What is topic Number One in the news media today? What it should be is the bald-faced attempt by Corporate
America to blackmail the president and Congress into backing down on taxing the
wealthy “elite.” This isn’t about business per say; many companies have been
making record profits in spite of supposedly
“suffocating” regulations imposed by the current administration in the wake of the
financial meltdown. No, this is about the greed of that one percent of the one
percent who think only in terms of how more money they can skim off the backs
of working people. Think of it: Rush Limbaugh, who doesn’t make a single thing
that is useful, is essentially a paid spokesperson for Corporate America, and
it compensates him to the tune of $40 million a year; but if his corporate
sponsors paid him “just” $4 million a year, how many good jobs would that
remaining $36 million pay for? Say $50,000 in wages and benefits? 720 jobs.
Multiply that by thousands of CEOs, executives, Trumps and Koch brothers who
make similarly obscene amounts while doing very little. If anyone is at fault
for the “threat” of raising their taxes, it is these individuals
themselves, and their greed. What those additional taxes will pay for in part is keeping federal
programs that create jobs intact.
So while individuals are
selling their stocks to make as much money as they can now before the
possibility of tax increases on themselves, as well as trying to artificially deflate
the economy (so much for their “patriotism” in this time of fiscal “crisis”), what
is the Number One topic for the news media today? Should we be surprised to
learn that a news media that is owned and controlled by Corporate America has
the people’s attention focused elsewhere? Like on another sex “scandal”?
The General David Petraeus “sex scandal” just keeps getting weirder
by the day, which of course keeps the media enthralled while most of us are
just jaded as hell by it all. To wit: Retired general appointed CIA director.
Has an adulteress affair with his biographer. Biographer becomes jealous of
socialite without a paying job who she thinks is her “rival.” Biographer sends
socialite anonymous threatening emails. Socialite contacts agent friend in local
FBI office to investigate. Affair exposed, leading to the resignation of CIA
director. Socialite also claims that another general sent her “suggestive”
emails and pictures. Socialite and doctor husband also happen to be the subject
of a dozen or so lawsuits for unpaid debts.
I would think that most people find this all pathetic and
sad, and wish everyone involved in this sordid affair would just disappear. Of
course some on the right want to keep it alive—not because they particularly
care about the sex angle themselves, but because if it has “legs” it will be an
embarrassment to the White House and might “derail” some of president’s initiatives.
Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein is helping out by demanding that that damaged
Petraeus testify before her committee concerning the attack on the Benghazi consulate
that led to the death of an American ambassador and several others; one
suspects that she is doing this as a favor for her friend, Hillary Clinton, to
absolve her of any blame.
Most countries look with disgust upon the frequency in which
Anglo-Saxon media culture devolves into the sewer of sex scandals, when they
believe that the personal lives of public figures should be their own affair
and those involved. After all, the media didn’t report the alleged affairs of
JFK, and not doing so didn’t seem to have an impact on the conduct of public
policy.
But that has all changed. In regard to the Secret Service “sex
scandal” in Colombia, comedian/political commentator Bill Maher observed that “Now
as you may know, the reason President Obama had made that trip to Colombia was
to discuss hemispheric security with Mexico, where a narco civil war has killed
over 50,000... oh, who am I kidding, a secret agent had sexy time with a
lady!! And I'll bet she had boobies
too! And you know who else is from
Colombia? The Modern Lady Family! And this has been the CBS Evening News. I mean, the Modern Family lady…Why do we
punish sex so much more than everything else?
Clinton lied about a blowjob, and got impeached. Bush lied about a war, didn't… The only
politics we understand is scandal, and the only scandal we understand is
sex. Look at the primaries. Newt
Gingrich, over his long career, has committed every crime in Dante's Inferno
except grave robbing, and that's just because shoveling is work. But why is he ineligible for high
office? Adultery.”
Where does this come from? William A. Cohen, author of the
book Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of
Victorian Fiction, wrote that
While the discursive
status of sexuality has indisputably changed in this period, sexual
transgressions still provoke the most sensational media spectacles. Even if, as
we often imagine, we have become inured to hearing news about sex, we are still
shocked—or, at least, we are told that others are shocked—by sexual
disclosures. Media reports insist that the public is outraged by the revelation
of sexual secrets not necessarily because people are outraged, but because a
consensus that sex ought not be talked about in public continues powerfully to
hold sway.
Of course, the media’s “shock” is only a pretense. It is a
ratings “winner,” and female journalists especially like to talk about these
things because it takes men down a peg. The precedent for this can be traced
back at least to Victorian times in Britain, when “Misdirected and uncontrolled male
sexuality generated public displays of disgust and horror.” Cohen provides the
example of the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, when Lord Arthur Somerset—a
“personal attendant” to the future King Edward VII—was accused of frequenting a
brothel of male prostitutes, which the Crown initially hoped to keep quiet:
The first potential
scandal, over Lord Arthur’s “immoral” behavior, works in the usual way, by
transforming hidden information into public knowledge, but the case is made
difficult by the Crown’s reluctance to prosecute a man who holds “Her Majesty’s
Commission.” Yet his secret, once revealed, cannot be ignored, and so another
scandal—over a failure to act—hangs before the government. Not to expose the
nobleman’s actions would precipitate a “public scandal” about government
protection of him; whether or not the case comes to trial, then, an expose is
certain. In giving past indiscretions the form of a popular narrative, scandal
enables so-called public morals to exercise social control, even as it
threatens to run out of the control of those who wield it.
Thus what is initially a “fascination” with sex—principally by
the media—and is normally cheap tabloid fodder, becomes “important” because of
its reinterpretation from personal life to institutional corruption. As in the
Penn State scandal, it doesn’t matter if there was only one person engaged in
sexual acts that the public finds revolting; that there was an alleged cover-up
made the story much wider in scope beyond the lone transgressor, and brought
down some previously nationally renowned and respected persons, like football
coach Joe Paterno. In the case of General Petraeus, many in the media and in
anti-Obama circles see this as an opportunity to be a footnote in a history book,
by turning the salacious into something much more “important.”
One may recall that the Watergate scandal began with the “simple”
break-in of the Democratic Party headquarters; no one knew the story would go
so far as it did. But the current “scandal” has almost nothing in common with
Watergate, and more so with the Monica Lewinsky “scandal.” The media may
hypocritically live in a “moral” bubble where the private lives of public
figures (and not their own—see Barbara Walters) are fair game. But in order to “justify”
their juvenile, prurient fascinations, there must be found some way to make the
story “bigger” than it actually is. The Benghazi attack has nothing to do with
this “scandal”—but that hasn’t stopped the insinuation that it somehow does. Of course, this is in contrast on how the media allowed Oliver North to call treasonable actions "patriotic"--and has allowed a criminal like Karl Rove to have a place at the table as a "respected" member of the media.
In the meantime, the corporate criminal blackmail going on
now that potentially may affect the lives of millions of Americans in a
material way continues, and the media only ignores it, or deliberately “misinterprets”
it.
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