*Ø* Blogmanac | Waiting for TIME and tide

Until the past few years, I was always able to refute my left-wing friends against their assertion of some of Noam Chomsky's sacrosanct ideas, one in particular being his notion of media filters. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think I argued my case with reasonable cogency.

This was before 9-11 when I could pull out statistics, such as that 70 per cent of American journalists identified as 'liberal', which acted as a counterbalance to the capital interests of their employers.

I would point out the rather obvious fact that the rush for Australia and the US to disengage from Indochina was not hampered but actually led by the media and Hollywood. "Nixon was brought down not by Chomsky," I would say, rather hyperbolically, "but by TIME magazine." Years ago, TIME was a mere step behind the progressive ideological vanguard on many issues: race, women, gays, the environment, art, literature, religion, censorship ...

Then, in recent years, TIME actually started to sport the kinds of filters Chomsky had sweepingly named. Who can forget the pre-election cover story on Dubya, for example? That edition looked like it had been written and photographed by Bush's campaign PR team. For many months the magazine has been as weak as water, gone to seed like the old MAD magazine and the media in general. So I dropped my analysis as outmoded.

Since 9-11, it got even worse, if worse were possible, and TIME starting looking like Bush's PR men had teamed up with Herbert W Armstrong, Walt Disney and J Edgar Hoover to produce a kind of Plain Truth or Watchtower magazine for Beaver Cleaver's Mom and Pop. Pure crud. Rah rah, let's bomb the terrorist countries!!

Now, there has been a slight sea change in America, or so my sniffing tackle detects from the Australian Hub of the Universe/boondocks. It's been a long time coming, such that I was almost in despair about the country that I grew up alongside: the country of Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, Martin Luther King. Then the dinosaurs of the Soviet Union abandoned world conquest, America gave the nod to South Africa that it was now safe to set Mandela free, the neo-cons staged a bloodless coup in Washington and the US corporate juggernaut rumbled across the world. But the tide inexorably turns, and in the past six months, scarcely a week has gone by that an anti-war, anti-Shrub book has not been foremost in the NY Times bestseller list (sponsor's note: we sell some at Cafe Diem to pay the Internet bills), and unflattering photos of Bush and Rummy adorn front pages, not to mention images of what American soldiers do when cheering people in loud clothes aren't waving little polyester flags in their faces. I started smiling again.

Even TIME is letting a little light into its hadean halls, "not before time", as it were. This week's (May 24) edition finally edges towards rationality, and I sense that even as Bush and Rumsfeld's cowardly chickens start coming home to roost, the chickens of the press are beginning to show some courage.

However, TIME never was Ramparts (and even Ramparts can't be Ramparts, not since its radical editor in the '60s, David Horowitz, became a fundraising speaker for the Repugs), and liberal credentials do not progressive make. That's why I'm saddened but not suprised that in the midst of events in Iraq that will forever live in infamy, and of a turning of the tide of media honesty about the conduct of the war, TIME could write this week:

"Watching it all unfold, it has been hard to dismiss the fear that the US not only might be failing to make America safer but might be doing the opposite."

Shades of Basil Fawlty under his breath to his wife: "Can't we get you on Mastermind, Sybil? 'Next contestant Sybil Fawlty from Torquay, special subject: the bleeding obvious.'" The journalist wakes. Lock up your daughters.

It would be funny if it weren't so tragic. The rest of the world has been watching Bush's America, Blair's Britain (and Howard's Australia) self destruct by sticking a branch into a hornet's nest, wiggling it around and telling the world that freedom from hornets will result. "Let's have a Crusade," said the Shrub. Millions have been screaming "No!! You stupid!!! Bad idea!" for nearly three years, and yet this highly paid writer at TIME is just hearing it. We have a long way to go when mealy-mouthed prose such as that poses as reporting for a magazine read by millions wherever people can read.

Mealy mouthed Mini-Me? You rang??!!
Speaking of mealy mouthed, who can hear the expression without thinking of Australia's John Howard? This week, Mitsubishi sacked 700 workers in a single blow, in a single factory and in a single town. Yesterday, the best that Australia's PM could say to the erstwhile employees of the Japanese car firm was, "We have a sense of concern". Jesus, that's even weaker than "We have concern", and that's 157 rungs down the ladder from "You poor bastards ... next week will ya pay the rent, or buy food and petrol?" Of course, Howard's never had to fork out money for any of those three luxuries in his whole adult life.

"Little Johnny" Howard is actually copping a bit of flak from the newly teething media here too, and ticcing his neck in his collar a tad more than usual. I think the natives are getting restless. The media reception he got over his gratuitous tax cuts for the rich (Howard is Mini-Me Bush) was comfortable for a coupla days until the press sniffed a poll that said the Australian voting (and newspaper-buying) public wouldn't wear it.

I mean, it sucked so badly that it was obscene. To push the envelope of mealy mouthed, Howard and some spotty-faced minister of his who shouldn't have been up so late, both said, and I quote (more or less), "Crikey, the tax cuts don't start till $52,000 annual income, and the average income in Australia is $52,000."

What they didn't come clean about, Mini-Me and Mini-Mini-Me, is that if Kerry Packer died, the annual average income in this country would be about the price of a packet of rollie tobacco and a bottle of New Zealand plonk.

It's like saying that the average colour of a zebra is grey, and the average woman in Australia is 17 days pregnant.

You know, the main reason I love writing for a blog is that, unlike journalists and people employed in absolutely anything at all, including bureaucratised progressive NGOs like Greenpeace or the ACLU, is that I don't have to filter what I say. And Noam, you can quote me on that, old son.