Circles of Hell

There are so many charges flying around the blogosphere and the larger mediasphere these days that it's difficult to know exactly what's going on or who is the most to blame. Well never fear reader for like Clarissa I can explain it all to you.

Speech, whether paid or not, relies on the trust that the reader or listener has in the speaker or writer. Mull that over for a moment. Do you trust that the person you're reading or listening to is giving it to you as honestly as he or she can? Forget political bias. Real, intestinal philosophical bias is a goldmine. I love to hear from people whose words are only biased by how they genuinely perceive right and wrong. These people exist on both left and right but are relatively rare.

No, the biases that concern me here are those of party and of crude brass (money). Truth is often hard to determine. It has been said that left and right in this country live in alternate realities, each in more or less self-consistent and self-reinforcing truths. I can't deal with that here. But there are smaller, bite-sized truths that both sides should, in theory anyway, be able to agree upon. An agreement on ground rules should be possible. Well it might be possible.

There are two holy grails of modern discourse: that the participants should be free of financial influence and free of partisan political influence. Note that being free of partisan political influnce doesn't mean that one should not have a political bias- one of the theoretical underpinings of the blogsophere is that everyone has a political bias, left, right, center, what-have-you.

So anyway we have some crimes.

Armstrong Williams, member of the broad mediasphere, accepts money for promoting the Republican (and government) policy on education.

Dan Rather and CBS, mainstream news mongerers, tell lies to discredit the Republican candidate for the US presidency.

Daily Kos and MyDD, two leading lights of the left half of the blogosphere, accept consultants' fees from the Howard Dean campaign during the Democratic party's candidate selection process.

Two anti-Daschle bloggers accept money from the Thune campaign during the campaign but don't disclose it.

Oliver Willis openly blogs and gets paid by an unofficial organ of the Democratic party.

So who can you trust? No one. Of course. There are shifting, overlapping, and contradictory fields of influence at work in any given media moment. There's the producers' bias- why is he or she doing this at all and putting up real money? There's the advertiser's bias- they want a readership in a buying mood free of non-consumer controversial thoughts. There's the audience's bias- they want to see more of what they're used to seeing in that spot. There's the author's bias, or the star's bias, in the case of network news- they want to cover themselves with the glory of the hero reporter, the speaker for truth. There is the author's affection-object bias- what does the person who the author wants to sleep with want the author to say? This stuff can matter.

In most cases, the random schmoe you come across in the blogosphere isn't getting paid by anyone, but he most likely has preferences and/or influences for something or from someone, and he's not necessarily letting on to that fact in every post.

In the mid 80's AIDS became a big problem, I wrote, beginning a mildly offensive metaphor. I was in high school at the time but I remember a debate that went on in the media, in legal circles, and in the country at large. The debate centered on who had the primary responsibility to ensure that you didn't become infected. Logic and arguments were tossed around and considered every which way as the country and the legal community and the medical community and the press dealt with this issue (pre-internet, no links). Some in the legal community argued that legally, a person might be responsible for giving someone else AIDS if it could be proven that such person knew or ought to have known that it was likely that they carried HIV. But the legal community is always happy when fault can be found outside an individual; no one makes any money suing themselves. (When was the last time the lawyer's guild argued for self-reliance?)

That aside, the national debate eventually settled on one point: the only way that you could ensure to a reasonable degree that you wouldn't be infected was to not engage in risky behaviour yourself. All the arguments about the character and lifestyles about one's sexual partners eventually came down to this: it doesn't matter. It didn't matter because there was no degree of assurance possible in a dating situation interview to get around the fact that you could never know if they were lying or merely ignorant. You must assume that they're infected, and act under that assumption.

It's the same for the media and blogs. Don't trust anyone just because they look good, or have a lot to spend on production values. That doesn't tell you what they might be carrying inside, ready to infect you with. Appearances can be deceiving. Treat every piece of information with suspicion- inspect it and question it and look for independent confirmation from multiple sources. Trust but verify. The center will not hold- there is no center anymore. Edward R. Murrow is a long time dead.

All this talk of blogosphere standards is just so much talk. We might agree upon such a code, but no one can enforce that code. In all likelihood you won't know that someone has violated it until it's too late, after they've taken advantage of you.

Anyway, on to the circles of hell. Just like in that book by that guy you read in college, the more evil the offense, the more inward the circle you get to spend eternity in.

Circles of Hell:

The fifth circle of hell is for Oliver Willis, that partisan hack. What's this Media Matters crap? It's a joke upon all the underworld. He confesses it openly but you have to look into it before you realize it's mere partisan hackery. Punishment: Must watch Fox News Alexander DeLarge-style for eternity.

The fourth circle of hell is for Daily Kos. He took money from a primary candidate for technical advice (wink, wink) even though he's not god's gift to internet technology and just happened to have a blog popular with Democratic voters when the Dean campaign hired him. Punishment: Must give non-political technical internet advice to eBay for eternity.

The third circle of hell is for the Thune bloggers. They didn't report the fact that they were paid by the Thune campaign when it counted. Woe as well to the blogosphere right for refusing to confront this adequately. The Thunees should be turned out with what's her name- that Treason chick. Punishment: Must spend eternity fruitlessly buying drinks for what's-her-name.

The second circle of hell is for Armstrong Williams, unannounced media shill for Bush administration policies. Though he probably would have supported these policies anyway, he was ethically obligated to disclose the payments, and he didn't. Punishment: Must spend eternity watching I Can't Believe They Invented It showmercials.

The first and central circle of hell is for Dan Rather and CBS News, an actual network news anchor and news organization (respectively), for lying during a US presidential race. The shame of the Thornburgh/Boccardi report isn't sufficient damnation for CBS News. Punishment: Must spend eternity reporting only the inspirational moments of Bush's second inaugural.