Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

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Fri, 14 Oct 2005 10:15:59 -0700

Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

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http://www.buzzflash.com/reviews/05/10/rev05104.html

 

 

 

October 14, 2005

 

Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin by Larry Beinhart

 

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

 

Larry Beinhart knows a bit about government propaganda that is used to

delude and divert the public. He is the author of the book that the

movie " Wag the Dog " was based upon. He also wrote the highly topical

novel, " The Librarian, " a couple of years ago, which was a thinly

veiled journey through the Orwellian world created by the Busheviks.

 

So it is with great eagerness that Beinhart's latest tome arrives on

the scene, " Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. " In a

stunningly insightful speech on the role of the media in early

October, Al Gore detailed how the contemporary corporate media has

corrupted democracy. He spoke eloquently of how the American

Revolution had recognized the value of an informed public and that

" what resulted from this shared democratic enterprise was a startling

new development in human history: for the first time, knowledge

regularly mediated between wealth and power. "

 

In " Fog Facts, " Beinhart reinforces Gore's point of how far we have

strayed from our revolutionary heritage of public debate on public

policy among a citizenry kept abreast of the latest news by the likes

of Tom Paine.

 

" The failure of the media to take responsibility, " Beinhart writes,

" is the reason that political lying -- especially in the soft-core,

public relations style that misleads -- has no penalties anymore. " (To

BuzzFlash, this brings to mind how the New York Times, like the White

House, never held anyone on its staff accountable for the misleading

reporting leading up to the Iraq War. Much of the media and the Bush

administration are complicit partners in disseminating fog facts.)

 

And Beinhart understands the repercussion of an obsequious media that

not only supports the Bushevik spin, but also abdicates its

journalistic responsibilities by focusing on entertaining and

titillating celebrity and bizarre news trivia. " This is a practical

issue, " Beinhart concludes, " not merely a moral one. If you drive

around in the fog, you must go very slowly. Americans like to go fast.

When you speed in the fog, eventually you crash into something. "

 

Fog facts are " important things that nobody seems able to focus on

anymore than they can focus on a single droplet in the mist. "

 

The Iraq War and the stolen election of 2000 strike BuzzFlash as two

such fog facts, as does the Downing Street Memo -- which the media

dismissed by intoning that everyone knew by now that the White house

lied about the Iraq War. Tell that to the people who still believe

Bush speaks the word of God and that Saddam Hussein was responsible

for 9/11 and really had Weapons of Mass Destruction.

 

Television news is the primary fog machine that leaps over the big

facts that are essential to the functioning of democracy to get to a

story about a runaway bride.

 

Soon Americans will be dazzled by the extraordinary detail of High

Definition Television, but their news will continue to be as dense as

a London fog.