THE LOW POST: The Scum Also Rises

This unwillingness to believe the "reputable" media outlets' final judgments about such controversies is now endemic and a result of a number of factors, most of those having to do with the failure of the mainstream media to perform vigilantly in the face of various bald national deceptions.

After the debacle of 2000, for instance, many people automatically distrust the published verdicts about election results, choosing to assume that votes were stolen by one side or the other and that the commercial media is a fellow traveler tied to whichever side you choose to think is rigging the game -- Republicans or Democrats, both sides are regularly suspected. And though few people probably register the issue consciously, there has to be some kind of fallout when the population is fed "They hate us for our freedom" by "reputable" media outlets as an explanation for the 9/11 attacks. When the media trades so blatantly in such egregious, transparent bullshit, why shouldn't their audiences choose to make their own decisions about truth and untruth?

The lesson of all this -- and of the Iraq war, the Swift Boat controversy, and indeed the whole careers of swine like Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage and the like -- is that unless you prevent the lie from coming out to begin with, it doesn't really matter what happens afterward. In the Internet age, and with no kind of regulation of the "facts" that are circulated on afternoon radio, once that genie is out of the bottle, he's staying out.

Moreover, we live in an age in which an increasing number of unscrupulous media creatures make phony/misleading rhetorical arguments and cover themselves by "citing" media reports that may be still floating around on the Internet, long after they've been debunked. Rush Limbaugh is the master of this technique. A classic Limbaugh news-reference involved a mountain-lion attack in Colorado (hyping alleged liberal overconcern for deadly mountain lions is a surprisingly hardy staple of right-wing radio entertainment); Limbaugh wanted to argue that PC-mad animal rights activists had raised more money for the lion cub than had been raised for the victim's family. "As of May 23, the orphaned mountain lion had received $21,000 in donations and Barbara Schoener's two kids had received around $9,000" was how Rush put it, way back in 1994. The story was total bullshit and had been exposed as such for more than a month at the time Rush came out with that story.

And once he realized he could do this without suffering consequences, he just kept on doing it, which is why his listeners over the years have been treated to such nuggets of wisdom as "There's no such thing as an implied contract," "It has not been proven that nicotine is addictive," "The condom failure rate can be as high as 20 percent," "The poorest people in America are better off than the mainstream families of Europe," "Banks take the risks in insuring student loans," "Anita Hill followed Clarence Thomas everywhere," and "$14,400 for a family of four-- that's not so bad." There are endless lists of these casually-told lies that stick long after debunking -- anyone interested in seeing the full list can check out sites like fair.org.