Just Jake

Jake Highton is a journalism professor at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevada, Reno. He teaches media law, history of journalism and advanced reporting. Highton is the author of numerous books, including "Nevada Newspaper Days." He writes a weekly column for the Daily Sparks Tribune.

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Saturday, March 07, 2009

2 books savage media

Mini-reviews of books crossing the desk of this columnist recently:
“No Time to Think” by Howard Rosenberg and Charles Feldman. The book makes it clear why you should never watch TV news and its shouting pundits.
The shallowness is appalling. Such “shows” are more entertainment than news. People who watch them let blowhards do their thinking.
The authors are also trenchant about the media being all about personalities rather than offering understanding and enlightenment.
About opinion disguised as news and analysis. About “five grams of news and 10 grams of speculation.” About the 24-hour news cycle “when fast and faster, brief and briefer” are essentials.
As for citizen journalism, it is amateur journalism. Producer Don Hewitt of “60 Minutes” says sarcastically that he also favors citizen brain surgery.

• “Static” is not the kind of book reviewed by the New York Times. It is far too critical of the Times, the media and American policies.
The Times, the epitome of Establishment journalism, runs reviews of a seven or eight run-of-the-mill novels in the Sunday book section. It seldom reviews important nonfiction books--and none like “Static.”
Written by the sister and brother team of Amy and David Goodman, “Static” hammers the Establishment media for cheerleading for the late, unlamented Bush administration and for bowing to power rather than fighting for people.
Amy Goodman is host of the popular radio program, “Democracy Now!” She is a muckraker in the glorious tradition of Upton Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens in the 19th century and George Seldes and I.F. Stone in the 20th.
Unfortunately, her program is not available in Nevada, one of the most retrograde states in the nation.

• “Neck Deep” by Robert, Sam and Nat Parry. The subtitle says it in a nutshell: “The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush.” It’s another nonfiction work you won’t see reviewed in the august New York Times.
The Parrys denounce the expansive vision of Bush regarding executive powers: “detention without trial of ‘enemy combatants,’ coercive techniques to extract information and confessions… assertion of the president’s right to wage war with or without congressional approval and the notion that the commander in chief’s authority for the ‘war on terror’ knows no limits.”
They write about Bush’s frat boy mentality: “extensive dabbling in instant gratifications from his playboy lifestyle that included evading military service in Vietnam, heavy drinking and illicit drug use.”
They rip Bush foreign policy as having had “the same characteristics as 19th century European imperialism: military garrisons, economic penetration and control, support for leaders, no matter how brutal and undemocratic as long as they obey the imperial power, and exploitation and depletion of natural resources.”

• “Head and Heart” by Garry Wills notes the frequent hypocrisy of Christians in America, from the Puritans to the un-Christian Christians in the apartheid South, to Father Coughlin whose 1930s radio show drew 30 million listeners despite his virulent anti-Semitic diatribes.
America is one of the most Christian countries in the world. Yet its religious history is full of yes-buts. Examples abound:
Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Bay Colony for purported heresy. A Cambridge pastor said her tolerance of other religions was “the foundation of all other errors and abominations in the churches of God.”
After Hutchinson was killed by Indians, Gov. John Winthrop exulted that “God had made a judgment on her.”
Pat Robertson thinks along those lines. Robertson, one of the most rebarbative religious leaders in U.S. history, is the wacko who attributed 9/11 to the moral collapse of America because of harboring gays and allowing abortions.
Another example of gross hypocrisy. School kids are taught that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to America to escape religious oppression in Britain. What they are seldom told are the hangings of religious people (Quakers) or expulsion of individuals (Roger Williams) who disagreed with them.
Thomas Paine, author of one of the greatest polemics ever written, “Common Sense,” thought it simply common sense to believe in God.
Paine, like most of the Founders, espoused deism, that “halfway house” between theism and atheism. He was reviled for his devastation of the Bible in “The Age of Reason.” But Paine had a failure of intellect when it came to belief in God.
Jefferson and John Adams also believed in a deity. Jefferson held the view that old friends would meet again in an afterlife.
Even great men sometimes utter nonsense.

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