Why I no longer respect Frameshop’s Jeffrey Feldman
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.
MORE THOUGHTS: Of course, the CIA swindled the liberals with the notion of a new conservative-to-liberal mainstream premised on opposition to “totalitarianism” — the “extremes” of “both left and right.” Fascism, as the CIA defined it and the obedient liberals repeated it, lay entirely in the past, having already been defeated in World War II. No existing government, no matter how right wing, no matter how repressive, no matter how similar to the fascist governments of the past, was ever considered fascist by the Cold War consensus. On the other hand, opposition to present communism became the leitmotif that dominated American political life from the late forties to the mid sixties, and persisted as a major, if weaker, force until the late eighties. Left-wing governments and insurgencies that had no resemblance to communism, like the Sandanistas, were consistently labelled Communist, forcing respectable liberals to oppose any and all socialist tendencies except within the wealthiest, U.S.-allied countries. In return, conservatives opposed the Axis regimes, which had already been defeated and dismantled before the deal was made. It was as if your neighbor who, unlike you, kept his potted plants under an overhang, said to you, “Nice for you that the rain watered all your plants. In exchange, why don’t you water mine?”
Similarly, Feldman is swindled — or participates in a swindle. His tradeoff is to reject right-wing paranoid fantasies about 9/11 that any rational person would have to reject anyway, IN RETURN FOR rejecting the case that the United States government was involved. Thus, as a compensation for the left-leaning indulgence of being allowed to dismiss right-wing theories for which there exists no evidence, he is compelled, in order to be fair, to reject all of the manifold, well-documented physical evidence that indicates something drastically wrong with the official 9/11 story — a story which was itself concocted by the right-wing regime currently running this country, and which has never been officially investigated by any organ not effectively controlled by that regime’s appointees.
False balance is one of the most important “framing” techniques of today’s mendacious corporate media. If Feldman doesn’t see the blatantly tendentious framing at work in his use of the term “9/11 conspiracy theory,” or sees it and lacks the integrity to correct it, it’s hard to see how his ideas about framing can be taken seriously.
Then again, maybe there really wasn’t a conspiracy on 9/11. Maybe old friends happened to be on the same plane, started chatting, and only came up with the idea of hijacking it after it left the ground. And then the same thing repeated itself on three other planes in the northeastern United States within a two hour period — by coincidence. That really would be a nonconspiracy theory of 9/11. If someone wants to advocate it, I will not criticize that person for using the term “9/11 conspiracy theorists” to describe the rest of us.