Here’s somebody who comes out of academia — and so do I! Now, I may not be the most pro-academic person in the world (to put it mildly), but I do appreciate good academics. That’s why I was tentatively excited when I found out about Feldman’s Frameshop, in which he dissects the way issues are framed so as to advantage conservatism…very much in line with my own blend of media criticism and discourse analysis, very interesting, potentially very good. I even used and linked to some of his material the other day.
I got a little worried when I read the sample chapter from Feldman’s book and found out his glowing reaction to Teddy Roosevelt’s 1906 “Muck Rake” speech, in which the president attacked the bulldogs who were too persistently pointing out America’s failings. Old Teddy had — and in some circles apparently still has — a greatly exaggerated reputation as a progressive. He did do some trustbusting and supported some health and safety regulations, but behind the scenes he was generally quite pro-corporate. He was also a ferocious racist and imperalist. His “Muck Rake” speech, which gave us the word “muckraker,” showed the true colors of a sunshine liberal — sure, criticize abuses, but not too much. Feldman turns this into an inspiring moral message on some elevated plane of little relevance to the actual politics of the time — or of any time.
But what really threw me was this ringing defense of deliberative censorship. In the midst of a post in which Feldman performs the admittedly worthy task of shredding Bill O’Reilly, he chides Mad Bill for accusing DailyKos of fostering “9/11 conspiracy theories”:
According to the FAQ free and open for every human being and Bill O’Reilly to read, The DailyKos adheres to a strict editorial policy whereby posting a 9/11 conspiracy diaries results not only in the deletion of the diary, but the banning of the offending writers from the site. Write a 9/11 conspiracy diary on DailyKos and within hours, your diary,and every other diary you ever wrote, is deleted and your a free account is canceled.
More importantly, O’Reilly failed to report how a volunteer team of DailyKos “trusted users” constantly sifts through every diary posted to make sure the site does not step across that murky line dividing civil debate from violent rhetoric. They accomplish this through a combination of requests to writers to clean up foul language and–occasionally–by “bleeping out” offensive words (e.g., O’Reilly is full of ***t). If nasty words do make are kept in a post, it is typically because they are a key to the story (e.g., the story of Bill O’Reilly’s viewers sending death threats to the owner of The DailyKos). These trusted users do not get paid, they simply believe in DailyKos’s patriotic mission of fostering free and open debate. In the end, then, even though YearlyKos is distinct from DailyKos, JetBlue should be proud of any perceived ties this gives them to The DailyKos–a blog that historians will someday credit with helping to revive deliberative democracy in America.
The hypocrisy here is a clear indication that Feldman has learned a little too much from studying Republican framing — like Saruman researching the rings too long.
After the above quote, Feldman castigates O’Reilly for allowing Dinesh D’Souza to promote his own “9/11 conspiracy theory.” D’Souza’s latest cerebral hemorrhage is that the “cultural left” caused 9/11.
Like well-trained CIA liberals of the Cold War era denouncing both fascism and communism in the same breath (see MORE THOUGHTS below), Feldman wants to make very clear that he rejects both “9/11 conspiracy theories” that blame the U.S. government AND those that blame the left. Instead, he takes a sensible, moderate, reasonable, unideological position in the middle — that it was a conspiracy done by Arabs. The great advantage of saying that Arabs plotted the meticulous conspiracy is, of course, that this isn’t a conspiracy theory. Only if some prominent group of Americans or American allies were the alleged conspirators would it be a conspiracy theory. (If this seems at all an unorthodox statement, just check the way the term “conspiracy theory” is in fact routinely used.)
The kind of “deliberative democracy” Feldman wants is the same one that has murdered people by the millions overseas for the last sixty years — while debating at home how to take our unchallengeable supremacy in the practice of democracy to an even higher pitch of perfection.
