennings seemed to be reporting on an entirely different war:

“On World News Tonight, the U.S. attacks all over Iraq, the drive on Baghdad is cautious. There is opposition and there is weather. The Iraqi leader is alive and on television. Who knows how well he is. The U.S. believes he is still in control. Two more Americans are captured, their helicopter shot down. So many others are coming back frill of bullet holes. And the pictures of the POWs. So public now, such pain for the families.”

As it turned out, of course, Rather’s reporting was not simply more optimistic than Jennings’s; it was far more accurate. "
(Weapons of Mass Distortion: The Coming
Meltdown of the Liberal Media
By Brent Bozell :69)

It's something to think about if you still watch the Old Media.

Dan Rather distorted his coverage of things all the time, depending on the issue and what he thought about it. Sometimes it is worth deconstructing a story and looking at the storyteller. I am not saying that deconstructionists always have a point, typically they do not. But if a person's basic philosophy is that all is matter in motion then deconstruction applies. Like Karl Kraus said of psychoanalysis, it applies to psychanalysts. It also applies to anyone whose basic philosophy is that all is matter in motion. How do you understand matter in motion, the way it moves as per cause and effect? You use the solvent of science on it, deconstruction and perhaps even psychoanalysis. The mind that refutes its being as spirit, seems to refute itself into a conditioned brain that can be analyzed, the symbols it writes deconstructed.

This is what happens to the New Man. C.S. Lewis predicted his abolition by his self-refutation, now his conditioning is like clockwork.

To attempt to see something from all sides, all the time, is the same as not to see at all.

"To reduce [Natural Law] to a mere natural product is a step of that kind. Up to that point, the kind of explanation which explains things away may give us something, though at a heavy cost. But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything then everything is tranparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see."
(C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man)

3 comments:

mynym said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mynym said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
mynym said...

Sheesh, I can't seem to get it working quite right. But I'll leave the recent comments thing there anyway. Blogger doesn't have one yet, which is too bad because it makes new comments hard to find for the average reader.

Later...