Democrat & Chronicle: Free beer if you register to vote

Cool. Take the poll and pass it on. Currently, "This is a cheap ploy to get votes" is winning, though I guess since they're only giving out 2oz beers it is a little cheap; c'est la vie.

In light of the death of Ronald Reagan, I bought HST's Generation of Swine -- which turns out to be mostly a collection of his columns in the SF Examiner -- to get a feel for the era. I spent a lot of my early days on a commune, traveling like a gypsy, going to hippy elementary school, sequestered for some summers on a farm in Iowa, and I wasn't really politically conscious during the Reagan era, except to know that my mom didn't fancy him too much. I picked up enough backwash on my own during the tenure of Bush the elder to realize Dutch was probably not my cup of tea, but Hunter really brings the heat:

The legacy of Ronald Reagan will be different from those of the other three... Richard Nixon was a crook, Gerald Ford was a shameless fixer and Jimmy Carter was an awesome bungler who gave once-proud political values like "decency" and "honesty" a bad name.

But these things are small compared to the horrible stains and half-blotted failures that Ronald Reagan is going to leave on the lives and memories of this sad generation of the 1980s that he once presumed to lead and inspire, while that the same tiem telling a reporter from People magazine, "This generation may well be the one that sees the end of the world."

...

Reagan's children must be proud of him. With AIDS and acid rain, there is not much left in the way of life and love and possibilities for these shortchanged children of the '80s. In addition to the huge and terribly crippling national debt, and a shocking realization that your country has slipped to the status of a second-rate power, and that five American dollars will barely buy a cup of coffee in Tokyo, these poor buggers are being flogged every day of their lives with the knowledge that sex is death and rain kills fish and any politician they see on TV is a liar and a fool.

-- H.S.T June 22, 1987

Earlier in the book he noted that white males aged 18-30 voted for Reagan by a 71% margin in 1984. Given that's the generation in power right now (white males aged 38 - 50) it's not terribly surprising that the whitewash of history has come on so strong. Still; a shame that people can't admit they were wrong.

I'm a supporter of Chris Allbritton and his adventures in Iraq. I gave him money and I read his site. Here's his latest: Car bombings and other musings

So here’s my honest question: Why do you think the media are not telling you the truth out of Iraq? What do you think the truth is? Why do you believe that the truth is what you think it is? And who is the media to you?

Something to consider: there's an important and growing difference between the efforts of individual journalists and the national narrative which is the collective product of the media. Chris sites a good example of journalism from the WaPo, and then wonders if it's television that's runing the reputation of reportage in general. He's mostly right.

What most people end up exposed to is some stray bit of story from some media combine, a single pulled quote from a 700 word story mixed in with some sensational footage butted up against the latest word from the spin room over in the West Wing. This mediated melange, our AVID-enabled later-day chorus, is largely responsible for the public's loss of faith.

This loss is near total for those who turn the corner. Between 2000 and 2004 I went from clicking through to cnn.com to nytimes.com to dailykos.com and never looked back. And why not? For the most part, the news is boring and predictable. It is flaccidly written and painfully devoid of anything but the most jaded conclusions; often lacking even those.

Journalists, men and women like Chris, are coming around to this fact en masse, and the sense of frustration is palpable in the air. "Why don't they trust us?" ask a mostly honest, mostly hard-working group of reporters. The answer is a collection of factors. As I call it:

• The best and brightest among you seem to be more concerned with their personal career arc than getting the story right
• The contemporary voice of journalism is often insulting to an intelligent audience
• The talking heads who represent your most public face are largely a collection of cowards and stooges
• Real journalists have done very little to counteract the corrosive effects of lowest-common-denominator TV infotainment; no one has taken a stand

Serious Journalists beware: you now have millions of fairly smart people running around America who are more of less convinced that they know better and are more courageous than you. They believe this because they never swallowed Bush's war pill, because they turned away in disgust at the moral masturbation which gushed forth after 9/11, because the media assassination of Howard Dean was plainly just that (whether he walked into it or not). Most simply, it is because they've been saying things for quite a while that you are only now coming around to report.

Of course "they" in this sense aren't often bright enough to realize that there are plenty of "you" who were dissenters from the media consensus. However, it's easier to blame your problems on an amorphous mass of people. The stupid left blames the Media just like the stupid right blames Islam. It's comforting in a darkly human way.

But no matter how unfair this all may seem, the problem still exists, and at it's heart the problem is very real. Journalists by in large do not (in my limited personal experience) seem to understand very much, or if they do they take great pains to obscure this understanding. It reminds me of a young girl in high school who pretends to be ditzy so as not to intimidate the boys, only in this case the boys are bent of doing some very plainly terrible things, and she's going along because... well that's the rub then, isn't it?

Tens of thousands of people are dead, our international credibility squandered, billions of dollars wasted, the 21st Century off to a very shitty start, and it can be said with some reason that all this is because nobody in a position of real public authority took a stand against the Juggernaut Media Consensus the Bush Gang managed to conjure out of the ashes of Ground Zero. A lot of us take that kind of personally, and it's a tough rep to beat in hindsight: not standing up to what they did. Ask John Kerry about it if you're ever hanging out.

Chris is doing quite a lot to remedy the issue for himself by taking control of his own voice and his own publishing. For the rest of the circus, there's a split coming between the people who want to make money and entertain Americans who fancy themselves "informed" and those who have a passion for truth and storytelling.

And unfortunately, I don't see reunification coming down the pipeline anytime soon. Ranting demogaugery is and always has been profitable. The question is what the other side can do to regain the trust of their readers. It begins will telling them things they didn't know before, and it's going to take a while.

And so plans are made and a new season swings into action. The thrill of adventure, of peril, of a worthy adversary. We're stepping up to the next level. I feel that the adventure is back.