TV Versus History
By Ed Driscoll
March 27, 2006
Whenever I visit my parents, I end up spending far more downtime watching cable TV news than I normally do at home, and this past week was no exception. The invention of television 100 years or so ago was one of the great miracles of science, but the medium that's evolved to fill the vacuum tube is one of the worst ways ever devised to convey serious information. As Michael Medved noted shortly before the 2004 election:
Television is an inherently liberal medium. Visuals
appeal to emotion, not reason; Bad news is more
interesting than good news and it is also invites
liberals to demand that government do something to solve
the problem.
In his latest op-ed, Brent Bozell examines the ever-growing disparity between "Liberal TV Pundits vs. History":
<<< To mark the third anniversary of launching the war to depose Saddam Hussein, the manufacturers of the “news” have established their usual template, Realistic Media vs. Pollyanna Bush. It’s not pessimism versus optimism, but reality versus hallucination.
How, then do we greet the bleats of liberals as they wildly overstate the alleged utter awfulness of the war situation? On CNN, Time writer Joe Klein, one of the nation’s leading worshipers of Bill Clinton, declared to Anderson Cooper, “Rumsfeld ran the most criminally incompetent military campaign, you know, in the last 100 years, perhaps in American history.”
Was Klein making a display of chutzpah, or just of his own historical incompetence? How many incompetent military campaigns can we assign, just for starters, to Klein’s hero Clinton? The bombing of the El Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Sudan? The “Black Hawk Down” fiasco and withdrawal in Somalia? What about Jimmy Carter’s failed hostage rescue that fell apart in the desert and humiliated an entire nation in the eyes of the world?
Klein might protest that the number of deaths don’t compete with the scale of Iraq war losses. Fine. What about Vietnam? Klein looks especially silly in rewinding back 100 years, 200 years in his emphasis on unparalleled military incompetence. Has he never read about the Civil War?
Thank God the likes of Joe Klein weren’t around 60 years ago. Historian Victor Davis Hanson has written that the Normandy campaign in 1944, seen today as so smashingly successful, would be painted as full of dramatic military blunders that were costing 2,500 American soldiers daily. Would Joe Klein like to insist that General Eisenhower or General Marshall should have resigned in disgrace? >>>
Read the rest.
mediaresearch.org
Update: "TV vs history? TV was winning." HehTM.
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