Media Matters - Borger on media's coverage of Bush's Iraq trip: "I think we are suckers":
From the June 18 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources:
KURTZ: Gloria Borger, are journalists suckers for this kind of secret trip to Baghdad stuff? I mean, Bush was there less than six hours but got an avalanche of mostly positive coverage.
BORGER: I think we are suckers. Particularly if you're the one who gets to go on the pool, Howie, and gets to travel with the president on a secret trip to Baghdad. We do like these secret trips.
Believe it or not, we kind of like to be surprised, but I think if you're a bureau chief in Washington, you may be asking, 'Gee, why didn't we have more information?' And when you ask that question, the answer you always get from the White House is, 'Because this has to be shrouded in secrecy because this is a matter of presidential security. So we can't tell you more about this in advance.' So you know you're being used, but in a way you kind of like it because it's good pictures.
KURTZ: You enjoy it."
1 comment:
Interesting. Just today read this take by Adorno on the idea that people knowingly like their ideology:
"The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals to the culture industry is not restricted to them alone. It may also be supposed that the consciousness of the consumers themselves is split between the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture industry and a not particularly well-hidden doubt about its blessings. The phrase, 'the world wants to be deceived,' has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as the saying goes, 'falling for the swindle'; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind-of self loathing, for what is meted out to them, knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admiting it they sense that their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions that are none at all."
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