THE LOW POST: The Scum Also Rises

Now we're seeing the same thing with the Obama story; it is lingering, even after it has been totally discredited. Emboldened by a generation that has refused to punish their libelous behavior, these guys now just take whatever "facts" they like and run with them. Hannity is one culprit. Michael Savage, a spineless little fuckhead who should be torn apart by hyenas, responded to the debunking of the Obama story by telling his listeners that Obama "will not reply" to the original Insight report, a blatant lie. He added, for good measure, that "assuming the world is still here" after a Clinton-Obama administration, Obama would then run for president with "Saddam Hussein's younger grandson" as his running mate.

The very fact that the liars are allowed to continue their trade unpunished is a sort of endorsement of their original versions of the "truth." I have absolutely no doubt that many Americans believe deep down in their gullible hearts that if people like Hannity and Limbaugh were really liars, they would be pulled off the air, or punished for some reason. They see that a Michael Savage can be yanked from a lucrative job for gay-bashing, but there appears to be no punishment at all for unchecked, intentional lying, which is at least as serious an offense for a journalist.

The results of widespread public disenfranchisement with the media are already out in the open for everyone to see -- wild conspiracy theories running rampant on both sides of the political aisle, great masses of the population eschewing reporting and appealing to Biblical interpretations of world events, and the explosion of a blogger movement that on the one hand has greatly enhanced press freedom, but on the other has inspired "mainstream" media organs to dispense with traditional fact-checking procedures in a desperate attempt to compete with the speed of the Internet and cable news. The direction all of this is traveling in is a future of pure informational mayhem, in which people will have absolutely no reliable means to make political decisions, leaving the political landscape ripe to be seized by demagogues and swindlers of all stripes, the public with no defense against political and environmental corruption, etc.

If the press is serious about saving itself as a social institution, it has to start policing its own business. We all have to encourage the likes of Barack Obama to hire the meanest lawyers on the planet and to file the hairiest lawsuits imaginable against the Hannitys, Gibsons, and Savages of the world. We have to impress upon the victims of these broadsides that choosing to ignore that style of libel is a betrayal of the public trust and an act of political cowardice that the rest of us end up paying for in spades. That's the ugly truth: Until one of those monsters goes down in a fireball of punitive litigation, we are all fucked. And it's not going to happen anytime soon.

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