I am SO thankful that this scandal is seeing the light of day! Finally we can stop the funding of right-wing pundits by the Bush Administration. Don't they know that funding pundits for propoganda is the rightful domain of the left??!! NPR and PBS cannot afford to have their funds siphoned off by these nutty neo-cons! The nerve of these bible-thumping red staters!!! To think that promoting an administration's positon on health care is as valuable as the left-wing agenda of our friends at NPR! Egads! Where is Teddy Kennedy when you need him?.
.
.
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Edmund Burke
I posted this over at DailyKos, and a few facts came to light. <br><br>
- Despite the Reuters' caption, the child in the picture is probably a boy, and it was his sister who was wounded (according to the <i>North County Times</i>). She appears in the background of the third photo El Gringo posted, and in other pictures in the Reuters gallery. The childrens' father was held in plastic handcuffs off-camera.<br><br>
- The Reuters photo, taken by Damir Sagolj, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. <br><br>
- The website was (is?) set up as a Political Action Committee. According to a commenter, an article in <i>Roll Call</i> stated the site was unaffiliated with any political party or candidate, and "despite its point of view, the site, rather than being harsh or shrill, is fairly straightforward and very informative."
Greg Beato has a couple of interesting posts about Maggie Gallagher (and he links to SourceWatch :) )
His second post brings something that's been stuck in my craw lately. Like many pundits and propagandists, Gallagher likes to refer to herself as an expert. In her latest defense, she even attempts to group herself with "researchers and scholars."
There seems to be a paradox in the right wing's attack on the media and academic establishment. On the one hand, movement conservatives (MCs) need to cloak themselves with the appearance of scholarship and the traditional notion of what constitutes an "expert" to establish credibility. On the other, there seems to be a deliberate effort to undermine the very notion of expertise, which is considered "elitist."
I suppose if one is trying to hoodwink the public, confusion is a good tactic. And in any case, MCs have little choice because many of their ideas would otherwise be ignored and their media personalities dismissed as cranks.
But as a long-term strategy, it seems self-defeating. As the public's trust in institutions and experts erodes, it becomes more and more difficult to win people over and earn their trust. It's the same, growing problem advertisers are facing - the more fog you release to blur the distinction between fact and fiction, the more difficult it becomes to get a message across.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if we've passed a point of no return, where the trust that binds a society together begins to fray to the point where it's impossible to put together coherent public policy. Unless the media begins calling a representative of the "Institute for Marriage and Public Policy" a "nut" instead of a "scholar," I'm pessimistic that the trend will reverse.
As a long time admirer of your work, I do worry that the new name is a bit soft. I know you can't please all of the people all of the time, so fair enough if you've come up with SourceWatch after a lot of thinking. But, for what it's worth, the name change sounds ironically like the kind of doublespeak you are always warning against.
Why? Because "source" almost sounds like it implies "legitimate". I know that this is far from what you intend, but think about it semantically (or rather, about its connotations). It resonates with words like "origin", "foundation", "font", "spring", "birthplace", and so on. Think source-code, re-source, re-source-ful... I know that these words are accurate from a denotation point of view, but looking at connotation they are all a little too nice.
I guess you considered (and rejected) "SpinWatch", "Spinpedia", "Lobbywatch" etc.?
Anyway keep up the excellent work. It has been fantastic to see the way the CMD and Disinfopedia/Sourcewatch have thrived in recent years.
Today's Washington Post story describes two federal contracts Gallagher received related to the Bush marriage intiative; a $21,500 contract with Health and Human Services and a $20,000 one with the Justice Department (detailed in [dis:Maggie Gallagher|the SourceWatch article on Gallagher]). So the total is $41,500.
His second post brings something that's been stuck in my craw lately. Like many pundits and propagandists, Gallagher likes to refer to herself as an expert. In her latest defense, she even attempts to group herself with "researchers and scholars."
There seems to be a paradox in the right wing's attack on the media and academic establishment. On the one hand, movement conservatives (MCs) need to cloak themselves with the appearance of scholarship and the traditional notion of what constitutes an "expert" to establish credibility. On the other, there seems to be a deliberate effort to undermine the very notion of expertise, which is considered "elitist."
I suppose if one is trying to hoodwink the public, confusion is a good tactic. And in any case, MCs have little choice because many of their ideas would otherwise be ignored and their media personalities dismissed as cranks.
But as a long-term strategy, it seems self-defeating. As the public's trust in institutions and experts erodes, it becomes more and more difficult to win people over and earn their trust. It's the same, growing problem advertisers are facing - the more fog you release to blur the distinction between fact and fiction, the more difficult it becomes to get a message across.
The more I think about it, the more I wonder if we've passed a point of no return, where the trust that binds a society together begins to fray to the point where it's impossible to put together coherent public policy. Unless the media begins calling a representative of the "Institute for Marriage and Public Policy" a "nut" instead of a "scholar," I'm pessimistic that the trend will reverse.
Pages